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You had a wonderful picture day, your post-processing is finished, and now it’s time to publish your gallery and start selling. Most parents intend to buy photos, but some don’t get around to it immediately…or maybe they straight up forget! So, just how can you keep the excitement of picture day going to encourage early sales?

One way to achieve this is by using money-saving incentives to create a sense of urgency. Encouraging quick ordering means your studio sees a faster return on the time and effort you devoted to picture day while still making sure your customers love your photos.

Luckily for you, we’re here to let you in on some insider info. We have SIX tried and tested ways to grab your customers’ attention and get them to press that Order Now button faster and earlier. Read on!

Understanding Order Urgency in Volume Photography

Each one of your jobs has a natural sales cycle, and the obvious overall goal is to make each one as profitable as possible. Playing up order urgency is a tried and true sales technique that uses the fear of paying more tomorrow to encourage customers to buy today. Expiration dates for promotions, discounts, and fundraisers help create this sense of urgency to buy quickly to get the best price possible.

Many parents will buy their kids’ photos no matter what—that’s great! Don’t worry about losing money by offering discounts; customers already committed to purchasing might purchase even more than they would have if no promotions were available.

Instead, the primary target of your studio’s order urgency campaigns is the less committed parent who is on the fence about ordering, who plans to order eventually but not immediately, or who has no intention of buying. Planting that suggestion in these customers’ heads is a massive win for your studio!

Six Ways to Create Order Urgency with PhotoDay

FOMO (fear of missing out) is a real and powerful driving force for many people's decisions—from attending parties to watching popular movies to, yes, even ordering pictures. With these six techniques, PhotoDay makes leveraging FOMO and increasing your studio’s AOV easier than ever.

1. Offer a Free Social Sharing Download for 48 Hours
   Add a free social sharing download to all of your packages for the first 48 hours after publishing the gallery. Customers who were planning to purchase a single print may see this freebie and decide to buy a whole package instead. Downloads are a fantastic item to offer for free because they don’t cost your studio a thing—you’re investing zero dollars to encourage a fast upsell.
   
   It’s easy to set this up in PhotoDay. Just duplicate the job’s price sheet and add a free social sharing download to each package. Then, assign the updated price sheet to the job before publishing the gallery. Use our Custom Promo feature to let customers know about the offer and set a reminder to swap back to the initial price sheet after 48 hours.
   
   
2. Publish a Gallery with a Time-Sensitive Offer
   Deadlines and scarcity are two of the most popular ways to drive order urgency. Try building in a deadline by creating an offer (free shipping or percent/dollar amount discount) just for customers who order by a specific date. You could also try the scarcity tactic of only making the offer available to the first 50 customers to encourage them to act even faster so they don’t lose out.
   
   Head to the Store section of your PhotoDay Studio Panel to determine your discounts, set the offer expiration date or max redemptions, and then attach the promotion to the job as a Gallery Offer before publishing.

3. Expire Your Best Prices
   Another effective route is to expire your best prices or all package offerings. If parents know they need to purchase by a specific date to get the best product prices or to be able to buy any discounted packages, they’ll feel even more motivated to spend early for the best savings.
   
   To implement this strategy, all you have to do is duplicate the existing price sheet for the job, remove the money-saving packages, and only leave a la carte products or increase the overall pricing. Request the Best Price Series Custom Promo to make sure parents know they should order quickly to save the most money.
   
   
4. Expire Your Gallery
   Expiring a gallery creates a whole different sense of urgency—once the gallery is no longer available, parents will have missed out on not only your best prices but also the chance to order their photos at all.
   
   With PhotoDay, you have complete control over how long your gallery remains published and accessible. You can set an expiration date in the job settings and manually re-publish the gallery anytime.
   
   
5. Make it a Fundraiser
   Build a promotion that saves parents money and benefits the organization by offering to donate a portion of your proceeds for a set amount of days back to the league, school, or dance studio. The silver lining of this approach is that the organization will be extra motivated to help spread the word since their reward increases with every family that places an order.
   
   Plan this with the organization before picture day and include it in your initial pitch. Determine how long you want the fundraiser to run, then add the information to your package descriptions and marketing materials. Use the Fundraising Series Custom Promo in PhotoDay to notify everyone who has opted into the gallery of the upcoming deadline.
6. Offer Free Bulk Shipping with Miller’s Lab
   We live in an Amazon Prime world, and not everyone is used to paying for shipping. Why not offer an incentive so they don’t have to? You can do this in any Private Gallery with a Miller’s Lab bulk price sheet attached.
   
   The difference between just creating a free shipping offer and using bulk shipping is that bulk shipping with Miller’s and PhotoDay is free for your studio if the order minimum is met! Learn all about Bulk Shipping Made Easy with PhotoDay.
   
   To set this up, create a private gallery using Miller’s Lab, select a bulk price sheet, and set an order deadline for two weeks after picture day. All orders placed before that deadline will ship to one address for pickup or distribution (e.g., the school, your studio, etc.). After the deadline, customers can still pay for drop-shipping directly to their door.
   

Don’t Forget AdvancePay

With PhotoDay’s AdvancePay (AP) feature, you can create urgency before you even take a single photo. AdvancePay is PhotoDay’s answer to traditional pre-pay and allows your customers to purchase credits before picture day, which they can then use when the gallery is published.

Anyone willing to pay early is already motivated to buy products, and most people who purchase AP credits spend even more once they see the amazing final images. Be sure to reward these customers with the very best savings opportunities—make sure AP offers are the biggest discounts when compared to any additional promos you decide to offer later on.

Thankfully, creating order urgency is a highly effective and easily repeatable process! Once you discover the right promotion mix for your studio and customers, you can automate the strategy job after job. PhotoDay puts all the tools you need right at your fingertips, and our Customer Success Team is always ready to help when you have questions! 

Your next job is coming soon. Act now to make it as successful and profitable as possible.

You booked your next job, the contract is signed, and it’s time to prep for the most exciting part: picture day. If this is your first big volume job, try not to feel overwhelmed—no matter your job count, mastering the game of efficiency is an ongoing work in progress for every business.

In the wise words of Benjamin Franklin, "By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail." But don’t worry! PhotoDay has your back with a handy interactive picture day checklist. No frills, no fuss—just a step-by-step guide to ensure you nail your next job.

