Client image review/approval (a.k.a. proofing)

Cyrano

SmugMug is a great end-to-end professional solution, with one glaring hole: there is no easy way for a client to review a set of images, and flag selects and rejects (i.e., thumbs-up and thumbs-down.)

SmugMug Events is not a workable solution for me. It's far too complicated, and my clients won't use it for that reason.

What's needed is a simple way for anyone, without prior registration or authentication, to review images in a gallery quickly and easily (i.e., navigation and image rating all done using keystrokes, no mousing required) and then submit the results to the photog with one click.

The photog must get the results in a form which is quickly and easily used in Lightroom. At a minimum, this would be a CSV file which can copied/pasted into Lightroom's Library filters. The ideal implementation would be full integration with SmugMug's Lightroom plug-in.

The lack of this critical feature is costing me $30/month for a third-party solution. It's also having a negative effect on my customers' perceptions of SmugMug, as they question why a third-party solution is needed.

leftquark

I’d love to understand more about what makes the Events system too complicated. Would you mind elaborating? While the system is old and in need of an update, I’ve been successfully using it and it’s been super handy since I do all my editing in Lightroom; being able to sync the favorites straight to lightroom has been a godsend saving me tons of time and frustration.

Cyrano

My workflow for sharing images with clients is simple: I edit them in Lightroom, and publish them to SmugMug.

Using Events requires creating the Event, customizing its settings, guest registration, identifying participants, etc. These are all extra steps which waste my time.

Worse, my clients don't want Events, because my clients expect their online photo experience to be as simple as Instagram. Bespoke URLs, guest lists, participants, etc. are all barriers. Signing up is off the table.

leftquark

If they don't sign in somehow and you don't have specific URL's for the client, how would you expect to share the photos without allowing others to muck with the client picks (favorites)?

If you want more than one visitor to pick favorites from the gallery, how do you expect them to pick their favorites? How do you expect to see which favorites each person selected?
If you want to reach out to the visitors who might not have purchased so you can potentially win them back? (ex: your client shares the gallery with their family members but the family member doesn't buy a photo. For the holidays you run a promotion and want to offer a coupon for a sale).

Instagram requires the viewer to login to favorite, comment, etc. Since you mentioned as simple as Instagram, would requiring them to login to some service be acceptable?

Cyrano

> @leftquark said:
> If they don't sign in somehow and you don't have specific URL's for the client, how would you expect to share the photos without allowing others to muck with the client picks (favorites)?
>

One URL exists for all users. Any user can visit the URL, pick favorites (or rejects), enter their ID (email address, name, account code, whatever), and click Submit. I get email with the client's selects.

This isn't great if a client wants to make repeated visits and have their selections persistent across visits -- but the work I do doesn't typically need that. My clients typically make one visit, pick their images, and that's it.

> If you want more than one visitor to pick favorites from the gallery, how do you expect them to pick their favorites? How do you expect to see which favorites each person selected?

See above.

> If you want to reach out to the visitors who might not have purchased so you can potentially win them back? (ex: your client shares the gallery with their family members but the family member doesn't buy a photo. For the holidays you run a promotion and want to offer a coupon for a sale).

I'm not concerned with this, as my need is to serve clients who have contracted with me.
>
> Instagram requires the viewer to login to favorite, comment, etc. Since you mentioned as simple as Instagram, would requiring them to login to some service be acceptable?

Acceptable, but not ideal.

Even if Events were friendly, it doesn't have the functionality I need -- which is to allow a client to pick both Selects and Rejects.

leftquark

Would love to know more about how you use the Selects and Rejects. Do you do anything in particular with the selects like continue editing them, turn them into prints/books? The rejects get removed from your website but all the rest stay?

