A Capture One Live alternative for proofing that runs past the shoot
Stabble is a client-proofing layer for a photography studio running Capture One, and the closest alternative to Capture One Live when the review has to outlive the shoot. Live shares a session in real time for as long as that session is up; Stabble publishes the same images to a gallery that stays online for months, collects the client's selects, and writes them back into the Capture One session, including freehand annotations and numbered markers placed on the image itself.
If everything you need is to show frames while the camera is still warm, Live is included with Capture One and does that well. The two overlap during the shoot; they diverge afterwards.
Live is built for the moment of the shoot
Live is designed for the present tense. You're on set, the client is across town or on a call, and they need to see what's coming off the camera now. The link opens in any browser, on any device, with no account. How long that share stays online depends on the subscription: 24 hours on Pro, one month on All in One, two months on Studio. Several shares at once, several collections behind one link, watermarks and email notifications arrive with All in One; local-network collaboration is Studio only.
None of that is a cut-down version of anything: it's a coherent design choice. Live covers sharing during the shoot. If your need stops there, it's enough, and you have nothing to buy.
We stream live too
Worth saying, because people often assume we sit that part out: Stabble has its own live mode. You turn it on for the session, and new frames join the client's gallery on their own as the shoot goes: nobody republishes. Your client rates and comments as the frames land, and if several people are culling in parallel, each one sees the others' choices appear.
The difference: our previews go through your Capture One export recipe, so a few seconds pass between the shutter and the image appearing in the gallery. Capture One's native live view is more immediate. That's its home ground. In return, what your client does with us during the shoot is already inside the cycle that carries on afterwards: same gallery, same selects, nothing to reopen or re-import.
And proofing carries on afterwards
The moment a professional client has to sign off, selection no longer ends when the set comes down. That's where it starts. And that holds in a ten-person studio as much as for a photographer working alone: what matters isn't the size of the team, it's that the decision has to travel.
The shoot wraps at 7pm. The art director looks that evening, the product manager the next day, legal on Thursday. Or, if you work alone, your client answers between meetings, in three sittings. Someone changes their mind about three frames. A second batch arrives the following Tuesday and has to join the same selection. Three weeks later, a retoucher opens the session and needs to know precisely what was asked for, by whom, and on which image.
That's a different problem. It's no longer measured in seconds but in days, across several people, with decisions that have to be traceable. That's the cycle Stabble is built for, with 90, 180 or 365 days of retention depending on the plan, a record of every access, and restore points for the day someone wipes out someone else's work.
What comes back into the session, and what doesn't
Let's give Live its due, because this is the part people get wrong about it: ratings and color tags placed by a reviewer do sync back into your Capture One collection, in real time, while sharing is running. That is genuinely useful and it works.
Two things behave differently. Comments live in the Live session: Capture One's own documentation describes them as viewable in the browser, and email notifications are listed from All in One onward, not on Pro. And there are no drawn annotations in Live's documented feature set: a reviewer rates, tags and writes, but doesn't mark up the frame.
With Stabble, the client circles a blemish, crosses out a frame, drops numbered markers on what they want fixed, and those marks reappear on the photo, inside Capture One, in the right place, on the right crop. They write "1 = remove the mole, 2 = stray hairs, 3 = redness" in their comment, and the retoucher opens the session with all three markers sitting on the image. Without that, the retoucher reads "the third one from the left, there's something top right" and hunts for it by eye. Across a hundred images and three rounds of review, the time adds up.
The other difference is when. Live's sync belongs to an active sharing session. Stabble's return is a step you run ("Retrieve selection") at any point while the gallery is alive, three days or three months after the shoot, on a session you reopened this morning.
