Publish a Client Gallery Straight From Lightroom Classic

Five minutes, once per computer. You will not repeat any of it.

• Download and unzip the plugin. The download gives you clientgallery.io-Lightroom.zip, which unzips into a folder named clientgallery.io.lrplugin. Move that folder somewhere permanent, such as Documents. Lightroom points at the folder where it sits, so a plugin left in Downloads and later tidied away stops working.
• Add it in the Plug-in Manager. In Lightroom, open File > Plug-in Manager, click Add at the bottom left of the list, select the clientgallery.io.lrplugin folder, then click Add Plug-in. It appears in the list with a green light. Click Done.
• Restart Lightroom. Quit fully and reopen. Lightroom builds its list of export destinations at launch, so the plugin does not appear in the Export dialog until you have restarted once. This is the step people skip and then report as a broken install.
• Open the Export dialog and pick the right dropdown. Select any photo and press Cmd + Shift + E. At the very top of the window is a dropdown labelled Export To: that reads "Hard Drive". Switch it to ClientGallery. There is a second menu with the same label lower down, inside the Export Location panel, but that one only ever lists folders. If you are looking at Desktop and Documents, you are in the wrong menu.
• Paste the studio key and press Check. The key lives at the bottom of your dashboard at clientgallery.io/studio, behind Show my studio key. Paste it into the Studio key field and click Check. The plugin asks the server whether the key is real and answers on the spot: it greets you by studio name, or it says the key was not recognised. That button exists so a bad paste surfaces now rather than 300 photos into a render. The key is remembered afterwards, on both the export side and the import side.

Treat the studio key as a password. If a machine leaves your hands, regenerate the key on the dashboard and the old one stops working.

With the key checked, an export has four decisions and none of them are technical.

• Gallery name. Type it in the Gallery name field. Whatever you type is what the client sees at the top of the gallery, so name it for the client and the round.
• Client sees. A Light or Dark theme. This is the gallery the client opens, not your dashboard.
• Password. Optional. Leave it empty for an open link.
• Export. The plugin creates the gallery before it renders a single photo, then Lightroom renders and uploads. When the render bar finishes, the gallery is live. A dialog gives you the address with an Open the gallery button.

There is no publish step after the export and no processing queue to wait on. The gallery exists from the moment the first photo lands, and finishes filling as the render runs.

The Export dialog normally shows you panels for file settings, image sizing, output sharpening, metadata and the export location. With ClientGallery selected, those panels are hidden. The plugin forces the render rather than offering it.

The forced settings are these: JPEG in sRGB, output sharpening off, and location metadata stripped from every file. Video is not accepted at all.

That reads like a limitation for about ten seconds, and then it reads as the point. Every one of those knobs is a way to get a delivery wrong, and the wrong answers are the ones people reach for by accident. An Adobe RGB export looks flat and wrong in a browser. Output sharpening tuned for matte paper is visible mush on a screen. GPS coordinates in a family session tell anyone who downloads a file where the family lives. A preset carried over from a print job quietly does all three at once.

Because the plugin dictates the render, there is no export preset to maintain, nothing to get wrong on a tired Sunday night, and no difference between the gallery you sent in March and the one you send today. The one setting you might miss, resolution, is not exposed either, and that is deliberate: proofs go up at a fixed proofing size, and full-resolution delivery is a separate step you control per gallery.

This is the question that arrives the day after the wedding. The client wants the reception photos added to the gallery you already sent.

Export them the same way and type the same gallery name. The plugin adds them to that gallery instead of creating a second one. The link you already sent keeps working, the client sees the new photos next time they open it, and nothing you sent earlier is disturbed. The hint sits under the field in the dialog so you do not have to remember it: exporting to a name you already used adds to that gallery.

The same rule is what makes a free account workable. A free account holds one gallery, and exporting into it by name keeps topping it up rather than failing.

The Export dialog is the fast route. The Publish Service is the one you graduate to when a gallery changes more than once.

In the Library module's left panel, find Publish Services, click Set Up… next to ClientGallery, paste the studio key, press Check, then Save. Right-click the service and choose Create Gallery. The collection's name is the gallery's name. Drag photos onto it exactly as you would with any collection, then press Publish.

From then on Lightroom does the bookkeeping. It sorts the collection into New and Modified queues and one click of Publish pushes exactly those. A develop edit marks a photo Modified, so it re-uploads and replaces itself in the live gallery. A metadata-only change, a keyword or a title, does not trigger a re-push, because no pixels changed.

The link runs both ways. Remove a photo from the published collection and it leaves the live gallery. Rename the collection and the gallery is renamed. Delete the collection and the gallery is deleted. The deeper treatment, including how to run a re-edit round without sending a new link, is in the Publish Service guide.

