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Welcome — here’s the whole system, in plain English.
There are two parts. First you set up your studio once — your brand, your packages, and your templates. Then, for every client, you follow the same simple flow from booking all the way through to delivery. Tap Take me there on any step to jump straight to it.
First things first — get set up 🤍
A few one-time steps and your studio starts running itself. Start at the top and work down:
1
Have you set up your brand yet?
Add your studio name, logo, and colors in Brand & settings — everything else (galleries, emails, invoices, forms) pulls its whole look from here, so do this first. Running more than one brand? Add it here too, and switch between them any time from the top of your sidebar.
Set up my brand →2
Add your prices
Two different things, and it’s worth knowing which is which. Packages live in Branding & settings — they’re what a client picks when she books. Products & services are the extras you add to an invoice afterwards: prints, albums, USBs, digital files. 🤍
Add products →3
Turn on a workflow
Set up one workflow so your welcome email, prep reminders, and follow-ups send on their own. Do it once and it quietly works for every client after that.
Set up a workflow →4
Add your inquiry form
Grab your inquiry / contact form (and a launch waitlist, if you like) from Leads and paste it on your website — new inquiries land straight in your pipeline and start your follow-up.
Get my form →Done all four? You’re ready for clients — here’s the whole flow, start to finish. 🤍
Set up your studio — do this once
1
Your brand & packages
This is the most important setup — everything else pulls from it. In Brand & settings, add your studio name, logo, colors, session types, and email signature. Then in Products & services, add your packages and prices so they’re ready to drop onto any invoice.
Brand & settings → Packages & prices →2
Your templates
Build your invoice, contract, and email templates once, and every client after that is just a tap — the details fill in automatically. Add a payment link to your invoice template and it carries through too.
Take me to Templates →Then, for every client
3
Add the client
Go to Clients and add the family — one at a time, or import a whole list from a spreadsheet. This is the foundation everything for them hangs on.
Take me to Clients →4
Book their session
Open the client and add a session — the type, date, time, location, and price. It shows up on your calendar and on their portal automatically.
Take me to Sessions →5
Invoice & get paid
Create an invoice from the session, drop in your packages, and send it. Your client can pay by card right on their portal once your Stripe account is connected — or add your own PayPal/Venmo link instead. Take a deposit to hold the date.
Take me to Invoices →6
Contract to sign
In Templates, open a contract, tap Use for client, pick the client, and hit Email. It lands on their portal with a live sign link — they read it, type their name, and sign from their phone. The signed copy comes right back to their profile.
Take me to Templates →7
The session
Shoot day! Send a little prep ahead of time — attach a guide (what to wear, what to expect), or let a workflow send your reminders automatically so nothing slips.
Take me to Guides →8
Share the gallery
Create a gallery, upload the photos, turn on sharing, and send the link. Your clients favorite and select their images — no separate gallery service needed.
Take me to Galleries →9
Their order & delivery
Once they’ve chosen favorites, invoice their print or product order (pull straight from your Products & services), take payment, and deliver their final images through the gallery.
Invoice their order → Products & services →10
The portal ties it all together
Every client has one private portal link where they see their sessions, balance, galleries, and any contract to sign — all in one place. You don’t build it; it fills itself in from the steps above. Open any client and tap Send portal.
Take me to Clients →Optional layers — reach for these when you want them
Leads — a pipeline to track inquiries and see what’s converting, then turn a lead into a booked client.
Session requests — a public link new families use to request a session. You approve every one before anything’s booked.
Mini sessions — bookable time slots for your minis; clients grab a spot (and sign your contract) and it locks instantly.
Workflows — optional email & to-do sequences (like “two weeks before, send my prep guide”). Handy, but never required for anything else to work.
Templates, questionnaires, guides, packages & expenses — the supporting pieces that make the steps above faster.
Dashboard — your day at a glance, plus a nudge on who to follow up with.
That’s the whole thing.
Start with step one — the rest falls into place as you go.
Your active pipeline — clients show up here once they’re in motion (an inquiry or consult, a booked session, or their first checked-off step). Check off steps on their profile and they move along automatically, or nudge them with the arrows.
Every job on one screen — what it is, how far along, and the very next thing to do. The steps are your own workflow, so this is your studio’s way of working, not ours. 🤍
Set your prices once — sessions, prints, albums, digital files, add-ons — then add them to any invoice from a dropdown instead of retyping.
Looking for your packages — the bundles a client picks when she books? Those live in Brand & settings → Session types & packages. Mark each one taxable or not, and set a default sales-tax rate that fills in automatically on new invoices.
Default sales-tax rate
Auto-applies to taxable items on every new invoice. You can still change it on any single invoice.
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Just shipped
The newest things now live in your studio.
Google Calendar — connecting now tells you the truth — August 12
A small thing with sharp teeth, found while testing the new connection.
Google recently changed how it asks for permission. Instead of one yes-or-no, each permission now has its own tickbox — and the calendar one starts unticked. Press Continue without noticing and you get a connection that works perfectly in every visible way and cannot see a single event in your calendar.
Until now that would have shown you a green “Connected” tick and your address, and then quietly never synced anything. You’d have had no way to know why.
We now record what you actually agreed to. If the calendar tickbox wasn’t ticked, the screen says so plainly and offers to try again, instead of a tick that isn’t telling the truth.
Nothing to do if your connection is fine — you’ll see the same green tick you saw before.
Google recently changed how it asks for permission. Instead of one yes-or-no, each permission now has its own tickbox — and the calendar one starts unticked. Press Continue without noticing and you get a connection that works perfectly in every visible way and cannot see a single event in your calendar.
Until now that would have shown you a green “Connected” tick and your address, and then quietly never synced anything. You’d have had no way to know why.
We now record what you actually agreed to. If the calendar tickbox wasn’t ticked, the screen says so plainly and offers to try again, instead of a tick that isn’t telling the truth.
Nothing to do if your connection is fine — you’ll see the same green tick you saw before.
Google Calendar — the connection is real now — August 12
Christine asked whether the calendar syncs both ways. It doesn’t yet, and I said so plainly. Tonight we started building the half that does.
The connection itself is now genuinely working: the Google project is set up, and signing in with a Google account properly links it to your studio. That’s been the missing piece for months — the button existed, but there was nothing behind it.
It’s switched on for one studio at first, and that’s deliberate. Google keeps new apps in a testing mode where only invited addresses can connect, and anyone not invited gets a blunt “access blocked” screen that looks like our fault and isn’t something you could fix. Showing you a button that Google will refuse is worse than showing you nothing. So we’re proving it works on one account first, then inviting testers in small batches.
What connecting will do, once sync follows: your sessions will appear in Google the moment you save them rather than whenever your calendar app happens to refresh — and, more importantly, appointments already in your Google calendar will block that time in My Studio Books so a client can’t book over your daughter’s recital.
Until then, your calendar link still works exactly as it does today and remains the thing to use. Nothing about it changes.
We’ll ask for access to your calendar events and nothing else, you can disconnect at any time, and we will never touch an event we didn’t create.
(Christine — you asked a straight question and got a straight no. This is the work that turns it into a yes.) 🤍
The connection itself is now genuinely working: the Google project is set up, and signing in with a Google account properly links it to your studio. That’s been the missing piece for months — the button existed, but there was nothing behind it.
It’s switched on for one studio at first, and that’s deliberate. Google keeps new apps in a testing mode where only invited addresses can connect, and anyone not invited gets a blunt “access blocked” screen that looks like our fault and isn’t something you could fix. Showing you a button that Google will refuse is worse than showing you nothing. So we’re proving it works on one account first, then inviting testers in small batches.
What connecting will do, once sync follows: your sessions will appear in Google the moment you save them rather than whenever your calendar app happens to refresh — and, more importantly, appointments already in your Google calendar will block that time in My Studio Books so a client can’t book over your daughter’s recital.
Until then, your calendar link still works exactly as it does today and remains the thing to use. Nothing about it changes.
We’ll ask for access to your calendar events and nothing else, you can disconnect at any time, and we will never touch an event we didn’t create.
(Christine — you asked a straight question and got a straight no. This is the work that turns it into a yes.) 🤍
Invoices now know which shoot they’re for — August 12
This is the proper fix for the thing Caryn found. Until today an invoice belonged to a client and nothing more. So if a family had a maternity shoot, a newborn shoot and a family session, there was no way for the app to know which one a deposit was against — and the session screen could never show you money that had genuinely been paid.
Invoices now have a session. There’s a new “Which session is this for?” box right under the client. Tie an invoice to a shoot and whatever’s been paid on it appears on that session, in green, above your own deposit note. Create an invoice from a client and we set it for you.
Your existing invoices were sorted out too — but only where it was safe. Every invoice belonging to a client with exactly one session was joined up automatically. Where a client had several shoots, we left it blank on purpose and it’s waiting for you to choose. There is real money on those, and putting a family’s deposit against the wrong shoot is worse than leaving it empty. When the line description makes it obvious we’ll pre-select the likely one and say so — but it’s a suggestion, and you can always change it.
Your own Deposit noted box stays exactly where it is. It’s still the right place for cash handed to you at a shoot that never touches an invoice.
One more thing while we were here: closing an invoice used to pull the dimmed backdrop away from whatever was open behind it — the same fault Caryn hit when saving a session. Fixed in both places now.
(Caryn — this was the fourth point in a post about clicking, and it turned out to be the deepest thing in it.) 🤍
Invoices now have a session. There’s a new “Which session is this for?” box right under the client. Tie an invoice to a shoot and whatever’s been paid on it appears on that session, in green, above your own deposit note. Create an invoice from a client and we set it for you.
Your existing invoices were sorted out too — but only where it was safe. Every invoice belonging to a client with exactly one session was joined up automatically. Where a client had several shoots, we left it blank on purpose and it’s waiting for you to choose. There is real money on those, and putting a family’s deposit against the wrong shoot is worse than leaving it empty. When the line description makes it obvious we’ll pre-select the likely one and say so — but it’s a suggestion, and you can always change it.
Your own Deposit noted box stays exactly where it is. It’s still the right place for cash handed to you at a shoot that never touches an invoice.
One more thing while we were here: closing an invoice used to pull the dimmed backdrop away from whatever was open behind it — the same fault Caryn hit when saving a session. Fixed in both places now.
(Caryn — this was the fourth point in a post about clicking, and it turned out to be the deepest thing in it.) 🤍
“Deposit paid” is now “Deposit noted” — August 12
Caryn recorded a payment on an invoice, opened the session, saw the deposit still sitting at zero, and typed it in again. She wasn’t doing anything wrong. That box and your invoice payments are two completely separate records, and nothing connects them.
So the box now says Deposit noted, and says underneath exactly what it is: your own note of what she’s put down. It doesn’t read from her invoices and it won’t update when one gets paid.
Your revenue figures were never affected. Analytics counts your session prices, not this box — so nothing has ever been double-counted, even if you’d entered the same money in both places. I checked that before anything else.
Properly joining the two is a bigger piece of work than a wording change, and I’d rather do it carefully than quickly, because it touches money. It’s next. In the meantime the app will at least stop implying a connection it doesn’t have.
(Caryn — buried in a post about clicking, and it was the most useful thing in it.) 🤍
So the box now says Deposit noted, and says underneath exactly what it is: your own note of what she’s put down. It doesn’t read from her invoices and it won’t update when one gets paid.
Your revenue figures were never affected. Analytics counts your session prices, not this box — so nothing has ever been double-counted, even if you’d entered the same money in both places. I checked that before anything else.
Properly joining the two is a bigger piece of work than a wording change, and I’d rather do it carefully than quickly, because it touches money. It’s next. In the meantime the app will at least stop implying a connection it doesn’t have.
