Client proofing that works with Capture One sessions

What happens between the last frame and the client's selects

The shoot is the part everyone plans for. What follows is the part that eats the week.

Three hundred frames sit in Capture. Someone has to get them in front of a client who wasn't on set, wait, and then turn whatever comes back into a decision the retoucher can act on. That "whatever" is usually an email with a list of file numbers, or a spreadsheet, or a phone call (occasionally all three, disagreeing).

The failure isn't dramatic. Nothing crashes. A number is read wrong, a frame that was rejected on Tuesday is retouched on Thursday, and the mistake surfaces at delivery, when it costs the most to fix. That's the real shape of the problem: not a technical breakdown, but a decision losing its context on the way from a browser to a session.

So the useful question about proofing isn't "how do I show the images". Sending images is solved, and has been for fifteen years. It's "how does the answer get back, in a form my session understands, without anyone retyping it".

From session to gallery

Publishing starts in Capture One, from the collection you're already looking at. The companion app processes the collection through your WebProof export recipe and uploads the previews: your recipe, so your sizing, your quality, your watermark if you use one.

What leaves your machine is the JPEG preview and the selection data. The RAW files never do. That is worth stating plainly to an art director or a legal department, because it is usually their first question, and it has its own page.

Your client gets a link and an access code. No account, no install, any device. They open a contact sheet, rate with stars, apply color tags, comment per image, draw on a frame, and drop numbered markers on the parts they want changed. If a second batch is shot the following week, you publish again and it joins the same gallery: the existing selection is never overwritten.

Selects coming back into the session

This is the part that justifies the tool, so it's worth being concrete about the mechanism.

Back in Capture One, Retrieve selection reads the gallery and applies the client's ratings and color tags to the matching variants. Star ratings become star ratings. Color tags become color tags. You then filter on them exactly as you filter on your own, because at that point they are your own.

Annotations take a second step, and it's worth knowing why. Capture One keeps a session's state in memory while the session is open and rewrites its sidecar files from that memory, so writing marks into a live session would simply be erased. Retrieve therefore arms the delivery, and the menu-bar app applies it when Capture One closes. The sidecars are re-read at the next open. You close the application the way you always do, and the client's strokes and numbered markers are sitting on the images when you reopen, on the right crop.

The client's numbering is stable. Marker 3 stays marker 3 even if marker 2 is deleted, because their comment says "3 = redness" and a comment that silently starts pointing at a different spot is worse than no marker at all.

Working as a team on the same shoot

On a production set, culling is rarely one person's job. A digitech triages, the photographer confirms, an assistant handles a second body, and the client's team looks from three different rooms.

Every member of the studio gets a personal companion key, so the gallery records who published what and when. On the client's side, several reviewers can be in the same gallery at once; ratings and tags appear for everyone as they land, with no manual refresh. Before every republish, and when the client submits, a restore point captures the state of the selection. So the day someone clears a colleague's work, it comes back in one click.

The longer version of that discussion is in the guide on multi-operator sessions and synced selections.

What this is not

Saying what Stabble doesn't do is quicker than saying what it does, and three lines will tell you if it isn't for you.

• Not a store. We sell nothing to your clients and take no commission. If you sell prints, a gallery platform (Pixieset, Pic-Time, SmugMug) will serve you better and cost less.
• Not a portfolio. There's no public site, no theme, no SEO for your images. Your galleries are private by construction.
• Not a delivery platform. We carry the JPEG preview and the decision, not the deliverable. Final files go out the way they already do.
• Not a DAM. No catalog, no keywording, no long-term archive. A gallery lives for its retention period and then goes; the session on your disk stays the master.

What's left is narrow on purpose: the round trip between a Capture One session and the person who has to approve what's in it. For the longer version (the whole field, and where each family fits), see the tools studios use to get photos approved by a client.

Common questions