When I first started in the portrait business we had a great
system called Portrait One Manager. It was made by Phase One (awesome camera
backs and capture software) and was relatively easy to use and had a ton of options
attached to it. Unfortunately it looks like it wasn’t a very successful piece
of software because Phase One doesn’t offer it anymore. What was really great
about the software was the fact that you could pull any bit of information out
of it that you wanted. The only catch was that the person scheduling the
appointment had to put in all the information. Another awesome aspect was that
it linked directly with Capture One (Phase One’s premiere digital tethered
capture software) and it was integrated with sales and accounting software as
well, with an export option to QuickBooks. I really liked this software and
appreciate it more now than when I was actually using it. You see when I first
started, I was just a dumb 22 year old in college without any real experience,
so when a problem came up I just naturally blamed the software instead of my
own inexperience.
Besides the point that I wish I could still use Portrait One
Manager, that software is now defunct and from what I have seen online, so are
most of the studio management software out there. Here are a few that I have
seen recently.
There are several different pieces of software out there,
but there are a couple of things to look for when purchasing. Here are some
things that I would find to be a great asset in software.
-Attaching
sessions with Clients: It’s really nice to look back and see what you have done
for a client has done in the past and be able to keep that all in one simple
file, instead of multiple mini files. Maybe it’s just me, but I hate it when I
go to look up a client’s pictures and there are 19 different contacts that
match the same name, and I have to go look up each and every one of them just
to find the right photo session (that explanation might not have been to clear,
but if you need some clarification, just comment)
-Generate
Lists. Invaluable for marketing. Say for example I want to send out a postcard
to all my clients whose anniversary is in the month of June. This feature
allows me to set the parameters, and generate an easy list that can be turned
into a mail merge for easily printable address labels.
-Invoicing.
If you are going to do photography and make money at it, then somewhere down
the line, you need to have financial records, whether it is for tax purposes,
or if you want to get a loan, etc. Financial records are very important to a
healthy business, and it’s nice to have some software to keep track of it for
you. It’s also nice if this software can export all the data to QuickBooks as
well.
-Calendar.
Do you really need me to explain a Calendar?
-Workflow
tracking. At some point you will need to access where an order of photos has
gone. If you are doing one shoot a week/month/year then this is probably not a
big priority. But if you are trying to manager 60 shoots a week, and then this
can be nice. This feature is basically a checks and balances system to make
sure everything goes as planned. As a photo goes through each part of the
workflow, that part get’s checked off, and so on. It ends with archiving the
image with a way to access it in the future (simply erasing it off your hard
drive is not archiving).
-Back ups.
Whether it is via the cloud or to a USB jump drive, you NEED to back up this
type of a system. If your studio becomes very successful and you start to
thrive off of this system, then when that system goes down, you’re dead in the
water. Did you see how people panicked when Wikipedia went down for a day (out
of protest)? Imagine you are a college student who has been using Wikipedia to
write all of your papers and then suddenly it’s gone the night before the paper
is due, and you haven’t even started on it. Yeah, that’s a little bit of panic.
Point of the matter is, back up your data.
-Create
appointments while mobile. It’s really nice to just pull out the smartphone,
make the appointment, and then have it sync up with your software at home.
There are some other bells and whistles that really make
life easier, but the list above is pretty much the essentials. Now technically,
with a little bit of organization, you could probably handle all of this using
Microsoft Outlook, and it would probably work great, except for the fact that
it is not written specifically for the photography industry. But do with it, as
you will. Below are a few samples of studio software that you might like to
try.
1. Studiocloud Basic Version is Free, updates are pretty
cheap (Studiocloud.com)
2. Studioplus Basic version is Free, after that you can
pay monthly. (studioplussoftware.com)
There used to be a lot more, but most of the ones that I had
used before were picked up by studio plus. I like Studio Cloud because it does
a cloud back up (the non-free version).
Good Luck Folks.
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