(Caryn — buried in a post about clicking, and it was the most useful thing in it.) 🤍
Sending a contract for signing, findable at last — August 12
Nichole asked how to get a contract onto a client’s portal for signing and wondered if she had to go through Send to book. Caryn thought you just had to switch something on. Christine thanked her for the answer. All three of them were circling the same problem, and none of them were doing anything wrong.
The button that does it was called “Email”. It was the quiet grey button, sitting next to a big Generate / Print. So the loudest thing on that screen was printing, and the one action that actually sends a contract for signing looked like an afterthought.
It now says Send for signing, and it’s the main button. Same thing it always did — it puts the contract on her client portal and drafts the email with her signing link already in it. Nothing about how it works has changed. It just says what it is.
The screen also explains both choices now, rather than only describing the printing half.
So, to answer the original question plainly: Forms → your template → Use → pick the client and session → Send for signing. No booking flow, no invoice needed. And the separate staff button is now Send to staff for signing, because internal agreements deliberately never appear on a client’s portal and the two shouldn’t share a name.
(Nichole, Caryn, Christine — three people converging on one badly-named button is a design problem, not a user problem.) 🤍
The button that does it was called “Email”. It was the quiet grey button, sitting next to a big Generate / Print. So the loudest thing on that screen was printing, and the one action that actually sends a contract for signing looked like an afterthought.
It now says Send for signing, and it’s the main button. Same thing it always did — it puts the contract on her client portal and drafts the email with her signing link already in it. Nothing about how it works has changed. It just says what it is.
The screen also explains both choices now, rather than only describing the printing half.
So, to answer the original question plainly: Forms → your template → Use → pick the client and session → Send for signing. No booking flow, no invoice needed. And the separate staff button is now Send to staff for signing, because internal agreements deliberately never appear on a client’s portal and the two shouldn’t share a name.
(Nichole, Caryn, Christine — three people converging on one badly-named button is a design problem, not a user problem.) 🤍
Your cover photo, edge to edge — August 12
Caryn shared a gallery cover running the full width of the page, and Kristina said that was exactly what she wanted too. Now you can have it.
Open a gallery and look at the cover controls: there’s a third option, Cover: edge to edge. The photograph runs the whole width of the page with nothing above it — no rounded corners, no margins, no gap. It’s the first thing your client sees when she opens her gallery, and now it can fill the screen.
Your other two choices are untouched. One size keeps every cover the same height across all your galleries, and Whole photo shows the full frame whatever shape it is. Every gallery you already have stays exactly as you set it — this is a new choice, not a change to anything.
It’s set per gallery, so a wide beach maternity session can run edge to edge while a tall studio newborn cover stays neatly in its frame.
(Caryn and Kristina — thank you, both.) 🤍
Open a gallery and look at the cover controls: there’s a third option, Cover: edge to edge. The photograph runs the whole width of the page with nothing above it — no rounded corners, no margins, no gap. It’s the first thing your client sees when she opens her gallery, and now it can fill the screen.
Your other two choices are untouched. One size keeps every cover the same height across all your galleries, and Whole photo shows the full frame whatever shape it is. Every gallery you already have stays exactly as you set it — this is a new choice, not a change to anything.
It’s set per gallery, so a wide beach maternity session can run edge to edge while a tall studio newborn cover stays neatly in its frame.
(Caryn and Kristina — thank you, both.) 🤍
Fewer clicks, and a client who actually moves — August 12
Caryn wrote up how many screens it takes to do one simple thing. Underneath the clicking were two real faults, and both are fixed.
Saving a session no longer throws you out. Every window in My Studio Books shares one dimmed backdrop. Closing a session removed that backdrop whether or not anything else was still open — so saving a session you’d opened from inside a client’s profile pulled the floor out from under the profile too, and you landed back at the beginning. Now the backdrop only lifts when the last window closes, and saving a session puts you back in the client’s profile where you were, with the numbers you just changed already showing.
Marking a session Booked now moves the client to Booked. Caryn changed a session to Booked and the client still sat in Leads under Consult after a refresh. She wasn’t missing a step. The Leads board reads the client’s pipeline stage, and until now the only thing on earth that could change that stage was ticking a to-do. Booking the session itself did nothing. It does now — and only ever forwards, from Inquiry, Re-inquiry or Consult. A past client booking again keeps her Past standing rather than being quietly reclassified.
And three things you could set up but never undo. While looking into Hannah’s deletions we audited every table for this, and found that connecting Stripe, verifying a sending domain, and issuing a gift card were all one-way doors. You can undo all three now. A gift card that’s already been partly spent still can’t be deleted — someone is holding that card, and it shouldn’t be able to vanish from underneath her.
(Caryn — the layering you described is a bigger piece of work and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. These two were the sharp edges inside it, and they’re gone.) 🤍
Saving a session no longer throws you out. Every window in My Studio Books shares one dimmed backdrop. Closing a session removed that backdrop whether or not anything else was still open — so saving a session you’d opened from inside a client’s profile pulled the floor out from under the profile too, and you landed back at the beginning. Now the backdrop only lifts when the last window closes, and saving a session puts you back in the client’s profile where you were, with the numbers you just changed already showing.
Marking a session Booked now moves the client to Booked. Caryn changed a session to Booked and the client still sat in Leads under Consult after a refresh. She wasn’t missing a step. The Leads board reads the client’s pipeline stage, and until now the only thing on earth that could change that stage was ticking a to-do. Booking the session itself did nothing. It does now — and only ever forwards, from Inquiry, Re-inquiry or Consult. A past client booking again keeps her Past standing rather than being quietly reclassified.
And three things you could set up but never undo. While looking into Hannah’s deletions we audited every table for this, and found that connecting Stripe, verifying a sending domain, and issuing a gift card were all one-way doors. You can undo all three now. A gift card that’s already been partly spent still can’t be deleted — someone is holding that card, and it shouldn’t be able to vanish from underneath her.
(Caryn — the layering you described is a bigger piece of work and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. These two were the sharp edges inside it, and they’re gone.) 🤍
Move and resize your logo watermark — August 11
Nichole asked whether a logo can be moved or resized once it’s uploaded. It couldn’t — every size and position was fixed in place. Now they aren’t.
Open any gallery’s settings, tick Watermark with my logo instead of text, and you’ll find a size slider and a position picker underneath. Size runs from a quarter up to double. Position works when your watermark style is single — a tiled watermark covers the whole photo, so there’s nowhere to move it to, and the control says so instead of quietly doing nothing. It’s set per gallery, so a dark newborn set and a bright outdoor set don’t have to share one compromise.
The text watermark stays centred on purpose. A watermark sitting in a corner is a watermark that can be cropped off in seconds.
Now the harder half of Nichole’s question — the square around her logo. That square is part of her logo file. Nothing in My Studio Books draws it. When a logo is saved without a transparent background, the background travels with it and sits over your client’s photo as a visible box.
I tried to build something that would strip it out automatically, and I want to be straight with you about why it isn’t here. It worked beautifully on a plain white or cream background — and then it destroyed a logo that was one solid colour edge to edge, and hollowed out the white lettering inside a dark shape. Both of those are ordinary photographer logos. Worst of all, it failed quietly: it looked fine in a small preview and went out wrong on a client’s gallery. I’d rather tell you the truth once than hand you something that breaks your branding when you aren’t looking.
So instead: when you upload a logo, we now check whether it has a transparent background and tell you plainly if it doesn’t, before it ever reaches a gallery. The file-type note has been corrected too — it used to say “PNG or JPG”, which was misleading, because a JPG cannot hold transparency at all. If you get the warning, ask whoever made your logo for a PNG with a transparent background. It’s a standard request and usually two minutes of their time.
(Nichole — two questions, two honest answers. One of them isn’t the answer I wanted to give you.) 🤍
Open any gallery’s settings, tick Watermark with my logo instead of text, and you’ll find a size slider and a position picker underneath. Size runs from a quarter up to double. Position works when your watermark style is single — a tiled watermark covers the whole photo, so there’s nowhere to move it to, and the control says so instead of quietly doing nothing. It’s set per gallery, so a dark newborn set and a bright outdoor set don’t have to share one compromise.
The text watermark stays centred on purpose. A watermark sitting in a corner is a watermark that can be cropped off in seconds.
Now the harder half of Nichole’s question — the square around her logo. That square is part of her logo file. Nothing in My Studio Books draws it. When a logo is saved without a transparent background, the background travels with it and sits over your client’s photo as a visible box.
I tried to build something that would strip it out automatically, and I want to be straight with you about why it isn’t here. It worked beautifully on a plain white or cream background — and then it destroyed a logo that was one solid colour edge to edge, and hollowed out the white lettering inside a dark shape. Both of those are ordinary photographer logos. Worst of all, it failed quietly: it looked fine in a small preview and went out wrong on a client’s gallery. I’d rather tell you the truth once than hand you something that breaks your branding when you aren’t looking.
So instead: when you upload a logo, we now check whether it has a transparent background and tell you plainly if it doesn’t, before it ever reaches a gallery. The file-type note has been corrected too — it used to say “PNG or JPG”, which was misleading, because a JPG cannot hold transparency at all. If you get the warning, ask whoever made your logo for a PNG with a transparent background. It’s a standard request and usually two minutes of their time.
(Nichole — two questions, two honest answers. One of them isn’t the answer I wanted to give you.) 🤍
Your client portal settings were never reaching your clients — August 11
Christine set a header image and a welcome message on her client portal, checked a few portals, and saw neither. She was right, and it was worse than the two things she noticed.
Under Brand & settings → Client portal there are five settings: header image, welcome message, your phone number, an Email us button and a Book another session button. All five saved correctly. None of them have ever been sent to the portal page. Not since the day that feature arrived.
The portal page asks the database for a specific list of things to show. That list was written before those settings existed and was never extended, so the page asked for your studio name, logo and colour, got those, and never even knew to ask for the rest. No error, nothing to see — just a portal that quietly ignored everything you’d set.
It asks for all of it now. If you set a header image months ago and assumed it simply looked different to how you’d pictured it, go and look again — it’s there this time. The Book another session button only appears if your booking page is actually switched on, so it can never send a client somewhere that isn’t open.
And Christine’s other question, answered honestly. The calendar sync goes one way only. We send your sessions out to Google, Apple and Outlook; we don’t read anything back. So a personal appointment you put straight into Google is invisible here and won’t stop that time being booked. There’s now a note saying so on the Calendar sync screen, because assuming otherwise going into a busy Fall is exactly how a double-booking happens. Two-way sync is on the list. It isn’t built yet, and I’d rather say that plainly than let you plan around it.
(Christine — both of these were yours. Thank you.) 🤍
Under Brand & settings → Client portal there are five settings: header image, welcome message, your phone number, an Email us button and a Book another session button. All five saved correctly. None of them have ever been sent to the portal page. Not since the day that feature arrived.
The portal page asks the database for a specific list of things to show. That list was written before those settings existed and was never extended, so the page asked for your studio name, logo and colour, got those, and never even knew to ask for the rest. No error, nothing to see — just a portal that quietly ignored everything you’d set.
It asks for all of it now. If you set a header image months ago and assumed it simply looked different to how you’d pictured it, go and look again — it’s there this time. The Book another session button only appears if your booking page is actually switched on, so it can never send a client somewhere that isn’t open.
And Christine’s other question, answered honestly. The calendar sync goes one way only. We send your sessions out to Google, Apple and Outlook; we don’t read anything back. So a personal appointment you put straight into Google is invisible here and won’t stop that time being booked. There’s now a note saying so on the Calendar sync screen, because assuming otherwise going into a busy Fall is exactly how a double-booking happens. Two-way sync is on the list. It isn’t built yet, and I’d rather say that plainly than let you plan around it.
