Proofing
A Client Proofing Gallery With Two Levels of Favorites
One tap stars a photo. Two taps love it. Two marks in the same grid turn an impossible choice into a two-pass sort, and both levels survive into your Lightroom catalog as different ratings.
Updated 5 September 2026
Ask a client to pick 30 photos out of 400 and you have asked them to do the hardest version of the job. Every yes is also 370 noes, and each one has to be final. That is why proofing rounds stall, and why the list that finally comes back is padded.
A second mark changes the shape of the task. In clientgallery.io a client can star a photo or love it, in the same grid, with the same thumb. A star means keep looking at this one. A love means this one is in. Nothing has to be final on the first pass, which is the whole point.
This guide covers what the two levels are, what Pixieset, CloudSpot, Pic-Time and ShootProof offer instead, why ranking is cheaper for a client than choosing, and what each level becomes when the picks come back into Lightroom Classic. It also covers the case where two levels are the wrong tool and a platform with multiple lists is the right one.
The two marks, and how a client makes them
Level one is a star. Level two is a love. Those are the words the client sees, next to a star glyph and a heart glyph. On the studio side the same two things are called stars and hearts.
The gesture is the part that matters on a phone, where most clients do this. A single tap stars a photo. A double tap loves it. There is no mode to switch, no second toolbar, and no separate screen to open first.
The gallery explains itself in one line before the client starts: Open a photo, star what you like, love your favorites, then send your picks. That sentence is the instruction manual. Most clients need nothing else, which is the practical test of whether a second level is worth adding at all.
Picking is on by default and can be switched off per gallery. A gallery meant purely for delivery does not need to invite a selection round, and turning picking off removes the marks from that gallery rather than hiding them.
What the client has to give you, and what they do not
Both halves of this deserve stating plainly, because platforms differ here and the friction lands on your client, not on you.
Marking costs nothing. There is no client account. The share link is the only credential. A client opens the link, taps, and their stars and loves are held against that gallery. Nobody signs up, nobody sets a password, and nobody has to remember which email address they used last time.
Sending does ask for something. The Send my picks dialog requires a name and a valid email address, and the server refuses a submission without both. So the browsing and the marking are anonymous, and the moment of handing the selection over is not. That is deliberate: a pick list with no name on it is a support ticket waiting to happen when two people in the same family both open the gallery.
None of the four big platforms puts two marks in the same grid
We checked Pixieset, CloudSpot, Pic-Time and ShootProof on 5 September 2026. Every one of them gives the client a single heart. What several of them add is multiple favorite lists, which is a genuinely different mechanism: it asks the client to manage folders rather than to rank a photo.
| Platform | What a client can mark on a photo | The second layer, where one exists |
|---|---|---|
| clientgallery.io | Star, or love, in the same grid. One tap and two taps | The second layer is a level on the photo, not a folder |
| Pixieset | Clients can click the heart icon on any photo to add it to a new or existing favorite list | Create multiple lists to organize different selections |
| CloudSpot | The heart icon on an image | A Create New List button, so clients can hold several favorites lists |
| Pic-Time | One heart | Multiple Collections and Favorites lists, plus a photographer-driven Selection Request with a maximum count |
| ShootProof | One favorites list per gallery visitor | Linked Contact mode: labels you define, plus hiding, behind a 6-digit access code and available only to that one contact |
Read that table as a description of two design choices, not as a scoreboard. One heart plus many lists is a coherent answer. So is one heart with two intensities. They are built for different moments in the same conversation.
When multiple lists are the better tool
Lists win whenever the client genuinely needs separate baskets, because the baskets are for different purposes and the same photo can belong to more than one of them. A wedding client building an album list, a print list and a list for social posts is doing three unrelated jobs. Two levels cannot express that, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. If that is your normal round, Pixieset and CloudSpot both let a client create as many favorites lists as they want, and Pic-Time carries both Collections and Favorites lists in the same gallery.
Pic-Time also ships the closest thing anyone has to an answer for the overshoot problem, and it deserves credit because it attacks the same pain from the other side. Its Selection Request is photographer-driven and count-capped: in Pic-Time's own words, "The Amount is the maximum number of images the client can select". It is included on the Professional and Advanced plans. Where two levels ask the client to rank, a Selection Request simply refuses to accept more than the number you set. If a hard cap is what your contract needs, that is a real and different answer, and it is worth looking at.