Our downloadable guide starts when you book the job and keeps you on track through publishing and selling. Go ahead and download the checklist, and keep reading to explore each of the nine steps in greater detail!

➡️ Download Picture Day Checklist ⬅️

Step 1: When the Job is Booked

Celebrate the win, and now let’s get you prepped for success. First up: setting up the job in your PhotoDay Studio Panel.

Creating a job in PhotoDay is easy and intuitive, but we also offer a rich inventory of walkthrough guides, support articles, and informative webinars that teach you everything you need to know in just a few clicks.

When setting up your job, you’ll select your gallery type and add important details like the job name, logo (if you have it), and picture day date. You’ll also set up your price sheet, AdvancePay, and any special offers. PhotoDay automates these gallery promotions for you, including header banners when a customer is viewing photos in the gallery.

Building your job is one of the more detail-oriented steps in the process, but with our intuitive platform, you’ll breeze through it in no time! 

Step 2: Four Weeks Before Picture Day

Communication is key when it comes to online selling! Your customers will need to know how to access their gallery before they can order their photos. It’s never too early to prepare your customer communication plan and marketing materials. 

First, decide how you’d like to notify parents and the organization that picture day is approaching, then create the items you’ll need to promote any specials and execute your communication plan.

Consider all the channels your studio will utilize and create materials for each. Here are some ideas for digital and print materials:

• Email flyers
• Social media graphics
• Printed flyers
• Posters
• Reminder cards 

Thanks to online selling, the days of paper order forms are in the past, so feel free to get creative with your printed marketing materials. PhotoDay users can take advantage of our integrated marketing kit full of customizable templates for banners, posters, business cards, social media graphics, and more!

Step 3: Three Weeks Before Picture Day

This is the perfect time to gather any data needed for a smooth and successful picture day. 

If you’re using PhotoDay’s public or group galleries, look into gathering your customers’ email addresses for marketing purposes and subject counts for scheduling and staffing purposes. Additional data such as team, group, or class names will also help if you use tags to organize your gallery. 

If you’re using PhotoDay’s private galleries, you’ll need some subject data to match photos with individuals using PhotoDay Capture and FaceFind. At a minimum, you should have each subject’s first and last name, but you could also include up to 3 emails per subject, team, group, or class names, and more. Compile this data into a CSV file and upload it to your job. Feel free to follow one of our step-by-step guides or articles for information on optimizing, uploading, and mapping your subject data CSV file. Once everything is set up, subjects will automatically match with their photos!

Step 4: Two Weeks Before Picture Day

Picture day is getting close, so it's time to get your parents and organization excited!

Distribute and display the materials you created in step two, use the email addresses you gathered to send out marketing flyers, and hang your posters on location so everyone knows picture day is coming soon. You can also start promoting the upcoming picture day on your social channels and ask the organization to do the same.

Step 5: One Week Before Picture Day

It’s almost here! Ensure parents know the different ways they can opt into gallery updates and order pictures and photo gifts when the gallery is published. Encourage them to text their access code to 90738 and/or subscribe to notifications in the gallery to stay in the know. Remember, if you're encouraging parents to purchase an AdvancePay credit, now is the time to switch your gallery status from Draft to AdvancePay!

Send out an email flyer with any last-minute information and updates, including a time-sensitive special offer to drive order urgency.

If the organization didn’t provide you with customer email addresses, ask them to distribute the digital flyers or print flyers on your behalf to ensure everyone knows how to access the photos. Remember, picture day benefits the school, sports league, or dance studio from a fundraising standpoint, so don’t be afraid to ask for help spreading the word.

Step 6: Day Before or Morning of Picture Day

Prepare your staff for a smooth and successful picture day! Communicate the importance of accessing the gallery and subscribing to notifications. With PhotoDay, there are multiple ways to connect to customers:

• The simplest route is for customers to text their access code to 90738 to sign up for notifications and receive a direct link to the gallery.
• Customers can also go straight to my.photoday.com on their phone, computer, or tablet.
• No matter how they get there, my.photoday.com is the final destination where customers can create an account, access the gallery, purchase AdvancePay Credits, and opt-in for transactional text messages.

Gathering text subscriptions is an ideal way to keep in touch! Customers who have opted in to receive SMS notifications will be the first to know when their photos are published and ready to order. PhotoDay also offers pre-built SMS campaigns studios can request to send to anyone who opted-in to a gallery less than a year old. 

Step 7: Picture Day

It’s finally here! Ensure you have all the gear you need (and backups!), plus onsite promotional materials like banners, signs, and reminder cards with the gallery’s access code.

Take advantage of the in-person opportunity to market and sell while photos are still fresh in parents’ minds. For example, you could advertise a “Today Only!” offer for anyone who purchases an AdvancePay Credit onsite.

Get to your location as early as you need to set up your equipment and marketing displays. PhotoDay and Capture make check-in a breeze, giving you and your staff extra time to interact with your subjects, talk up your promotions with parents, and ensure you can answer all their questions about your product offerings.

The most important thing to remember on picture day is to have fun! This is why you started your volume photography studio in the first place, so never lose sight of that.

Step 8: After Picture Day

You had a successful picture day—breathe a sigh of relief and treat yourself to some tacos!

Now it’s time to level up your beautiful photos with post-processing and editing so you can upload them to your galleries and start selling.

PhotoDay has multiple tools to simplify and automate post-processing. You can use Knockouts to extract subjects from backgrounds to use for composites or to add custom backgrounds. Our AI-driven Color Correction service adjusts exposure, contrast, white balance, and gamma faster than ever. These services are available right within your PhotoDay job, making it even easier to upload final photos into the customer gallery. 

Once the photos are published, watch the sales come rolling in! All customers subscribed to the gallery will automatically receive a text message letting them know their photos are ready. You and the organization can also send out emails and post on social channels to make sure you reach everyone.

Step 9: After Publishing

Don’t stop marketing once the images are published! To encourage sales, continue to drive awareness and sales opportunities by re-marketing the gallery at ideal times.

PhotoDay makes continuous promotion of your galleries a breeze with automated text campaigns and manual email marketing flyers. You can use these resources to communicate with your customers about gallery expiration, early bird prices, and flash sale offers, which will help boost sales and AOV! 

