Collaborative Proofing?

[AlanHaynes.com]

Lightroom Version Number

Lightroom Classic 10, Lightroom cloudy 4

Operating System

1. Windows 10

As a Classic user, I'm not up to speed on all the mobile/cloud features of the cloudy versions. So, a few related questions:

1. A client has a need to share photos with his design team for them to make choices about the images. I know that one of the album sharing options is to enable likes and comments. But it seems that the design team would need an Adobe account for this to work. Am I correct about this? Or can they leave likes an comments even if they don't subscribe to Adobe?
2. Also, it would be better if they could apply star ratings or pick flags instead of likes. Is it possible for the recipient of a shared album to do this?
3. Apparently, there was a technology preview in Lightroom called "Collaborative Proofing", but Adobe must have removed it because I can't find it. Does it still exist?
4. In Classic, I see a badge for the photos that have comments on them. But I couldn't find a way to filter for them. Is there a way to filter to show only the images with comments? How about a smart collection to do the same?

Any help here would be greatly appreciated.

 

[johnbeardy]

Clients need an Adobe account, which can deter them. So set up a second Adobe account for yourself, calling it something like [email protected], and send the client the url, this user name, and password.

Collaborative Proofing is still there, but you do have to enable it in LrWeb - click your user profile icon and it's under Technology Previews. In a collection, you then have to click an icon down at the bottom left, which then tells you to enable proofing by clicking an icon in the top right hand corner. Afterwards you can save client selections as new collections. It does rather suffer from Cloudy thinking for a Classic workflow, so it's quite primitive and hasn't progressed much, but it could be such a great feature if Adobe put in a bit of effort.

You can't filter likes, something I requested as soon as I first saw the feature. What you can do is sort by comment time, which can be enough.

 

[AlanHaynes.com]

Thanks John. I found the technology previews with your help. Now, I'll have to see if it will do the job.

You mentioned setting up a second Adobe account for myself so that I can give the password to the client. Do you mean to pay for a second subscription? Or is there some way for one subscriber to have two accounts?

 

[Jim Wilde]

Thanks John. I found the technology previews with your help. Now, I'll have to see if it will do the job.

You mentioned setting up a second Adobe account for myself so that I can give the password to the client. Do you mean to pay for a second subscription? Or is there some way for one subscriber to have two accounts?

No, a subscription is not required, all they need is a free Adobe login (and I believe they can use any existing Facebook or Google login to have the Adobe login generated for them).

 

[johnbeardy]

I find that clients are favourably impressed by having this [email protected] login . It's simple and it's appears professional (and more professional than it is!) compared to the alternative.

 

[Replytoken]

If you decide to look at solutions outside of LR, there are programs designed for this work. I went with frame.io for a project as I liked a lot of its features, including that clients or customers did not need to sign up with an account. If you are interested, here is a referral link for a two week free trial - Video Review and Collaboration Software .

Good luck,

--Ken

 

[AlanHaynes.com]

I've been practicing with syncing from LR Classic and collaborative proofing. Two things I like about the way Classic handles comments on shared images:

1. Classic makes it easy to see which shared images have comments on them by displaying comment badges in the grid mode
2. I like being able to sort images by "last comment date" so that it's easy to find the few commented images in a large batch of images.

My client prefers to use LR Desktop (the cloud-based app). The comments show up in LR Desktop, but there are no badges in the app and there doesn't seem to be a way to sort them by comment date. So, if the shared album contains a lot of images, it's hard to find those that have comments. You'd have to go through them all manually and look for comments. Any suggestions on how to make this process easier in the cloudy version?

I may try to convince him to go back to Classic, but if he doesn't want to, is collaborative proofing not worth the trouble.

 

[Jim Wilde]

Any suggestions on how to make this process easier in the cloudy version?

Tell him to look at the Notifications panel. It will list all recent comment/likes in chronological order, providing the name of the commentor and the Album name that contains the image. Clicking on the thumbnail in the panel will open the image in the display mode with the Activity panel opened. It would be better with some form of filtering, but Adobe know all that. Hopefully they'll do something about it in due course. BTW, the same Notifications can be seen in all the other Lightroom apps as well, and the iOS mobile version has a grid overlay view which indicates if an image has received comments/likes.

 

[AlanHaynes.com]

Thanks Jim. I did discover the notifications. I wish Adobe had set up the notifications so that, after you clicked on one, it was dimmed or marked as viewed in some way. With a long list of notifications, it's hard to remember which ones you've already viewed. This is especially true when the photos are all very similar. A guy can dream, right?

 

[johnbeardy]

I translate "in due course" as the plot of Waiting for Godot.

The good thing about the Collaborative Proofing is that in LrWeb you can identify the client's choices from the drop down box, and this lets you save them to a new collection.