Feedback
Guests can react to photos in six ways: likes, favourites, star ratings, comments, emoji reactions, and colour labels. Each type is switched on per gallery, and new galleries inherit defaults you set once.
On the beta channel, galleries can also ask for an explicit approve / reject per photo, let guests draw on a photo, and let a guest hand in a finished selection. Stable (v3.134.x) has none of these three; see Release Channels.
Feedback types
Likes and favourites
A guest can like a photo and, separately, mark it as a favourite. Both are counted per guest, and you can cap how many of each one guest may set.
Star ratings
One to five stars per guest per photo. On the beta channel (from v3.161.0-beta.0) a guest can also rate straight from the grid tile — see Rating from the grid. A guest clears their rating by clicking the star they already gave, which removes it rather than storing a zero — so the photo’s average and count recalculate, and it can drop back out of any “rated” filter.
Comments
Free text per photo. Comments can be moderated before guests see them, and you can require a name and email first.
Emoji reactions
Five fixed emoji: ❤️ 😂 😍 👏 🎉. The set is not configurable.
Each guest gets one reaction per photo. Clicking a different emoji switches theirs over, clicking the same one removes it. Guests see the tallies only if you have “Show feedback to guests” on.
Reactions appear in the admin feedback list, on the guests table, in the activity feed, and in feedback exports. There is no reaction filter in the admin photo grid.
Enabled per event as Emoji Reactions; on by default for new galleries.
Colour labels
Red, yellow, green, blue and purple — Lightroom’s set, chosen deliberately so a client’s picks travel back into your catalogue. See Lightroom round-trip.
This is the proofing tool: instead of “I like this one”, the client marks a verdict. One colour per guest per photo, changeable, and clearing is the same click again.
Two keyboard schemes in the lightbox, set per event:
| Scheme | Keys |
|---|---|
| Colors only | 1 green (first choice), 2 yellow (second choice), 3 red (rejected) |
| Lightroom | 1–5 set the star rating, 6–9 set red / yellow / green / blue |
Pressing the same key again clears, and 0 always clears.
Guests filter by colour with chips above the grid. In the admin grid each photo shows a dot for its dominant colour — the one most guests chose, with ties broken in the order green, yellow, red, blue, purple.
Enabled per event as Color Labels; off by default, unlike the other types.
Admins have their own private marks, separate from the client’s. When you export XMP you choose which set to write out: Client selections or Your marks.
Approve / reject per photo
Beta channel only, from v3.167.0-beta.0 (PicPeak PR #1858 ).
Approve / reject per photo gives the lightbox toolbar an Approve and a Reject button, so the client gives an explicit verdict instead of a colour or a star. A rejection can carry an optional reason (“eyes closed”). One decision per guest per photo: the same button again withdraws it, the other one replaces it.
- Off by default. New galleries take the default from Settings → Event Creation → Approve / reject per photo.
- With Show feedback to guests on, other guests see each decision with the guest’s name, but never someone else’s reason.
- In the admin, tiles carry a decision marker, the photo grid filters by Approved, Rejected or Undecided, the photo viewer lists each decision with name and reason, and the feedback exports carry decision and reason. The photo CSV gets
approved/rejectedcolumns at the end. - Decisions count against their own rate-limit bucket, 2,000 per hour.
Drawing on photos
Beta channel only, from v3.171.0-beta.0 (PicPeak PR #1963 ).
With Drawing on photos on (off by default, and only available while comments are on), the comment form in the lightbox has Draw on photo: freehand pen and arrow in six fixed colours, with undo and clear. The drawing is attached to a comment, and the comment text is required, so moderation, notifications and every visibility rule of comments apply to the drawing too.
- At most 20 strokes per drawing.
- A posted comment with a drawing gets Show drawing, which lays it over the photo; it follows zoom and pan.
- While drawing, the photo is reset to fit and swipe, zoom and the keyboard shortcuts are paused. Escape or Cancel leaves drawing mode.
- You see drawings read-only on the gallery’s feedback panel, in the moderation panel and in the photo viewer. CSV and JSON exports carry the comment text only.
Finish selection and Approve edited photos
Beta channel only, from v3.171.0-beta.0 (PicPeak PR #1960 ).
Finish selection (off by default) lets each guest hand in their picks when they are done:
- The gallery header shows a counter: “12 of 30 selected” when the gallery caps likes or favourites (favourites when both are capped), “12 selected” otherwise. The counter appears where a cap is set or the switch is on.
