Thankfully, the internet and digital age have brought upon us a wave of free information, tools, and services that can make many parts of your photography business significantly less expensive. Being thrifty is vital to the success of many new business ventures, and it is especially so when so much photographic equipment is both expensive and necessary.

Let’s take a look at some of the best free tools for your photography business.

Website creation and Development

The fees and costs of running a website and online portfolio surely add up. Some of these costs are necessary; the allocation of server space and the cost for a domain, for instance. Some paid plugins and templates for your website might be worth the professional look they afford you, but that’s your choice to make. On the other hand, let’s take a look at some of the best free resources for someone starting out their website.

Domainr

Domainr is a simple tool; it lets you check if your prospective website domain names (the actual name of the website such as amazon.com) are available. When coming up with your website name, it’s important to see the options and see if you can actually use it. This is especially true before you start creating marketing materials!

WordPress

WordPress is a great open-source website design tool that, due to its longevity and commercial success, is accompanied by easily searchable information that will surely cover all and any questions you may have. You can use WordPress for both a traditional website and a blog, and the amount of pre-built free templates, plugins, and options you have at your disposal is incredible. Additionally, WordPress bridges the gap between all-in-one website design businesses and starting from scratch – you aren’t getting the instant cookie-cutter look from a boutique website design that you would pay for, but you also aren’t tasked with immediately having to learn all the intricacies of website design. Lastly, WordPress is used by so many photographers and photograph centric businesses that any questions you have will probably have been asked and answered several times over. 

Backing up your photos

Photographs take up lots of space. Currently, my Canon CR3 RAW files are at least 30MB, each, and there are days where I shoot several thousand images. That means I have days where I literally shoot over 100 gigabytes of images. This means two things – firstly that I need to be good about managing my Lightroom backlog, and secondly that I need a lot of storage and backups. I definitely don’t keep every photo or even 10% of them, but I still have filled many, many hard drives, not to mention offsite storage. Thankfully, there are some great offsite storage solutions that are either free or relatively low in cost if needed.

Amazon Photos

If you are already paying for Amazon Prime, Amazon photos are bundled in your membership and allow you unlimited RAW storage. Sadly, for those of us using a file format such as the aforementioned CR3, it isn’t currently supported. Make sure to check if the file type that you shoot in is, or else you will have to painfully convert each image to one that is supported to upload it. I use Amazon Photos to backup all deliverable images and edits that I want easy access to from my phone. You can even set Amazon photos to auto-sync from your image library, such as where I import Lightroom photos to, but I prefer manually doing it as one of my final steps when working on files.

Google Photos

As someone that does not currently own a Google Pixel device, Google Photos makes me envious of those that do. Sadly no longer free for all users, Google Photos provides unlimited photo backup, albeit it will compress RAW files. This is still a great option for those wanting to save those finalized JPEGs.

Flickr

Although a recent change has made the free upload amount rather slim, using Flickr as a backup tool and somewhere to share some of your best work is definitely an option. I recommend using Flickr as somewhere to keep your ‘mega-portfolio’, or every photo that you would consider using in a future online portfolio. That makes it possible to even reach out to mentors or other photographers for fast critiques, editing or compositional suggestions, or any other advice you might want to receive. 

Dropbox

Lastly, Dropbox offers 3GB of free storage, with the possibility to increase that storage later on on a paid plan. Sadly, there isn’t currently any website that just offers free unlimited storage, and if that were the case, it would be hard to trust them to retain your files and have actual server uptime. These storage solutions might not let you save every single photo you have ever taken, but even as they stand, they are a better alternative than not having a single online backup. 

Finance and Business Tools

This is the boring part of the guide, but also the important part. A lot of finance and business based tools are expensive, often having high fees meant for large corporations to pay out. Let’s take a look at some of the better options for photographers that want to keep that overhead as low as possible. 

