Photo proofing: run a round clients finish

This page is about the round before delivery, when you want your client to tell you which photos they love before you finish the edit or fill an album. Tellisto calls that proofing. By the end you’ll know what your client does and what comes back to you. You’ll also know why tapping a photo on a proofing gallery means something different from tapping one on a final gallery.

Proofing picks and keeping picks are different

Most gallery tools give you one heart and change what it does depending on the gallery’s stage. That catches people out all the time, so Tellisto keeps the two apart.

On a proofing gallery, the heart is feedback to you. Your client taps it on the photos they love, and those picks come straight back to you, ranked. It means “these are the ones I want you to work on”.

On a final delivery gallery, there’s no heart to confuse it with. A tap marks a photo as one they want to keep. They get a last look before anything saves, and the list stays in their browser. You’re never notified and you never see it. It means “these are the ones I’m taking”. The client-side view covers that side in full.

So the rule is this. If you want to know what a client loves, run a proofing round. Once you’ve delivered the finished work, what they pick is theirs alone.

There’s one exception. A delivered gallery that still has an open formal selection shows both, because the selection needs its own way to pick. It’s uncommon, and it’s on our list to tidy up.

Set the gallery to proofing

Set a gallery to its proofing stage and it works as a review round rather than a delivery. Your client opens the same clean, phone-friendly page they’d get for any gallery. A banner tells them it’s in proofing, not the final set.

From there they heart the photos they love. They can leave a note on a single photo or on the whole gallery, which is the difference between “this one” and “can we warm up the whole reception set”. When they’ve been through the shoot, they send their picks to you.

Downloads stay locked the whole time. Nobody can download the full-resolution files from a proofing gallery until you unlock them, so a review round never turns into an early delivery. When you’re happy with the picks, you finish the edit and deliver the gallery as usual. That’s when downloads open.

If you want the proofs watermarked while your client chooses, open the gallery’s Settings tab and switch on Watermark the proofs. It uses your studio logo by default, or your studio name as text, and you pick the placement and strength. The watermark is only on what your client sees in the gallery, never on your original files. When you deliver, unlock downloads or switch the watermark off, and your client sees clean photos straight away.

What comes back to you

Your client’s picks arrive in the gallery’s Proofing tab. The loved photos are ranked by how many people loved each one. Say the couple, both mums and a maid of honour all went through the gallery. The frames they all agreed on sit at the top, and you don’t have to count anything by hand. Notes appear next to the photos they belong to, so you read each comment in context. You don’t have to match stray messages to photos later.

You also get an email as soon as a client sends their picks, so you’re not refreshing the tab wondering whether they’re still deciding. If they never open the gallery, Tellisto tells you it’s still unopened, so you can follow up yourself. That’s covered on the automations page.

When the job needs a formal selection

Proofing is loose on purpose: hearts and notes, no fixed count. Some jobs need a formal selection instead, which is a locked pick against a package. The client chooses and submits, and the list locks. You then edit against a fixed list rather than one that keeps changing.

The included-image count stays on screen while they choose. If the package covers 30 images and they’ve picked 45, you can both see the overage before you start the edit. That makes the “you’ve gone over” conversation easier, because the numbers already show it. Use a selection when the number of images is contractual. Use proofing when you just want to know what they love.

Getting their picks into Lightroom

Once the selection is in, the Selection tab gives you Copy for Lightroom. It copies their chosen frames as a list of filenames, with the extensions removed and a space between each one. That’s the format Lightroom’s Library filter expects. Paste it into the filter’s text field and the grid narrows to the client’s picks. You can then flag them all and get on with the edit.

Next to it is a plain Copy filenames, which keeps the extensions. Use it for a culling tool other than Lightroom, or for pasting into an email. Either way you don’t sit with two windows open, reading numbers off one screen and hunting for them on the other.

The Proofing tab has the same two buttons. Each photo your client loved shows its filename, so you can pull their favourites into Lightroom before there’s any formal selection.

Helping the client who never finishes

Slow choosers are the main reason proofing rounds stall. Most of the fix is in how you set up the round, not in any setting.

Give fewer, better options. A tight gallery of your strongest frames gets chosen faster than a pile of near-duplicates, because every extra similar shot is another decision for the client. Cull hard before you send it. The first gallery walkthrough has more on cutting a shoot down to the frames worth showing.

Put a friendly deadline in your own delivery email: “have a look through by Sunday and I’ll start on the album Monday”. This is a nudge in your own words, not a feature of the product. Tellisto doesn’t enforce a proofing deadline or show your client a countdown. Any pressure comes from how you write the note. The delivery email guide has a template you can use.

If they haven’t even opened the gallery, you’ll know. The gallery’s page shows whether it’s been viewed, and the unopened-gallery reminder flags it for you before too long. Most “they’re taking ages” cases turn out to be “they haven’t looked yet”. That needs a quick, friendly resend, not a chase.