Levels win when there is one job, one output, and too many candidates for it. That is the album round, the ten-image press set, the twelve family portraits going to the framer. One outcome, one list, and a client who cannot get from 400 to 30 in a single sitting.
Ranking is a cheaper act than choosing
The reason a second level helps is not that clients want more buttons. It is that ranking and choosing are different cognitive tasks, and only one of them is expensive.
Choosing is comparative and final. To decide whether a photo is in the final 30, the client has to hold the other 399 in their head, and every yes forecloses something. That is why the first pass stalls around photo 40 and why the answer that eventually arrives is padded.
Ranking is local and reversible. Is this one better than average? That question can be answered by looking at one photo. A star costs nothing to give and commits to nothing, so the client keeps moving, and the whole gallery gets seen instead of the first sixty frames getting all the attention.
So the two-pass sort falls out of the interface on its own. Pass one: go through everything, star anything that is not a no. Pass two: go through the stars, love the ones that are actually in. The second pass runs over a much smaller pile, with the weak candidates already gone, and it is the only pass where the client has to be decisive. Two easy passes finish; one hard pass does not. There is more on running that conversation in the guide to helping clients narrow an album selection.
Both levels survive into Lightroom Classic
A ranking that only exists in a browser is a ranking you have to retype. The reason the two levels are worth the extra tap is that they arrive in your catalog as two different things, on attributes you already filter on every day.
| What the client did | What lands in Lightroom Classic |
|---|---|
| Loved a photo | 5 stars, plus a Pick flag |
| Starred a photo | 3 stars, no flag |
| Applied a color label | The same Lightroom color label: red, yellow, green, blue or purple |
| Everything they touched | A collection named <gallery title> — picks, inside a collection set named ClientGallery |
Matching is by filename. Adobe documents stars as zero to five and flags as pick, rejected or unflagged, so nothing here is an invented attribute: a love is a five-star Pick and a star is a three-star maybe, and both are already in the Library filter bar and already usable in smart collections.
What that buys you is edit order decided before you open a file. Filter to five stars and you are looking at the client's definite yeses, which is where the careful retouching goes. Filter to three stars and above and you have the whole shortlist, which is what you check against when the package has room for four more. The step-by-step version of the import is in the guide to getting client picks back into Lightroom.
The .txt export, and exactly what it does not carry
If you do not use Lightroom Classic, the other route out is a text file. The button is labelled Export picks (.txt) and it appears in the completed gallery banner, only after the client has actually sent their picks. It is not a button sitting on every gallery.
Be clear about what is in that file, because it decides whether it fits your workflow. It is filenames only, one per line, with no header and no level column. The loves are listed first and the stars after them, but the file does not label which is which. So the file preserves the order of the two tiers and nothing more. It does not carry the two levels as data, and a script reading it cannot tell a love from a star.
The counts arrive separately. When a client sends their picks you get an email, and the body states how many photos were loved and how many were starred. Read the number of loves off the email, count that many lines from the top of the file, and the split is recoverable by hand. That is honest but manual, and it is the reason the plugin route is the better one when Lightroom Classic is where you work.
A phone notification also fires on picks sent, on the iOS app, with its own per-device toggle. On the studio side, the clients page carries per-gallery pick and comment counts, and each gallery tile shows whether it has been opened at all.
What two levels are not
Two levels are not a full ranking. There is no third tier, so a client who wants a gold, silver and bronze has to make silver and bronze mean the same thing. There is no ordering inside a level either: the loves are a set, not a sequence, so if you need to know which of the twelve loves is the cover shot, the client has to tell you in a comment and you have to read it.
Two levels are also not baskets. One photo carries one mark. If your client needs the album list kept apart from the print list kept apart from the social list, that is a lists problem, and a level cannot be bent into it. Look at Pixieset or CloudSpot for that, both of which let a client build as many favorites lists as they like, or at Pic-Time, which carries Collections and Favorites in the same gallery.
And a studio whose business runs inside a print store, a CRM and an integrated ordering flow should stay where it is. clientgallery.io hosts JPEG proofs on one flat plan, with no print store and no commissions, which is what keeps the price where it is and is also exactly why it is the wrong fit for a print-led studio. Two pick levels are not a reason to dismantle a sales pipeline that works.
Sources
Product behaviour was verified in the clientgallery.io source on 5 September 2026. All competitor and Adobe pages were fetched on 5 September 2026.
