How to Update an Online Client Gallery After Re-editing Photos in Lightroom

This assumes the gallery already exists as a published collection under Publish Services in the Library module's left panel.

1. Make the develop edits. Warm the frames the client flagged, redo the crop, retouch the distraction. Work on the same photos already in the collection, not on virtual copies, which count as different photos.
2. Click the published collection. The grid splits into groups. Photos you have edited since the last push move out of Published Photos and into Modified Photos to Re-Publish.
3. Check the Modified group holds what you expect. If a photo you edited is not there, you edited a copy, or the change was metadata only. The next two sections cover both cases.
4. Press Publish. Lightroom re-renders only the photos in the New and Modified groups and sends them. A 30-frame revision takes as long as exporting 30 photos, not 800.
5. Open the gallery link and confirm. Same link you sent originally. Reload it and look at one of the frames you changed.

What the client sees while this is happening: the gallery stays up. It is never taken down, emptied or rebuilt. A client who happens to be browsing during the push sees the old version of a photo until they reload, and the new one after. Nothing they have already done goes away, because the photo is updated in place rather than deleted and re-added, so a pick or a comment they left on that frame stays attached to it.

The gallery identifies a photo by its filename. When Lightroom re-publishes a photo whose filename is already in that gallery, the existing photo is replaced in place: same entry, same position in the sequence, new pixels. That is what keeps a revision round from turning into a gallery with two of everything.

Three consequences worth knowing:

• The gallery link does not change, because the gallery was never recreated. Neither does the password, if you set one.
• The photo keeps its place in the order. A re-edited frame does not jump to the end of the gallery.
• A replacement does not consume a new slot against the 1,000-photo ceiling of a gallery. Re-publishing the same 800 photos ten times leaves 800 photos.

The corollary is that filename is the hinge. If you rename a file in Lightroom, the gallery has no way to connect the new name to the old photo. See the next section.

Lightroom Classic lets a publish service declare which changes should mark a photo for re-publishing. The clientgallery.io plugin declares develop edits only. A change to keywords, a title, a caption, a star rating, a flag or a colour label leaves the photo sitting in Published Photos, untouched, and the next Publish does nothing with it.

This is deliberate, and it is worth understanding rather than working around. The gallery holds a rendered proof JPEG. A keyword or a rating does not change a single pixel of that render. If metadata changes marked photos for re-publish, then tagging a wedding for your own catalog hygiene would queue 800 photos for a re-render and a re-upload that produces byte-for-byte the same picture. You would be paying an hour of rendering for nothing, and the client would get a gallery that says it changed when it did not.

Here is the full map of what does and does not reach the client.

If you genuinely need a metadata change to reach the client. In practice this is almost always a filename: the client sees the filename on a photo, and you renamed the shoot after publishing. There is no way to re-push a name on its own. The honest fix is to remove that photo from the published collection, which deletes it from the live gallery, then add it back and Publish, so it arrives as a new photo under the new name. You lose whatever the client had marked on that frame, so do it before the client starts choosing, not after. Renaming files before the first publish is much cheaper than renaming them afterwards.

There are two ways to get photos out of Lightroom Classic and into a gallery, and they behave differently afterwards. Which one you used decides whether this page saves you any time.

• The Publish Service route. The gallery lives in the left panel as a published collection. Lightroom remembers which catalog photo is which gallery photo, so it can tell you what is New and what is Modified. This is the route the whole page is about.
• The Export dialog route. You selected photos, chose clientgallery.io in the Export dialog, named the gallery and exported. The gallery is live when the render finishes, and that is the end of the relationship. Lightroom keeps no connection between the catalog and the gallery, so there is no Modified queue and nothing to click.

How to tell which situation you are in: open Publish Services in the Library module's left panel. If the gallery is there as a collection, you are on the first route. If it is not, you exported.

The Export route is not a dead end. Exporting to a gallery name you have already used adds to that gallery rather than creating a second one, and because the gallery identifies photos by filename, re-exporting a photo that is already there replaces it rather than duplicating it. So you can re-export the 30 re-edited frames to the same gallery name and the live gallery updates. The difference is that you are doing the bookkeeping yourself: Lightroom will not tell you which 30, you have to remember or re-select them. The Publish Service keeps that list for you, which is the entire reason it exists. If you are going to have revision rounds, it is worth moving the gallery onto a published collection before the first round, not during the third.

Sometimes the note is not "warm this up" but "take this one out." Select the photo inside the published collection and remove it from the collection. The plugin deletes it from the live gallery.

Treat this as destructive on the gallery side. It is not a hide, not an unpublish, and not a staged change you confirm later. The photo and anything the client had attached to it in the gallery go with it. Removing a photo from the published collection does not delete it from your catalog or your disk, so your master is safe, but the gallery copy is gone and putting it back means publishing it again as a new photo.

