September 2, 2026
If you deliver shoots to clients through proofing galleries so they can pick their final photos, you've probably already hit this wall: Lightroom doesn't let you watermark a shared gallery directly. The feature simply doesn't exist, and not for lack of people asking for it.
On the Adobe community, a feature request titled "Ability to Watermark images shared online" was opened on January 10, 2019. It now has more than 70 replies and 92 likes, and it's still active: as recently as August 2026, an Adobe community manager confirmed that "at the moment, Lightroom doesn't have this feature."
On the Lightroom Queen forums, one photographer summed up the problem well in a thread about the state of proofing galleries: the ugly part, in his words, is no watermarks. He adds that he can only use Lightroom's proofing galleries with clients he trusts enough not to steal the proofs, for lack of built-in protection.
The workaround described, year after year, in these threads has become something of a ritual in the profession: export the photos at low resolution with a watermark, reimport those exported files into a new album, then share that separate album as the proofing gallery.
The real problem comes after. Once the client has made their picks, someone has to manually match every watermarked, selected photo back to its high-resolution original.
This is probably not an oversight so much as a product-priority call. Lightroom is a huge ecosystem, and watermarking proofing galleries touches a relatively narrow slice of its user base: photographers who sell shoots through client selection, rather than those who deliver a final set directly. For the people who do need it, the result is a process that doesn't scale: fine for a handful of galleries a month, painful once you're running several shoots a week.
Beyond the time lost exporting and reimporting, this workaround has three blind spots:
No real protection without a watermark. Until the photographer finishes the full workaround, shared proofs stay vulnerable to screenshots or unauthorized downloads — a real risk when sharing dozens or hundreds of unedited, unsold photos.
Error-prone manual matching. Matching watermarked photos back to their originals by hand, shoot after shoot, opens the door to mistakes: delivering the wrong photo, or missing one from the final batch.
A drag on studio growth. A process that takes twenty minutes for one shoot easily takes two hours for ten. It's the kind of repetitive task that limits how many shoots a photographer can reasonably run in parallel — not for lack of talent, but for lack of administrative time.
The classic export-reimport workaround exists because Lightroom treats watermarking as an export step, not a display layer. A more direct alternative is to separate the two entirely: keep the original files untouched on the photographer's computer, and generate a watermarked version on the fly, only for display in the shared gallery.
That's exactly the approach behind Prooftide: a folder of photos becomes a shareable watermarked gallery in a few clicks, with no intermediate export and no reimport. The client browses the gallery and picks their favorites with a click on a heart, no account needed. The photographer then pulls the original files matching those picks directly, no manual matching, because the link between the watermarked version and the high-resolution original is kept automatically from start to finish.
The high-resolution files never leave the photographer's computer: only the web versions, already watermarked and compressed, are ever shared online.
The gap between local editing and an online proofing gallery isn't an imagined problem. It's friction that professional photographers have documented since 2019, living it shoot after shoot. If the export-reimport workaround above sounds familiar, there's now a way to skip it entirely.