Side by side
| Capture One Pro | All in One | Capture One Studio | Stabble | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| How reviewers open it | Browser, any device, no account | Browser, any device, no account: email address and access code, on every plan | ||
| How long the share stays online | 24 hours | 1 month | 2 months | The gallery stays online for the plan's retention: 90, 180 or 365 days, independent of whether anything is actively shared |
| Real-time feedback | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes: ratings, tags and comments appear as they are made |
| Several shares at once | – | Yes | Yes | 10, 40 or 150 active galleries depending on plan, each with its own link |
| Several collections behind one link | – | Yes | Yes | One gallery per session; a second batch joins the same link |
| Watermark | – | Yes | Yes | Set in your Capture One export recipe, burned into the exported pixels, on every plan |
| Email notifications | – | Yes | Yes | You send the link yourself, in your client's language, from the studio console |
| Local-network collaboration | – | – | Yes | Not applicable: the gallery is reached over the internet, from anywhere |
| Multi-user sessions | Join a hosted session | Join a hosted session | Invite up to two collaborators | Every seat on your plan works on the same selection; client-side reviewers are unlimited and never count as seats |
| Ratings and color tags in the session | Yes: they sync to the Capture One collection in real time while sharing is running | Yes: written into the session by "Retrieve selection", at any point during retention | ||
| Drawn annotations on the image | Not documented | Freehand strokes and numbered markers, written back onto the image in the session, on the right crop | ||
| Record of who opened it | Not documented | Email address and timestamp for every unlock | ||
| Restore points on the selection | Not documented | Snapshots before each republish and when the client submits | ||
| Does behavior depend on each person's subscription? | Yes: the rows above differ by tier, so a team on mixed subscriptions has several sharing behaviors at once | No: every seat on a studio's plan gets the same behavior | ||
| Where it runs | Inside Capture One (macOS, Windows) | Companion app on macOS; the gallery opens anywhere | ||
Capture One figures checked on July 27, 2026 against Capture One's own pricing pages (English, French) and its Capture One Live product page. The Mobile tier is deliberately left out: it is an iPad and iPhone application, a different product category, outside the tethered-studio workflow this page is about. No free Live tier is documented on the pricing pages consulted on that date, which states the absence of a source, not the absence of a feature. "Not documented" means the capability is not described on those pages, not that it is absent. Stabble figures are the published limits of our own plans. Capture One and Capture One Live are trademarks of their respective owner; Stabble is an independent product and is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Capture One.
What about client gallery platforms?
The other objection is just as fair: there are excellent gallery platforms (Pixieset, Pic-Time, SmugMug and others) with favorites, per-image comments and client activity tracking, and they cost less than we do.
They are very good at what they're built for: delivering, presenting and selling photographs. If that's your need, they will serve you better than we will. We sell nothing to your clients, and we have neither a store nor a website to offer you.
But none of them knows your Capture One session exists. Your client's selects stay in their browser: someone then has to read them off one screen and reproduce them by hand in your software. Across three hundred images, that transcription is precisely where the mistake creeps in, and nobody notices until retouching.
So the question isn't "which one is cheapest", it's "where does the client's work end up". In a browser tab, or in your session. That's what client proofing means to us.
A few things worth knowing
Watermarking is configured in your Capture One export recipe, not on our side. So you keep full control of it (text, size, opacity, placement) in the interface you already know, and it's burned into the pixels: it survives a download, a screenshot and opening the image directly. Set it once.
We're not a store, a portfolio, a delivery platform or a DAM: that's deliberate, and we explain it elsewhere. And we assume Capture One: this is a layer on top of it, not a universal tool. The companion app needs a Mac; the gallery opens anywhere.
How to choose
Three situations.
You show images during the shoot, and the selects don't need to come back to you later. Live is included in Capture One and does exactly that. Buy nothing.
You deliver galleries and sell prints to consumers. Go with a gallery platform. It will do it better and cheaper.
Your selects travel across days and have to come back into your session. That's where we come in, whether you're ten people or one. At ten, what counts is keeping everyone in sync; alone, it's a clean conversation with your client and nothing retyped by hand. The question to ask isn't the price of a subscription, but the cost of one selection lost or transcribed incorrectly: half a day of retouching redone, and the conversation with the client that comes with it.
Client proofing that works with Capture One.
Free for 14 days. No card required.