OffTopic

Obviously Cyrano has his own needs, but I can tell you how I would use this feature - I do a lot of image licensing and often get a call asking to see what I have for a given subject, for example Natural History Magazine asked to see everything I had on a list of specific wildflowers blooming at Kelso Dunes for a multi-page spread they were doing. I prepare a private gallery for the client to review. The client lets me know what images they want, and after preparing the licensing agreement and invoice I send them a link to a gallery where they can download the full res images (or send them via DropBox depending on client's preference). As it stands now, my client has to manually write down and send me the file numbers of the photos they want. This is not an appropriate use of Events. Events is better suited to...events. I should be able to just create a regular private gallery, upload the photos, send my client the link, and let them click a button to choose what they want. Personally I don't even need an e-mail or csv file (although I understand how that could help others), I just want an easy way for clients to select their choices without having to log-in, register, or be set up as a Participant or me having to jump through the hurdles of creating an inappropriate "event". I did create an Event once, for an event, and I don't intend to ever create one again.

This was originally requested on User Voice in 2009 and it had over 400 votes when it was marked Completed because SmugMug created Events, even though there are a lot of comments on the request saying that Events are not the answer. There was a new request created in 2010 with another 256 votes asking to allow client favorites without having to use Events. In 2015 we were told that SmugMug hoped to open favoriting to all galleries "some day" and to follow that 2010 request for the status. Sometimes us old timers get tired of asking.

leftquark

We're starting to have multiple conversations here but hopefully we can keep track of them all...

@OffTopic said:
As it stands now, my client has to manually write down and send me the file numbers of the photos they want. This is not an appropriate use of Events. Events is better suited to...events. I should be able to just create a regular private gallery, upload the photos, send my client the link, and let them click a button to choose what they want. Personally I don't even need an e-mail or csv file (although I understand how that could help others), I just want an easy way for clients to select their choices without having to log-in, register, or be set up as a Participant or me having to jump through the hurdles of creating an inappropriate "event". I did create an Event once, for an event, and I don't intend to ever create one again.

I'd love to understand a little more about what made the process feel like hurdles. Is it just the name "Events"? What if the feature was called "Client Proofing", "Favorites", or some other name? The current process certainly requires extra steps but I'm trying to understand what makes it cumbersome. When we improve the feature I want to make sure to remove those pain-points but I'd love to understand what makes it complicated, cumbersome, difficult to setup. Does the 2 minutes you saved from not setting one up outweigh the pain of your client having to manually write down the file numbers, then find the photos, put them together and into their own gallery? How so?

I use Events for all sorts of things -- any time I want someone to let me know which one(s) are their favorites. I can set it up in ~30 seconds, send the person a unique URL, and they can begin favoriting without having to do anything except click the heart. Then I refresh Lightroom, all their favorites are right there, re-edit those, and then quickly re-publish. Good riddance to making the client send me a list of file numbers, find those file-numbers in LR (which isn't easy for ... imagine typing "DSC0001", "DSC0104" ... 100 times), save them to a collection in LR, then upload that collection. It's literally just "Sync Folder" - to Get all the Favorites -> Select All -> Create New Gallery -> Publish.

When you say "Events is better suited to events" - why do you feel that way? When we go to separate favoriting from events I'd like to make sure it doesn't still feel that way!

@OffTopic said:
This was originally requested on User Voice in 2009 and it had over 400 votes when it was marked Completed because SmugMug created Events, even though there are a lot of comments on the request saying that Events are not the answer. There was a new request created in 2010 with another 256 votes asking to allow client favorites without having to use Events. In 2015 we were told that SmugMug hoped to open favoriting to all galleries "some day" and to follow that 2010 request for the status. Sometimes us old timers get tired of asking.

Believe me when I say this is something I'm super passionate about (actually, many of us are pretty passionate about this topic). It was actually the first project I worked on when I joined the company, but I scoped it a little too large, new priorities came in and we went off to tackle some other things (like Coupons improvements, SSL for Custom Domains and a mobile-friendly shopping cart).

OffTopic

Maybe part of the difference is because I haven't been syncing my site with LightRoom and I don't use LR for everything. Finding the correct file in my archives is easy for me, when I set up my current DAM workflow 12 years ago I began using a unique file name for each image that tells me exactly where to find it in my archives. I don't search for it in LR, I go directly to the file on my drive when I need it.