Flolu Photographer CRM

A CRM, or Customer Relationship Management Software, makes it easy to organize, price, and bill for your clients. Flolu isn’t really anything special – it’s marketed towards photographers, but isn’t any different from a basic CRM software, other than some slight difference in interface nomenclature. Despite this, what makes Flolu great is the price – it’s free, and a great step up from the use of unorganized spreadsheets. 

InvoiceToMe

I used to invoice only through Paypal, which meant that on each transaction I was losing out on money to pay for Paypal’s service and support. That isn’t a bad thing if you need the payment protection, but it really wasn’t something I needed. InvoiceToMe is a great place to throw together invoices for free, and it doesn’t require any hassle. Just open the link and type out what you need paid for!

Docracy

Docract is a fantastic website that allows you access to millions of legal documents that you don’t have to pay for. Contracts are just the starting point; you can find everything you will need here. Make sure to read them through yourself, however, as it’s just the best practice when using any open source legal literature. Down the road, if you find yourself reusing the same contracts over and over, it might be time to get a lawyer to draft a contract template for you!

With these three business side tools, you will be able to cut out the majority of the cost for your photography business. I hope that these resources, along with the others listed above, were helpful to you!

• How do I connect my print sales to Mailchimp?
• How do I get my print customers into Hubspot?
• Can I connect NextGEN Pro to CovertKit?

Out of the box, NextGEN Pro does not offer such integrations.

However, there is a workaround thanks to the gateways included in the Ecommerce plugin.

Because NextGEN Pro utilizes Stripe and PayPal for you to collect payments on print and digital download sales, there are two connection services you can utilize.

IFTTT is a free service that will allow you to connect Stripe to Mailchimp and a handful of other platforms.

Zapier is a freemium service that will allow you to connect Stripe and/or PayPal to a large variety of other platforms.

For photographers only using Stripe for payments and Mailchimp for email marketing, IFTTT can be the quick solution.

But for those who need more, check out Zapier. You might wind up having to pay for their service depending on your needs. But the option is there for you to explore.

If you would like to see integration with your CRM or email marketing service inside of NextGEN Pro, reach out to support with your request. We keep track of all requests and pay close attention to the most popular ones.

Some of the ways we’ve noticed changes happening, are shorter session time (time is money), virtual pre-planning meetings and even changing the packaging materials used when delivering prints.

But client galleries are also a place where photographers can save a lot of money.

For example, Smugmug charges $360 for their annual service, in order to get their best e-commerce abilities and website features.

But they also charge 15% commission on top of that annual fee.

Photocrati costs only $99 a year and comes with the website part, the proofing part, the e-commerce part, and more.

That’s over $260 in savings every year. The amount over depends on how much in print sales you do.

Photoshelter starts at $540 and charges 8% commissions.

But either way, for photographers counting pennies to save money where they can, this sounds like a great place to start.

Switch to Photocrati for your photography website and client gallery. Try us for 30 days and if you’re unhappy we’ll offer a refund.

Fortunately, you can make life easier for you and your customers by collecting booking requests through your website. The right booking plugin can automate this process, leaving you to focus on other responsibilities. It can also make booking management easier with automatic reminders and calendar integration.

In this article, we’ll look at the importance of online bookings and go over some practical schedule management tips. We’ll then cover three ways you can collect bookings through your website. Let’s get started!

The Benefits of Collecting Booking Requests Through Your WordPress Site

Booking requests are the lifeblood of many photography businesses. Making the process of collecting them as simple as possible can boost your revenue and streamline your management tasks.

Enabling clients to submit booking requests on your website is more convenient for you and them. Since it’s automated, your customers won’t be left waiting for you to return a call or email.

This can improve customer satisfaction while reducing the work you need to do. Online scheduling should also minimize the risk of double booking yourself and other mistakes that could cost you sales.

Tips for Successfully Collecting Booking Requests Through Your WordPress Site

As we stated, the primary purpose of collecting booking requests via your website is to make the process simpler for all parties. To that end, it’s important to include features such as confirmation messages so customers know their requests have been submitted successfully.