PhotoDay also offers unlimited gallery storage, so you can use these same sales techniques to re-market previously expired galleries for seasonal and holiday promotions. Check out the following blogs for more ideas and instructions on creating special offers: Maximizing Sales in Volume Photography: A Guide to Products, Pricing, and Promotions and Driving Incremental Volume Photography Revenue Through Seasonal Strategies.

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Picture day is an exciting, important event for the subjects, families, and organizations involved, and adopting a game plan for your studio minimizes stress, de-escalates surprises, and ultimately leads to a more enjoyable experience for everyone involved.

Think of this checklist as a roadmap that you can adapt to the needs of your studio and each specific job. Remember to keep it flexible if the timelines don’t line up perfectly—while our guide starts up to four weeks before picture day, your studio might only have a few weeks’ notice. 

You’ll also discover entirely new ways to build your own efficiencies, like creating your marketing materials when you set up the job in your studio so that you will be prepared to send them out when the time is right. Let this checklist be an adjustable guide rather than a rigid rulebook. 

The intuitiveness of PhotoDay and all the practice you’ll get as you book more and more jobs will make executing these picture day plans comfortable and stress-free!

➡️ Download Picture Day Checklist ⬅️

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Join thousands of photographers and studios as they modernize their business with PhotoDay. Create a free account to transform your studio with online galleries, e-commerce shopping, direct-to-door order delivery, sales tax remittance, post-processing services, and much more.

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We're thrilled to announce a new partnership with the well-established APS Lab (Advanced Photographic Solutions). As we continue to elevate the PhotoDay platform and enhance your experience, we're excited about this collaboration that will bring a myriad of benefits to both photographers and customers by ensuring a seamless and exceptional photo ordering process through PhotoDay with the high-quality prints and products of APS Lab.

Starting 12/4/23, PhotoDay Users can add APS Lab to their accounts and choose them for any or all of their jobs! If you don’t have a PhotoDay account yet, you can select them during sign-up!

Why APS Lab?

APS Lab is a renowned name in the world of professional photo printing and fulfillment. As one of the largest wholesale photo finishing labs in the country, their commitment to high-quality products, efficient fulfillment, and reliable customer service aligns perfectly with our own dedication to providing photographers with the best products and tools available. 

With over 40 years of industry experience, APS Lab has earned an excellent reputation, making them an ideal partner. Providing services covering multiple photo categories, including underclass, sports, senior, and general volume photography markets, APS has been a stalwart lab for many volume photography studios across the country from its offices in Cleveland, TN.

What Can You Expect from This Partnership?

Streamlined Order Fulfillment

APS boasts a 100,000+ sq/ft facility with over 200 dedicated professionals, proficiently capable of delivering an impressive output of 18,000 units per hour. Their capacity allows them to stay on time even during peak periods. With a focus on speed and accuracy, APS has an average of less than 3 days of in-house production time and over 98% accuracy.

As with all of PhotoDay’s lab partners, order fulfillment is a breeze. If you’re currently using APS Lab, consider signing up for a free PhotoDay account to test out the seamless integration. In PhotoDay, the entire process—from publishing the gallery to customers placing their orders to shipping directly to your clients—will be efficient and hands-off for you, the studio. What you do with your new free time is up to you!

Exceptional Print Quality

We understand the importance of delivering high-quality prints to your clients, and APS Lab shares this commitment to excellence! They utilize state-of-the-art printing technology and premium materials to produce stunning representations of your work that your customers will love.

Quality Product Offering

Through our collaboration with APS Lab, you can look forward to an excellent range of products to offer your schools, organizations, and customers. From standard prints to premium photo products to personalized gifts, you can expect high-quality offerings to thrill your customer base and boost your revenue potential.

How to Add APS Lab to Your PhotoDay Account

If you're already a PhotoDay User, this partnership will only enhance your experience. You'll have the option to add APS Lab into your workflow with just the click of a button. As always, you can have as many of our lab partners added to your account as you’d like. Just follow these simple instructions, then create a new price sheet with APS Lab.

If you’re not a PhotoDay User yet, this is the perfect opportunity to take us for a test drive this winter ❄️ Forget the paper order forms and move your galleries online for higher sales and happier customers! 

It’s completely free to get started. The best way to experience PhotoDay is to create an account and have a look around with no strings attached. You can select APS as your lab during sign-up!

Exceptional photos start with great lighting! While stunning photographs are comprised of multiple elements, the quality of lighting often makes or breaks an image. Mastering this aspect takes practice, but you can get there with some experience and the right equipment! 

Thankfully, there’s a fast-track option—the LVL Up Studio System is a revolutionary lighting setup that will streamline your next picture day and boost sales. With it, you can guarantee consistently perfect lighting with every picture you take while significantly reducing your set-up and breakdown time. 

Acclaimed photographers Tom and Mario Muñoz of LVL Up Imaging and Muñoz Photography wanted to create a solution that maximizes efficiency without sacrificing quality. Sounds like every volume photographer’s dream, right? This dream became a reality when they developed the LVL Up Studio System to replicate the control and artistry achieved in their studio, on location in volume settings. Tom and Mario know the value of simplifying their workflow, so they’re also proud PhotoDay partners!

Keep reading to learn more about how LVL Up and PhotoDay can transform your volume photography business like never before.

How important is lighting, really?

If you’re wondering why having a stellar lighting setup is so critical, to put it plainly, lighting is the most important part of any photograph. It sets the mood of the images and affects how the subject looks more than any other factor. Good quality lighting also makes the entire process easier and more efficient—from your own post-production workflow to increasing sales.

You may already have a lighting setup you love but want to simplify your equipment before scaling your business. Perhaps you’re new to photography and want to learn everything you can as fast as possible. Or maybe you’re a seasoned portrait photographer interested in expanding into the volume school market. 

Regardless of where you are on your journey, LVL Up can help you achieve your goals through their inventive lighting solution.

What makes LVL Up’s lighting system unique?

To understand why Tom and Mario’s invention is so ground-breaking, let’s explain what a traditional lighting rig might look like. An ideal lighting setup needs three main components: 

1. A large soft light source for the main light
2. A large soft fill either from a strobe or bounced light
3. A separation or hair light to add dimension

Instead of having three separate lights, diffusers, stands, and variable spacing, The LVL Up Studio System comprises one lightweight, collapsible diffuser screen and two reflector screens. With the screens in place, you only need one light to capture beautiful, powerfully lit images. Plus, the entire setup is easy to carry and can be assembled at lightning speed.