What I don't like about using Events when I'm licensing images to editorial clients:

• First I have to create the review gallery and this is probably a big difference - I don't do this in LR since these often aren't photos from a single commissioned shoot, they are photos I select from my existing archives. Anything pre-2015 isn't in LR until I add it so it's usually easier and faster for me to drag-and-drop than it is to import multiple galleries into LR before I can do anything, especially if I'm in a rush. Then I would have to create an Event and add that gallery to it and add my client as a Participant. After the client selects favorites, yet another folder is created in an entirely different place (Event Favorites) on my site. I had to go into the Organizer to figure out where to find it. Since I don't usually sync with LightRoom I can't find an easy way to access the Event Favorites folder outside of LR without going through the Organizer. (I'm in the process of syncing to LR right now and I do see where it shows up in LR, but I apparently have several thousand conflicts to resolve before syncing can finish because I've been using Photoshop since the 90s & have a lot of .psd master files. Now I remember why I decided I wasn't going to bother with syncing my site to LR!).

• The first time the Events Favorite folder is created (when someone actually favorites an image) it defaults to Public Visibility and searchable on the web. Only after the system creates the folder can the owner access the privacy settings. Not an issue after the first time someone favorites an event photo, but it was something I didn't realize until after the fact. I think that folder should default to Private.

• The link sent to the client contains the word Event because the word Event is in the breadcrumb when they visit my site. So yes, calling it Client Review/Client Proofing or something like that would be much better.

• Even though I only add one gallery to an Event, the e-mail link takes the client to a page called "Participant's Event Page" and shows the words "Event Galleries" (and then that one lone gallery). I'm sure I could change the wording or remove it entirely by playing around with the code, but that's more work. From there it requires another click on their part to actually view the gallery. It's not a smooth process for them and use of the word Event throughout gives the wrong impression. I prefer to send them a link that will take them directly to the gallery.

• You can't see the unique Participant's share link (you only see the Guest share link) to send it to them directly, and the automated e-mail sent contains a lot of SmugMug branding, not my branding. It even says the e-mail was sent by SmugMug, not by me (although I can add my name). The only way around it is to send myself a test e-mail, get the link from that, and then send it to the client directly from my own e-mail account. More extra work.

I think the process you described probably works well for wedding, portrait and event photographers, and for commissioned shoots. It just doesn't work for me when I'm licensing images from my archive and need to quickly put together a review gallery, and I would love to have an easy way for a client to make selections. But I do realize that I'm probably in the minority and I'm interested in hearing others' thoughts.

leftquark

Thanks for the really detailed explanation. That's quite helpful!

@OffTopic said:
(I'm in the process of syncing to LR right now and I do see where it shows up in LR, but I apparently have several thousand conflicts to resolve before syncing can finish because I've been using Photoshop since the 90s & have a lot of .psd master files. Now I remember why I decided I wasn't going to bother with syncing my site to LR!).

In case it helps for the future, you can just do a Sync on a specific folder or gallery. When I have a client mark favorites, I just right click on the "Events Favorites" folder, and do a sync on there. Only their new favorites end up syncing and I don't have to worry about conflicts with syncing the entire site. It might help you a little. (and I still want to work on a better interface for dealing with hundreds/thousands of sync conflicts).

@OffTopic said:

• The first time the Events Favorite folder is created (when someone actually favorites an image) it defaults to Public Visibility and searchable on the web. Only after the system creates the folder can the owner access the privacy settings. Not an issue after the first time someone favorites an event photo, but it was something I didn't realize until after the fact. I think that folder should default to Private.

A Private gallery wouldn't allow the client to see their favorites, but an Unlisted one might. At a minimum we could also turn Searchable on the Web to OFF by default for these.

OffTopic

@leftquark said:

A Private gallery wouldn't allow the client to see their favorites, but an Unlisted one might. At a minimum we could also turn Searchable on the Web to OFF by default for these.