- Finish selection asks for confirmation and an optional note, then locks that guest’s likes and favourites, adding and removing alike, until you reopen the submission. Ratings, colour labels and comments stay open. A locked heart explains why it does not change.
- An empty selection cannot be handed in. Photos the client has since hidden are not counted.
Approve edited photos needs no switch of its own: it appears whenever Approve / reject per photo is on, and locks that guest’s approve / reject decisions the same way. An approval without any per-photo decision is allowed.
Both are per guest, keyed by the same identity as the guest’s other feedback. When the gallery requires name and email, the guest is asked for them before handing over (from v3.174.0-beta.0, PicPeak PR #2006 ).
When a guest hands in, you get an entry in the notification bell, a selection_submitted email to the gallery’s admin email address, and the selection.submitted webhook. The gallery’s Guests & Feedback tab lists the submissions under Finished selections and approvals, with the guest, the count, the note and a Reopen button (needs events.edit or events.support). Reopening lets the guest change their picks again; they then have to hand them in anew.
Who the feedback belongs to
shared mode below is stable from v3.132.1; on beta before that. See Release Channels.Each gallery picks one identity mode, which decides how PicPeak attributes feedback:
| Mode | What it means |
|---|---|
| Simple feedback | Anonymous and device-based. Everyone using the same device shares one set of selections. |
| Per-guest selections | Each visitor enters a name first. You get per-person tracking and admin insight into who picked what. |
| One shared colour tag | One colour per photo that everyone sees and anyone can change. Likes, ratings, comments and reactions stay per-visitor. |
Pick simple for a casual gallery on one household device, per-guest when you need to know who chose what, and shared when a couple or an agency needs to agree a single verdict per photo rather than each person having their own.
Shared colour tags have no author, so the admin view cannot show who set one. Switching modes is non-destructive: existing per-visitor colour labels are kept but hidden while shared mode is on, and come back if you switch away.
Filtering
Guests get a feedback filter with Liked, Favorited, Rated and Commented. Several can be active at once and they combine as OR — a photo matching any selected chip shows. Colour-label chips are a separate group that narrows the result further, as does the people filter.
Sorting offers date, date taken, name, size and rating, with ascending and descending as a separate control.
Admins get a richer panel on the photo grid: has likes, has favourites, has comments, a rating threshold, colour labels, and your own marks — plus an explicit Combine with switch to run them as AND (the default) or OR.
Admin moderation and review
From the admin panel you can read every comment, like, rating and reaction per event, delete comments, see totals per type, and review activity as it comes in. On the beta channel this lives on the gallery’s Guests & Feedback tab.
Comment moderation and the word filter are described under Moderation. Photos can also wait for review before guests see them: uploads from gallery team members (beta channel from v3.167.0-beta.0) and, if the gallery asks for it, guest uploads (beta channel from v3.171.0-beta.0). See Moderation → Holding uploads for review.
Export
Filtered selections export as a ZIP, or as file lists and XMP sidecars for Lightroom and Capture One. Exports carry ratings, colour labels and reactions, and the CSV includes both the client’s colour label and your own.
Settings
Per gallery, under Settings → Guest interaction on the gallery page: the master Enable feedback switch, the identity mode, which of the six types are on (plus, on the beta channel, Approve / reject per photo, Finish selection and Drawing on photos), the lightbox keyboard scheme, per-guest caps for likes and favourites, and privacy options — require name and email, moderate comments, and show feedback to guests. Guest feedback is limited by the instance-wide feedback rate limits; the per-event rate-limit switch was removed because it was never applied (builds containing PicPeak PR #1489 ).
In builds containing PicPeak PR #1809 the totals guests see (feedback summary, photo count) only count photos that guest can see, and a guest’s own feedback list leaves out photos that were hidden afterwards. View, download and visitor totals are no longer sent to guests at all; they are on the admin Analytics page.
With Show feedback to guests off, guests also do not see a photo’s average rating or its like, favourite and comment totals. Photos a client has hidden accept no feedback from guests and are left out of the feedback summary. (Builds containing PicPeak PR #1495 .)
Globally, under Settings → Event Creation, you set what new galleries start with. Ratings, likes, favourites, comments and reactions default on; colour labels and approve / reject default off. Changing a global default does not touch galleries that already exist.
Related
- Lightroom round-trip — getting client picks into your catalogue and finished edits back.
- Gallery Interface — where guests meet these controls.