"You set this up in literally five minutes, and because your highlight comes from the shadow, you get consistent, three-dimensional lighting without having to change it based on the subject.” - Tom Muñoz

An Innovative Solution for Volume Photography

The LVL Up System is remarkable because it solves multiple common issues volume photographers face, particularly on school picture days. 

Save Time & Money

Time is money! LVL Up users save precious time and money by decreasing their setup and breakdown time to under 5 minutes. Traditional lighting and backdrops can take an hour or more. Not only does LVL Up make picture day easier, but it means you and your team can arrive later and leave earlier—so you can focus on that prized work-life harmony. 

Additionally, you can work efficiently with a smaller staff since you’ll only need one system per photographer. Get ready to save money in every aspect of your business.

Consistency is Key

The system creates consistent lighting with its one-strobe solution. Utilizing one light eliminates misfires from additional strobes, which can interrupt your picture day flow. You can say farewell to the days of time-consuming retakes. 

Consistent images also make for easy, streamlined editing. You’ll save time and reduce headaches during post-processing.

Level Up Your Image Quality

Due to its consistent, bounced lighting, the LVL Up System will improve your image quality by providing a significantly softer look to the subject’s skin. It also practically eliminates troublesome eyeglass glare. While you can also spend time fixing these things in post, why not solve the problem when you press the shutter? 

With online selling, impeccable image quality automatically means increased sales. The better your subjects look in the photos, the more likely they will buy them! 

Private & Efficient

The intuitive wall design helps create a private mini-studio vibe for each subject while they’re being photographed. Whether you’re using just one station or have five stations lined up in a row, your subjects will feel comfortable, naturally leading to more relaxed interactions and better poses and expressions.

Easy to Use

Last but not least, the LVL Up System is so simple to use that onboarding new staff becomes a total breeze. You’ll be able to teach almost anyone how to take a high-quality picture with it in seconds.

LVL Up & PhotoDay: A Powerful Match

During picture days, LVL Up integrates seamlessly with PhotoDay. Our Capture app’s facial recognition capabilities eliminate manual check-in and tedious data matching, enabling photographers to interact with students and focus on creating a relaxed atmosphere from start to finish. 

The beautiful, consistent lighting provided by the LVL UP Studio System enables foolproof Color Corrections and crisp Knockouts to streamline your post-processing with PhotoDay. 

Our backgrounds feature also allows you to offer multiple digital backgrounds for your customers to view and choose from so you can generate even more sales. 

During checkout, customers can add on PhotoDay’s AI retouching service, which magically softens and smooths skin, removes acne blemishes, and evens skin tone without affecting permanent scars or freckles—all with the click of a button.

“[Using PhotoDay Capture] allows the photographer to spend less time checking in data…and more time to engage with the actual student to create the photography experience we need to get that expression and emotion so we can quickly get on to the next student and let them get back to class.” - Tom Muñoz

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The First Step to Refine Your Lighting Process

For volume photographers and studios wanting to improve the overall quality of their work, the first thing to do is invest in lighting and education. The LVL Up Lighting System is the most versatile system available to date. It replaces virtually all light modifiers with one simple and easy-to-use solution. 

If you’re an established studio looking to scale your business, consider simplifying your current lighting setup. Reducing your rig's complexity will minimize set-up time and significantly minimize onsite mishaps, retakes, and adjustments. 

Investing in quality equipment will provide your studio with consistent results and make it easier to scale your business over time. If your team is experiencing difficulty getting repeatable, consistent lighting from location to location, the LVL Up system could be the perfect investment for your studio.

In all types of photography, lighting is everything. For volume photographers, well-controlled light creates efficiencies that will impact every facet of your business. 

Are you ready to make your next picture day unbelievably simple and efficient while capturing balanced, perfectly lit images with every click? You can explore all of LVL Up Imaging’s products at www.lvlupimaging.com. Learn more about Tom, Mario, and Muñoz Photography at www.munozphotography.com.

If you’re new to lighting, check out A Beginner’s Guide to Understanding Photography Lighting on our blog to learn more about the basics.

Join thousands of photographers and studios as they modernize their business with PhotoDay. Create a free account to transform your studio with online galleries, e-commerce shopping, direct-to-door order delivery, sales tax remittance, post-processing services, and much more. We promise work will start to feel less like work and more like what you love. 

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Designing composites in volume photography opens a whole new world of creative possibilities to show off your craft and artistry. If your studio isn’t offering composites, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to stand out from your competition! Learn how to elevate your images with custom graphics for more exciting photo galleries and enticing products.

As a studio, you can explore creating individual subject and team composites to save time during picture day, easily add absent subjects into a group photo, and ultimately deliver creative images that can’t be captured with a parent’s iPhone over your shoulder.

The PhotoDay tools you already know and love for school photography, like Private Galleries and the PhotoDay Capture app, can also be powerful components of a composite building workflow when combined with a third-party program like Pixnub Sport Photo Automation (SPA) or using a service like Rebooku.

In this blog, we’ll cover what a composite is, common challenges, and how to use software to automate workflows and save countless hours of post-processing time.

What is a Composite?

Simply put, a composite combines two or more images to create one new image. In the world of volume photography, one image would be a subject photographed against a green screen or similar background that can be easily removed digitally (PhotoDay Knockouts make this a breeze). The second image would be a specifically designed piece of artwork, usually with custom graphics and possibly text, on which you place your extracted subject. Some photographers refer to the second image as a backplate. You can place an individual image on the backplate or arrange multiple people to create a composite team or group photo.

The result is a flashy, eye-catching product that takes your original images to the next level. It’s exciting for your customers as they scroll through your galleries, encouraging them to order!

Composite Challenges

Historically, creating composites has been a complicated process. Developing the technical skills to utilize composites effectively can take time and practice. Your photography lighting must match the backplate design, as should the perspective and angles. You must also align your color balance so subjects look natural against the digital background. It’s best to consider your backplate before setting up on location to ensure smooth compatibility between your real subjects and the digital enhancement you will use in the finished product.

Post-processing images to prepare them for compositing is a time-consuming process. If done manually, it could require days of intricate background removal and design work to create images that work together to achieve your desired result. Slowing down your workflow to this degree will result in dissatisfied customers and lost sales.