(Christine — both of these were yours. Thank you.) 🤍
Everything else that wouldn’t delete — August 11
Yesterday we fixed sessions coming back after Hannah deleted them. Then we went looking for the same fault everywhere else, and found it in twenty-one more places: clients, invoices, galleries, to-dos, templates, mini sessions, questionnaires, guides, tutorials, brands, and more.
The cause is the same every time. If something in the database is protecting a row, it removes nothing and reports no error at all. So we saw success, said “Deleted”, took it off your screen — and it was back the moment you reloaded. Anywhere in the app.
The worst of them was deleting several clients at once. That one counted the batch it had sent rather than the rows that actually went. So it would tell you “Deleted 100 clients” having deleted none of them. If you’ve ever cleared out test clients and found them all sitting there afterwards, that is exactly what happened, and you weren’t doing it wrong.
Every one of those now asks the database what it actually removed. If the answer is nothing, we say so plainly instead of pretending. You may start seeing a message where you previously saw a cheerful “Deleted” — that isn’t a new problem, it’s an old one finally becoming visible. Please send those to me, because each one tells me which rows are protected and why.
Nothing here deletes anything extra. It only stops us claiming a delete that never happened.
(Hannah — you reported one screen. It turned out to be twenty-two. Thank you for being precise about it.) 🤍
The cause is the same every time. If something in the database is protecting a row, it removes nothing and reports no error at all. So we saw success, said “Deleted”, took it off your screen — and it was back the moment you reloaded. Anywhere in the app.
The worst of them was deleting several clients at once. That one counted the batch it had sent rather than the rows that actually went. So it would tell you “Deleted 100 clients” having deleted none of them. If you’ve ever cleared out test clients and found them all sitting there afterwards, that is exactly what happened, and you weren’t doing it wrong.
Every one of those now asks the database what it actually removed. If the answer is nothing, we say so plainly instead of pretending. You may start seeing a message where you previously saw a cheerful “Deleted” — that isn’t a new problem, it’s an old one finally becoming visible. Please send those to me, because each one tells me which rows are protected and why.
Nothing here deletes anything extra. It only stops us claiming a delete that never happened.
(Hannah — you reported one screen. It turned out to be twenty-two. Thank you for being precise about it.) 🤍
Contracts that could not be signed — August 11
This is the most serious thing we’ve had to tell you, and it’s entirely ours.
Since Build 590 on August 8, any contract without a {consent} question in it could not be signed at all. Three days. Not slow, not occasional — it could not succeed. Your client typed her name, pressed Sign, and got “we couldn’t save your signature, please try again”. Trying again did the same thing. It was never going to work, however many times she tried.
Here’s what happened. When we built {consent}, we added a new version of the signing routine to the database and left the old one sitting beside it. Both were valid. So when your client signed a plain contract, the database was handed two equally correct instructions and refused to choose between them — and stopped. Contracts that did carry a {consent} question sent enough detail to be unambiguous, so those kept working perfectly. That’s why this looked random. It wasn’t random. It depended entirely on whether that one question was in the contract.
And the safety net we’d built for exactly this kind of moment made it worse. It was written to rescue a signature if the database didn’t understand part of the request — but it recognised the wrong thing, fired, and retried in a way that was even more ambiguous than the first attempt. The one piece of code meant to catch her signature is what guaranteed it fell.
Signing now sends every detail every time, so there is nothing left to choose between. Nothing about what gets stored has changed, and no signature that was already saved is affected.
What this means for you. If a client told you she couldn’t sign since Friday, she was telling the truth and it was us. Please ask her to try once more — it will work now. And if you have contracts sitting unsigned that you assumed clients were simply slow to get to, it may be worth a second look. Some of them may never have had the chance.
I’m sorry. This was found while looking into something else entirely, which means it could have run longer, and I don’t love that. We’re now checking for this specific kind of duplicate across everything else in the database. 🤍
Since Build 590 on August 8, any contract without a {consent} question in it could not be signed at all. Three days. Not slow, not occasional — it could not succeed. Your client typed her name, pressed Sign, and got “we couldn’t save your signature, please try again”. Trying again did the same thing. It was never going to work, however many times she tried.
Here’s what happened. When we built {consent}, we added a new version of the signing routine to the database and left the old one sitting beside it. Both were valid. So when your client signed a plain contract, the database was handed two equally correct instructions and refused to choose between them — and stopped. Contracts that did carry a {consent} question sent enough detail to be unambiguous, so those kept working perfectly. That’s why this looked random. It wasn’t random. It depended entirely on whether that one question was in the contract.
And the safety net we’d built for exactly this kind of moment made it worse. It was written to rescue a signature if the database didn’t understand part of the request — but it recognised the wrong thing, fired, and retried in a way that was even more ambiguous than the first attempt. The one piece of code meant to catch her signature is what guaranteed it fell.
Signing now sends every detail every time, so there is nothing left to choose between. Nothing about what gets stored has changed, and no signature that was already saved is affected.
What this means for you. If a client told you she couldn’t sign since Friday, she was telling the truth and it was us. Please ask her to try once more — it will work now. And if you have contracts sitting unsigned that you assumed clients were simply slow to get to, it may be worth a second look. Some of them may never have had the chance.
I’m sorry. This was found while looking into something else entirely, which means it could have run longer, and I don’t love that. We’re now checking for this specific kind of duplicate across everything else in the database. 🤍
Sessions that came back, and to-dos that outlived them — August 10
Hannah deleted her cancelled sessions. Some went. Then she reloaded and five were back. She deleted them again, and it wouldn’t work. And her To-do list still had every task from a job that no longer existed.
Two faults, both ours.
We never checked that anything was actually deleted. If a row is protected, the database removes nothing and reports no error at all — so we said “Session deleted”, took it off her screen, and it was back the moment she reloaded. She wasn’t imagining it and she hadn’t done anything wrong. We now check what actually went, and if nothing did we say so plainly, with the session’s id, instead of pretending.
And a session’s to-dos were being cut loose rather than removed. Deleting a session quietly emptied the link between its tasks and the job they belonged to — so they stayed in your list forever, with nothing left to say what they were for. Now they go with it, and we tell you how many before you decide.
If your To-do list has tasks you can’t place, from sessions you know you deleted, that’s where they came from. Those old ones have already lost their link and can’t be found automatically, so they’ll need clearing by hand — I’m sorry about that.
(Hannah, thank you for rebooting, checking, and reporting it precisely. That’s what made it findable.) 🤍
Two faults, both ours.
We never checked that anything was actually deleted. If a row is protected, the database removes nothing and reports no error at all — so we said “Session deleted”, took it off her screen, and it was back the moment she reloaded. She wasn’t imagining it and she hadn’t done anything wrong. We now check what actually went, and if nothing did we say so plainly, with the session’s id, instead of pretending.
And a session’s to-dos were being cut loose rather than removed. Deleting a session quietly emptied the link between its tasks and the job they belonged to — so they stayed in your list forever, with nothing left to say what they were for. Now they go with it, and we tell you how many before you decide.
If your To-do list has tasks you can’t place, from sessions you know you deleted, that’s where they came from. Those old ones have already lost their link and can’t be found automatically, so they’ll need clearing by hand — I’m sorry about that.
(Hannah, thank you for rebooting, checking, and reporting it precisely. That’s what made it findable.) 🤍
A fix for something we broke this morning — August 9
This one is ours, and it’s worth telling you plainly.
This morning we added {consent} to contracts, so a client could agree or decline to her images being used. Her answer was meant to save onto her record. It saved as a sentence — and that field only accepts one of five set choices. The database refused the sentence.
And because that happened inside the signing itself, the refusal took the signature down with it. So for a few hours today, any contract containing {consent} could not be signed at all. Not signed-without-recording-the-answer — not signed. Your client would have seen an error, and you’d have seen a contract still waiting.
Contracts without {consent} in them were never affected. If you added it today and someone struggled to sign, that’s why, and it was us, not them. Please ask them to try again.
Her answer now saves properly: yes becomes “Portfolio, social & website” on her record, no becomes “Declined — please don’t share”. And we’ve made the signature itself untouchable: if recording her preference ever fails again for any reason, the signature stands. Noting a preference must never be able to undo a legal act.
Sorry. It was found because Christina reported something else entirely, and we went looking. 🤍
This morning we added {consent} to contracts, so a client could agree or decline to her images being used. Her answer was meant to save onto her record. It saved as a sentence — and that field only accepts one of five set choices. The database refused the sentence.
And because that happened inside the signing itself, the refusal took the signature down with it. So for a few hours today, any contract containing {consent} could not be signed at all. Not signed-without-recording-the-answer — not signed. Your client would have seen an error, and you’d have seen a contract still waiting.
Contracts without {consent} in them were never affected. If you added it today and someone struggled to sign, that’s why, and it was us, not them. Please ask them to try again.
Her answer now saves properly: yes becomes “Portfolio, social & website” on her record, no becomes “Declined — please don’t share”. And we’ve made the signature itself untouchable: if recording her preference ever fails again for any reason, the signature stands. Noting a preference must never be able to undo a legal act.
Sorry. It was found because Christina reported something else entirely, and we went looking. 🤍
Merge fields that were never going to work — August 9
Mandie asked whether she could invent her own merge fields for contracts. Before answering we went and looked at every template in every studio — and found 62 fields in curly brackets that nothing recognised.
They weren’t typos. They were sensible names, written by people who’d come from another CRM, or who simply called a thing what a contract calls it: {client1_first_name}, {contract_effective_date}, {event_time}. Every one of them printed straight through to the client with the curly brackets still showing — in documents named “Session Contract”, “Photo Session Agreement” and “Release of Claims Agreement”. Nothing warned anybody. One contract had the same broken field in it five times.
Most of them now simply work. Where we already had the answer and only had the wrong name for it, we’ve taught the app the name you wrote. Thirty-seven of those sixty-two fill in properly from today — your existing contracts included, with nothing for you to change.
And where we genuinely don’t have the answer, we say so. Save a contract containing a field we can’t fill and we’ll tell you which ones and what your client would see, while you’re still looking at the text. You can save anyway if you meant it.
One we deliberately did not paper over: {client_city}, {client_state} and {client_zip_code}. A client record holds one address, not separate parts — so filling those in would have put a blank space where a city should be. In a signed agreement, “residing at , ” is far worse than something visibly wrong. Those still warn.
If you’ve sent an agreement recently, it’s worth opening your contract templates and having a look. 🤍
They weren’t typos. They were sensible names, written by people who’d come from another CRM, or who simply called a thing what a contract calls it: {client1_first_name}, {contract_effective_date}, {event_time}. Every one of them printed straight through to the client with the curly brackets still showing — in documents named “Session Contract”, “Photo Session Agreement” and “Release of Claims Agreement”. Nothing warned anybody. One contract had the same broken field in it five times.
Most of them now simply work. Where we already had the answer and only had the wrong name for it, we’ve taught the app the name you wrote. Thirty-seven of those sixty-two fill in properly from today — your existing contracts included, with nothing for you to change.
And where we genuinely don’t have the answer, we say so. Save a contract containing a field we can’t fill and we’ll tell you which ones and what your client would see, while you’re still looking at the text. You can save anyway if you meant it.
One we deliberately did not paper over: {client_city}, {client_state} and {client_zip_code}. A client record holds one address, not separate parts — so filling those in would have put a blank space where a city should be. In a signed agreement, “residing at , ” is far worse than something visibly wrong. Those still warn.
If you’ve sent an agreement recently, it’s worth opening your contract templates and having a look. 🤍
A proper header on the Lifetime page — August 9
Yesterday we made the studio name at the top of the Lifetime page clickable and called that a header. It wasn’t one. It looked like a title, so nobody would ever have thought to press it.
There’s now a real header bar that stays with you as you scroll: the name on the left, and Home, See what it does and FAQ on the right. Somebody arriving cold from a post can now find out what this actually is before deciding about the price — which is the whole point of them being there.