The same warning applies one level up. Deleting the published collection deletes the gallery, and renaming the collection renames the gallery the client is looking at. The left panel in Lightroom is not a staging area. It is the live gallery with a Lightroom interface on it.

A wedding is delivered as an 800-photo gallery. Four days later the couple writes back: the reception frames are too cool, could you warm them. There are 30 of them, and they have listed the filenames.

1. You pull their picks back into the catalog if you have not already, so you are looking at the right frames instead of retyping filenames from an email. That is a separate command, covered in getting client picks back into Lightroom.
2. You warm the 30 frames in Develop. Nothing is uploaded while you do this.
3. You click the published collection. Modified Photos to Re-Publish holds 30 photos. The other 770 sit in Published Photos and are ignored.
4. You press Publish. Lightroom renders 30 JPEGs and sends 30 JPEGs. The other 770 are never re-rendered, never re-uploaded, and never touched.
5. You reload the gallery, check two of the reception frames, and reply to the couple that it is done. Same link. No new email with a new address in it.

Compare that with the ritual the Publish Service is replacing. Export 30 JPEGs to a folder on your desktop. Open the gallery in a browser. Find and delete the 30 old versions, one at a time, hoping you delete the right ones. Upload the 30 new ones, which land at the end of the gallery instead of in their original places. Discover the sequence is now wrong and drag them back, or give up and re-upload all 800 into a fresh gallery, which produces a new link, which means writing to the client to tell them the old link is dead. That is the evening this page is about. The difference is not that one workflow is nicer. It is that one of them touches 30 files and the other touches 800.

Do not take your own first look as proof of failure. Browsers and phones hold on to images they have already loaded, and the most common "the update did not work" is a stale image sitting in a browser cache. Before you conclude anything, hard-refresh the gallery page. On a Mac that is Command and Shift and R, on Windows Control and Shift and R. If a frame still looks unchanged after a hard refresh, then check the Modified queue, because the photo probably never left it.

A client on a phone is the awkward case. Reloading a tab that has been open since Tuesday may not be enough. The reliable instruction is to close the gallery and open the link again. That is one sentence in your reply, and it saves the exchange where they insist nothing changed.

We are not going to promise you that every viewer everywhere sees the new pixels the instant the Publish progress bar finishes, and we are not going to invent a number for how long a cached copy lives. A reload is the reliable check. Do that first, on the real gallery link, before you start debugging anything.

Be clear-eyed about the boundary. The plugin installs into Lightroom Classic on a desktop. If you re-edit somewhere else, none of the above applies to you:

• Lightroom's cloud app (the one on the web, the iPad and the phone) does not run Lightroom Classic plugins. There is no published collection and no Modified queue.
• Capture One and Photo Mechanic have no clientgallery.io plugin either.

In all three cases the update path is the ordinary one: export the re-edited files, open the gallery in a browser, and upload them. Because the gallery matches on filename, uploading a file that is already in the gallery under the same name still replaces it rather than duplicating it, so at least you are not deleting first. But you are the one keeping the list of which frames changed, and you are moving the files by hand. This page will not save you the evening. It will only tell you, honestly, that the evening is the price of editing outside Lightroom Classic.

Three ceilings, none of them subtle, all of them announced by the plugin.

• Publish Service galleries are flat. A published collection is one gallery. There are no nested collection sets inside it, so do not plan a revision round around a folder structure that Lightroom will not create.
• A gallery holds 1,000 photos. When it fills, the plugin says to start a second one. Replacements of photos already in the gallery do not count against this, so revision rounds never push you over the line.
• A free account holds one gallery. The plugin tells you before it fails rather than after. The paid plan is 10 $/month or 100 $/year, flat, with galleries, photos and clients unlimited under fair use.

For the shape of the whole loop, publish to picks and back again, see the two-way Lightroom client gallery workflow or the plugin page.

• clientgallery.io Lightroom Classic plugin, version 3.2.0 (Publish Service behaviour: New and Modified queues, develop edits mark a photo Modified while metadata changes do not, removal from the published collection deletes the photo from the gallery, renaming and deleting the collection rename and delete the gallery, flat galleries with no nested sets, 1,000 photos per gallery, one gallery on a free account, exporting to an existing gallery name adds to that gallery, same-filename photos are replaced in place rather than duplicated). Plugin source checked 4 September 2026; the flow is documented at https://clientgallery.io/lightroom
• clientgallery.io plan and fair use (10 $/month or 100 $/year, galleries, photos and clients unlimited under fair use, proofs hosted as compressed JPEGs, 1,000 photos per gallery and 250 GB of proofs per paid account, 5 GB and one gallery on a free account), checked 4 September 2026, https://clientgallery.io/
• Adobe, Lightroom Classic help, Export to hard drive using publish services (the published-collection queues that Lightroom Classic itself displays). Listed as a reference for Adobe's own terminology; the page did not respond to a direct fetch on 4 September 2026, so every behavioural claim on this page is taken from the plugin source instead, https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/help/export-hard-drive-using-publish.html