The table is the whole contract between your catalog and the client's link.

Three ceilings are worth knowing before you build a workflow on top of this, rather than after.

• Publish Service galleries are flat. There are no nested collection sets under the service. A gallery is a gallery. If you organise your catalog in deep sets, that structure stops at the service boundary. Folder-style sub-galleries exist inside a gallery on the web side, but the published collection itself is one level.
• A free account holds one gallery. The plugin says so plainly before it fails, and tells you that exporting into your existing gallery by name still works. Unlimited galleries are 10 $ a month or 100 $ a year, which works out to 8.33 $ a month.
• A gallery holds 1,000 photos. When it fills, the plugin stops the photo that did not fit and tells you to start a second one. In practice a 1,000-photo proofing gallery is already more than any client should be asked to review at once.

Two things the plugin never does: it does not warehouse RAW files and it does not take video. Galleries hold JPEGs. Your masters stay in your own storage, which is exactly what lets the price stay flat instead of climbing with a storage tier.

Publishing is half the loop. When the client has finished choosing, go to Library > Plug-in Extras > Import ClientGallery Picks…, paste the gallery link you already sent, and press Import. The studio key is already filled in from the export side.

The plugin matches by filename against your catalog and writes the client's decisions as native Lightroom marks. A like becomes 3 stars. A love becomes 5 stars and is flagged as a Pick. The client's colour labels come across as Lightroom colour labels, filterable in the Library filter bar and usable in smart collections. Everything found is gathered into a collection named after the gallery, inside a ClientGallery collection set. It is re-runnable at any time, so a client who adds three more favourites on Thursday costs you one menu command. The detail is in the picks import guide.

The plugin reports four failures in plain words. Each one has a specific fix.

• "That key was not recognised", or the same message when the export starts. The studio key is wrong or incomplete. Recopy it from the bottom of clientgallery.io/studio and press Check again. If you regenerated the key on another machine, the old one is dead and every computer needs the new one.
• "free account, 1 gallery". You already have a gallery and the export is asking for a second. Either export into the existing gallery by typing its exact name, or move to the paid plan.
• "This gallery holds 1000 photos, start a second one". The gallery is full. Photos beyond the ceiling are reported as failed rather than silently dropped. Name a second gallery and export the remainder there.
• "N photos did not make it, export those again". Individual uploads failed, usually a connection that dropped mid-render. The summary dialog gives the count. Select those photos and export them again to the same gallery name, which adds them rather than duplicating the gallery. If you are on the Publish Service instead, the failed photos stay in the New queue and the next Publish retries them.

One failure that is not the plugin's: if the import says none of the picked filenames were found in this catalog, you are importing picks into a catalog that does not hold the shoot. Import the shoot folder first, then run the import again.

Said plainly, because the rest of this page assumes an Export dialog you may not have. The plugin is a Lightroom Classic plugin. The cloud-based Lightroom app does not take plugins, so none of the steps above exist there.

If you work in Lightroom cloud, Capture One, Photo Mechanic or anything else, the Export-dialog route does not apply to you. Export your JPEGs the way you already do and upload them through the web instead. The gallery, the branding, the password, the client picks and the download all behave identically. What you lose is the round trip: nothing tracks New and Modified for you, and picks come back as a list you read rather than stars written into a catalog.

That is a real difference, and it is the honest reason to weigh this plugin at all. If you do not live in Lightroom Classic, choose your gallery platform on gallery features, not on this one.

Every figure and every piece of interface named on this page comes from the product itself, checked on 4 September 2026.

• clientgallery.io Lightroom Classic plugin walkthrough (install steps, Plug-in Manager, the two Export To menus, Publish Services setup, picks import, Lightroom Classic only), checked 4 September 2026, https://clientgallery.io/lightroom
• clientgallery.io Lightroom plugin build, version 3.2.0 (forced render settings, the Check button, gallery name behaviour, New and Modified tracking, flat collections, remove, rename and delete behaviour, the 1,000-photo and free-account messages, failed-upload wording, picks written as 3 stars, 5 stars and Picks, colour labels, the collection named after the gallery), read 4 September 2026, https://clientgallery.io/downloads/clientgallery.io-Lightroom.zip
• clientgallery.io pricing and fair-use ceilings (10 $ a month or 100 $ a year, 1,000 photos per gallery, one gallery on a free account, JPEG only, no RAW warehousing or video), checked 4 September 2026, https://clientgallery.io/
• clientgallery.io studio dashboard (where the studio key is shown and regenerated), checked 4 September 2026, https://clientgallery.io/studio