“It’s technically a link” isn’t the same as somebody being able to find it. 🤍
There’s now a real header bar that stays with you as you scroll: the name on the left, and Home, See what it does and FAQ on the right. Somebody arriving cold from a post can now find out what this actually is before deciding about the price — which is the whole point of them being there.
“It’s technically a link” isn’t the same as somebody being able to find it. 🤍
A way back from the Lifetime page — August 9
The Lifetime Day page had one link on it, in the footer. Which meant anyone arriving cold from a post saw a price and had no way at all to find out what they’d be buying.
It now links home from the studio name at the top, offers Take a look inside right under the buttons for anyone not ready to decide, and carries Home, the tour, What is a CRM and the FAQ in the footer.
Asking someone for $300 while giving them nowhere to look first was the wrong way round. 🤍
It now links home from the studio name at the top, offers Take a look inside right under the buttons for anyone not ready to decide, and carries Home, the tour, What is a CRM and the FAQ in the footer.
Asking someone for $300 while giving them nowhere to look first was the wrong way round. 🤍
Lifetime Day — August 9
For one day, lifetime access to My Studio Books is back at $300, once. After Monday there won’t be a lifetime option again, and annual is retiring alongside it — from Tuesday there’s one way to join: $29 a month.
If you’re on annual, you’ll be moved to lifetime within 48 hours at no cost. Nothing to do, nothing to pay. If you’re on monthly, nothing changes at all. And if you’re already a lifetime member, you’ve been here from the start and nothing changes for you either. 🤍
There’s a page with the details, and a counter on it, at mystudiobooks.com/lifetime.html. It closes Monday at 11:59pm California time.
If you’re on annual, you’ll be moved to lifetime within 48 hours at no cost. Nothing to do, nothing to pay. If you’re on monthly, nothing changes at all. And if you’re already a lifetime member, you’ve been here from the start and nothing changes for you either. 🤍
There’s a page with the details, and a counter on it, at mystudiobooks.com/lifetime.html. It closes Monday at 11:59pm California time.
The public site was underselling you — August 9
Nothing changed inside your studio today. This is about the page people land on before they get here.
Our sign-in page still listed “coming next: online payments and deposits on invoices, and clients choosing their images in the gallery”. Both of those have been live for weeks. So anyone you sent to have a look was reading a description of My Studio Books from months ago — and being told two things you use every day were still on their way.
Worse, the “live now” list named about a third of what’s actually here. No mini sessions. No booking page. No gift cards, no discount codes, no newsletters, no expenses, no model-call forms, no referrals, no client portal, no multiple brands, no e-signing, no watermarks. All built, all in your hands, none of it mentioned.
Both lists now say what’s genuinely here, what’s genuinely next, and what’s further off — and we’ve been careful not to swap one kind of wrong for another. Nothing is listed as live unless you can use it today.
If you’ve ever recommended us to another photographer and she came back unconvinced, this may honestly be why. 🤍
Our sign-in page still listed “coming next: online payments and deposits on invoices, and clients choosing their images in the gallery”. Both of those have been live for weeks. So anyone you sent to have a look was reading a description of My Studio Books from months ago — and being told two things you use every day were still on their way.
Worse, the “live now” list named about a third of what’s actually here. No mini sessions. No booking page. No gift cards, no discount codes, no newsletters, no expenses, no model-call forms, no referrals, no client portal, no multiple brands, no e-signing, no watermarks. All built, all in your hands, none of it mentioned.
Both lists now say what’s genuinely here, what’s genuinely next, and what’s further off — and we’ve been careful not to swap one kind of wrong for another. Nothing is listed as live unless you can use it today.
If you’ve ever recommended us to another photographer and she came back unconvinced, this may honestly be why. 🤍
Your cover photo, whole — August 8
Caryn: “this crop is pretty awkward and restricts which photos can be used.” She was right, and the second half of that sentence is the part that mattered. The cover has always been cropped to a fixed height, which looks tidy across galleries but quietly decides which of your photographs are usable at all. A wide frame loses its ends. A tall one loses its top and bottom. You end up choosing covers to suit the box.
There’s now a choice, sitting next to Grid and Masonry in your gallery:
Cover: one size — exactly what happens today. Every cover the same height, neat across all your galleries.
Cover: whole photo — no crop at all. The page makes room for whatever shape the photograph is, and she sees the frame you actually made.
This was Kelli’s idea, and it was the right one. We were about to pick a side for everybody, when the honest answer is that both are correct and it depends on the photograph — and on you.
One practical note: on “whole photo” a very tall portrait is still capped, so it can’t push the actual gallery off the bottom of a phone. The whole image, but not the whole screen.
Every gallery you already have stays exactly as it is. Nothing changes until you choose it.
(Caryn found it, Kelli solved it. Thank you both.) 🤍
There’s now a choice, sitting next to Grid and Masonry in your gallery:
Cover: one size — exactly what happens today. Every cover the same height, neat across all your galleries.
Cover: whole photo — no crop at all. The page makes room for whatever shape the photograph is, and she sees the frame you actually made.
This was Kelli’s idea, and it was the right one. We were about to pick a side for everybody, when the honest answer is that both are correct and it depends on the photograph — and on you.
One practical note: on “whole photo” a very tall portrait is still capped, so it can’t push the actual gallery off the bottom of a phone. The whole image, but not the whole screen.
Every gallery you already have stays exactly as it is. Nothing changes until you choose it.
(Caryn found it, Kelli solved it. Thank you both.) 🤍
Your newsletter link, without going to fetch it — August 8
Mandie asked for a button that drops your newsletter signup link into an email “without needing to go find it”. She was describing something that already existed — the link was just on a different page, so you had to leave what you were writing, go and get it, and come back.
There’s now a ✉ Newsletter button in the toolbar above your email templates and above your newsletter composer. Tap it and your signup link goes in as a ready-made link, already pointing at your studio and your brand.
Select some words first and those become the link — highlight “sign up here” in the middle of a sentence and it reads properly, rather than a bare address sitting on its own line.
(Mandie asked for this in the same post as the No Response buttons. Thank you.) 🤍
There’s now a ✉ Newsletter button in the toolbar above your email templates and above your newsletter composer. Tap it and your signup link goes in as a ready-made link, already pointing at your studio and your brand.
Select some words first and those become the link — highlight “sign up here” in the middle of a sentence and it reads properly, rather than a bare address sitting on its own line.
(Mandie asked for this in the same post as the No Response buttons. Thank you.) 🤍
Consent she can actually give — or refuse — August 8
Mandie asked for clients to be able to agree or disagree to their images being used for portfolio, inside the contract. Rachel wanted it too.
Here’s what was there before: a contract could print a checkbox next to that clause, and it was a drawing of a checkbox. Your client saw a little square, couldn’t tick it, signed anyway, and you got back a signed agreement with an empty box that meant nothing at all. Arguably worse than not asking.
Now type {consent} under your clause — or {consent:Use of your images} to title it — and she gets a real question, right where the clause sits: Yes, that’s fine with me or No, please keep them private.
She has to answer, and either answer lets her sign. Both halves of that matter. Silence isn’t consent — if she could skip it you’d be back to a signed contract and an empty field, knowing nothing. And consent she can’t refuse isn’t consent at all; it’s a formality, and for the season your clients trust you with, that difference is the whole point.
Her answer saves onto her record, into the same field that warns you before you open her gallery. If you’d already written something there yourself, yours stays — you may well have spoken to her since.
And one that had been quietly broken. When you send an agreement by email link rather than through her portal, that page showed the contract exactly as written — so a contract containing {initials} displayed the word “{initials}” to your client, as text. The portal has handled those properly since Build 475; this page never learned. It has now, and initials work there too.
Contracts without {consent} in them are completely unchanged. Nobody gets asked who you didn’t ask.
(Mandie and Rachel — thank you. And Cynthia, whose initials request in Build 475 is what this was built on top of.) 🤍
Here’s what was there before: a contract could print a checkbox next to that clause, and it was a drawing of a checkbox. Your client saw a little square, couldn’t tick it, signed anyway, and you got back a signed agreement with an empty box that meant nothing at all. Arguably worse than not asking.
Now type {consent} under your clause — or {consent:Use of your images} to title it — and she gets a real question, right where the clause sits: Yes, that’s fine with me or No, please keep them private.
She has to answer, and either answer lets her sign. Both halves of that matter. Silence isn’t consent — if she could skip it you’d be back to a signed contract and an empty field, knowing nothing. And consent she can’t refuse isn’t consent at all; it’s a formality, and for the season your clients trust you with, that difference is the whole point.
Her answer saves onto her record, into the same field that warns you before you open her gallery. If you’d already written something there yourself, yours stays — you may well have spoken to her since.
And one that had been quietly broken. When you send an agreement by email link rather than through her portal, that page showed the contract exactly as written — so a contract containing {initials} displayed the word “{initials}” to your client, as text. The portal has handled those properly since Build 475; this page never learned. It has now, and initials work there too.
Contracts without {consent} in them are completely unchanged. Nobody gets asked who you didn’t ask.
(Mandie and Rachel — thank you. And Cynthia, whose initials request in Build 475 is what this was built on top of.) 🤍
A package that is more than one day — August 8
Mandie sells a maternity / birth / newborn package. One price, one contract, three shoots months apart. And when she went to send it, we asked her for a date — singular — and then created one session, as though the other two weren’t part of it.
Send to book now takes as many sessions as the package actually has. Add the second and the third, give each one its own type and date, and they all land on her file together off one invoice and one signature.
You can leave a date blank. This mattered more than anything else here: you cannot schedule a birth. An undated session still gets created, still sits on her file waiting, and simply doesn’t appear on your calendar until you know. Fill it in when she calls you.
The price stays on the first session only. It’s one package at one price — putting the whole amount on all three would read as three times the money in your books, and your year would look like a fiction.
Your invoice says what she actually bought, too. If you picked a package it uses its name; otherwise it lists the sessions — “Maternity + Birth + Newborn — package” — rather than naming one shoot and going quiet about the rest.
Sending a single session is completely unchanged. If you never add a second row you won’t notice this exists.
(Mandie, this was the biggest thing you asked for, and you were right that it mattered. Thank you.) 🤍
Send to book now takes as many sessions as the package actually has. Add the second and the third, give each one its own type and date, and they all land on her file together off one invoice and one signature.
You can leave a date blank. This mattered more than anything else here: you cannot schedule a birth. An undated session still gets created, still sits on her file waiting, and simply doesn’t appear on your calendar until you know. Fill it in when she calls you.
The price stays on the first session only. It’s one package at one price — putting the whole amount on all three would read as three times the money in your books, and your year would look like a fiction.
Your invoice says what she actually bought, too. If you picked a package it uses its name; otherwise it lists the sessions — “Maternity + Birth + Newborn — package” — rather than naming one shoot and going quiet about the rest.
Sending a single session is completely unchanged. If you never add a second row you won’t notice this exists.
(Mandie, this was the biggest thing you asked for, and you were right that it mattered. Thank you.) 🤍
Ask once, and it files itself — August 8
Christine asked whether clients get asked about referrals automatically. They don’t — and she was already asking two questions on her own questionnaire, “who referred you” and “how did you find me”, then going back later to copy the answers onto the client by hand.
Your questionnaire questions have had a Save answer to setting since Build 480, which drops an answer straight onto her record. Referral simply wasn’t in the list. It is now: Referral source for how she found you, and Referred by for the client who sent her — which is what feeds Top Referrers and your thank-you tracker. Set it once on the question and it does the rest, every time, by itself.
Two things we were careful about. If she types a name and you have two clients called that, we link nobody rather than guess wrong — her answer is still there in her responses for you to settle. And a source she gives never overwrites one you’ve set yourself; yours wins.