Publishing your galleries quickly with consistent, high-quality photos available for purchase is critical. Heavily investing your time also decreases your profitability—never forget how valuable your time is! If you spend too much precious time creating sellable images, it’s virtually impossible to price them appropriately, considering both your margins and affordability for your customers. Thankfully, we have incredible time-saving solutions to share. 

Composite Solutions

Third-party software has developed and evolved to be a photographer’s best friend in countless ways—especially when making composites. Using software to automate many of the most cumbersome steps of combining images is a huge win for studios. Minimizing the time commitments of composite photography creates an excellent customer experience, adds to your profitability, and saves your sanity. It also opens up a world of possibilities for photographers previously uninterested in the labor-intensive composite process.

Pixnub is the most comprehensive problem-solving platform on the market for photographers. It is a subscription-based series of plugins for Photoshop that perform many functions, including batch removal of green screens, cropping, and group photo building. Pixnub allows you to set specific parameters and then automates the most cumbersome portions of your workflow. 

The best part: Pixnub and PhotoDay complement one another perfectly. Let us show you how.

Combining the Power of Pixnub and PhotoDay

Effectively utilizing Pixnub relies on leveraging PhotoDay’s Capture App, Private Galleries, and Exports features.

PhotoDay Capture is a free companion app for mobile devices that automatically matches and pairs photos based on the subject data you provide for each job. Capture works alongside Private Galleries to create a safe and secure private shopping experience for each individual subject (as opposed to Group or Public Gallery options). 

PhotoDay’s Exports feature packages the Private Galleries data into a spreadsheet with customizable subject information, like names, team, jersey numbers, and corresponding file names that Pixnub then translates into your final composites.

If this sounds a little complicated, don’t worry! We’ve broken down the process into a few easy-to-follow steps. 

Composite Workflow Utilizing PhotoDay and Pixnub

• Before any work begins, make sure you:
• Create a private gallery job‍
• Upload subject data‍
• Take reference photos in Capture‍
• Photograph the subjects on picture day

1. Upload, match, and feature photos in your private gallery job.

• Export your green screen photos from your photo editor as small JPG files, then upload them to your private gallery. 
• Once PhotoDay’s FaceFind feature has matched those photos to the previously uploaded subject data, specify the image you want to composite for each subject by selecting them as featured photos.

2. Export from PhotoDay

• From within your private gallery job, create a new Compositing Data export—a specially formatted CSV file created by PhotoDay precisely for compositing automation.
• Download the completed export to your computer.

3. Create a SPA-Ready CSV

• Using Pixnub’s Sports Photo Automator (or SPA), you’ll need to create a CSV that’s specifically readable by the plugin.
• Within SPA, create a template CSV by specifying what text fields you wish to utilize, and then export that CSV.
• Next, use the data from the previously PhotoDay-exported CSV to copy and paste the relevant data into this new SPA-formatted file.
• Then, save and export as a whole new CSV!

4. Set up your Templates with the correct layer names for this data

• Create the template for your batch composite. Ensure all your layer names correspond to the newly exported CSV column headers.
• Import your newly exported CSV into the SPA Batch Panel in Sports Photo Automator and run a batch.
• From there, SPA will go through the batch of photos specified in that CSV, automatically load text and images into your templated layers, and export the finished composites to a new folder.

This combo workflow reduces your compositing timeline from hours upon hours to just a few minutes. The only limit is the processing power of your computer!

A More In-Depth Guide

Visit this guide with helpful videos for a more detailed walkthrough of this process, hosted by PhotoDay’s very own Brian Derenski.

Integrating composites into your product lineup can rapidly boost your studio's sales. Due to time constraints and a steep learning curve, these images were formerly only offered by the biggest, most technologically advanced studios. Thanks to the evolution of user-friendly software and powerful tools, these limitations no longer restrict you!

It’s time to take your photos and customer experience to the next level by leveraging the power of PhotoDay and the intuition of Pixnub to create composite photographs your customers will be unable to resist. So what are you waiting for? The sooner you start, the sooner you can start growing your studio’s business.

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Summer PhotoDay Fest 2023 continues with our new Digital Download Bundles feature! SPF ‘23 is our series of summer feature releases and updates—we have so many that we created a whole fun-in-the-sun campaign to keep track of them.

As you know, the PhotoDay Team is always hard at work refining and expanding our platform’s features, and significant updates to price sheets are on the way! We’ll share more soon about everything this transition to Price Sheets 2.0 entails, but the first part of this rollout is Digital Download Bundles.

You already know that downloads are popular, high-profit products. In fact, our own data shows that download sales are on the rise - with 43% of studios' gross revenue coming from download sales alone this past spring.

And it's not just customers who are placing mixed orders of prints and downloads. The percentage of orders that are comprised only of download products is steadily increasing as well - meaning as you capture more photo variety and have more inventory to sell, these downloads will become one of your most profitable and desired products.

What does all this mean? Well now it’s even easier to sell more of them! Digital Download Bundles are a complete revamp of how volume photography studios can sell download products in PhotoDay by making it simpler to sell multiple downloads all while offering your customers better deals.

What’s New?

Currently, PhotoDay users can add a single download to a price sheet as an a la carte product with a set retail price, as a part of a package, or both. This process is the same for prints, specialty items, and other products in PhotoDay.

Now, in addition to the current process described above, you can also create bundle pricing for High-Res Downloads. This is a new way to sell multiple download products together to give your customers enticing deals. Additionally, we’ve designed these Digital Download Bundles to create unique upselling opportunities in both the storefront and in the cart.

Simply put: you can sell more, and your customers can still save money.

We’ve created two unique bundle structures so you can customize your price sheets and customer storefront: Tiered Pricing Bundles and Max Price Bundles.

Buy More, Save More with Tiered Pricing

Let’s start with Tiered Pricing for Digital Download Bundles which allow you to offer automatic discounts to customers based on the number of photos that they would like to purchase as High-Res Downloads. Tiered pricing bundles are ideal for upselling in the storefront and in the cart, promoting discounts based on a "Buy More, Save More" approach. If you currently offer multiple packages with varying quantities of High-Res Downloads, tiered pricing bundles can replace all of these!

Tiered pricing allows you to set up to 5 different tiers of photo counts with increasing discounts for each range—giving your customers plenty of options to save. The discounts can be based on setting a decreasing price per photo (PPP) or by an increasing percentage discount off the a la carte retail price. Manipulating one column will update the other automatically.

