If you use ShootProof for client galleries and Lightroom Classic for editing, you've probably hit this wall: your client stars their favourite photos in ShootProof, and now you need to find those exact photos in your Lightroom catalog so you can start editing.
ShootProof does a lot of things well. The galleries look professional, clients can favourite photos with a single tap, Labels let you set up structured selections for albums and products, and the built-in print shop means you can sell directly from your galleries. But when it comes to getting those client selections back into Lightroom Classic, you're on your own. If you are looking to rethink your proofing setup entirely, browse our checklist on choosing the best client proofing tools for your studio.
So how do you close the loop?
What the ShootProof Lightroom Plugin actually does
This trips up a lot of photographers. The ShootProof Lightroom Plugin is a publish service. It lets you create gallery and album structures inside Lightroom and publish photos directly to ShootProof without exporting to a folder first. If you edit a photo after publishing, you can republish the update and ShootProof reflects the change. That's genuinely useful.
But it's a one-way street. Lightroom to ShootProof. The plugin does not pull client favourites, Labels, or any selection data back into your catalog. When you install it, it syncs your existing gallery and album names into Lightroom, but not the photos themselves, and definitely not your clients' choices. There's no reverse sync. The feature simply doesn't exist.
The filename copy workaround
ShootProof does give you a way to see what your client selected. Here's the official method:
Go to Galleries, find the gallery in question, open the Gallery Visitors report, and click the number in the Favourites column next to your client's email address. This opens a list of their favourited photos. At the bottom, you'll see a Filenames box. You copy those filenames.
Then you switch to Lightroom Classic, open the Library module, enable the Text filter, set the first dropdown to Filename and the second to Contains, and paste the filename list into the search bar.
In theory, Lightroom filters down to just those photos. In practice, this method has a few well-documented problems. If any of your filenames contain spaces, the search breaks. If the list is long, Lightroom can freeze or lag while processing the filter. And if you renamed your files at any point between importing and uploading to ShootProof, the filenames won't match at all.
The download-and-reimport workaround
ShootProof's other option is to download the favourited photos as a ZIP file. From the Gallery Visitors report, you click Download All on the client's favourites page, request the download, and ShootProof emails you a link to the ZIP.
You then import those JPEGs into Lightroom alongside your original RAW files. Lightroom treats them as new files, so you end up with duplicates. You can use the imported JPEGs as visual references to flag or label the corresponding RAW files, then delete the JPEGs when you're done.
This method avoids the filename search issues, but it's slow and messy. You're downloading files you already have, importing them into a catalog where they don't belong, cross-referencing by eye, and cleaning up afterwards. For a 20-photo portrait session, it's manageable. For a wedding with 150 selections, it's painful.
The manual matching process
Whichever workaround you use, the core task is the same: you have a list of photos your client picked, and you need to mark those photos in Lightroom so you can filter and edit just the selections. Here's what that looks like in practice:
Step 1: Pull the favourites list from ShootProof's Gallery Visitors report, either by copying filenames or downloading the ZIP.
Step 2: Open Lightroom Classic, navigate to the folder or collection with your shoot.
Step 3: Search for each filename using the Library filter, or cross-reference against the downloaded JPEGs.
Step 4: Flag, colour label, or star rate each selected photo manually.
Step 5: Repeat for every selection.
For a typical wedding where the client picks 100-150 photos out of 800, this takes 20-40 minutes if the filename method works cleanly. If it doesn't, and you're doing the download-and-match approach, it can take longer.
Do this for 30 weddings a year and you're spending 10-20 hours on what amounts to data entry.
Where the manual workflow breaks down
The time is one thing. The real problems show up at scale or when the situation gets messy.
Client changes. Your client submits their favourites, you spend 30 minutes matching them in Lightroom, and then they message you the next day asking to swap five photos. You're back in Lightroom, removing labels from five photos and hunting for five new ones.
No per-photo comments. ShootProof doesn't support comments on individual gallery photos. If your client wants to say "Can you crop this tighter?" or "Make this one black and white," they have to tell you outside of ShootProof, via email, text, or a voice note. You end up cross-referencing filenames between a WhatsApp thread and your Lightroom catalog, trying to match "the one where we're walking away from the camera" to an actual file.
Labels don't reach Lightroom. ShootProof's Labels feature is useful inside ShootProof. You can create custom labels like "Album," "Wall Print," or "Thank You Cards," set limits on how many photos a client can assign to each, and see the labelled photos in your dashboard. But none of that structure makes it to Lightroom. When you copy the filename list, you get one flat list. Album picks and wall print picks are mixed together. You have to manually sort them on the Lightroom side.
Errors. When you're manually searching for filenames, it's easy to miss one or flag the wrong photo. Lightroom's text filter sometimes matches partial filenames, so searching for "IMG_412" might surface both IMG_4120 and IMG_4122. 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:
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.
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.
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.).
Open the GallerinaSync plugin in Lightroom Classic. The plugin automatically detects which project to sync based on the photos in your catalog. Click sync.
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 and print sales. If you use ShootProof for delivering edited finals, selling prints, and managing your e-commerce, you keep using ShootProof for all of 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 ShootProof for delivery, print sales, and products.
Gallerina sits between steps 3 and 6. ShootProof sits at step 7. No overlap, no switching. You get the automated sync you need for proofing and the full-featured e-commerce platform you need for delivery.
This hybrid approach gives you the best of both worlds. For a broader look at why an automated proofing loop cuts down turnaround times, see our comprehensive guide on how to let clients choose their photos without losing your mind.
Manual vs plugin: a realistic comparison
Manual (ShootProof filename copy): 20-40 minutes to match 150 selections. Filename search breaks with spaces in filenames. No per-photo comments available. Labels don't carry over to 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.
If you also use Pixieset alongside ShootProof, we wrote a similar breakdown on how to get Pixieset client selections back into Lightroom Classic.
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 ShootProof to test it. Upload one wedding's worth of proofs, let your client pick, sync the selections, and see if it saves you time.