Yes sorry, I probably did mean Unlisted. But I'm not clear on understanding, since the Favorites gallery is created in a different place/folder on our websites, how would the client know where to find it? Do they receive another e-mail with a new link to the newly created Favorites gallery? I assumed they would just see their favorites in the original gallery, and that only we would see the newly created Favorites gallery. I understand the thought process behind having two separate galleries for us on the back end, but I think it would be confusing for the client to have one link to the full gallery and another link to just their favorites. So I guess what I'm asking is, does the client need to be able to see the Favorites gallery?

@leftquark said:
In case it helps for the future, you can just do a Sync on a specific folder or gallery. When I have a client mark favorites, I just right click on the "Events Favorites" folder, and do a sync on there. Only their new favorites end up syncing and I don't have to worry about conflicts with syncing the entire site. It might help you a little. (and I still want to work on a better interface for dealing with hundreds/thousands of sync conflicts).

Thanks for the tip, I did notice that now that I've started the sync process (actually an update from the last time I did it years ago) and now have the complete updated folder structure, I can just update a specific folder or gallery.

leftquark

@OffTopic said:
since the Favorites gallery is created in a different place/folder on our websites, how would the client know where to find it? Do they receive another e-mail with a new link to the newly created Favorites gallery? I assumed they would just see their favorites in the original gallery, and that only we would see the newly created Favorites gallery. I understand the thought process behind having two separate galleries for us on the back end, but I think it would be confusing for the client to have one link to the full gallery and another link to just their favorites. So I guess what I'm asking is, does the client need to be able to see the Favorites gallery?

From their event page there's a link for the client to "View My Favorites". They could go into the gallery (galleries) to view their favorites, mixed in with the ones that weren't their favorites ... or they can just go straight to the gallery of their favorites

(the "Edit Event" button wouldn't be there for the client. Sorry that my screenshot wasn't properly done).

OffTopic

Got it, thanks.

Cyrano

I need to execute this workflow::

1. I post a set of images to a gallery only my client can see (e.g., an unlisted gallery.)
2. My client reviews the images. Those which the client wishes to purchase are marked Select. Those which the client wishes me not to use in my portfolio are marked Reject.
3. I send to my client their Select images, and I delete from the gallery their Reject images.
4. I make the gallery visible to the public as part of my online porfolio.

To satisfy my needs as a photographer and my client's needs as a customer, the workflow solution must meet these requirements:

1. To post the images for review, I use only my normal LIghtroom-based workflow, which includes publishing to SmugMug via the excellent Lightroom plug-in. That's it -- no extra time wasted in creating invitation lists, Event structures, permission hierarchies, etc.
2. To review the images, my client uses only the normal SmugMug gallery/folder interface. That's it -- no extra time wasted in registering, signing in, etc.
3. A quick and easy mechanism exists to transfer the client's Select/Reject choices to my desktop-based Lightroom catalog. Ideally, this would happen automatically via the SmugMug/Lightroom plug-in.

Given the overall sophistication and quality of SmugMug, I don't understand why providing this capability has eluded the SmugMug development team for 8 years.

leftquark

Aside from not having an easy system for “rejects”, that’s mostly possible with the Events system. It’s obviously a little work for you to setup but it satisfies all 3 (Lightroom, client clicks a link and doesn’t have to register, the LR plugin identifies your favorites).

I’ve used Comments to mark rejections, since our LR plugin can also pull in comments ... and then you can sort by Comment time to filter all the ones that have comments vs. those that have no comments. It’s a workaround in the absense of a system of rejects, but it works

Cyrano

Comments require sign-in. Would it be low-hanging fruit to add another icon to the existing choices for Events image review, to indicate disapproval? For instance, immediately next to the Heart icon, one might see a "thumbs down" icon.

chrishilgendorf

My question would be ... Why have Client Galleries at all since most of our clients will want to pick their favorites, and then even order from the list of favorites? There is an obvious need for individual client galleries, and I add my voice to the hundreds that would simply love to create a Client Gallery for an individual client and allow the to choose their favorites. Nice and clean

loissmliew

I support and would strongly want this feature to be available. This is a very basic feature, even a free Shootproof account has it.

loissmliew

And also, why is Smugmug so against client having to register or sign in to access a gallery? We need to know who view our gallery, if the client has viewed their photos, use the emails to communicate with them later etc

leftquark

@loissmliew said:
And also, why is Smugmug so against client having to register or sign in to access a gallery? We need to know who view our gallery, if the client has viewed their photos, use the emails to communicate with them later etc

What gave the impression that we're against client registration? Client registration is already supported:

Is there something else in addition to this that you're looking for?

