clientgallery.io

Lightroom

A Proofing Gallery That Flags Client Favorites In Your Lightroom Catalog

Most proofing tools stop at showing the client the photos. The part that actually saves you a morning is the return trip: the client's choices arriving in your catalog as flags, star ratings, color labels and a collection you can edit from.

Updated 5 September 2026

A proofing gallery is easy to shop for and easy to get wrong. Every platform shows a client a grid and lets them heart the ones they want. That part has been solved for a decade, and it is not where your evening goes.

Your evening goes to the step after it. The client picks 42 frames out of 600, and now you have to find those 42 in Lightroom Classic and mark them so they survive closing the catalog. That is the round trip, and it is the only part of proofing that is still manual almost everywhere.

This guide sets out exactly what a client action becomes in your catalog, what those catalog objects are in Adobe's own words, which competing plugins write anything back at all, and who should stop reading because none of it applies to them.

The gallery is not the product. The round trip is.

Think about which half of proofing you pay for in hours. Sending a link costs a minute. Receiving a decision costs a minute. Turning that decision into an edit queue is the part that eats the morning, because the decision lives in a browser and the edit lives in a catalog, and nothing carries one into the other except filenames.

So the useful question when comparing proofing galleries is not how the grid looks. It is what lands in Lightroom Classic when the client is done. If the answer is a list of filenames, you still have the whole job in front of you: reproduce the list inside the catalog, then re-mark everything by hand so the selection persists. If the answer is flags and ratings, the job is already done and you open the Library filter. clientgallery.io is built around that second answer, with a plugin that goes both ways: proofs out of the catalog as a Publish Service, picks back in as catalog metadata.

What the client does, in two levels

The gallery gives a client two marks on the same grid, not one. Level one is a Star. Level two is a Love. A single tap stars a photo, a double tap loves it. The client-side instruction is one line: open a photo, star what you like, love your favorites, then send your picks.

Two levels matter because the round trip has two levels waiting for it. A single heart flattens the difference between a shortlist and a must-do before it reaches you, and no amount of clever importing puts it back.

There is no client account. Picking is authorized by the share link alone, so the client does not sign up for anything to mark photos. Sending is the one place a little friction exists on purpose: the send dialog requires a name and a valid email, and the server rejects a submission without both, so you always know whose picks arrived. Picking is on by default and can be switched off per gallery when a gallery is a delivery rather than a proof.

The exact mapping into the catalog

This is the part worth being pedantic about, because a vague promise of syncing favorites is what every platform says, and the difference between the products is entirely in this table.

In the galleryIn Lightroom Classic after the import
Love (heart)5 stars, plus a Pick flag
Star3 stars, no flag
Color labelThe matching Lightroom color label: red, yellow, green, blue or purple
CommentNothing, unless you tick the IPTC caption box. It is off by default
Everything the client touchedA collection named "<gallery title> — picks", inside a collection set named "ClientGallery"

Matching is by filename. The plugin compares the picked filenames against the catalog that is open at that moment and writes to the photos it finds. The menu item is literally "Import ClientGallery Picks…", under the Library menu in Plug-in Extras.

The Lightroom side of the structure is deliberately flat. One collection set, one collection per gallery inside it. There is no nesting to maintain and nothing to reorganize after each shoot.

What a flag, a rating and a collection actually are

If you have never leaned on these three objects, the mapping above is abstract. Here is what each one is, in Adobe's own documentation, so you can judge whether the mapping is the right one for how you work.

  • Flags. Adobe: "Flags designate whether a photo is a pick, rejected, or unflagged." You set one by hand with P for pick and X for reject. A flag is binary and it is the fastest thing in the Library to filter on, which is why a love earns one.
  • Star ratings. Adobe: "you can award from zero to five stars", with ] to increase and [ to decrease. Five levels, so a star and a love can sit at different heights on the same scale without competing.
  • Color labels. Adobe calls labeling photos with a color "a flexible way" to mark many photos at once. Its documented shortcut table covers red, yellow, green and blue.
  • Collections. Adobe defines a regular collection as "A group of any photos you choose to put in a group". It is the container the picks land in, so you can open the shoot months later without re-deriving anything.

Because the picks arrive as these native objects, you filter them with the Library Filter bar you already use, which Adobe documents in three modes: "Text, Attribute, and Metadata". Attribute row, five stars, and you are looking at the loves. Three stars and up gives you the whole shortlist.

