Hello fellow photographer! You may have found yourself here because you’re looking for some information on how to improve your daily tasks, save time and thus make more money per hour.
What so many people DON’T realize is that we are not glamorously arriving to shoots and then coming home to bathe in our money. Instead we are spending 80% of our job on the computer. – Editing, marketing, doing our accounting and taxes, learning our craft, emailing, keeping up with blogs and social media, filling out product orders…
You know how it is.
I’ve been a full time photographer for 10 years, photographed close to 400 weddings and thousands of portrait sessions. And I have mastered this day to day photography life stuff. Not only am I a solo mom (deployed husband), but I’m often doing 3-5 sessions a week.
I do NOT have time to waste. And neither do you.
So let’s cut to the chase. These are my absolute must have programs I use that have changed my life. They have made it so that I can run a successful business day to day, and be present for my son, with a little time to get sucked into Disney+ every once in a while (Hannah Montana is on there).
Here are my top 5 BEST digital programs for my photography business below!
Disclosure: There are some affiliate links below. These are all products I highly highly recommend and I chose these because I personally use every single day.
If I could shake other photographers and yell BUY BLOGSTOMP RIGHT NOW!!!! I would. Well I don’t know why I can’t do that, the opportunity just hasn’t presented itself yet.
Blogstomp has single handedly made me blog MORE, pinterest MORE, and sit in photoshop way less. Time is money and this program has saved me hours and hours and hours of time. Let’s jump into what Blogstomp really does.
How it works: drag your images in and create one image that includes the two images you select, or more. Instantly. You can also have it resize your image for website usage in the same click.
Why does it matter: You can now prepare your entire session, or even wedding for blogging in 5 minutes! This means more blogging! This means more work shown! This means more clients! Less images are easier to look through, faster to load, and showcase your work better.
The Cost: $50 one time fee. ARE YOU KIDDING ME!!! Right I’ve gotten my point across that I think it’s a good deal.
I would crash and burn without Honeybook, plain and simple. Once you start booking sessions, you need to have a system in place to keep your bookings organized. Why? Because angry clients means bad reviews and a bad business service. This is a way to become the professional you’ve always dreamed of being! It also is impressive and easy for clients.
I have a digital calendar I can pull up on my phone or computer through Honeybook that tells me who’s session is that day, who’s paid, what notes I have written, and more. It is the single most important business program I have.
How it works: Honeybook is a client booking program. Here are the tasks that it does that I could not live without.
Why does it matter: Keep track of your clients, stop making mistakes about when someone’s booked, who has or hasn’t paid, what specifics they told you about them and more. Protect yourself with secure payments and contracts. Present yourself professionally for higher value and service to your clients.
The Cost:
You have to deliver your images, and present them beautifully, while making things easy for your clients. In comes Pic-time Galleries.
How it works: Upload images to a gallery. Now you are able to share the gallery with your client, they can download high resolution or website resolution, or you can turn off downloads. They can “heart” their favorite images. You can upload your logo and then select “watermark” and it will be automatically added on all of those images if you want it to be a proofing gallery. There is an online store connected to the gallery so you can set prices and allow clients to buy their images without having to deal with any of the ordering or shipping yourself!
BONUS: I also use Pic-time galleries highest package option for image storage for up to 10 years. If my hard drives crashed or perished in a fire then I would have all of my sessions and weddings uploaded here. That’s invaluable to me.
Why does it matter: You need to deliver your photography sessions in a beautiful and easy to navigate way for all of your clients! Also it allows online print sales with no hassle, and the storage is incredible to keep people’s memories backed up.
The Cost: FREE for a certain amount of images, then $17 or $34 monthly options that you can choose from.
Use this code: DXEL2K to get a FREE month!
This is the one phone APP I have listed here, and it’s a good one. Later works with instagram, the current king of the social media world, and super important to photographers.
How it works: Connect your instagram, then you upload images that will show what your layout will look like once the new ones are added. You can move images around before you post them to see how it will all look in your feed. You can also schedule reminders for when to post and write descriptions for them ahead of time.
Why does it matter: As photographers our instagram feed is now our portfolio. How it looks and the layout is very important considering we are being hired for our images. Plus I also will instagram once a day when I already have images pre chosen, whereas I would not post as often before when I was just trying to figure out an image in the moment.
The Cost: free for a basic plan
This is a culling program. You may ask, but Rae, I already having a culling program in Lightroom or whatever else. Yes you do! I used to cull in Lightroom and it took 3-5 seconds for an image to load. I would cull and edit at the same time, and it would take me 8+ hours to get through a wedding.
3 seconds to load + 3000 images = 9,000 seconds, or 150 minutes.
That’s 2 AND A HALF HOURS OF ADDITIONAL TIME. WAITING FOR LOADING.
Photomechanic takes away the loading time. You can scroll through your images instantly and cull them with one click by sorting them with a color. Then you take all your culled images (800 out of 3000 or whatnot) and pull them into lightroom to edit them from there.
How it works: Insert your memory card to your computer and then upload all the images from the card into Photo Mechanic (also save the RAW files on your hard drive or desktop). Then you go through and click a number (1-8) to assign a color. Then pull all of those images that you selected into lightroom (or wherever) to edit.
Why does it matter: I am currently doing 10-15 sessions and weddings a month. That’s 25+ hours saved a month and I can’t even handle how ridiculous that is.
This program has ABSOLUTELY!!!!! saved me mass loads of time. I have too much life to live and enjoy to spend my time on stupid things.
The Cost: $139 one time fee – try it for free for 90 days
I hope you enjoyed some of my absolute favorite programs, I use all of these every single day as part of my business workflow and I think they could help you too!
Let me know what you may want to hear about next and I may write a blog post to help answer one of your questions!
Rae Marshall is an Oahu Wedding and Portrait Photographer in Hawaii who also specializes in elopements, engagements, maternity, family, senior portraits, lifestyle, fashion and more and is available for travel for select projects.
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