- clientgallery.io product source (Star and Love labels and glyphs, single tap and double tap, the gallery intro line, picking on by default and switchable per gallery, name and validated email required to send picks, the Export picks (.txt) button and its filenames-only contents, the pick email stating loves and stars, push on picks sent, per-gallery pick and comment counts, the opened indicator, the Lightroom mappings and collection naming), verified in code 5 September 2026, https://clientgallery.io/lightroom
- Pixieset, How does my client create multiple Favorite Lists (the heart icon on any photo adding to a new or existing favorite list, creating multiple lists to organize different selections), fetched 5 September 2026, https://help.pixieset.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003733251-How-does-my-client-create-multiple-Favorite-Lists
- CloudSpot, Can Clients Create Favorites Lists (the heart icon, the Create New List button), fetched 5 September 2026, https://help.cloudspot.io/en/articles/114536-can-clients-create-favorites-lists
- Pic-Time, How can my clients create Collections and Favorites (one heart, plus Collections and Favorites lists in the same gallery), fetched 5 September 2026, https://help.pic-time.com/en/articles/11771979-how-can-my-clients-create-collections-and-favorites-in-pic-time-2-0
- Pic-Time, How do I request a Client Selection ("The Amount is the maximum number of images the client can select", included in the Professional and Advanced plans), fetched 5 September 2026, https://help.pic-time.com/en/articles/7831183-how-do-i-request-a-client-selection
- ShootProof, How does a Linked Contact label and hide photos in a gallery (photographer-defined labels plus hiding, behind a 6-digit access code, for that single linked contact), fetched 5 September 2026, https://help.shootproof.com/hc/en-us/articles/115010151928-How-does-a-Linked-Contact-label-and-hide-photos-in-a-gallery
- Adobe, Flag, label, and rate photos in Lightroom Classic (zero to five stars; flags designate pick, rejected or unflagged; color labels), fetched 5 September 2026, https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/help/flag-label-rate-photos.html
- Adobe, Photo collections in Lightroom Classic (collections and collection sets), fetched 5 September 2026, https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/help/photo-collections.html
Frequently asked
What are two levels of favorites in a client proofing gallery?
Two marks a client can put on the same photo, in the same grid, meaning different things. In clientgallery.io level one is a star and level two is a love. A single tap stars a photo, a double tap loves it. A star means keep this one in the running, a love means this one is in. The client sees the labels Star and Love next to a star glyph and a heart glyph.
Does any other client gallery platform offer two levels of favorites?
Not among the four we checked. On 5 September 2026, Pixieset, CloudSpot, Pic-Time and ShootProof all give the client a single heart. Pixieset, CloudSpot and Pic-Time add multiple favorite lists instead, which asks the client to manage folders rather than rank a photo. ShootProof's only second layer is Linked Contact mode, with photographer-defined labels behind a 6-digit access code, available to that one contact only.
Do clients need an account to star and love photos?
No. Picking is authenticated by the share link alone, so a client opens the link and starts marking with no signup and no password. Sending the picks is different: the Send my picks dialog requires a name and a valid email address, and a submission without both is rejected. Browsing and marking are anonymous, handing the selection over is not.
What do the two levels become in Lightroom Classic?
A love becomes 5 stars plus a Pick flag. A star becomes 3 stars with no flag. Client color labels become the same Lightroom color labels. Everything the client touched lands in a collection named after the gallery with picks appended, inside a collection set called ClientGallery. Matching is by filename.
Does the .txt export tell me which photos were loved and which were starred?
No. The Export picks (.txt) file is filenames only, one per line, with no header and no level column. Loves are listed first and stars after them, but nothing in the file labels which is which. The counts arrive in the pick email instead, which states how many photos were loved and how many were starred, so you can count that many lines from the top to recover the split by hand.
When should I use multiple favorite lists instead of two levels?
When the client needs separate baskets for separate purposes, such as an album list, a print list and a list for social posts, and the same photo can belong to more than one. Two levels cannot express that. Pixieset and CloudSpot both let a client create as many favorites lists as they want, and Pic-Time carries Collections and Favorites lists in the same gallery.
Can I turn picking off for a gallery?
Yes, per gallery. Picking is on by default, and a gallery meant purely for delivery can have it switched off so the client is not invited into a selection round they were never asked to run.
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