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It's no secret that I manage my photos using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3. Whenever I do a model or client shoot whether I'm shooting tethered into Lightroom in the studio or shooting to a memory card in the field and importing the shots later, they end up in Lightroom. I do my non-destructive adjustments using Lightroom's Develop Module. Before I do any compositing and further retouching using Photoshop CS5 Extended those initial images are posted online in a private gallery for the model/client to review and make their selections.
While Lightroom has had built-in web galleries since day one, none of the ones that come with Lightroom automate the process for receiving the client picks. A couple of years ago I discovered a really cool Lightroom Web Gallery Template/Plugin by The Turning Gate and I haven't looked back.
The Turning Gate Highslide Gallery
I'm so used to using this template that I often forget when I'm presenting Lightroom, that it doesn't come with Lightroom. Once you download this plug-in and install it, it shows up in Lightroom alongside all the rest of your Web galleries. You can customize the look and feel of your gallery pretty extensively. You can then either upload your gallery to your FTP space directly (hosting is NOT included with the plugin) from Lightroom or Export a folder of your web gallery and upload it via any other method that you use to get files to your space.
The one caveat is that your web server/space has to allow you to be able to run PHP scripts. Luckily most web hosting packages do! This FormToMail script is necessary to process the form that the client uses for their selections to send back to you via email. It's very transparent on the clients end. They basically see a web page with all the images that you provided. They can click to make them larger (again sizes you specify) and they can check off the ones they want. At the bottom of the web page is a spot for them to enter their name, email address and comments. At that point they hit the submit button and you get an email (to the address you configured in the plug-in/script) containing the choices they made.
You can get the Turning Gate Highslide Gallery here for $25. They also make a pretty cool Client Response Gallery with less features for $10 here.
I couldn't imagine using Lightroom without this plugin!
I also use the Lightroom plugins from “The Turning Gate” for my own photography website. I use “TTG Pages” for creating the website itself, “TTG Auto Index” for creating multiple sub-galleries and of course “TTG Highslide Gallery” for creating nice looking image galleries.
http://www.markushoerster.com
The great thing is that you can add a discription into the meta data of your images and “TTG Highslide Galley” can display them as captions in you slideshow! I like these plugins so much because they save you so much time compared doing all the coding on your own.
While this is undoubtedly an excellent solution for basic online selection, I think that client ordering is a use case that is relevant to so many photographers around the world that at least a basic ordering solution should actually ship with Lightroom by default as an optional add-on module.
By ordering solution I don’t mean just a web gallery for online but a way to manage a simple list of clients, prices and which photos and print sizes they have ordered, maybe even including a way to tie that into database or spreadsheet software and a way to generate an order list for the lab (i.e. how many of which image and which sizes etc.). A dedicated companion web gallery could then be added so that Lightroom could automatically retrieve orders that were made online (similar to the way publish services retrieve and display comments) and those online orders would automatically be integrated directly into the order management of the Lightroom module, where all the orders that were entered manually would live.
Terry, thanks for the heads up on Highslide Gallery! I have been looking for something like this. I hope it works with my .mac account?
You continue to amaze me with with all the useful products and software that you test. Your blog is invaluable!
Terry… How does TTG compare to Slideshow Pro plugin? Do they produce similar galleries? Thanks!
~erick
How odd – I was just in the Adobe Exchange community a while back looking at TTG’s and other themes for the web module – including that of LightroomBlog authot Sean McCormack’s web module themes. As luck would have it, my write-up was on his theme just last week:
http://www.canonblogger.com/2010/10/15/extending-lightrooms-web-module/
Hi Terry,
Thanks for the publicity!
I would love to get a copy of my latest web engine into your hands for possible review. Would you please email me and let me know where to send the file?
Thanks,
Matt
Hi Terry, i recently used this gallery for my clients!! It’s very cool!! easy to use!!!
Thanx!
CL
no problem!