Rename Files Before Client Proofing

Camera filenames fail in a small number of specific ways. Each one has a different fix, and only some of the fixes are a rename.

Notice how the table splits. The top three rows are real and a rename genuinely solves them. The bottom two are the reason this page exists, because they are the rows where the usual advice quietly does damage.

Start with the honest version, because it applies to a lot of photographers.

The Lightroom Classic plugin here is a two-way tool. It publishes a collection as a gallery, and when the client is finished it writes their choices back into the catalog. One tap from the client is a star and two taps is a love. The plugin writes stars back as a 3-star rating and loves back as a 5-star rating plus a Pick flag, and it gathers both into a collection named after the gallery inside a collection set.

Read that again with a naming scheme in mind. At no point does a human read a filename. You do not type one, the client does not speak one, and the match happens between the plugin and your catalog rather than between two people on a phone call. If that is your whole workflow, a careful template buys you tidiness in the Finder and nothing else.

So the first recommendation on this page is a negative one. If you shoot alone, deliver from one catalog, and your picks always come home through the plugin, you do not need to design a naming convention and you should not spend a weekend on it. Rename because you like your archive to be legible, not because proofing demands it. Nothing about proofing demands it in that loop.

The loop is not the only path out of a gallery, and the other paths are all filename-shaped.

You process in Capture One or anything that is not Lightroom Classic. Every completed gallery has a one-tap Export picks button that downloads a .txt file of the original filenames, one per line. That file is the universal escape hatch and it is pure text, so every name in it has to mean something to you unaided. Be aware of its one limitation: the .txt does not distinguish stars from loves. It is a flat list of what the client chose, not a ranking of how strongly. If the difference between a star and a love matters to your edit, the plugin is the path that preserves it.

You work with a second shooter. This is the single best reason on the page. Two cameras produce the same four digits constantly, and a collision is not an inconvenience, it is a lost frame. Rename both cards at import, before they ever meet in one folder. No proofing tool can repair a name collision after the fact, because by then the evidence of which frame was which is gone.

Files leave your hands. A print lab, an album designer, a publication, an agency, or a client who downloads the whole gallery as a ZIP and mails it to a relative. Once a file is somewhere you cannot see, its name is the only context it carries. Downloads here are exactly that kind of exit: the client takes the whole gallery in one click as a ZIP of every proof numbered in order, or any single image, with no account at any point. Those files will sit in a stranger's Downloads folder for years under whatever you called them.

Your archive has to be searchable by a human. Three years later, somebody asks for the shot of the grandmother from the Tremblay wedding. Whether that is a ten second search or a twenty minute one is decided by a template you set once.

Good naming is boring naming. The template below is built from four parts, and the reasoning for each part matters more than the exact punctuation.

Assembled, that is 2026-09-12-tremblay-a-0231.jpg. Lowercase throughout, hyphens rather than spaces, and no accented characters, because those three habits stop a name from being mangled by some system between you and the client.

Two things deliberately absent. Do not put the shot type in the filename, because you will rename half of them during the edit and the names will start lying. Do not put pick status in the filename either, because that is what ratings and flags are for and because the client decides it, not you.

One more absence worth naming. Uploads here accept JPG and PNG. There is no RAW and no video, because this hosts proofs rather than warehousing masters, and that is what keeps the price flat. Your renaming template therefore has to work on your own drives first. The gallery inherits whatever you rendered.

Renaming has exactly one dangerous moment, and it is late rather than early. The sequence below exists to keep you away from it.

1. Import and rename in one move. Lightroom Classic can apply a filename template at import, which is the cheapest possible time to do this. The second shooter card gets a different shooter initial and the collision never happens.

2. Cull and edit. Names are settled by now, so nothing downstream can drift.

3. Publish. The plugin is a real publish service. Lightroom tracks which photos are New and which are Modified, and one Publish pushes exactly those rather than re-uploading the set. The gallery keeps the same link across republishes, and renaming the published collection renames the gallery without breaking that link. Renders go out as JPEG in sRGB with location metadata stripped.

4. Let the client pick, then bring the picks home. Stars come back as a 3-star rating, loves as a 5-star rating plus a Pick flag, both gathered into a collection named after the gallery.

The risk. Renaming after step 3 is the mistake. The gallery is holding the names that were uploaded, and the .txt export downloads those original filenames. Change the names in your catalog while a gallery is live and you have created two sets of names for one set of photographs, with a client sitting in the middle of them. If you must rename late, do it before the client has started picking and republish so the gallery carries the new names, never in the middle of a live selection.

A related note on the iOS app. Live Shoot mode watches the phone's photo library and uploads new arrivals during a session, and those files are renamed on the way in. That means they do not filename-match the Lightroom pick import or the .txt export. Live Shoot is for showing work during an event. Treat the catalog publish as the authoritative delivery, and do not expect your import template to survive that path.

Nothing urgent, and probably nothing at all. A gallery that is already live with camera filenames is not broken. The client still taps to star and love, the picks still come back into your catalog as ratings and a flag, and the gallery still stays live for as long as the account exists. Leave it.

Start the scheme on the next job instead. A naming convention is only worth anything going forward, and retrofitting one across an archive is a large amount of work for a small amount of tidiness. If a specific old job genuinely needs renaming, do it when no gallery for that job is in active selection, and republish afterwards so the two sides agree.

If the reason you are reading this is that clients keep sending you lists of numbers to retype, the fix is the round trip rather than the template. The guide on retyping filenames covers that directly, and getting picks back into Lightroom covers what lands in the catalog when they arrive.

This page states no external figures and no competitor claims. Every product detail above is a clientgallery.io plan or fair-use fact checked against the running product on 12 September 2026: the flat 10 $/month or 100 $/year plan with a free first gallery, the Lightroom Classic publish service and its New and Modified tracking, stars written back as a 3-star rating and loves as a 5-star rating plus a Pick flag gathered into a collection named after the gallery, the one-tap Export picks .txt of original filenames that does not distinguish stars from loves, the one-click whole-gallery ZIP with no client account, JPG and PNG uploads with no RAW and no video, and Live Shoot files being renamed on the way in. The naming template in the fourth section is a recommendation rather than a measurement.