Reduce the Time You Spend Delivering Photos to Clients

This is one shoot, from the end of editing to the client having their files. Nothing here is exotic. It is what most delivery looks like when the gallery lives in a different place from the catalog.

Notice the shape of the two that cannot be removed. One is writing to a human. The other is a human thinking. No software removes either, and a tool that tells you it does is selling you something it cannot deliver.

The Lightroom Classic plugin is a publish service, not an uploader. That distinction is the whole point. You drag the edited photos into a published collection and press Publish. Lightroom renders and sends them, and the gallery exists. There is no export folder, because there is nothing to export to.

What disappears with it is the second copy of every proof on your disk, the folder you had to name in a way you would recognise in three weeks, and the step where you tab into a browser and drag a few hundred files into it.

Two smaller things come from living in the catalog rather than beside it. Renaming the collection renames the gallery, so the client sees the name you actually use for the job. Deleting the collection takes the gallery down. The gallery is the collection, in the place where you already work.

Renders go out as JPEG in sRGB with location metadata stripped. That last part matters more than it sounds on a home shoot or a newborn session.

The re-edit is where a delivery workflow either holds together or falls apart. A client comes back and asks for nine photos to be warmer. You re-edit the nine. Then, in a folder-and-upload workflow, you face a second full export, or the worse alternative, which is hand-picking nine files out of a folder of four hundred.

A publish service already knows. Lightroom tracks what is New and what is Modified inside the published collection. One Publish pushes exactly those and nothing else. You do not choose the nine photos, because Lightroom chose them the moment you touched the sliders.

One detail worth knowing before it confuses you: metadata-only edits do not re-push pixels. If you add a keyword or fix a caption, no re-render happens. That is correct behaviour and it is not the plugin failing to notice.

Round trip 6 goes away for a duller reason. The gallery keeps the same link. There is no second gallery and no second URL, so the update is silent and the client's original email still works. Hosted galleries stay live for as long as the account exists, which means the re-send, months later, when someone loses the email, is a copy and a paste rather than a rebuild.

This is the round trip that steals the most time and gets discussed the least, because it does not look like work. Your client sends a reply with forty-one filenames in it. You open the catalog, and you type. Or you read, and click, and read the next one, and lose your place.

In the gallery, the client taps. One tap is a star, two taps is a love. When they send their picks, the plugin imports them straight into Lightroom Classic: stars come back as a 3-star rating, loves come back as a 5-star rating plus a Pick flag, and both are gathered into a collection named after the gallery inside a collection set.

So the selection arrives already expressed in the vocabulary you filter by. You open the collection and the two tiers are already separate. The album favourites and the everything-else are not a list you have to interpret.

If you do not use Lightroom Classic, every completed gallery has a one-tap Export picks button that downloads the original filenames, one per line, as a .txt file. That file goes into Capture One or any processor that reads a filename list. It does not distinguish stars from loves, so if that distinction is what you work from, the plugin is the path and the .txt is the fallback.

One honest exception: files uploaded through Live Shoot mode on the iOS app are renamed on the way in, so they do not filename-match the pick import or the .txt export. That mode is for showing work during a session, not for the delivery you will bring back into the catalog.

The delivery email is still yours to write. Nothing here composes it, and you should distrust the idea that it should. What you can do is stop retyping it: keep one saved message in your own mail client, paste the link, send. The password can already be set from the Lightroom export dialog, so the gallery goes live password-set and you are pasting a credential you did not have to go and create afterwards.

The wait is the one nobody can remove. A client deciding which forty photos they want out of four hundred is doing real work, on their own evening, after their own job. That is not latency to be engineered away. It is the actual deliverable being consumed.

What can change is your relationship to the wait. Every gallery tile in the studio carries an opened indicator that tells you whether your client has opened that gallery, with All, Seen by client and Not opened yet filters. That single fact separates the two silences that feel identical from your side of the screen and are completely different problems. A client who has not opened it needs a nudge or a working link. A client who opened it four days ago and has not sent picks needs patience, or a phone call about something else.

Account-wide analytics sit behind that: gallery visits, unique visitors, photo views, favourites, picks sent, ZIP downloads, shares, time spent and average time per visitor, a device split of mobile, desktop and tablet, and the five most-viewed photos with their view and like counts. Visitors are counted by a daily salted hash and are never identified, and your own visits are excluded. There is no referrer, geography or browser breakdown. Read it as a trend across your work, not as a report on one client.

The iOS app closes the loop from the other end. You get a push notification when a client sends picks and when a client downloads the full-resolution ZIP, each with its own switch. The value is not speed. It is that you stop checking.

There is no hours-saved figure on this page. Not a number per delivery, not a number per week, not a number per year. We have not measured one, and a figure we have not measured is not a figure we will print.

The claim being made is narrower and checkable: four specific steps stop existing. The export-to-a-folder step, the type-the-filenames step, the full re-export step and the second-link step. Whether that is worth anything to you depends entirely on how often you deliver and what an hour of your admin time is worth, and you know both of those numbers better than we do. Price it yourself.

Be suspicious of the arithmetic in the other direction too. If you deliver four shoots a year, the round trips are not your problem and you should keep whatever you are using. This is a workflow argument, and workflow arguments only pay off at volume.

Most of what this page describes is a plugin, and the plugin is Lightroom Classic only. The cloud Lightroom app takes no plugins at all. That is Adobe's architecture, not a feature we have not built yet, and it will not change because you subscribed.

If you work in Capture One, in the cloud Lightroom app, or in anything else, you lose round trip 1 and round trip 5. You upload from the browser instead of publishing from a catalog, and after a re-edit you decide yourself which photos to re-upload. Those are the two trips that come back.

Two round trips removed instead of four is still a real answer, and the .txt export is genuinely the difference between reading a filename list into Capture One and typing those filenames in by hand. But it is half the argument, and you should buy against the half that applies to you.

One more constraint to check before you commit. Uploads accept JPG and PNG. No RAW and no video. This hosts JPEGs and does not warehouse master files, which is what keeps the price flat and what makes it the wrong tool if what you wanted was an archive.

Publish from the catalog. Paste the link into your saved email, with the password already set from the export dialog. Wait, and look at the opened indicator instead of writing a second email into silence. The push arrives when they send. Open the collection Lightroom made and the picks are already rated. Re-edit, press Publish, and the Modified queue sends the nine that changed to the same link.

When the money side is settled, the full-resolution handoff is its own upload: your own ZIP per gallery, live for 3 days per handoff, re-uploadable any time. You can paste your own payment link so a Pay your invoice button appears beside the download, and you can switch downloads off until you have been paid. That unlock is manual. You flip it yourself when the money lands. Nothing here watches your bank account.

For the neighbouring pieces of this, the two-way Lightroom workflow covers the publish-and-import loop in detail, and collecting selects without a spreadsheet deals with round trip 4 on its own.

This page states no external figures and quotes no competitor. Every product behaviour described above, the Lightroom Classic publish service and its New and Modified tracking, the pick import and its 3-star and 5-star ratings, the one-tap .txt export, the opened indicator, the account-wide analytics list, the iOS notifications, the 3-day full-resolution handoff, and the clientgallery.io plan and fair-use figures, was checked in the running product on 12 September 2026. The time saving is deliberately left unquantified: no delivery timing study has been run here, so no hours-per-week figure appears on this page.