Additionally, a reminder system for you and your customers can reduce your cancellation rate. You can automate these notifications with a plugin or a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform.

Finally, remember to consider the length of your sessions carefully when creating your booking system. Blocks that are too short may lead to overbooking and rushed appointments. Blocks that are too long might reduce your productivity. You should also account for travel and setup time.

How to Collect Booking Requests Through Your WordPress Site (3 Possible Methods)

Adding scheduling functionality to your website might sound complicated. Fortunately, there are several methods you can use to accomplish this goal. Below, we’ve covered three you can use, depending on your preferences.

1. Install a WordPress Booking Plugin

There are a lot of WordPress booking plugins you can use. However, some are better than others when it comes to photography businesses. Our recommendation is Amelia, which includes several handy scheduling features, such as:

• Google calendar syncing to easily update your schedule and your clients’
• Custom services scheduling so you can configure the length of your sessions
• Support for multiple locations so you can manage shoots at all your venues
• Client and payment databases to keep track of your contacts and invoices
• Automated email and SMS notifications so you and your clients remember your appointments

Once you install the plugin on your WordPress site, you can navigate to Amelia > Settings to configure basic settings such as your default time slots, the time required before booking, and cancellation periods, and more:

Amelia also enables you to create a services catalog. This is ideal if you have multiple photography packages on offer.

2. Add a Booking Request Form to Your Site

Your website might already have a contact form. With a few tweaks, you can adjust it to accept booking requests as well. Alternatively, you could create a dedicated booking request form instead.

This solution is generally a bit more time-consuming and requires more hands-on management than a booking plugin. Also, a lack of calendar integration could leave you with multiple requests for the same time slot, reducing customer satisfaction.

If you want to implement a booking request form, you can use a plugin to create it. Two of the most popular tools for this task are Gravity Forms, and WP Forms:

After installation, you can create your booking request form. There are certain fields you should include for best results, such as:

• The customer’s contact information
• Preferred date and time of the shoot
• The type of shoot (if you offer multiple packages)
• The session’s location
• Space for clients to include any special information or requests

You can also use a template for your booking request form. This makes the process easier and ensures you don’t forget any important fields.

3. Use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System

Reducing the number of tools your business uses can save you money and make life a little easier. A quality CRM platform creates a single channel for managing all communication with your customers.

While there are many CRM systems available, you should look for one that automates most of your processes. This will leave you with more time for shooting and keeping your customers happy. When choosing a platform, keep an eye out for features such as:

• Online booking
• Calendar management
• E-commerce integration
• Lead collection
• Analytics reporting

You should also consider accounting software integration, referral tracking, and invoicing. However, these are additional features that aren’t necessarily vital.

Some CRM systems, such as Táve, target photographers and offer all the features you need to collect booking requests. Once you’ve chosen your platform, you’ll need to look into integrating it with your site via a designated plugin or a tool such as Zapier.

Conclusion

Taking booking requests through your website can streamline this often time-consuming process. Online scheduling is also more convenient for potential customers and can help prevent mistakes such as double booking.

In this post, we covered three methods you can use to collect booking requests through your WordPress photography site:

1. Install a WordPress booking plugin such as Amelia.
2. Add a booking request form to your site.
3. Use a CRM system such as Táve and integrate it with your site.

Do you have any questions about collecting bookings on your website? Share them with us in the comments below!

I’m a firm believer that in-person sales is a big part of being a full-service photography studio.

Being in the photography industry, we take for granted how easy it is to put together a wall art collection or an album.

We forget that these sorts of things can be totally overwhelming for our clients.

They have every intention of sitting down to choose their wall art and album images, but the sheer number of images they have to sort through overwhelms them, they don’t know how to choose the best image groupings, etc.

As a result, the images sit on a USB drive in the back of a drawer and never get seen again.

In-person sales is a great way to make sure that your clients not only get quality images taken but also make sure that their images end up in places where they can be seen and enjoyed – a wall display, a folio box, an album, etc.

