If you use Pixieset for client proofing and Lightroom Classic for editing, you've probably run into this: your client picks their favourite photos in Pixieset, and now you need to find those exact photos in your Lightroom catalog.
Pixieset is great at the client-facing side. The galleries look good, clients can heart their favourites, and the whole experience feels polished. But when it comes to getting those selections back into Lightroom Classic, you're left with a gap. Pixieset's Lightroom plugin is designed to upload photos to Pixieset, not to sync selections back to your catalog.
So how do you close the loop?
What the Pixieset Lightroom Plugin actually does
This catches a lot of photographers off guard. The Pixieset Lightroom Plugin is a publish service. It lets you export photos directly from Lightroom Classic to your Pixieset galleries without going through the web uploader. That's it.
It does not sync client selections, favourites, or any feedback back into Lightroom. There's no "pull" direction. It's a one-way street: Lightroom to Pixieset. Once the photos are in Pixieset and your client starts picking favourites, that information stays in Pixieset.
If you've been searching for a way to make the plugin sync selections back, it's not a settings issue. The feature doesn't exist in Pixieset's plugin.
The copy list workaround
Pixieset does give you a way to see what your client selected. In your Pixieset dashboard, you can view the favourites list and use the "Copy Lightroom List" button. This copies the filenames of all favourited photos to your clipboard in a format that looks something like this:
IMG_4021.jpg, IMG_4035.jpg, IMG_4087.jpg, IMG_4122.jpg, IMG_4156.jpg
From there, the idea is that you paste this list somewhere and use it to find those photos in Lightroom Classic. Pixieset also lets you download a CSV file with the same information.
This works. But if you've ever tried it on a real wedding with 100 or more selections, you know how it goes.
The manual matching process
Here's what most photographers actually do once they have that list of filenames:
Step 1: Copy the favourites list from Pixieset or download the CSV.
Step 2: Open Lightroom Classic, go to the folder or collection with your photos.
Step 3: Start searching for each filename. Use the Library filter, type in the filename, find the photo, flag it or add a colour label.
Step 4: Repeat for every single selection.
For a typical wedding where the client picks 100-150 photos out of 800, this process takes 20-40 minutes depending on how fast you can search and how your catalog is organised. Some photographers paste the list into a text file and work through it line by line. Others print it out and check off each one.
The process is straightforward. It's just tedious. And when you're doing it for 30 weddings a year, that's 10-20 hours of your time spent on what amounts to data entry.
Where the manual workflow breaks down
The bigger problems show up at scale or when things get messy.
Client changes. Your client submits their favourites, you spend 30 minutes matching them in Lightroom, and then they email you the next day asking to swap three photos. Now you're back in Lightroom, removing labels from three photos and hunting for three new ones.
No comments in Lightroom. If your client left comments on specific photos in Pixieset ("Can you crop this tighter?" or "Love this one, can you make it black and white?"), those comments stay in Pixieset. You have to keep switching between Pixieset and Lightroom while editing, cross-referencing filenames to figure out which comment goes with which photo.
No grouping. If you organised your Pixieset gallery into sections (ceremony, reception, portraits), that structure doesn't carry over to Lightroom. Your selections all end up in one flat list.
Errors. When you're manually searching for filenames, it's easy to miss one or flag the wrong photo. The more photos you're matching, the higher the chance of a mistake. One wrong photo in the final delivery is a bad look.
A different approach: syncing selections automatically
We built Gallerina because my co-founder and I kept watching photographers struggle with this exact step. Gallerina is a client proofing gallery with a Lightroom Classic plugin called GallerinaSync that works in the opposite direction from what you're used to. Instead of pushing photos from Lightroom to a gallery, it pulls client selections from the gallery back into Lightroom.
Here's how the workflow looks:
1. Upload your unedited JPGs to Gallerina. Drag and drop from your shoot folder. In our tests, the upload speed is faster than Google Drive for the same batch of photos.
2. Share the gallery with your client. They get a link and a PIN. No account creation needed. The gallery is branded with your name and logo.
3. Your client picks their favourites. They can heart photos, leave comments on individual images, and you can organise photos into groups (ceremony, reception, portraits, etc.).
4. Open the GallerinaSync plugin in Lightroom Classic. The plugin automatically detects which project to sync based on the photos in your catalog. Click sync.
5. Selections appear in your catalog. The photos your client picked get colour labels, star ratings, and any comments they left. If you used groups in Gallerina, those sync as Lightroom collections. The whole sync takes a few seconds, not 30 minutes.
After that, you can filter your catalog by colour label to see only the selected photos, read your client's comments right inside Lightroom, and start editing. If your client changes their mind and swaps a few photos, you re-sync and the labels update.
How this fits with your existing workflow
Gallerina handles the proofing-to-Lightroom step. It works alongside whatever you already use for final delivery. If you use Pixieset for delivering edited finals and selling prints, you keep using Pixieset for that. The workflow becomes:
Shoot the wedding
Cull in Lightroom Classic
Upload unedited JPGs to Gallerina for client proofing
Client picks favourites in Gallerina
Sync selections back to Lightroom via GallerinaSync
Edit only the photos your client chose
Upload edited finals to Pixieset for delivery and print sales
Gallerina sits between steps 3 and 6. Pixieset sits at step 7. No overlap, no switching.
Manual vs plugin: a realistic comparison
Manual (Pixieset CSV): 20-40 minutes to match 150 selections. Client comments stay in Pixieset. No gallery groups in Lightroom. Colour labels and star ratings applied manually per photo. Client changes their mind, you redo the whole process.
GallerinaSync Plugin: Under 5 seconds to sync 150 selections. Client comments synced to each photo in Lightroom. Gallery groups become Lightroom collections automatically. Colour labels and star ratings applied automatically. Client changes their mind, re-sync in seconds.
Getting started
If you want to try the automatic sync on your next shoot, Gallerina has a free tier that includes the GallerinaSync Lightroom Classic plugin. You don't need to switch away from Pixieset to test it. Upload one wedding's worth of proofs, let your client pick, sync the selections, and see if it saves you time.