CE4 Client Response Gallery is available NOW, and the CE4 family is now fully assembled. Huzzah!
This new version is absolutely massive, a complete overhaul and a major step forward for the product.
CE4 Client Response Gallery facilitates communication between the photographer and client following a photo shoot. The photographer posts a gallery of images online, and the client is able to make selects and provide feedback, sending that information to the photographer's email address for further processing.
The photographer hosts galleries on their own website, and the gallery is highly customizable, visually and behaviorally.
Presentationally, CE4 Client Response Gallery shares DNA from CE4 Gallery, so includes the same CE4 improvements to gallery layout and lightboxes, and most of the same options for visual customization. And, of course, the gallery is fully compatible with CE4 Publisher. In fact, using the client response gallery together with CE4 Publisher unlocks even more new features.
This version fully abandons the Form-to-Email script from formtoemail.com, which previous versions relied upon. Instead, the gallery now uses proprietary mail functions, offering built-in spam prevention and greater reliability for delivering messages. This has given us greater control over the processing of messages, as well as the formatting of those messages. Big improvements here include:
- built-in anti-spam measures
- improved reliability for email delivery
- client feedback is backed up and viewable online from within the TTG BE admin interface
- messages include feedback in comma-separated lists, useful for image filtering in Lightroom's Library module; feedback is also itemized and presented in a human-readable format for easy reading.
- Thanks to the gallery's new databasing, we've also been able to implement several highly requested features.
In past versions of the gallery, all images had to appear on a single page and very large galleries would bog down significantly. New in CE4, galleries may be paginated! Spanning multiple pages allows each page to load more quickly, and keeps performance high even browsing on mobile devices.
Gallery filtering has also been improved to support pagination. When enabling the filter to view only selected images, the gallery will pull together selected images from all pages in the gallery, allowing the client to review selects side-by-side, even if they previously appeared on different pages in the gallery.
Client selects and feedback are saved in real-time to the database. This allows clients to quit the gallery and resume at a later time, and prevents the accidental loss of work.
Overall gallery performance and stability have also been significantly improved, as we are now able to store information in the database, rather than having it reside in browser memory. This eliminates significant overhead from the gallery.
Used together with CE4 Publisher, CE4 Client Response Gallery also has Client Management features. You may create client accounts, then assign image galleries to those accounts. When a client is logged in, they will be presented a list of their galleries; these galleries will be protected from unauthorized access, and you may choose to hide galleries from appearing in gallery indexes using CE4 Publisher.
Get / See
Pricing and Upgrades
Let's talk about the elephant. CE4 Client Response Gallery comes with a price hike to $50 USD. Previously, I developed the client response gallery entirely on my own, and me being a designer above all else, there were limitations to what the gallery could do. For the CE4 version, Ben has joined the project to supply programming duties, allowing us to implement many new, frequently requested features (saving, pagination, client management, etc.), and to overcome many of the limitations of the older versions of the plugin. We've put more time and resources behind CE4 Client Response Gallery than anything else we've ever made, so the price hike is not only justified, but we think it's more than fair.
For those of you upgrading from the CE3 version, we are offering upgrade pricing depending on the date of purchase:
- For those having purchased the client response gallery since the launch of CE4, the full amount of your original purchase will be discounted from the upgrade price. We are only asking that you pay the difference between the CE3 and CE4 versions.
- For older purchases, we are providing a discounted upgrade.
To claim your upgrade discounts, lookup your existing order for CE3 Client Response Gallery. The discount will be attached to your order in a TXT file. Check out CE4 Client Response Gallery from our shop, and use the discount during the checkout process.
Integration with other CE4 products
Of course, CE4 Client Response Gallery plays nicely together with other members of the CE4 family. To get up-and-running successfully, be sure to upgrade to the new TTG-BE 2.0.3 (included with your CE4 Client Response Gallery purchase), and if using CE4 Publisher, then you will need to be running the newly released CE4 Publisher 2.2.0.
We have detailed these updates in a separate blog post.