I’ve talked about and shown The Turning Gate’s Client Response Gallery plugin for Lightroom. This plugin produces a totally customizable web gallery to get feedback/pic selections from your client. I couldn’t imagine being a photographer without this awesome solution. Last year The Turning Gate moved all of their popular web publishing solutions to their CE4 platform. The obvious omission was the Client Response Gallery (CRG). What the CE4 platform enabled was the ability to use Lightroom’s “Publish Services” to update your website (no matter where it’s hosted) with the same ease as publishing directly to Facebook or Flickr. No more having to export a gallery and use FTP or having to configure and use Lightroom’s FTP. Although the front end of my photography website (http://terrywhitephotography.com) was created with Adobe Muse CC, the galleries are all powered via the The Turning Gate’s Web Publishing Suite. This means that all I have to do to update my site is drag photos into a collection and hit the “Publish” button – Done!
Now imagine that same convenience for putting up a web gallery of “proofs” for your client to look through, select and send those selections back to you. That’s exactly what the NEW CE4 Client Response Gallery brings to the table.
Now I can just create a new Lightroom Collection under the Client Response Gallery Publish Service and click the Publish button.
My images are uploaded at the web resolution I specify with my copyright watermark on them. Once the upload completes I just send my client an email or text message with the link to their gallery.
They can scroll through the thumbnails, click to view the larger versions, play a slideshow and make selections. Even the color labels that I use for identifying my favorites or their (in studio) favorites are shown to make the selection process go faster. They click the Send button, put their name, email address and any comments in and I get an email with the exact photo “titles” that they chose. Now I can simply select the names in the email, copy them and then paste them in the Text search in Lightroom to show me exactly which ones I need to retouch.
The NEW CE4 Client Response Gallery offers even more customization options and the overall performance has been improved. While the price has increased from $25 to now $50 (upgrade pricing is available), it is worth every penny as it saves me time and headache with every single shoot that I do.
You can get the CE4 Client Response Gallery here.
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This sounds great Terry, Would be even better if Adobe can add this to Lightroom 6 like we have been requesting for years.
Interesting! How easy is the fusion with Muse? I also use Muse for my website
It’s really just a matter of tying in your Muse menu to the location that you uploaded your TTG galleries to.
Thanks Terry. I’ve been looking for some way of improving my galleries on Muse withoud increasing the weight of the files. This plugin looks great on your site…I’m sold!
Cool but note that the galleries on my site use there Web Publishing Suite, not the CRG plugin above.
Thanks Terry, I was wondering if it was the CE4 Gallery that you have used for the layout with perhaps CE4 Publisher to get it online – in this case the Suite bundle. I still do like the idea of the Client Response Gallery too!
Curious what you do to “protect” the client galleries they are reviewing. Is it just it’s own page w/in Muse that is password protected?
It’s its own page (linked to the rest of the site or not) and The Turning Gate galleries offer the option of setting up oassword protection.
as a free alternative you can give a try fontoGallery Lite – it is simple but does the most important thing you need – lets the client choose the photos: http://fonto.pl/fontogallery.html
Hi, Terry. I’ve created a site with muse. How would I integrate this into an already made muse site?
by uploading your gallery to a folder on your site. for example, ikeamoss.com/proofs/davejones. You would upload the gallery created by Lightroom to the davejones sub folder of the proofs folder then link to it if you want in your Muse site or just give people the direct URL.
Hmmm. Maybe it would make more sense if I just went ahead and made the ttg purchase. I was also checking your podcasts and youtube on a visual tutorial on how to do this. Is there one that may get me close to understanding a bit more. I’m completely new to this!
Hi Terry,
Sounds like a good tip. We developed Evlaa (https://evlaa.com) to simplify a lot more this client proofing workflow!
It’s a very easy to use tool for both sides (photographer and client). Check it out and save more time.
We can discuss about it 🙂