And a quiet one worth telling you about. While we were in here we found that Photo sharing permission — offered on questions since Build 480 — was never actually being saved. The database had never been taught that field. Every client who answered it had her answer dropped on the floor, and nothing anywhere said so. If you’ve been wondering why that box stayed empty on clients who definitely answered: that’s why, and it works now.
(Christine asked the question. Erin and Kristina, your photo-permission field is finally doing what we told you it did — sorry it took this long.) 🤍
Your questionnaire questions have had a Save answer to setting since Build 480, which drops an answer straight onto her record. Referral simply wasn’t in the list. It is now: Referral source for how she found you, and Referred by for the client who sent her — which is what feeds Top Referrers and your thank-you tracker. Set it once on the question and it does the rest, every time, by itself.
Two things we were careful about. If she types a name and you have two clients called that, we link nobody rather than guess wrong — her answer is still there in her responses for you to settle. And a source she gives never overwrites one you’ve set yourself; yours wins.
And a quiet one worth telling you about. While we were in here we found that Photo sharing permission — offered on questions since Build 480 — was never actually being saved. The database had never been taught that field. Every client who answered it had her answer dropped on the floor, and nothing anywhere said so. If you’ve been wondering why that box stayed empty on clients who definitely answered: that’s why, and it works now.
(Christine asked the question. Erin and Kristina, your photo-permission field is finally doing what we told you it did — sorry it took this long.) 🤍
1. 2. 3. — August 8
Nichole was building her review-request template, numbered her questions 1, 2, 3, and the preview showed her 1, 1, 1.
Her numbers were never wrong. She’d put a blank line between each question — which is exactly how you’d space out a list you want to breathe — and a blank line was quietly ending the list. Every question became a list of its own, and every list starts counting at one.
Now a blank line between items is understood as spacing, not as a full stop. Your list stays one list, your numbers count properly, and it keeps the airier spacing you were reaching for when you pressed return twice. A real paragraph in between still separates two lists, so you can absolutely still write “and then:” and start again at one on purpose.
Bullets were breaking in the same way. They don’t renumber, so nobody ever saw it — but a spaced-out bulleted list was becoming several little lists stacked up, each adding its own gap, which is why some emails came out looking oddly airy in the middle. Fixed too.
(Thank you, Nichole — and thank you for the screenshot. It made this a five-minute find instead of an afternoon.) 🤍
Her numbers were never wrong. She’d put a blank line between each question — which is exactly how you’d space out a list you want to breathe — and a blank line was quietly ending the list. Every question became a list of its own, and every list starts counting at one.
Now a blank line between items is understood as spacing, not as a full stop. Your list stays one list, your numbers count properly, and it keeps the airier spacing you were reaching for when you pressed return twice. A real paragraph in between still separates two lists, so you can absolutely still write “and then:” and start again at one on purpose.
Bullets were breaking in the same way. They don’t renumber, so nobody ever saw it — but a spaced-out bulleted list was becoming several little lists stacked up, each adding its own gap, which is why some emails came out looking oddly airy in the middle. Fixed too.
(Thank you, Nichole — and thank you for the screenshot. It made this a five-minute find instead of an afternoon.) 🤍
Four locks that had quietly stopped locking — August 8
Christine’s test booking sent us looking at the code behind minis, and what we found was worse than the thing she reported.
There were three copies of the function that claims a mini spot. Your booking page calls the newest one — and that copy had been built by starting from the oldest version instead of the current one. It kept the new signature work and lost four guards that the older copy still had. Nobody would have seen it. Everything looked right.
Here’s what hadn’t been working:
Your booking close date. If you set a mini to stop taking bookings on a date, it stopped showing that message — and kept taking bookings.
Your scheduled open date. A mini set to open on Friday could be booked on Tuesday by anyone holding the link.
One spot per person. Unless you’d ticked “allow multiple”, the same email was supposed to be stopped from taking two spots. It wasn’t stopped.
A contract means a signature. If you’d attached an agreement, it could be skipped entirely by anything that wasn’t your booking page.
Your booking page has always known how to say all four of those things to a client, in kind words. It has simply never once been given the chance. All four are back, there’s now one copy of that function instead of three, and an email is required at the database itself — not just on the page — so no booking can arrive without a way to reach the person who made it.
If you’ve had a mini fill past its close date, or one person take two spots, this is why. It wasn’t you.
(All of this came out of Christine testing her own booking page as a client. Every bit of it.) 🤍
There were three copies of the function that claims a mini spot. Your booking page calls the newest one — and that copy had been built by starting from the oldest version instead of the current one. It kept the new signature work and lost four guards that the older copy still had. Nobody would have seen it. Everything looked right.
Here’s what hadn’t been working:
Your booking close date. If you set a mini to stop taking bookings on a date, it stopped showing that message — and kept taking bookings.
Your scheduled open date. A mini set to open on Friday could be booked on Tuesday by anyone holding the link.
One spot per person. Unless you’d ticked “allow multiple”, the same email was supposed to be stopped from taking two spots. It wasn’t stopped.
A contract means a signature. If you’d attached an agreement, it could be skipped entirely by anything that wasn’t your booking page.
Your booking page has always known how to say all four of those things to a client, in kind words. It has simply never once been given the chance. All four are back, there’s now one copy of that function instead of three, and an email is required at the database itself — not just on the page — so no booking can arrive without a way to reach the person who made it.
If you’ve had a mini fill past its close date, or one person take two spots, this is why. It wasn’t you.
(All of this came out of Christine testing her own booking page as a client. Every bit of it.) 🤍
Your name, set once — and an enquiry that just went quiet — August 8
Two from the group, both small, both the kind of thing you notice every single day until it’s gone.
Caryn’s gallery was saying her name twice. Her logo at the top — which already has her name in it, beautifully set — and then her studio name again directly underneath in a different face. Your emails have chosen between these since Build 563: a logo if you have one, your name in type if you don’t, never the two stacked. The gallery had simply never been told the rule. It knows it now. Nothing changes if you don’t use a logo, and if your logo ever fails to load your name reappears rather than leaving the page headed by nothing.
And Mandie’s enquiries that go quiet. Some people write once and never write again. That isn’t declined — you didn’t turn them away, and marking it so put a decision in your mouth you never made. There’s now a No response button, its own filter tab, and its own quiet grey pill. Your Pending list goes back to being what it should be: people actually waiting to hear from you.
Both of those endings can be undone, too — anything declined or gone cold has a Reopen button, because people come back. That’s rather the point of the follow-up emails you’ll want to hang off this next.
(Caryn and Mandie, both of you. Thank you.) 🤍
Caryn’s gallery was saying her name twice. Her logo at the top — which already has her name in it, beautifully set — and then her studio name again directly underneath in a different face. Your emails have chosen between these since Build 563: a logo if you have one, your name in type if you don’t, never the two stacked. The gallery had simply never been told the rule. It knows it now. Nothing changes if you don’t use a logo, and if your logo ever fails to load your name reappears rather than leaving the page headed by nothing.
And Mandie’s enquiries that go quiet. Some people write once and never write again. That isn’t declined — you didn’t turn them away, and marking it so put a decision in your mouth you never made. There’s now a No response button, its own filter tab, and its own quiet grey pill. Your Pending list goes back to being what it should be: people actually waiting to hear from you.
Both of those endings can be undone, too — anything declined or gone cold has a Reopen button, because people come back. That’s rather the point of the follow-up emails you’ll want to hang off this next.
(Caryn and Mandie, both of you. Thank you.) 🤍
A mini spot should never go to a stranger — August 7
Christine tested her own Back to School minis as if she were a client. She gave a name. Nothing else. No email, no phone, no questionnaire, and she never paid — she closed the window halfway through.
The spot was hers. Held. One of a handful she had to sell that day, gone to someone she had no way on earth to contact.
Three things were wrong, and all three are fixed.
Her email is now required. It isn’t paperwork — it’s the only thread back to her. It’s where her confirmation goes, where the reminder goes, and it’s what we check to stop one person quietly taking two spots. Without it we were holding a time for a ghost.
Required questions are actually required. If you marked a question with a red asterisk, this page has been showing that asterisk to your client and then letting her walk straight past it. It promised you something and never once kept it. It does now.
And you can take the spot back. Anyone sitting in Awaiting deposit now has a Release the spot button. Until today your only choices were to mark them paid — a lie in your own books — or hold that time forever. Releasing opens it up again and clears their details. It doesn’t refund or message anyone, so if they deserve a word, send it first.
One honest note: a spot is still claimed the moment she books, before her payment goes through. That’s deliberate — it’s what stops two people paying for the same time — but it does mean an abandoned checkout still holds a slot until you release it. Making that time itself out automatically is the next piece, and it’s coming.
(Christine found this by testing her own booking page like a client would. That’s exactly how these get found.) 🤍
The spot was hers. Held. One of a handful she had to sell that day, gone to someone she had no way on earth to contact.
Three things were wrong, and all three are fixed.
Her email is now required. It isn’t paperwork — it’s the only thread back to her. It’s where her confirmation goes, where the reminder goes, and it’s what we check to stop one person quietly taking two spots. Without it we were holding a time for a ghost.
Required questions are actually required. If you marked a question with a red asterisk, this page has been showing that asterisk to your client and then letting her walk straight past it. It promised you something and never once kept it. It does now.
And you can take the spot back. Anyone sitting in Awaiting deposit now has a Release the spot button. Until today your only choices were to mark them paid — a lie in your own books — or hold that time forever. Releasing opens it up again and clears their details. It doesn’t refund or message anyone, so if they deserve a word, send it first.
One honest note: a spot is still claimed the moment she books, before her payment goes through. That’s deliberate — it’s what stops two people paying for the same time — but it does mean an abandoned checkout still holds a slot until you release it. Making that time itself out automatically is the next piece, and it’s coming.
(Christine found this by testing her own booking page like a client would. That’s exactly how these get found.) 🤍
When she’s already yours — August 7
A past client texts you asking for another session. You go to Leads, press New lead, and start typing her name — because that’s the door that’s there.
And it made a second her. A new, empty file with the same name, while her real one — four sessions, her gallery, her portal link, everything you’ve built together — sat untouched somewhere else in your list. Nothing warned you. The session window has checked for this since Build 483; this window never has.
Now, as you type, if she’s already in your studio we tell you so before you go any further, with the two things you actually wanted: Open her file, or Book her a session — straight into a new session with her already chosen, no second record made.
We’re careful about what counts. One email very often covers a whole family — a mum’s address on her newborn’s session and again on her sister’s. So a shared address alone never blocks you; we just mention it and let you carry on. Only the same name and the same email will stop and ask.
And to be plain about something that already worked: Sessions → New session has always let you pick an existing client from the list. You never needed the portal, and you never needed a new lead. It just wasn’t where you were looking.
(Mandie asked this one, and Christine said she’d want it too — she was right.) 🤍
And it made a second her. A new, empty file with the same name, while her real one — four sessions, her gallery, her portal link, everything you’ve built together — sat untouched somewhere else in your list. Nothing warned you. The session window has checked for this since Build 483; this window never has.
Now, as you type, if she’s already in your studio we tell you so before you go any further, with the two things you actually wanted: Open her file, or Book her a session — straight into a new session with her already chosen, no second record made.
We’re careful about what counts. One email very often covers a whole family — a mum’s address on her newborn’s session and again on her sister’s. So a shared address alone never blocks you; we just mention it and let you carry on. Only the same name and the same email will stop and ask.
And to be plain about something that already worked: Sessions → New session has always let you pick an existing client from the list. You never needed the portal, and you never needed a new lead. It just wasn’t where you were looking.
(Mandie asked this one, and Christine said she’d want it too — she was right.) 🤍
Your booking page has a calendar now — August 7
Until today, your open dates arrived as one long wall of buttons. If you take bookings a few months out, that could be a hundred of them, and someone hoping for a Saturday in October had to read every single one to find it.