There are a couple of different ways to do in-person sales – you can either do them the same day as the session, or you can schedule a separate date and time after the client’s session for them to come in and view their images for ordering.

Regardless of how you choose to do it, one question seems to come up somewhat regularly – how do you outsource your editing while still doing IPS?

It’s actually not as difficult as you may imagine. Having worked as an editor for photographers for the last decade, I can tell you that I have clients that do it successfully whether they do same-day viewing and ordering or whether they have their clients come back on a separate date for their viewing and ordering.

Here’s some tips I have based on each type of workflow.

How To Outsource Photography Editing When You Schedule A Separate IPS Date

The usual workflow outline for most photographers who schedule a separate date for their IPS session typically goes like this:

1. Meet with the client for the session
2. Choose a date for viewing and ordering session
3. In the meantime, cull, edit, and retouch images for the viewing and ordering session
4. Have client return on their IPS date to go through and choose images
5. Put in print order for the client
6. Receive order and either ship to the client or have them stop in to pick it up

(Of course, there’s always some variances in this, but this seems to be the main trend.)

If this is your workflow, you generally want to add in outsourcing somewhere between either steps 2 and 3, 3 and 4, and/or 4 and 5.

Option 1: If you’re outsourcing between 2 and 3:

This is the workflow you’ll utilize if you want someone else to handle the entire process of culling, editing, and retouching.

Essentially, they’d be taking over the entire Step 3 for you.

Option 2: If you’re outsourcing between 3 and 4:

This workflow assumes that you’ll be doing some of the editing yourself. For a lot of my clients that utilize this workflow, they do the culling, and then send the images to me for light editing (exposure, white balance, tonal adjustments, etc.) and retouching (blemish removal, background fixes, and essentially anything that happens in photoshop).

Or, the photographer does the culling and the basic exposure and color-correcting (i.e., light editing), and then send the images to me for retouching (blemishes, eye bags, background fixes, etc).

Option 3: If you’re outsourcing between 4 and 5:

If this is the workflow you want to go with, usually the photographer will have culled the images and done some basic editing (white balance, exposure, etc.) before the client sees them.

For the most part, the images the clients see at their viewing and ordering won’t be retouched – meaning small imperfections like blemishes and eye bags will still be intact. You’ll just have to let your clients know that the images have just received some light editing, but that the images they order will be fully retouched per your retouching style.

Once the client chooses the images they want, you send the chosen images to an editor for retouching and polishing. Once you receive them back from the editor, you put in their print order.

Option 4: A Combination

The other option would be a combination of Option 1 and Option 3. Here, you would send the raw, unedited images to the editor for culling and light editing. Then, once you receive them back, show them to the client during their IPS session.

After the client chooses the images during IPS, you send the chosen images back to the editor for retouching and polishing.

This option has a bit more back-and-forth but has a couple of advantages.

First, it’s the option that has the least amount of time spent behind the computer editing. Second, it can be easier on the budget, as fully retouching an image is more expensive than just getting some light editing done. If only a handful of the images are being fully retouched, you’ll pay less per image on average for editing.

How To Outsource Photography Editing When You Do Same Day Viewing And Ordering

For photographers that utilize this workflow, this is usually how it goes:

1. Meet with the client for their session
2. After the session is over, send them away for a couple of hours
3. While they’re gone, quickly cull and lightly edit the images (just basic white balance and exposure/tonal adjustments, maybe some light skin smoothing at most)
4. Once the client returns, go through the lightly edited images with the client so they can choose which ones they want to purchase
5. After the client has selected their images and gone home, retouch and polish off the images
6. Send in their print order

With this workflow, unless you have someone in-house that does your editing for you, you can really only send the images out at Step 5, as most photo labs will not have a 2-hour-or-less turnaround time.

This also assumes that you will do the culling of the images yourself as well, as again, there isn’t much time to send it out to a lab to do it for you.