Here’s how it looks from the photographer’s perspective when setting it up in the studio panel:

Here’s how it looks from the customer’s perspective in the gallery storefront. When a customer buys more photos, the price-per-photo decreases, increasing total savings based on the tiers set by the studio.

You Set the Limit with Max Price

The second bundle structure is Max Price—you can define a maximum number of downloads that can be purchased for a fixed, discounted price. With this structure, customers will only pay the max retail price if (selected quantity of downloads) x (retail price per download) is greater than the max retail price. Up until they reach this breakpoint, they will pay the a la carte retail price per download. Once they reach the breakpoint, they will essentially get the extra downloads for “free.”

Here’s how it looks from the photographer’s perspective when setting it up in the studio panel:

In this example, the a la carte price per High-Res Download is $20, the Max Retail Price is set to $100, and the Max Allowed Digitals is set to 10. Customers purchasing 5-10 downloads will pay the bundled Max Retail Price because it’s the better deal—essentially, the 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th downloads added to the bundle would be free! Customers purchasing only 1-4 downloads will still pay the retail price of $20 per download to not overcharge them. 

From the customer’s perspective, in this example, they will see the option to need exact wording from the storefront window. Take a look at how Max Price bundles look in the storefront:

Easy and Responsive for Everyone

The best part? It’s totally automatic! You won’t have to make a custom download package ever again. We can hear the cheering from here!

You set up the bundles when you create your price sheets, and PhotoDay calculates the rest—both for you in the studio panel and for the customer in the storefront. And just like every other aspect of price sheets in PhotoDay, you can modify the bundles and pricing at any point, and the changes will automatically update live in the storefront.

You might be wondering: “How are Digital Download Bundles different from creating a download package?” We’re glad you asked. When shopping packages, contents and pricing are static and can’t be adjusted by the customer during the shopping experience. With these new Digital Download Bundles, you can now set up your own discount tiering to allow your customers to choose as many or as few downloads as they’d like. We’re all about making things simple—easy to set up, easy to maintain, and easy to sell more than ever.

Flexible Customer Shopping Experience

Once your Digital Download Bundles are set up, your customers can take control. Let’s walk through the customer experience: 

• No matter which type of bundle you have selected (Tiered Pricing or Max Price), your customers will see a banner enticing them to buy more to save more. 
• When they select a High-Res Download product, they will see the option to specify how many photos they want to purchase.
• Depending on how many photos they add, customers will see responsive pricing and discounts reflected.
• They can select their photos, choose more favorites, and even add more photos to their bundle all from right within the product customizer window.
• The Digital Download Bundle is then displayed in the customer’s cart with each product listed (similar to packages). Don’t worry, we made sure they can even add more photos to the bundle from here, too—just like grabbing a candy bar at the register.
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We’re excited to have streamlined yet another facet of selling volume photography photos online. We heard your requests for a less manual way to sell downloads and hope you and your customers love these enhanced capabilities!

Want to see Digital Download Bundles in action? Get the full customer experience by checking out one of our sample galleries. Click this gallery link or text LMDEMO23 to 90738 to experience our text message marketing and receive a link.

Digital Download Bundles are live and available now! Sign up for a free PhotoDay account and create your first job today. Onboarding is always free and fast—our incredible Customer Success team will have you set up and selling in no time!

If you’re a current PhotoDay User, check out this support article with even more details to get started with Digital Download Bundles. Make sure you’re signed into your PhotoDay account to view the article.

Welcome to Summer PhotoDay Fest 2023—SPF 23, for short. The PhotoDay Team is releasing exciting developments over the next few months, so we wanted to create a new way to celebrate and share all of the summer fun. First up: our brand new customer gallery!

Introducing Galleries 4!

We are thrilled to announce the release of Galleries 4—our latest and greatest version of PhotoDay Galleries. The team has been working hard to research, implement, and innovate the entire Galleries experience while carefully listening to and incorporating feedback from volume photography studios using PhotoDay—and it’s now officially released into the wild!

After significant development efforts across all departments, we’re ready to share the exciting details about our new, innovative gallery and shopping experience. It’s now easier than ever for your customers to find, customize, and order their photos. But, the developments don’t stop there! Did we mention we’re also expanding your studio branding options? We have a lot to cover!

Keep reading to learn more about how Galleries 4 provides enhanced speed and security, upgraded customer experience, customizable branding, and more.

Mobile-Friendly & Lightning Fast 

Through our research, we determined that a whopping 88% of all PhotoDay orders were placed on mobile devices. This means that the large majority of our active shoppers are accessing their galleries and placing orders through their phone’s web browser. For this reason, Galleries 4 is thoughtfully designed to be mobile-first, but still computer-friendly, of course, because everyone deserves a top-notch experience.

One of the biggest and most exciting changes is that Galleries 4 is now a Progressive Web Application—PWA for short. PWAs deliver a refined app-like experience without needing to download an actual app. It can be viewed right in your mobile or desktop web browser and automatically adjusts for any device’s screen size. The result? Galleries 4 is highly responsive, 4x faster than the typical e-commerce portal, and even more secure than HTTPS.

With this foundation, the entire customer gallery experience was rebuilt from the ground up to maximize customer engagement and increase conversions and overall sales. This brings us to the marketing updates!

Direct, Hassle-Free Access

With Galleries 4, all three gallery types can now be shared and accessed through deep links. Deep links are a type of link that sends users directly to specific locations. To put it simply, PhotoDay’s deep links provide a frictionless way for parents already subscribed to the gallery to access their photos—without getting lost in the process of re-entering an access code. 

The direct, deep links are shared through all of PhotoDay’s built-in communications, including smart text marketing, manual flyers, and automatic email campaigns. Studios can also use the gallery deep link in their own marketing outside of the PhotoDay platform. By clicking the link shared in those communications, your opted-in customers can enter their galleries without entering their access code and without sacrificing security, making it a win-win for everyone!

While this capability is already available for public galleries in PhotoDay, we’re ecstatic to introduce it to group and private gallery types! This direct linking system significantly improves the user experience by enabling customers to access their galleries twice as fast. Additionally, when a studio changes a gallery’s status from AdvancePay to Published, accessing the correct gallery will be easier than ever.

Gallery deep links will be shared with customers through PhotoDay’s text (SMS) marketing, manual flyers, and automatic email campaigns. We hope you’re ready for fewer “I lost my access code” messages!