Your booking page now opens on a month calendar. Open days are circled and tappable, the rest are just quiet, and picking one brings up that day’s times underneath exactly as before. There are arrows to move between months — and they only go as far as you actually have dates, so nobody wanders off into empty months. If a month has nothing in it, there’s a Find a date link that jumps straight to the next one that does.
The old list hasn’t gone anywhere. There’s a small see all dates as a list link above the calendar, and it remembers which one your visitor chose while they’re on the page. Nothing about your availability, your slot lengths or your notice period has changed — this is only how the same dates are shown.
(Mandie asked for this one and sent a picture of what she meant, which made it easy.) 🤍
Your booking page now opens on a month calendar. Open days are circled and tappable, the rest are just quiet, and picking one brings up that day’s times underneath exactly as before. There are arrows to move between months — and they only go as far as you actually have dates, so nobody wanders off into empty months. If a month has nothing in it, there’s a Find a date link that jumps straight to the next one that does.
The old list hasn’t gone anywhere. There’s a small see all dates as a list link above the calendar, and it remembers which one your visitor chose while they’re on the page. Nothing about your availability, your slot lengths or your notice period has changed — this is only how the same dates are shown.
(Mandie asked for this one and sent a picture of what she meant, which made it easy.) 🤍
Asking the Help page about full payment now finds the answer — August 7
Christine went looking in the FAQ for how to charge the full price on a mini, and came away with nothing. She was searching the right thing in the right place. The Help page only had an entry about deposits, and its search reads the question and its keywords rather than the answer underneath — so “full payment” and “$0.00” matched nothing at all.
There’s an entry for it now, and it answers the question underneath the question: if your booking page keeps saying $0.00, that’s the deposit field sitting at zero, because the page charges the deposit and not the price.
Then we went looking at why the search had let her down, and found something worse. Asking it a question the way a person asks one — “how do I set up a mini session” — matched every single entry on the page, because “how” and “do” and “a” turn up somewhere in all of them. You’d get the whole list, in no particular order, with something unrelated sitting at the top. It looked for all the world like your answer simply wasn’t there.
Search now sets the little joining words aside and sorts by how well each answer actually fits, so the closest one comes first. Christine’s question brings back six results with the right one at the top, instead of twenty-seven with the wrong one. (Thank you, Christine — an unanswered search is worth telling us about.) 🤍
There’s an entry for it now, and it answers the question underneath the question: if your booking page keeps saying $0.00, that’s the deposit field sitting at zero, because the page charges the deposit and not the price.
Then we went looking at why the search had let her down, and found something worse. Asking it a question the way a person asks one — “how do I set up a mini session” — matched every single entry on the page, because “how” and “do” and “a” turn up somewhere in all of them. You’d get the whole list, in no particular order, with something unrelated sitting at the top. It looked for all the world like your answer simply wasn’t there.
Search now sets the little joining words aside and sorts by how well each answer actually fits, so the closest one comes first. Christine’s question brings back six results with the right one at the top, instead of twenty-seven with the wrong one. (Thank you, Christine — an unanswered search is worth telling us about.) 🤍
Minis: charging the whole price, and a subtitle that breathes — August 6
Three things on mini sessions, all from the same afternoon of testing.
You can now ask for the whole price. Your booking page has only ever charged the deposit — price was a figure clients read, not one anybody was asked for. So a mini priced at $325 with the deposit left at $0 took the booking and asked for nothing, and the confirmation email said, quite honestly, that there was nothing to pay. That is not a mini session; that is a free session. There’s a new tick box under the price: ask for the whole price to book. Tick it and the full amount is what they pay at checkout.
The address has its own line now. The line under your title used to run the place and the price together, so “Fabyan Forest Preserve, 1925 S Batavia Ave, Geneva, IL 60134 · $325” read as though the price were the last part of the address. Where it is goes on one line; what it costs goes underneath.
And a stray click can’t take your work any more. Clicking the dimmed area beside any window closed it instantly and threw away everything you’d typed. No warning. Ania lost a full set of package edits that way, and it would have caught any of us. We now notice when something has been typed and ask before closing — everywhere in the app, not just on minis.
(All three from Ania, in one very patient afternoon of testing her Fall minis.) \U0001F90D
You can now ask for the whole price. Your booking page has only ever charged the deposit — price was a figure clients read, not one anybody was asked for. So a mini priced at $325 with the deposit left at $0 took the booking and asked for nothing, and the confirmation email said, quite honestly, that there was nothing to pay. That is not a mini session; that is a free session. There’s a new tick box under the price: ask for the whole price to book. Tick it and the full amount is what they pay at checkout.
The address has its own line now. The line under your title used to run the place and the price together, so “Fabyan Forest Preserve, 1925 S Batavia Ave, Geneva, IL 60134 · $325” read as though the price were the last part of the address. Where it is goes on one line; what it costs goes underneath.
And a stray click can’t take your work any more. Clicking the dimmed area beside any window closed it instantly and threw away everything you’d typed. No warning. Ania lost a full set of package edits that way, and it would have caught any of us. We now notice when something has been typed and ask before closing — everywhere in the app, not just on minis.
(All three from Ania, in one very patient afternoon of testing her Fall minis.) \U0001F90D
Answering a question without having to decide — August 6
Somebody asks whether her brother’s family could join for one group photo, and mentions she’s not tied to that date. She isn’t ready to book. She’s asking you a question.
Until now your Requests screen offered exactly two doors out: approve, which creates a session she never agreed to, or decline, which closes the door on someone who wanted to book with you. Neither of those is an answer.
There’s now a Reply by email button on the request. It opens your usual email window, addressed to her, with her question quoted underneath so you’re not switching windows to remember what she asked. The request doesn’t move — it stays pending, waiting for her, and you approve it when she’s ready. It’s there on approved and declined requests too, for when there’s one more thing to say.
(Mandie asked for this one, with the screenshot that made it obvious.) \U0001F90D
Until now your Requests screen offered exactly two doors out: approve, which creates a session she never agreed to, or decline, which closes the door on someone who wanted to book with you. Neither of those is an answer.
There’s now a Reply by email button on the request. It opens your usual email window, addressed to her, with her question quoted underneath so you’re not switching windows to remember what she asked. The request doesn’t move — it stays pending, waiting for her, and you approve it when she’s ready. It’s there on approved and declined requests too, for when there’s one more thing to say.
(Mandie asked for this one, with the screenshot that made it obvious.) \U0001F90D
The right questionnaire, for the right client — August 6
If your client opened her portal and found a questionnaire meant for somebody else’s session, that was ours to fix.
A questionnaire with no session type set is treated as this one is for everybody. Fair enough — except the box where you choose the session type only ever appeared on Pre-session prep questionnaires. Build one as Booking & inquiry intake or General and there was no box, so there was no session type, so it went to every client you have. You couldn’t have set it, because we never showed it to you.
That box now appears on every questionnaire, whatever kind it is. And it’s tick boxes rather than a single choice, so one newborn questionnaire can cover Newborn, Newborn Family and Newborn + Family at once, instead of you keeping three copies of the same questions in step with each other. Tick nothing and it goes to everyone, exactly as before — but now that’s something you chose, and it says so underneath.
There’s also a Portal questionnaire box on each client now, down in the portal section. Leave it alone and she gets whichever one matches her booked session. Pick one and she gets that one, on its own — for the client whose session doesn’t fit any of your usual boxes.
(Erin found this one and asked the question plainly. Mandie, this is the other half of what you spotted back in June.) 🤍
A questionnaire with no session type set is treated as this one is for everybody. Fair enough — except the box where you choose the session type only ever appeared on Pre-session prep questionnaires. Build one as Booking & inquiry intake or General and there was no box, so there was no session type, so it went to every client you have. You couldn’t have set it, because we never showed it to you.
That box now appears on every questionnaire, whatever kind it is. And it’s tick boxes rather than a single choice, so one newborn questionnaire can cover Newborn, Newborn Family and Newborn + Family at once, instead of you keeping three copies of the same questions in step with each other. Tick nothing and it goes to everyone, exactly as before — but now that’s something you chose, and it says so underneath.
There’s also a Portal questionnaire box on each client now, down in the portal section. Leave it alone and she gets whichever one matches her booked session. Pick one and she gets that one, on its own — for the client whose session doesn’t fit any of your usual boxes.
(Erin found this one and asked the question plainly. Mandie, this is the other half of what you spotted back in June.) 🤍
The check button was eating its own answer — August 5
This is the one I’m most sorry about. If you added your own sending domain, published every record correctly, and pressed I’ve added them — check and got “not visible yet” — over and over, for days — it was us.
Asking our email provider to look at your records doesn’t give an answer straight away. Asking is what sets everything to “waiting”; the answer lands a few seconds later. We were asking, then reading a fraction of a second afterwards, seeing “waiting”, and saving that. The real answer arrived and we never looked. And the next time you pressed, we started by asking again — wiping out the result you were waiting for.
Which means the harder you tried, the more certain you were never to see it. Press it once and you might have got lucky. Press it every hour, like any sensible person would, and you never could.
We now read first, then ask — so each press shows you the settled result of the last one. And a fresh look can never downgrade a record that was already through. You’ll be told when we’ve asked for a new one, so you know to come back in a minute rather than reading a half-finished answer as the verdict.
(Kristina, since July 30th. Kelli, who waited her full 24 hours and did everything right. Caryn, if you ever wondered. None of you did a single thing wrong, and you were all three doing exactly what the button asked of you.) 🤍
Asking our email provider to look at your records doesn’t give an answer straight away. Asking is what sets everything to “waiting”; the answer lands a few seconds later. We were asking, then reading a fraction of a second afterwards, seeing “waiting”, and saving that. The real answer arrived and we never looked. And the next time you pressed, we started by asking again — wiping out the result you were waiting for.
Which means the harder you tried, the more certain you were never to see it. Press it once and you might have got lucky. Press it every hour, like any sensible person would, and you never could.
We now read first, then ask — so each press shows you the settled result of the last one. And a fresh look can never downgrade a record that was already through. You’ll be told when we’ve asked for a new one, so you know to come back in a minute rather than reading a half-finished answer as the verdict.
(Kristina, since July 30th. Kelli, who waited her full 24 hours and did everything right. Caryn, if you ever wondered. None of you did a single thing wrong, and you were all three doing exactly what the button asked of you.) 🤍
Telling you the truth about your sending domain — August 5
If you’ve added your own sending domain and watched it go backwards — from “waiting on DNS” to “not started” — that was us, and I’m sorry. Our email provider has a status meaning some of your records are through and some aren’t yet, and we’d never taught this screen to recognise it. Anything we didn’t recognise, we labelled “not started.” So the one status that means you are making progress came out as the one that reads like nothing you did counted.
Worse: each record has always carried its own status, and we never put it on the screen. You got a single badge for the whole domain and no way to see that three records were still waiting and one had already landed.
Every record now shows found or waiting next to it, with the count above — 1 of 4 records found so far. And when we can’t recognise a status, we now say “checking” instead of inventing a verdict. We’ve also stopped telling you “nothing more for you to do” when there might well be.
(Kelli spotted this one and asked whether she’d done something wrong. She hadn’t. Kristina, yours reads the same way — have another look.) 🤍
Worse: each record has always carried its own status, and we never put it on the screen. You got a single badge for the whole domain and no way to see that three records were still waiting and one had already landed.
Every record now shows found or waiting next to it, with the count above — 1 of 4 records found so far. And when we can’t recognise a status, we now say “checking” instead of inventing a verdict. We’ve also stopped telling you “nothing more for you to do” when there might well be.
