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.

This work by The Photo Geek is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License

Capturing your Client’s Selections in Lightroom

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I recently found out I was the official photographer for my brother’s wedding only two days before the actual event.  Aside from the stress of my first wedding shoot (for a family member no less – no pressure…) I also had to work through the logistics of processing and publishing the reams of photos captured.  Living over 1000 kilometers away from the client made this process a little more difficult than for your average wedding shoot.

The foundation of my digital photography workflow is Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom 2 (LR2). I was confident my core workflow was up to the task but what I was missing was a way to publish the proofs, record the client selects, and bring that information back into LR2 so I could complete my editing tasks.

The Turning Gate’s Client Response Gallery provided a simple solution to the problem.  The web engine plugin generated my proof gallery for me, and when family members selected photos I would receive an email with the details:

Selections: EX_20080914_153823, EX_20080914_154715
GalleryTitle: Test Gallery
Name: Sample
Email: <<email address>>


The standard process for loading the selections into LR2 involves copying part of the selection line, pasting it into an LR2 find or filter field, then working with the displayed photos.  I found this a little cumbersome given the volume of selection emails (> 40) I ended up receiving, so I wrote a perl script to turn the gallery email body into smart albums that could be imported directly into LR2.

The script to convert TTG Client Response gallery selection emails into smart collections can be downloaded here: ttgclient.pl.  If you are a Windows user and don’t have perl installed already you can download it here. 

Using the script is as simple as:

1. Copy the body of a TTG Client Response gallery selection email into a text file. (Example: input)
2. Run the ttgclient.pl script, passing one or more filenames as parameters.
   e.g. on Windows c:\> ttgclient.pl ttgclient-sample.txt
Smart Collection TTGClient-Sample-Selections.lrsmcol ready for import to LR2.
e.g. on Mac (assumes perl is in you path)perl ./ttgclient.pl ttgclient-sample.txt
Smart Collection TTGClient-Sample-Selections.lrsmcol ready for import to LR2.

3. Open LR2’s library module.
4. In the Collections panel, right click on a Collection. Select Import Smart Collection Settings from the context menu, then select the file generated by ttgclient.pl (e.g. TTGClient-Sample-Selections.lrsmcol).
5. If the client specified ratings for any of the photos you will also have a separate import files generated for each rating level awarded.  Repeat the previous step until all of the collections are imported.

You should now have a new Smart Collection (e.g. TTGClient-Sample-Selections) containing all of the selections and rated images included in the email from the gallery. 

I hope this helps your workflow as much as it did mine.  And thanks to Matt for making such a useful LR2 gallery available for free!

Updated Feb 2009: Added Mac details based upon user feedback

This work by The Photo Geek is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License

Working with a Wedding Client’s Photo Selects in Lightroom 2

Related Posts:

• Capturing your Client’s Selections in Lightroom (7)
• Export Backup Plugin for Lightroom 2 Updated (Version 20090208.003) (14)
• Backup Your Rendered Images When Exporting From Lightroom 2 To The Web (0)