Capturing your Client’s Selections in Lightroom
Lightroom is adept at managing the digital photography workflow from camera through to output, but it currently doesn’t help gather your client’s feedback that will influence the processing and final output of your work. Photographers today must either present the photos to their client using Lightroom, and mark the selects as they go, or capture selects information elsewhere and manually load them back into the catalog.
The Lightroom 3 beta is taking a step in the right direction with its new Publish Services. The included Flickr plugin will synchronise ratings and comments back to your catalog but only time will tell if this capability will support retrieval of individual client selections from Publish Services. In the meantime Lightroom 2 users can make use of web galleries to achieve a similar outcome.
Matt at The Turning Gate has developed a number of web galleries, including TTG Client Response Gallery, TTG Highslide Gallery and TTG Highslide Gallery Pro, that can help Lightroom publish self-contained web sites that automatically email a client’s selects. Articles and tutorials regarding web gallery usage are available on Matt’s site so I won’t repeat that information here. These galleries cover part of the workflow gap – allowing clients to inform you of selects – and my TTG Client script addresses the remainder by converting the response emails into Smart Collections ready for import into Lightroom.
New TTG Client Script features
I first published this script as part of my Working with a Wedding Client’s Photo Selects in Lightroom 2 post last year. This revision provides the following functionality improvements over the original version. Usage of the script remains unchanged and is described on the TTG Client script homepage.
Support for TTG Highslide Galleries
Over the past year Matt has released new Highslide galleries that can email client selects to the photographer. The TTG Client script now supports client select emails from these galleries.
Workaround for Lightroom 2 (LR2) bug when hyphens (-) are used in filenames
LR2 has a minor bug that means it quietly renames files to replace hyphens (-) with underscores (_) when producing web galleries. While the gallery itself will work fine it makes it difficult to match the client selects back to the original file names in your Lightroom catalog. The Turning Gate recommends file naming conventions to avoid this issue but this could require renaming of files imported before you started using these galleries. This new release of TTG Client script allows you to continue with your current file naming scheme and instead treats every underscore as a search wild card so the Smart Collections can locate the selects.
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Download the latest TTG Client Lightroom Script version here (20091216.002) Released under the GNU GPL version 3 license. Usage instructions here. |
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