(Kelli spotted this one and asked whether she’d done something wrong. She hadn’t. Kristina, yours reads the same way — have another look.) 🤍
A cover photo on your gallery — August 5
Your galleries have always opened on a grid. Beautiful, but every gallery opened the same way — and the one image you’d have chosen to greet her with was sitting in row three.
Open a gallery, and every photo now has a small star in the corner. Tap it and that image becomes the cover: full width across the top of her page, above your name and the title. Tap the same star again to take it off. Nothing is copied or re-uploaded — we just remember which one you chose, so it costs you nothing but the tap.
(Kristina asked for this one.) 🤍
Open a gallery, and every photo now has a small star in the corner. Tap it and that image becomes the cover: full width across the top of her page, above your name and the title. Tap the same star again to take it off. Nothing is copied or re-uploaded — we just remember which one you chose, so it costs you nothing but the tap.
(Kristina asked for this one.) 🤍
Knowing who came to look — August 5
A gallery link travels. It goes to the grandmother, the sister, the friend who’s expecting in the spring — and until now every one of them looked at your work and left without you ever knowing they were there.
There’s a new tick box on each gallery: ask visitors for their name & email before they view. Leave it off and nothing changes. Turn it on and a quiet card appears first, with your own words on it if you’d like to write them.
It is always skippable, and we mean always — no thanks, just show me the photos sits right under the button, and it takes them straight in. We’re not going to hold your client’s newborn photos to ransom for an email address, and we’d ask you not to either. Whoever does choose to leave one lands in Leads tagged Gallery visitor, so you can see exactly where they came from. Your own client’s record is never touched.
(Kristina again — she has been asking for both of these for a while.) 🤍
There’s a new tick box on each gallery: ask visitors for their name & email before they view. Leave it off and nothing changes. Turn it on and a quiet card appears first, with your own words on it if you’d like to write them.
It is always skippable, and we mean always — no thanks, just show me the photos sits right under the button, and it takes them straight in. We’re not going to hold your client’s newborn photos to ransom for an email address, and we’d ask you not to either. Whoever does choose to leave one lands in Leads tagged Gallery visitor, so you can see exactly where they came from. Your own client’s record is never touched.
(Kristina again — she has been asking for both of these for a while.) 🤍
Your own copy of your newsletter — August 4
If you’ve ever sent a newsletter to yourself — through Just me, through Send a test, or just by being on your own client list — and it never turned up, this is why. We were putting your own address in the reply line of your own message. Arriving from us but carrying your address on the inside is the exact pattern Microsoft and Google treat as someone pretending to be you, so they held it. Not junk, not spam — held somewhere you were never going to find it.
Your copy now goes out on its own with no reply line, so nothing about it looks borrowed. Everyone else’s copy is untouched: your clients still reply straight to you, exactly as before.
(Kristina, who noticed one address worked and another didn’t and told us so — that was the whole clue. And Christy, who’s been saying her own copy never arrives for a while now. It wasn’t you, and it wasn’t your inbox.) 🤍
Your copy now goes out on its own with no reply line, so nothing about it looks borrowed. Everyone else’s copy is untouched: your clients still reply straight to you, exactly as before.
(Kristina, who noticed one address worked and another didn’t and told us so — that was the whole clue. And Christy, who’s been saying her own copy never arrives for a while now. It wasn’t you, and it wasn’t your inbox.) 🤍
Opens and clicks on your own domain — August 4
Yesterday we switched open tracking on and it started working for everyone sending from our shared address. What we didn’t know yet is that tracking is set per domain at our email provider — so any studio who’d gone to the trouble of sending from her own address was quietly left out of the fix. You’d have moved to your own domain and watched your opens go back to zero.
Every domain added from today comes with tracking on from the start. If yours is already verified, open Brand & settings → Sending domain and press check — you’ll see one last CNAME record to add, and a line explaining what it’s for. Your email keeps sending exactly as it does now while you get round to it; the only thing waiting on that record is being able to see who opened.
(Caryn and Kristina, this one is yours — you were the first two on your own domains, so you were the two it cost.) 🤍
Every domain added from today comes with tracking on from the start. If yours is already verified, open Brand & settings → Sending domain and press check — you’ll see one last CNAME record to add, and a line explaining what it’s for. Your email keeps sending exactly as it does now while you get round to it; the only thing waiting on that record is being able to see who opened.
(Caryn and Kristina, this one is yours — you were the first two on your own domains, so you were the two it cost.) 🤍
Emailed questionnaires can actually be filled in — August 3
If you used Email to a client on a questionnaire, your client got a plain numbered list of questions and nothing to answer them with. Every question type you’d built — the dropdowns, the date pickers, the required ones — was flattened into text on the way out, so she’d write her answers back in a reply and you’d retype them by hand.
That button now sends her to the real form on her own private page, where she can fill it in properly and her answers come straight back onto her profile. We also switch on “Show this on the client portal” for you when you use it — asking us to email it to her is enough to say you want her to have it.
(Thank you, Erin, who said “it is only text, no fill ins” and was exactly right. And Kristina, who’d asked for the same thing from the other direction.) 🤍
That button now sends her to the real form on her own private page, where she can fill it in properly and her answers come straight back onto her profile. We also switch on “Show this on the client portal” for you when you use it — asking us to email it to her is enough to say you want her to have it.
(Thank you, Erin, who said “it is only text, no fill ins” and was exactly right. And Kristina, who’d asked for the same thing from the other direction.) 🤍
Opens and clicks are working — August 3
Two things came together tonight. Open tracking wasn’t switched on at our email provider — it had been off since the very first newsletter, which is why nobody has ever seen an open. It’s on now, and every send from here forward records who opened and who clicked.
Then, once opens started arriving, they still weren’t showing on the Stats panel. Newsletters going to more than 1,000 people were only loading the first 1,000 rows, so anything past that — opens, bounces, the recipient count itself — simply never made it to the screen. Stats now loads your whole list however long it is, and the Remove bounced tool sees everyone too, not just the first thousand.
If you send to a big list, your Recipients and Delivered numbers were being capped at 1,000. They’ll read true from now on. 🤍
Then, once opens started arriving, they still weren’t showing on the Stats panel. Newsletters going to more than 1,000 people were only loading the first 1,000 rows, so anything past that — opens, bounces, the recipient count itself — simply never made it to the screen. Stats now loads your whole list however long it is, and the Remove bounced tool sees everyone too, not just the first thousand.
If you send to a big list, your Recipients and Delivered numbers were being capped at 1,000. They’ll read true from now on. 🤍
Send a newsletter to just yourself — August 3
There’s a new audience at the top of your newsletter list: Just me (a real send). It goes to your login address and nobody else, but unlike Send a test it’s a proper send — so it appears in your recent newsletters with Stats, and you can watch your own open and click register. Useful for checking how something really behaves before it goes to hundreds of people. Until now the only way to see whether a newsletter was working was to send it to your whole list and hope. 🤍
Why your newsletter went to fewer people than you expected — August 1
If you’ve sent a newsletter and it reached far fewer people than your audience count, here’s the likely reason and it wasn’t you. The skip list — the file you can upload of people who’ve already had this — stayed switched on for the rest of your session. Upload one in the morning and every send that afternoon quietly left those people out, with nothing to remind you. Now: the skip list says clearly that it’s active, with a clear button next to it. And before every send you’ll see the full arithmetic — how many are in your audience, how many will receive it, and exactly who’s being left out and why. (Thank you, Christy, who said “yet again it’s only sending out half” — the “yet again” was the clue that cracked it.) 🤍
Four things you asked for — July 30
Your signature on every email. The signature in Brand & settings now appears at the foot of everything you send, not only where you remembered to type {signature}. (Caryn.)
Pick several to-dos at once. Tick boxes down the left, a select all on each day, then mark done, mark not done, or delete the lot together. (Mandie.)
Duplicate a product. A price list is mostly variations on a theme — copy one, change the size, done. (Julia.)
Put a gift card amount back. If you recorded a redemption and the client changed her mind, type the amount with a minus in front. It won’t let a card go above what it was bought for. (Kristina.)
Also: your products now belong to the brand you’re in, like your packages and pricing. 🤍
Pick several to-dos at once. Tick boxes down the left, a select all on each day, then mark done, mark not done, or delete the lot together. (Mandie.)
Duplicate a product. A price list is mostly variations on a theme — copy one, change the size, done. (Julia.)
Put a gift card amount back. If you recorded a redemption and the client changed her mind, type the amount with a minus in front. It won’t let a card go above what it was bought for. (Kristina.)