The whole loop, once you have set it up

Installation is Adobe's standard route. Adobe: "Choose File > Plug-In Manager", then "click the Add button. Navigate to the plug-in, select it". Lightroom Classic supports third-party plugins that extend the Export dialog, and publish plugins that upload from the Library.

  1. Publish the proofs. The clientgallery.io plugin is a real Publish Service and supports incremental publishing, so a gallery is a destination in the left panel rather than an export folder you upload by hand. Adobe describes the panel as the place that "allows you to send photos" to a service, with queues for new photos to publish and modified photos to republish.
  2. Send the link. No client account, your own subdomain, no platform branding on anything the client sees.
  3. Wait for the picks. When the client sends, you get an email at your own address, subject "<name> sent their picks" with the gallery title, and the body says how many were loved and how many were starred. The iOS app pushes the same event to your phone.
  4. Import the picks. Library menu, Plug-in Extras, Import ClientGallery Picks. Paste the gallery link. Decide about comments. The mapping in the table above is what lands.
  5. Edit the collection. Filter to five stars, or to the flag, and develop only what was chosen.

Because both halves run from the same catalog, the filenames on both ends are the same filenames. That is the quiet reason publishing from Lightroom beats uploading a folder of renamed exports, and it is covered in publishing a gallery straight from Lightroom Classic.

Who else writes anything back into Lightroom Classic

Checked on 5 September 2026, against each vendor's own help documentation. The short version: no competitor writes flags or star ratings into a Lightroom Classic catalog. One of the four writes something back, and it is a folder of selections, not catalog metadata.

PlatformWrites picks back?What its own documentation says
clientgallery.ioYes, as metadata5 stars plus a Pick flag for a love, 3 stars for a star, color labels, and a picks collection in a ClientGallery collection set
PixiesetNoThe plugin "allows you to upload photos to Pixieset directly from Lightroom Classic". Structure sync pulls collection and set names, and "Your photos from Pixieset will not be imported into Lightroom". Favorites return as the Lightroom Copy List, a filename list you paste into the search field
ShootProofNo"The ShootProof plugin is a Publish Service, so photos and album structures ... are kept in sync and pushed directly from Lightroom to ShootProof." Installing it syncs gallery and album names, "but not the photos themselves"
CloudSpotNo"The best way to describe the Lightroom and CloudSpot connection is that it is a one-way sync." Filenames from a favorites list are copied to the clipboard
Pic-TimePartlySelections and Favorites "will now be shown under the Selections folder", which is a folder or collection, not flags and not star ratings. "The Sync feature is only available on paid plans", and "Automatically syncing the favorites lists is currently unavailable in Pic-Time 2.0 galleries"

State it fairly. Pic-Time genuinely built a return path, and for a photographer who only wants the chosen frames gathered somewhere editable, a Selections folder is enough. The two caveats are theirs, printed in their own article: it is a paid-plan feature, and automatic favorites syncing is currently unavailable in their 2.0 galleries, which matters because accounts are being moved to 2.0.

The other three are upload tools and they say so plainly, which is to their credit. Their favorites come back as text you paste into a search field. That is covered in detail, including the two ways it goes wrong, in getting client picks back into Lightroom.

The text file, and what a text file cannot carry

There is a manual escape hatch here too, and it is worth knowing its limits rather than discovering them. Once a client has sent their picks, the completed-gallery banner offers "Export picks (.txt)". It is not a button sitting on every gallery; it appears after picks arrive.

The file is filenames only, one per line, with no header and no level column. Loves are listed before stars, but nothing in the file labels which is which. So it is the right tool for handing a list to another application, and the wrong tool for a two-pass workflow that depends on knowing which frames were loved. That is the whole argument for the plugin: a filename list is a selection, and the mapping is the client's ranking.

Where filename matching breaks, and what the import tells you

Matching by filename fails in exactly one way: the names on the two ends stop being the same names.

  • The shoot is not in the open catalog. The match runs against whatever catalog is open, so open the one the photos were imported into.
  • The files were renamed on export. If the gallery carries export names and the catalog carries capture names, nothing lines up. Publishing from the catalog rather than uploading a folder of exports removes this failure entirely.
  • The link points at an earlier round. Paste the link the client actually used.

The alternative has a limit worth naming. Adobe documents no way to filter a Lightroom Classic catalog by a pasted list of filenames. The nearest documented behaviour is the Text filter with a Contains rule, and Adobe states that with multiple terms under Contains, Lightroom "finds photos that contain any of the individual sequences". Any means a partial name can pull in frames the client never chose.

