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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In: Howto, Project, Software, Web · Tagged with: gallery, lightroom, lr2, LR3, script, smartalbum, Web, workflow
Very cool! How did I miss this script?
We were having this issue just last week. We were working on images for an upcoming photo book when the client sent us a spreadsheet of file names… ugh! I’ll be introducing this to our workflow at LaDolceVitaPhoto.com soon!
Cheers!
@Wade, Thanks! Please let us know how you go, and if there are any issues or missing features that you need help with.
[…] The Photo Geek has released an update to its TTG Client Script (originally for use with TTG Client Response Gallery), adding support for TTG Highslide Gallery Pro and TTG Highslide Gallery. The script allows you to easily convert selection gallery email messages into Smart Collections that can be loaded into Lightroom. For more information and to download the script, visit the Photo Geek. […]
FYI this script is GREAT!
I do have a few suggestions / feature requests though. These are all from the point of view of the client response gallery although may apply to the highslide gallery emails.
1) Creation of collections for photos with option X selected
i.e. photos for which the client has marked one of the photographer defined options in the gallery
example:
Black & White: filename1, filename2, filename3
Sepia: filename4, filename5, filename6
I suppose this would be tricky because each photographers gallery would have different options defined. Maybe this could be solved by having a user prompt or external file for defining the options to look for in the response email.
2) Creation of a smart collection for photos that the client has commented on.
Would be handy to have a smart collection containing all the photos that the user made comments on
example: Comment–: can you please crop the extra people out.
Ideally the comments would get inserted into a metadata field in lightroom (i.e. the “instructions” field or something). I guess that is more than what could be done with an external script and would probably require a full on plugin… which might not be a bad idea because it would open up a whole new world of possibilities with brining the client comments back into lightroom 😀
3) Listing photos in smart collection in a single line OR put them in a sub-row
i.e instead of creating a smart collection with a new criteria line for each photo put them in a comma separated list in a single line. That way you can customize the smart collection by adding additional criteria. As it is now you can’t add any AND criteria because that is a gigantic list of ANYs if you know what I mean. Alternatively you could put the large list of ANYs in a sub-row and set that sub-section to “Any of the following are true”. You know the same thing you get when you hold the option/alt key and click the + sign on a smart rule criteria line.
Hope that makes sense. If not shoot me an email and I can explain better and send screenshots.
@DigitalOxygen, sorry it has taken me a while to get back to you. Thanks for the suggestions.
1) I don’t really use TTG galleries much any more so haven’t seen this option before. It does sound a little difficult to implement but there might be ways to achieve this. On the feature list it goes.
2) A list of commented on photos sounds possible. Injection of comments into the photos would really require a plugin or a bunch of error prone scripts followed by some manual steps so I’m marking that as “not possible”. This overall feature request will need further consideration before I can implement it.
3) This is doable. I used to use one long criteria line but recently changed because of Lightroom’s habit of replacing characters in filenames that don’t really need to be replaced, so a smart collection can’t find the original files. I’ll see whether I can nest the multiple criteria lines.
Now that Lightroom 3 and Publish Services have been released you might want to consider using those to get metadata and selects back into Lightroom. Hopefully Matt C has something in the works to marry together Publish Services and his web galleries and offer the best of both worlds.
Yes a publishing service would be amazing! I am also hoping he’s working on such a thing. In the meantime is there a timeline for your next release of a list of what we can expect to see?
@DigitalOxygen, no feature list or timeline for the next update yet. My Lightroom plugins are significantly more popular so I’m trying to give them some attention first.