Secure & Seamless Customer Onboarding

Now you can know exactly who is viewing their galleries! To enter a gallery and view their photos, all customers must first create an account, meaning they will no longer have the option to checkout as an anonymous guest. Having each customer create an individual account not only bolsters security but also paves the way for robust future updates and marketing developments. 

Additionally, studios using private galleries have the ability to send targeted marketing emails to subjects who have either viewed or not viewed their gallery, as well as those who have not purchased photos from their gallery—even if they have viewed it.

When creating their accounts, customers can opt-in to further communications—such as text and email campaigns—to be compliant with TCPA and CAN-SPAM. This flow is not only respectful to your customers but safer, too, by allowing each subject to be associated with a parent/guardian/responsible party. 

Overall, we’re excited about how much this customer onboarding step will improve opt-in rates—making communication with your customers that much easier. If you haven’t caught on already, that’s what PhotoDay is all about: creating simplified, elevated experiences for you and your customers.

Showcase Your Studio Branding

Keep your unique studio branding front and center in Galleries 4! As highly requested by PhotoDay users, studio names are now included in the gallery’s header. Along with the studio name, any uploaded job logos will also be displayed in the header of each gallery. Studios can choose to make the job logo their own business logo to level up their brand awareness.

This fresh design not only solidifies your studio’s identity and builds brand recognition for your customers, but it also differentiates studio galleries from one another. Rest assured that if another photographer is also using PhotoDay, you can feel confident that your galleries will be visually distinct to the end-shopper. You worked hard on that logo, so why not let it shine?

Filter & Search Intentionally

As you photograph the same schools, leagues, events, etc. season after season, you’re bound to have wonderful repeat customers. With Galleries 4, those customers can easily sort the gallery list to view their most recent photos first. 

If a customer has opted into multiple galleries, they are now listed chronologically from the most recently published. This is a dream for those repeat clients and customers! We also added sorting options so galleries can be filtered alphabetically and by publish date, making it effortless to access older galleries (and encouraging passive income).

We also streamlined the tag search process. Tags in PhotoDay are an easy way for studios to add structure and organization to their group and public photo galleries. Using tags (e.g. team name, age group, picture day date, etc.) allows customers to filter their searches and find their photos quickly. We enhanced this process, so customers can now search for tags without needing to scroll through a list. Tags can also be selected and stacked to further optimize their search efforts! Because life is way sweeter without aimless scrolling.

The All-New Favoriting Workflow

We completely revamped the way customers select their favorite photos to purchase—making the customization and checkout process faster and more intuitive than ever. It’s a total game-changer for the gallery experience.

To get started, customers will tap to favorite their photos in the gallery before moving on to the rest of the shopping experience (where they can select products and print sizes, choose themes, customize text, etc.). Customers can also “Favorite All” to make proceeding to the shopping cart a breeze. In group or public galleries, customers can favorite all once they’ve narrowed down their search through tags or FaceFind; in private galleries, customers can favorite all photos in their gallery with one click. 

Choosing their favorite photos at the beginning of the shopping experience prevents customers from needing to return to the main gallery to search for other favorite poses. And if Instagram has taught us anything, it’s that everyone loves tapping hearts. ❤️ 

A Transformed Storefront Experience

Last but not least, the Galleries 4 storefront has been transformed to be more user-friendly, organized, customizable, and all-around streamlined. And we might be biased, but it’s also quite pretty. Here are some of the highlights:

• Package descriptions are now displayed clearly, and in a new pop-up, customers can get a quick view of the package contents. This alleviates having to open the package fully, then go back to compare it with the rest of the package offerings.
• Products are organized into fully searchable categories, allowing for efficient picking without scrolling.
• The customization process for both individual images and packages has been intuitively refined. After selecting a package or an à la carte product, the all-new Product Customizer appears, allowing customers to quickly adjust their photo choice, custom text, and graphic themes on their products.
• The Product Customizer especially shines when customizing products included in a package.
• Retouching is available right from within the customizer, as well, making it more visible and accessible than ever before.
• The checkout section has also been revised for optimal efficiency. If a customer wants to, they can make final adjustments and edit their products right from within the shopping cart.

But don’t just take our word for it! We’d love for you to take a look around one of our sample galleries to get the full customer experience. This new gallery experience exists at my.photoday.com, so we recommend updating your marketing materials to reflect the updated address!

Text LMDEMO23 to 90738 to experience our text message marketing and receive a link to see the new Galleries 4 in action.

Prefer not to text? Just go to https://my.photoday.com/ and enter LMDEMO23 or click this direct link.

The release of Galleries 4 is an exciting and significant step forward in PhotoDay's mission to provide the best experience possible for our studios and their customers. Not only does Galleries 4 make for a quicker and easier shopping experience, but it also provides valuable tools to promote your studio's brand and improve your overall sales and engagement.

Galleries 4 is out now! Sign up for a free PhotoDay account and create your first job today. If you’d like some help getting started, our Customer Success team is ready to guide you through the process. Onboarding is always free and fast—we’ll have you set up and selling in no time!

For current PhotoDay users, all galleries published or in AdvancePay mode before 7/5/23 will not be affected at this time and will remain on galleries.photoday.io. Starting 7/5/23, all new jobs and galleries in PhotoDay can be accessed on my.photoday.com.

Stay tuned to learn what other exciting releases we have in store for SPF 23!

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At PhotoDay, we believe that investing in continuing education is essential for expanding your volume photography business. By attending conferences and workshops, you can improve your photography skills, get inspired creatively, learn from industry-leading professionals, and so much more. 

The PhotoDay Team is excited to sponsor and attend many fantastic events throughout each year, and we want to share some of our upcoming dates with you! Whether you’re still considering ditching paper order forms or have already jumped into the world of online selling, further education is a great way to keep your business moving forward. 

Kick off the summer season at the workshop or conference of your choice—or join us in attending them all. Participating in live education is a fantastic way to network and learn—plus, we can’t wait to meet you!

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Boatwright Bootcamp

June 5-7, 2023
Canton, GA

At Smax Photography’s Boatwright Bootcamp, you will learn shooting, editing, and sales methods that are proven by Jay Boatwright and his team to turn quality photography into profits. Being a successful photographer is more than just taking exceptional photos. You must also learn how to present your products to your customers in order to maximize sales.