However, you can still have a lab do the basic editing (white balance, exposure, etc.) and the retouching (eye bags, blemishes, background fixes, etc.). You just have to make sure you let your clients know at their viewing that the images haven’t been edited at all, but they will be once the client chooses the images they’d like to purchase.

The other option is to do the culling and basic edits yourself, show them to the client for their ordering session, and only send the images to the editor for retouching that the client chooses.

I have photographers that I work with that do both, and both are great options.

However, for this to work well, you have to make sure you’re doing a few other things.

1. Don’t overshoot. If you walk away from a portrait session with hundreds of images, it’s going to take you too long to cull the images. You won’t have enough time to cull through all the images while the client is taking a break.

You want to make sure that you can get the culling time down to half an hour or less. If you can’t, you really need to work at either shooting less, culling faster, or both.

2. Get it right in camera. The more consistently you’re able to shoot, the easier (and quicker!) it will be to edit. If you only have to make minor adjustments to exposure and white balance here and there, light editing will go really fast. If you have to make dramatic changes and your consistency is all over the place, it will take far too long.

At most, it should take you half an hour to do basic light editing (exposure, white balance, and tonal adjustments) on roughly 100 images. If it’s taking you longer than that, you need to work on getting your settings right in camera and shooting consistently.

3. Don’t show too many images. You shouldn’t really be showing your clients more than 50 images at their viewing and ordering. We think that choice is a good thing, but in reality, it’s completely overwhelming to the client. If they have to sort through dozens of images they’ll hit Analysis Paralysis and not be able to choose any.

Instead, get the number of images you’re showing your clients down to 50 or less (30 or less is even better). Lightly editing 30-50 images shouldn’t take you longer than 15-30 minutes.

4. Nail down your style. If you find yourself going back and forth between two or three different presets or constantly fiddling with the tone curve or HSL panel, this is going to add a lot of time. Instead, pick 1 or maybe 2 presets that you use regularly and ditch the rest. The idea is to be able to apply the light edits as quickly as possible, so you really need to nail down your aesthetic and know what look you’re going for right out of the gate.

5. Don’t nit-pick. Remember, your clients are not photographers. They don’t know what proper exposure or white balance is. Don’t spend time adjusting images by 100 degrees in temp or adjust the tint by 1 or 2 points here and there.

These adjustments are so minimal that your client will not notice them and therefore won’t care. The quicker you can let go of your perfectionism during the editing process, the quicker you’ll be able to get the images ready for your client to view them.

How Do You Choose What’s Best For You?

Ok, so I’ve laid out a lot of options here. How do you know what’s best for you?

Well, if you do same-day viewing and ordering, that makes up some of the decisions for you. If you don’t, consider how much time you want to spend editing. If it’s none, you might want to choose a workflow that allows an editor to do all of the editing and retouching for you.

If you’re ok with spending a little bit of time editing, you might want to consider doing the culling yourself and sending the rest of the process out.

If you don’t quite have the cost of retouching worked into your budget yet, it might be best to only send out the images which the client orders. This will probably give you the biggest return on your time (since retouching usually takes the longest), but make it so you’re not paying for images to be retouched that the client doesn’t order.

In the end though, a good editor will work with you on figuring out the best workflow based on your specific needs. For me, this is something that’s always worked out with the client during the onboarding process and is customized for each client.

During the onboarding process we go over the photographer’s current workflow, how their ordering process works, their budget, roughly how many images need editing on average, what the turnaround time in their contract dictates, and figure out a workflow that fits all of those requirements.

Once all the kinks are worked out and the workflow established, it runs like a well-oiled machine and you’ll wonder why you never started sooner

Beth Teutschmann has been working in the photography industry as an editor and virtual assistant for over 5 years. When not working, she pursues her passions of yeti-hunting, underwater basket weaving, and teaching herself Elvish.  See her website here.

• Liability insurance
• Gear insurance
• Car insurance

In this video you will learn about what should be keeping your business safe.