If you are not organizing your PASS collections for Weddings & Portraits- Your clients are missing out!!

We love PASS. We love how it displays our clients’ photos both beautifully and simply! The experience that our clients get for viewing their wedding photos through a program like PASS sure beats loading a disc or USB drive and viewing your photos in your desktop finder! HOWEVER, a lot of photographers are not taking advantage of the ability to organize their clients’ photos into different categories and sections of the day! If this is you, then you’re missing out! When you have the photos just in one masters collection, rather than categorizing them into events like “Getting Ready”, “Ceremony”, it makes it more difficult for both you as the photographer, and especially the client, to find photos easily and it can be very frustrating. There may be many ways other photographers organize their photos, but this is the way we have found is best for us and our clients. Here’s a sample of a typical wedding:

“Sneak Peaks” – These are the photos from our same day edit

“Getting Ready”

“First Look” (if they have one)

“Wedding Party” or “Wedding Portraits”

“Couple Photos” (Use their names)

“Ceremony”

“Family Photos”

“Reception”

“Engagement Masters”

“Engagement Sneak Peeks”

You can even have categories such as “Details”, “Sparkler Exit”, as well as some that you mark for other use like “Vendors” or “Wedding Team”, “blog photos”, “album photos”, “competition”, “publication” etc.

PRIVACY SETTINGS

Another great feature about PASS is that you can set your own privacy settings for the collections you’ve just made. This allows you to have some images public for everyone to view, and some images private for whatever reason you may have. Sometimes there are sensitive photos that your couples don’t want their friends and family to see, and sometimes you can just use the collections to organize photos easily for your workflow. Having some collections made for things like Publication submissions, specific vendor images, or portfolio updating can really speed up your workflow when it comes to image sharing and organization. Simply un-clicking the “show” button allows you to have the images organized, but not visible in the web gallery. This way you can still download them, or make someone a VIP and give them access to the specific collection.

As you see above, you can also password protect the whole gallery, although we suggest steering clear of that as it inhibits the social sharing aspect of a beautiful web gallery like this. If your client requests it though, then you do what’s best for your clients’ needs. Just explain to them that every time someone forgets the password, they’ll be calling 🙂

 HOW TO ORGANIZE

PASS makes this easy for us as photographers! Here’s how to make new collections.

1 – In the manage area, under Collections, click “+Add Collection” and type in the different categories one at a time.

*If you don’t want the images public right away, be sure to go into the privacy settings and click off the “show” button in the different categories before you start organizing your images.

2 – Upload all of the edited wedding images into PASS by clicking “+ Add Photos” and selecting the first collection as the collection to add the photos to (Usually “Getting Ready”)

3 – Go through the first collection and select the images that you want to put in a certain category (you can press shift to highlight a bunch of photos at once) and drag them into the appropriate collection. While they are still highlighted, right click on 1 image and select “Remove Photos From” and click on the collection that you DO NOT want the photos in. the color coding on the images will show you which collections the images are in.

Easy! Takes 10 minutes! Just be sure to go through “All photos” to make sure all of the images are in one of the categories and that none of them were missed.

ONE MORE THING

Another helpful tip is to include any wedding sneak peaks at the top of the categories, that way if guests or family are looking at the photos, these are the first ones they see, rather than 300 of the bride getting ready. Same goes for your portrait sessions! For weddings, we also include the engagement sessions in the same gallery. For us, we normally select all of the collections to be private (other than the sneak peaks) until we have the couple’s permission to change it to public. At the wedding, when we post the same day edits, we hand out little cards of the couple (usually a photo from their engagement session) with their customized pass website listed so the guests can go right away to see the sneak peaks on their own phones in addition to the iPads that we have available for them. This definitely may not be rocket science to a lot of you photographers, but if you are a photographer that hasn’t taken advantage of making different categories of the wedding, I encourage you to try it out! Your clients will love it!

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