Photo Mechanic Client Selects: From a Picks List to Tagged Photos

The button sits in the studio view of a gallery. It appears only after the client has sent their picks, so there is nothing to export before that.

The download is a plain text file named after the gallery, as <gallery-title>-picks.txt.

There is no CSV version and no copy-to-clipboard version. The client has no export of their own either. The .txt is the one list, and it is the studio who downloads it.

Which name lands in the file depends on how the photo reached the gallery.

If your proofs went up as JPEGs and your contact sheet shows RAW files, clean the list first. Open the .txt in any text editor and replace .jpg with nothing. What remains are base names.

Base names are shorter, and shorter names catch more. That trade is covered in each route below.

Find works on the contact sheet, so it is available without Photo Mechanic Plus. Camera Bits documents it under Edit, Find, with Command-F on macOS and Control-F on Windows.

1. Open the contact sheet for the shoot.
2. In the .txt, turn the line breaks into spaces, so every name sits on one line. Any text editor with find and replace can do this.
3. Open Find and paste the line into the search field.
4. Tick the Filenames option. Camera Bits: "Select the desired option to search Filenames, IPTC Metadata, or both."
5. Choose Any of the words. Camera Bits documents the choice between finding any word in the phrase or only results that have all the words. A list of different filenames needs any.
6. Set the search to all items on the contact sheet, not only the items already selected.
7. Turn on the option that switches the contact sheet to the Selected filter after a successful Find. Camera Bits: "When selected, the Contact Sheet will filter to show only the selected files that match the Find search."

You now have the client's picks selected and nothing else on screen. Tag them while the selection is live. Camera Bits describes tags as "simple toggles", where "A photo is either tagged or untagged." "T" toggles the tag on a single image, and the Tagging article documents a separate shortcut for tagging a selection together.

Then use the View menu to show only tagged photos. Camera Bits lists the choices as All, Tagged and Untagged.

What Find does not document. The Find page does not say whether a filename term matches part of a longer name. It does offer a Whole words option, which it explains with the example that "book" excludes "bookkeeper". So check the count: the number of tagged photos should equal the number of lines in the .txt. If it is higher, something extra matched. If it is lower, a name did not line up.

Photo Mechanic Plus adds catalogs and a catalog search. Camera Bits states that a search runs on "all Catalogs in the Active Catalogs Panel" that have their Search checkbox enabled.

Two documented behaviours make it suit a picks list.

• It matches filename text anywhere in the name. Camera Bits' own example: a search for "hill" finds keywords with hill, a byline of Jason Hill Photography, and "all photos that contained the letter sequence "hill" anywhere in the file name."
• It accepts OR between terms. The documented example is "keywords ocean or beach or pier", which finds keywords that contain at least one of the three terms.

So the list becomes one query. Replace each line break in the .txt with or , then paste the result into the Plus search.

The same page documents AND, NOT, and double quotes for an exact phrase. It also mentions anchoring with ^ and $. We have not tested those anchors against filenames, so this guide does not rely on them.

The honest cost of a partial match. A letter-sequence match can pull in similar names. A base name such as IMG_1234 is also a letter sequence inside IMG_12345. A term can also hit a keyword or a byline, as the "hill" example shows. Full names with extensions narrow this, and so does limiting the search to the catalog that holds the shoot.

The Plus search page does not describe a bulk action on search results. Tag the results the same way as in route one, then compare the tagged count with the line count of the .txt.

Loves apart from likes. The .txt lists loves first, then likes, with nothing marking the boundary. One search tags them all the same way. If the two levels matter to your edit, Photo Mechanic will not recover them from this file.

The client's colour labels and comments. They are not in the file. The only route that carries labels into an editor is the Lightroom Classic plugin, covered next.

A mapping to Lightroom. Camera Bits documents that Lightroom Classic and Capture One "can recognize star ratings and color classes", and that "the text label for each class must be exactly the same in each app." It does not document how a Photo Mechanic tag becomes a Lightroom Pick flag, so this guide does not claim it does.

If you cull in Photo Mechanic and edit in Lightroom Classic, the text file is the long way round.

Publish the proofs from the Lightroom Classic catalog with the clientgallery.io plugin, which shows up in Lightroom as ClientGallery. When the client has sent their picks, run Import ClientGallery Picks.

• Likes get 3 stars.
• Loves get 5 stars and the Pick flag.
• The client's colour labels are applied as Lightroom labels.
• Everything found goes into a collection inside a set called ClientGallery, reused on each run.
• Frames the client did not touch are left alone, and develop settings are never changed.

Two cautions. On the frames it writes, the import replaces the earlier rating and label, so a Photo Mechanic star rating carried into Lightroom on a picked frame is overwritten. And the match is a contains match on filename: a catalog photo whose name contains the picked name is written too, which includes the same name in two folders.

The plugin writes labels by colour name. Camera Bits warns that class labels must match exactly between apps, so a Lightroom Classic set up with different label names may not show them as expected.

You already deliver and proof inside a platform with a print store. clientgallery.io has no store and takes no commission. If prints and albums pay your bills through Pixieset or Pic-Time, a filename list is no reason to move.

You need loves and likes split without a plugin. The .txt does not carry the split. Outside Lightroom Classic, that is a real gap.

You deliver RAW files. clientgallery.io hosts JPEG proofs and does not warehouse RAW files or master video.

For everyone else, the plan is one price: 10 $ a month or 100 $ a year, with unlimited galleries under fair use and no platform branding on client pages. Capture One users have a dedicated command for the same file, covered in the Capture One filename list guide.

Every Photo Mechanic behaviour, option and quote on this page was read on the Camera Bits pages below on 18 September 2026. None of these pages shows a date, so each is cited by fetch date.

• Camera Bits, "The Find Tool" (Edit, Find; Command-F and Control-F; Filenames and IPTC options; any or all of the words; all or selected items; Whole words; switch to the Selected filter), no date on page, fetched 18 September 2026, https://docs.camerabits.com/support/solutions/articles/48000361385-the-find-tool
• Camera Bits, "Photo Mechanic Plus Search" (letter sequence anywhere in the file name; OR, AND, NOT; double quotes; ^ and $ anchors; active catalogs with Search enabled), no date on page, fetched 18 September 2026, https://docs.camerabits.com/support/solutions/articles/48001077445-photo-mechanic-plus-search
• Camera Bits, "Tagging Photos" (tags as toggles; T for a single image; tagging a selection; View menu All, Tagged, Untagged), no date on page, fetched 18 September 2026, https://docs.camerabits.com/support/solutions/articles/48001142232-tagging-photos
• Camera Bits, "Star Ratings & Color Classes between Software" (Lightroom Classic and Capture One recognise star ratings and color classes; labels must be exactly the same in each app), no date on page, fetched 18 September 2026, https://docs.camerabits.com/support/solutions/articles/48000223643-star-ratings-color-classes-between-software
• clientgallery.io product facts, checked in code 18 September 2026 (Export picks (.txt) appears after the client sends picks; one filename per line, no header, loves first then likes, unmarked; no labels, comments or label-only photos; extensions kept; browser uploads keep the uploaded name; plugin publishes store the catalog filename; no CSV or clipboard export; plugin import gives likes 3 stars, loves 5 stars and a Pick flag, applies labels by colour name, uses a collection in a ClientGallery set, replaces earlier values on matched frames, contains match on filename, leaves untouched frames and develop settings alone; 10 $ a month or 100 $ a year; no store; JPEG proofs, no RAW), https://clientgallery.io/