Attendees receive “all day, hands-on training, in the field for volume sports photography.  Badass photography, on the field of play, straight out of the camera! No matter the subject, location, or time of day.”

PhotoDay is honored again to be sponsoring and attending another Boatwright Bootcamp! Learn more on their site or in this local news feature. Currently sold out, but be sure to sign up for notifications so you can register for the next one!

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Do It Different Workshop

June 23-24, 2023
Oklahoma City, OK

This summer, PhotoDay is excited to sponsor Emily Hart Davis and Rose Coleman’s Do It Different Workshop! Join these amazingly talented and successful photographers for a two-day photography and business workshop that will take you to the next level.

At this workshop, attendees will learn how to…

• Set Specific Goals & Make A Plan To Achieve Them
• Advance Your Lighting Techniques
• Learn How To Scale & Build Your Team
• Solidify Your Posing Flow
• Gain Confidence In Direct Prospecting New Clients

Learn more — Only one ticket remaining! Please reach out to Rose and Emily to claim it. In addition to sponsoring this workshop, part of the PhotoDay Customer Success Team will also be attending and speaking!

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School Photographers of America

July 10-13, 2023
Greenville, SC

The School Photographers of America Conference is a place to connect with other studios and “industry suppliers from across the nation (and sometimes from across the world!) as we celebrate the best that our field has to offer and explore the ways we can grow both as individual companies and as an industry.” Don’t miss out on this opportunity for education, networking, exhibits, workshops, and more! 

PhotoDay will be exhibiting in Booths 48 and 49, so be sure to come by and meet the team! Learn more and register. 

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IncredibleU Workshop

July 14-16, 2023
Charlotte, NC

Cane Sampson of CL Photoz is launching his new IncredibleU Workshop this summer! Attendees will get a hands-on approach to learn all about…

• Live lighting setups and demonstrations
• How to land more business (proven to work)
• Tips for video creation, graphic design, and branding that will “wow” your clients
• Building confidence
• And more!

PhotoDay is thrilled to be sponsoring IncredibleU! Learn more and register to attend. 

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Pas de Deux

July 21-23, 2023
Chicago, IL

If you're not already familiar, Pas de Deux is a premiere conference for dance photographers known for its enriching hands-on learning with top photographers working in dance photography. Attendees can participate in classroom presentations, photo walks, demonstrations and studio setup classrooms, trade show exhibits, social events, and more. 

PhotoDay will be exhibiting, so come by and meet the team! Use the code PD100 for $100 off your 3-day conference ticket (valid through 6/15/23). Learn more and register.

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Virtual Events

If traveling or in-person events aren’t in the cards for you this summer, don’t worry! We have some amazing virtual events coming up. Keep an eye on our webinars page for all of the details!

PhotoDay is also hard at work creating a whole new online education series for volume photographers. Stay tuned for more information coming soon!

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We hope to see you at some of these incredible photography workshops and conferences this summer!

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If you’re a volume photographer, you know that snapping pictures of students and athletes is only a small facet of the overall job. What happens after the picture day is over, the photos are edited, the gallery is published, and the customers have ordered their prints and products? Shipping! PhotoDay’s e-commerce shopping options include direct-to-consumer drop shipping for all gallery types. Additionally, studios using Miller’s Professional Imaging and private galleries can also offer free bulk shipping to their customers. Bulk shipping allows studios to specify one shipping destination for all orders tied to a job to be shipped together—completely free and overnight. This feature will not only save you time and money, but it will delight your customers and organizations!

Why choose bulk shipping?

Long have photographers batched orders together and delivered them back to the schools, leagues, and other organizations. The free bulk shipping option for private galleries using Miller's to fulfill their orders reduces this process to the mere click of a button. Here are five reasons why bulk shipping is an ideal choice:

       
1. Shipping is completely free—for you the studio and your customers!
       
2. Overnight shipping once processed.
       
3. Low bulk unit pricing with a minimum lab cost of $15 for the entire bulk order.
       
4. Offer both bulk and drop shipping—if you’re torn between the two options, let each customer decide!
       
5. Keep selling with drop shipping once the bulk order deadline has passed.

When to use bulk shipping?

Why choose bulk shipping instead of direct-to-customer shipping? Here are a few scenarios where choosing bulk over drop shipping might make sense for your studio:

       
• If one of your organizations is a school requesting a gallery of class photos to be shipped to their location so they can be manually handed out to students and parents.
       
• You want to offer your customers free shipping but don’t want to absorb the cost of offering a discount code.
       
• If you prefer to pass out fulfilled orders manually, you can use your studio or home address as the bulk shipment destination.

How it works—it’s easy!

Publishing a gallery with bulk shipping in PhotoDay is a quick and seamless process. With our easy-to-use platform, you can set it up yourself using our guide as a reference or book a one-on-one demo with our Customer Success Team for a walk-through. How to get started:

       
1. Create a free PhotoDay account.
       
2. Create a Miller’s price sheet with bulk shipping selected.
       
3. Publish your private gallery and watch the sales roll in thanks to automatic email and text campaigns.
       
4. As customers order, you can easily view and track them in the PhotoDay studio panel (more on that in the next section).
       
5. When the deadline date passes, the bulk order processes automatically and ships overnight from Miller’s directly to the address you chose!

How does tracking work for bulk shipments?

Just because these orders are batched, doesn’t mean you lose any of the valuable insights PhotoDay offers! You can view all the details about your processed bulk shipments, as well as a list of every order included in each bulk shipment—all directly in the PhotoDay studio panel. Additionally, you can see every order’s associated sales information, shipping status, and tracking information.PhotoDay’s Reports section provides even further insight with detailed monthly reporting of your overall sales, orders, and products. You can view, compare, and export all for free.

Ready to try bulk shipping?

At this time, bulk shipping in PhotoDay is available exclusively for private gallery types with Miller’s. We know you’re going to love the combination of image-first online selling in our modern galleries and Miller’s quality products and swift turnaround time.PhotoDay allows you to say goodbye to additional work and equipment—this workflow is entirely free of QR codes, barcodes, and tethering. Explore all of our game-changing features including the magic of FaceFind and our Capture app. PhotoDay is free to use and you only pay when you sell, so no expensive licensing fees, contracts, subscriptions, or credit cards on file. The setup process is quick and easy—we’ll even walk you through it with a complimentary one-on-one demo!