When you should stop reading

You do not use Lightroom Classic. Everything above is a Lightroom Classic plugin, and if you cull and edit somewhere else you get none of it. Capture One users have a better native answer than Lightroom users do: Capture One documents Select > Select By > Filename List, where you paste the names and choose a delimiter, and it selects the images directly. Capture One also ships its own review product, Capture One Live, which shares a collection in a browser to people who "do not need to own Capture One", lets reviewers rate and tag, and syncs "any ratings or tags added by reviewers" back in real time. Its published limits are worth weighing: a shared collection "will stay active for one month (24 hours if you are a free user)", and comments "will disappear when the collection expires". If that is your world, the filename-list route or Live is your answer, not this page.

Your business runs on a print store. If a real share of your revenue flows through an integrated store inside Pixieset or Pic-Time, with your pricing, lab and fulfillment already configured there, one workflow improvement does not justify dismantling a revenue channel. clientgallery.io has no print store and no commissions, which is part of why it stays at one flat price, and it is exactly why it is the wrong tool for a print-led studio. Keep what makes you money.

You deliver RAW or master video. clientgallery.io hosts JPEGs. It does not warehouse RAW files or master video. That limit is deliberate and it is what keeps the price flat, but if RAW delivery is the service you sell, this is not your platform.

For everyone else, the arithmetic is small and repeats every shoot. One plan, $10 a month or $100 a year, which is $8.33 a month. Unlimited galleries, photos and clients under fair use, with the tripwires stated plainly: 1,000 photos per gallery and 250 GB of proofs per paid account. A free account holds one gallery and 5 GB, which is enough to run one real proofing round end to end and see the picks land in your catalog before you decide anything.

Sources

Product behaviour was verified in the clientgallery.io code and Lightroom Classic plugin source on 5 September 2026. Every external page below was fetched on 5 September 2026.

Frequently asked

Is there a proofing gallery that flags client favorites in my Lightroom catalog?

Yes. The clientgallery.io plugin for Lightroom Classic imports the client's picks and writes them into the open catalog: a love becomes 5 stars plus a Pick flag, a star becomes 3 stars with no flag, client color labels become Lightroom color labels, and everything lands in a collection named after the gallery inside a ClientGallery collection set. The command is Library menu, Plug-in Extras, Import ClientGallery Picks. Matching is by filename.

Does any other gallery platform write flags or star ratings into Lightroom Classic?

No. Checked on 5 September 2026 against their own documentation: Pixieset's plugin is upload-only and states that photos from Pixieset will not be imported into Lightroom, ShootProof's is a Publish Service that pushes from Lightroom to ShootProof, and CloudSpot describes its connection as a one-way sync. Pic-Time is the only one that writes anything back, and it writes a Selections folder or collection rather than flags or star ratings.

What are the Pic-Time limits on syncing favorites to Lightroom?

Two, both stated in Pic-Time's own help article. The Sync feature is only available on paid plans, and automatically syncing the favorites lists is currently unavailable in Pic-Time 2.0 galleries. What comes back appears under a Selections folder, which is a container of the chosen photos, not pick flags and not star ratings on the photos themselves.

Why two pick levels instead of one heart?

Because the catalog on the other end has levels. Adobe's ratings run from zero to five stars and flags designate a photo as a pick, rejected or unflagged. Two client levels map onto that cleanly: a love becomes 5 stars plus a Pick flag, a star becomes 3 stars. One heart flattens the client's ranking before it ever reaches your catalog, and no import can recover it.

Do client comments get written onto my photos?

Only if you tick the box. Comments can be written into the IPTC caption field, and the checkbox is off by default. Leave it off if you caption for stock, an agency or archival metadata, because the caption field is already carrying something you care about.

What if I do not use Lightroom Classic at all?

Then this workflow is not for you, and Capture One users have a better native option. Capture One documents Select, Select By, Filename List, where you paste a list of names and it selects those images. It also ships Capture One Live, a browser review product where reviewers rate and tag and those ratings and tags sync back in real time, with the published limits that a shared collection stays active for one month, or 24 hours for free users, and comments disappear when the collection expires.

Can I get the picks as a plain list instead?

Yes, after the client sends their picks the completed-gallery banner offers Export picks (.txt). Be aware of what the file holds: filenames only, one per line, with no header and no level column. Loves are listed before stars but the file does not label which is which, so it is fine for feeding another application and poor for a workflow that depends on knowing which frames were loved.

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Proofing Gallery That Flags Client Favorites in Lightroom