ShaneKarns

I read through these posts as I'm looking for a proofing option as well. I've been using the events to create a proofing type set up. Clients would select their faves, then got to the faves gallery and narrow down even further. Initially this process was a little clunky for me but now that I've been doing it for years it's been part of my work flow and not a big deal. New and returning clients have been fine with the process as well. However, now that SM has changed things so clients can't unfave from the faves gallery my work flow is majorly screwed up!! I can't believe they've left us hanging like this with no good option! What are others's doing for a proofing process for clients?

leftquark

I know how frustrating the recent change can be - I use "Events" for client proofing all the time (in fact, I took a break from editing a clients favorites to check dgrin). It's driving us crazy as well, and it was a change that broke our hearts as we did it. I'll be open and admit that we chose to improve the Lightbox experience at the expense of being able to un-favorite from the favorites gallery. SmugMug Pros have better looking galleries and are seeing a significant increase in sales with the new Lightbox. We're eager to revamp the entire Events experience and make the whole thing a lot better in the coming year.

In the meantime I've been directing my clients to head back to the gallery and search for their "hearts" on top of the photos. It's not as elegant but it's at least allowed them to narrow down their favorites. Another option that I've been doing is to have them sit at my computer with me. I pull up their favorites in Lightroom (look for the "Event Favorites" folder and sync that with Lightroom). From there we can hit the delete key on any photo they want to unfavorite, then publish the changes, which results in removing the favorites.

ShaneKarns

Ahhh...help! As I get back to work again and begin sending clients their proofs they're still unable unselect images from their faves folder. They find this frustrating and it makes me look out of date and out of touch with their needs. I'm often making a second and third gallery out of their first/second round of faves so the can select their faves from their faves. This is a silly and time consuming process. I have to find a more professional solution and I so want to do it with SM. It's more than a year later and I'm still dealing with this time consuming and archaic workaround. :/

Schmee

Dear God.
Stop everything else and focus on providing client proofing within each gallery.
Clients need to choose and unchoose easily.
You are SmugMug.
No more promises, workarounds, or excuses.
At this point, it is nothing but cruel.

adamup4

The removal of this feature renders client proofing almost useless. It is enough to drive me away from SmugMug as a whole. Peeps - come on! There's got to be a way!

MartyH

I feel Smugmug are missing the point of the feature here and the is for the speed and ease of us and for the clients. Client galleries have always been easy and for clients to locate a gallery and provides a point to return to if they would like to order more images in the future. If other sites are able to provide this, why do Smugmug ignore this?

Johnny Dakar

Amen. Just did a headshot session, and client, client's agent, client's trusted friends, and I, all need a proofing feature. It can be as simple as yes/no with an OPTIONAL comment section, that produces a list or a separate gallery.

THIS IS NOT HARD, SMUGMUG.

mtmartini

I am with Cyrano on this and want to see if there is anything being done. I keep emailing SmugMug about adding a client feature where we don't have to create an event in order to get our client's favorites.

All my clients have their own folder and gallery structure. That is where they go when they want to find images they need. Adding in an Event structure makes it confusing about where they go in addition to me having to create a temporary event each time.

arcentoni

Neeed this. Please 🙏🏼

Cyrano

This request is now 5 years old.

FIVE. YEARS.

G-Imagery

@Cyrano said:
This request is now 5 years old.

FIVE. YEARS.

Logic suggests it is not due to lack of time or resources to implement such a basic feature. It is likely a strategic decision to protect their sales.