Also: your products now belong to the brand you’re in, like your packages and pricing. 🤍
Your dashboard stays in its own brand — July 30
Four lists were showing you every brand’s people regardless of which brand you were in: the leads panel on your dashboard, your cold list, your do-not-book list, and your referrals. The client count sitting right beside the leads panel always got it right, which made it especially confusing. All four now follow the brand you’re in, like everything else. (Thank you, Cynthia — her portrait enquiries kept turning up on her sports dashboard, and she kept describing it patiently until it was obvious.) 🤍
Two brands, two price lists — July 30
If you run more than one business from one login, your session types, pricing and packages were never actually separate — whichever brand you switched to, you saw your first brand’s. Cynthia has a portrait studio and a sports business and got her portrait prices while setting up sports. They follow the brand you’re in now. If a brand looks empty, nothing has been lost — it simply never had its own packages, and there’s a button to copy them across from another brand if that’s what you want. Studios with one brand won’t notice any difference. (Thank you, Cynthia, who kept describing it clearly until it was obvious.) 🤍
“I’ve sent the payment” — for bank transfer & Zelle — July 29
If you take deposits by bank transfer, Zelle, Venmo, PayPal or Square rather than card, there was no way for a client to finish booking with you — your details sat on an invoice and they had no way to tell you they’d sent anything. Now: under Money → Payments there’s a new Paying at booking box. Write how you’d like to be paid, and clients see it at booking with a box to tick once they’ve sent it. It arrives in Requests marked ◦ says they’ve paid — needs confirming. Two things done on purpose: ticking that box does not book the session — you check your bank and approve, because your Saturday is worth more than a click. And your bank details are never shown on your booking page; you write the public note yourself and decide what’s safe to put there. (Thank you, Julia — your first report and a real gap.) 🤍
Package deposits were never being saved — July 29
This one is serious and it was entirely ours. If you set a deposit on a package, it was thrown away the moment your brand saved. Not hidden, not mis-read — deleted, every time, for everyone, since the field was added. Which means the pay-to-book deposit on your booking page has been reading a number that was never there, so clients could book a session without paying a deposit at all. Please open Brand & settings → Session types & packages, put your deposits back in, and check your booking page asks for one. We’re sorry — if you’ve taken bookings expecting a deposit and none arrived, that’s why. (Thank you, Kristina, who noticed it late at night and mentioned it in passing.) 🤍
Your logo in your emails, properly this time — July 29
Yesterday we said your logo would appear at the top of your emails. For most of you it didn’t, and here’s the honest reason: your logo is stored inside your studio record rather than as a web address, and Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail all refuse to load images stored that way. It shows on your invoices and booking page because those are web pages. It could never have shown in an email. Nothing was wrong with the email design. Your logo now also gets published to a proper web address the next time you save your brand, and your emails use that — so open Brand & settings and press Save once, then send yourself a test. Until then you’ll see your studio name set in your brand colour, which is deliberate: better a clean name than a broken image. (Thank you, Caryn, who told us twice.) 🤍
Embedded forms getting cut off — July 29
If you’ve put your inquiry or Model Call form on your own website and the bottom was cut off — no Submit button, no way for anyone to send it — that’s fixed. The embed code comes with a small script that grows the form to fit, but some website builders block scripts in their HTML blocks, and when that happened the form was stuck at whatever height we’d guessed. On a narrow page, where every field stacks, our guess was too short. Copy your embed code again from Forms and paste it over the old one. There’s now a note under each one explaining how to make it taller still if your site needs it. (Thank you, Eleanor, who found this on her own contact page while migrating everything across.) 🤍
Your gift cards weren’t duplicated — July 29
If you opened your gift cards recently and found every single one showing twice, nothing had gone wrong with your data. We checked the database and every code was still unique — it was the page showing each card twice. A recent update taught MSB to register your hand-issued cards so the balance checker could find them, and this page then counted both the card and its registration. Fixed — you’ll see each card once, with the right balance, and nothing was ever lost or double-counted against a client. (Thank you, Kristina, who reported it with a 😅 when she’d have been entitled to something stronger.) 🤍
The Masonry button now actually does it — July 29
Yesterday’s masonry galleries had a daft problem: there were two controls called Masonry. The obvious one, sitting right above your photos, only changed how you saw them while editing — it was never saved and your client never saw it. The real setting was a dropdown buried in gallery settings. So you could press Masonry, watch your thumbnails rearrange, and your client’s gallery would look exactly as before. Now there’s one control: the Grid / Masonry buttons above your photos are the setting, they save the moment you press them, and they tell you that’s what your client sees. The buried dropdown is gone. (Thank you, Caryn — and sorry, that one was ours from start to finish.) 🤍
Send from your own address — July 28
Your emails have always carried your name, but the address behind it was ours. You can now use your own. Brand & settings → Send from your own address: add your domain, and we’ll show you the two or three records to add at your registrar. Press check when they’re in, and once it says Verified put your address in Sending email just above. There’s no way round the records, sorry — Gmail decides whether to trust an email by looking them up, and it’s the same thing every studio system asks for. One thing worth knowing: until a domain is verified we keep using the shared address, on purpose. An unverified From doesn’t arrive plainly, it arrives in junk, and you’d never know why your enquiries went quiet. (Thank you, Caryn, who asked the obvious question nobody had asked.) 🤍
Galleries that show the whole photograph — July 28
Your client galleries squeezed every thumbnail into a square and cropped it to fit — so a tall newborn frame quietly lost its top and bottom before anyone clicked it. There’s now a masonry option that keeps each image its true shape, uncropped, with square corners. Set it per gallery under Thumbnail layout, so a set of portraits can sit in masonry while a mini session stays in a neat grid. Existing galleries are untouched unless you change them. (Caryn asked for the masonry and the square corners in the same breath, and she was right — they belong together.) 🤍
Different notice for different sessions — July 28
You can now set how much notice each session type needs, separately. A week before anyone instant-books a newborn, a day for maternity, an hour for a consultation call. Find it in Booking → Session types: each type that’s on your booking page has a notice box beside it. Leave one blank and it uses your studio-wide setting, so nothing changes unless you want it to. Before this there was one number for everything — which meant a week’s notice on newborns also put a week’s notice on the consultation call you need first. (Caryn’s idea, and her example, almost word for word.) 🤍
Put your packages in the order you want — July 28
Packages appeared on your booking page in whatever order you happened to add them, and there was no way to change it. Now there is: Brand & settings → Session types & packages, and each package has arrows to move it up or down. Clients read top to bottom, so lead with the one you most want booked. (Thank you, Caryn.) 🤍
Leads that arrive without an email — July 28
Approve a booking request and MSB makes you a client from it. Sometimes that client was arriving with no email address, even though the request had one — so a booking would land in your pipeline with no way to reply to it, which rather defeats the point. Two things now. Approving a request checks the address actually saved and puts it back if it didn’t. And we’ve gone through and restored the missing addresses on leads already sitting in your studio, carefully — where there was any doubt about which request a lead came from, we left it alone rather than guess and put a stranger’s email on your client. (Thank you, Mandie, who spent an afternoon certain she’d done something wrong. She hadn’t.) 🤍
The right questionnaire for the right session — July 28
If your client’s portal has been showing them the wrong form, it wasn’t you. The portal was handing out whichever questionnaire came first alphabetically, no matter what kind of session was booked — so a newborn client could open her portal and be asked about her mini session. Your questionnaires have always carried the right session type; nothing was reading it. They now match the sessions your client actually has, with the one for their upcoming session first, and any general form (no session type set) still shows to everybody. (Thank you, Mandie, who checked her own setup over and over looking for a mistake she hadn’t made. And Kristina — “oh good catch, I didn’t even notice this” — which means it had been quietly doing it to her too.) 🤍
Why a brand-new brand looks full of other people’s clients — July 28
Make a new brand and it can open looking like it already has everyone else’s contacts in it. Here’s why: a contact who has never been assigned to a brand belongs to all of them — newsletter subscribers, old imports — so they show everywhere rather than risk vanishing. Sensible rule, but nothing said so, and the switch to change it was labelled backwards and filed under Currency & referrals. It now sits in Studio details, says what it actually does, and your Clients page explains the situation right where you notice it, with a link straight to the setting. Nothing was ever moved or deleted — it was only ever about what you were being shown. 🤍
Your availability tells you when something’s off — July 28
Two silent traps in your booking hours, both now spoken out loud. A time block with no session type ticked accepts everything — so a 20-minute consultation window would happily take a newborn booking, and it looked identical to a block you’d set on purpose. It now says so plainly. And if you give hours to a session type that isn’t ticked on your booking page, it tells you right there, because clients can’t choose it and those hours would quietly sit unused. Worth opening Booking → your weekly hours and having a look — if you see a warning, that block wasn’t doing what you thought. (Thank you, Caryn, who set up a beautiful week and got offered maternity sessions at 9am for her trouble.) 🤍
Your emails look like you now — July 28
Every email your studio sends now arrives wearing your brand: your logo across the top if you’ve added one, your studio name set in your brand colour if you haven’t, and your name and address in the footer. Session emails, reminders, booking notes, the auto-replies your inquiry and model call forms send — all of it. Here’s the slightly embarrassing part: your newsletters have looked like this for months, while everything else went out as plain words on a white page. Same app, two standards, and no reason for it. Add your logo under Brand & settings and it appears everywhere on its own. (Thank you, Caryn — “this is such a visual industry” was the whole argument and it only needed saying once.) 🤍
The truth about Google Calendar sync — July 28
The Connect Google Calendar button has been sitting in your settings for a while now, and it never worked. Not for you, not for anyone — there was nothing behind it on our side. Worse, it told you calendar sync wasn’t switched on for your studio yet, as though you were in a queue. You weren’t. That was our wording and it sent people looking for a setting that didn’t exist. Today it says what’s actually true, and there’s no button to press until there’s something real behind it. Your calendar link above works and always has — copy it into Google, Apple or Outlook and your sessions flow in. The live two-way version is genuinely being built now. (Caryn spent a week on this one and kept asking. Kristina named exactly what was wrong. Thank you both.) 🤍
Gift cards you issued by hand can be checked — July 26
If you issued a gift card yourself and someone tried Check the balance, it said “we couldn’t find that code” — even though the card was sitting right there in your books, active.
The reason: cards you issue by hand and cards bought on your public page were being kept in two different places, and the balance checker only ever looked in one of them. So every hand-issued card failed, from the first one. Fixed — and your existing cards bring themselves across the next time you open Money → Gift cards, so there’s nothing for you to redo.
Also, for the embedded version: there’s now a tick-box that hides the logo and studio name. Your website already says who you are, so on your own page it read as the same thing three times over. The link you send people still introduces itself properly. (Thank you, Kristina, for both of these.) 🤍
The reason: cards you issue by hand and cards bought on your public page were being kept in two different places, and the balance checker only ever looked in one of them. So every hand-issued card failed, from the first one. Fixed — and your existing cards bring themselves across the next time you open Money → Gift cards, so there’s nothing for you to redo.
Also, for the embedded version: there’s now a tick-box that hides the logo and studio name. Your website already says who you are, so on your own page it read as the same thing three times over. The link you send people still introduces itself properly. (Thank you, Kristina, for both of these.) 🤍
You’ll know when a client picks her images — July 26
When your client chooses her favourites, that’s the moment the real work starts — and until now it was a small badge on your Galleries list that you had to go looking for.
It’s on your dashboard now: “Your clients picked their images”, with who chose, from which gallery, and how many. It sits there until you’ve dealt with it, alongside your signatures and deposits. Click through and it opens the gallery. Your bell rings at the same moment, and it now rings for a gallery being opened too — once a day per gallery, so a client flicking back and forth doesn’t fill it with herself. (Thank you, Heather, for asking — and Kristina, whose bell it rings.) 🤍
It’s on your dashboard now: “Your clients picked their images”, with who chose, from which gallery, and how many. It sits there until you’ve dealt with it, alongside your signatures and deposits. Click through and it opens the gallery. Your bell rings at the same moment, and it now rings for a gallery being opened too — once a day per gallery, so a client flicking back and forth doesn’t fill it with herself. (Thank you, Heather, for asking — and Kristina, whose bell it rings.) 🤍
The Packages button now opens your packages — July 26
Clicking Packages on your dashboard took you to Products, which is a different thing entirely: products are your individual prints, albums and digital files, priced once so you can drop them onto an invoice. Your packages — the bundles a client picks when she books — were somewhere else altogether, near the bottom of Session types & packages in Brand & settings.
So that button was quietly sending everyone to the wrong place. It now says Products & pricing, which is what it opens, and there’s a proper Packages button beside it that takes you straight to your packages and highlights them when you land. There’s also a line on the Products page pointing the way, for anyone who arrives there looking. (Thank you, Heather — you clicked Packages and reasonably expected packages.) 🤍
So that button was quietly sending everyone to the wrong place. It now says Products & pricing, which is what it opens, and there’s a proper Packages button beside it that takes you straight to your packages and highlights them when you land. There’s also a line on the Products page pointing the way, for anyone who arrives there looking. (Thank you, Heather — you clicked Packages and reasonably expected packages.) 🤍
A bell, for the things that happen while you’re not looking — July 26
There’s a bell at the top of your studio now. Someone opens a gallery, picks out their favourites, or sends you an inquiry — and it’s there waiting, with a count, instead of you finding out whenever you next happen past the right screen. Click one and it takes you to the client or the gallery it’s about; Mark all read quiets it.
One thing we left out on purpose. The bell will never ring for an email being opened. An “open” is a hidden image loading, and Apple Mail loads it by itself before your client has read a word — a bell ringing for those would be ringing at nobody, and within a week you’d stop trusting the ones that matter. You’ll still see Opened and Clicked on the email itself, where you can weigh it for yourself.
(Thank you, Kristina, who asked for this and showed us how the tools she came from handle it.) 🤍
One thing we left out on purpose. The bell will never ring for an email being opened. An “open” is a hidden image loading, and Apple Mail loads it by itself before your client has read a word — a bell ringing for those would be ringing at nobody, and within a week you’d stop trusting the ones that matter. You’ll still see Opened and Clicked on the email itself, where you can weigh it for yourself.
(Thank you, Kristina, who asked for this and showed us how the tools she came from handle it.) 🤍
A gallery downloads as one tidy folder — July 26
Yesterday Download all started delivering every photo instead of just the last one. Caryn asked the obvious next question: they all arrived, but they arrived one by one into Downloads, scattered among everything else already in there.
Now a gallery comes down as a single zip folder named after the gallery — malin-family-2026.zip — with all the photos inside it, still numbered in order. Your client double-clicks it and has a folder with your gallery’s name on it, not a hundred loose files. One save instead of a hundred, so no permission prompts either.
You’ll see it collecting the photos, then preparing the folder. A large gallery takes a moment, and the wait happens before anything saves rather than during. (Thank you, Caryn — you tested it, told us it worked, and then asked the better question.) 🤍
Now a gallery comes down as a single zip folder named after the gallery — malin-family-2026.zip — with all the photos inside it, still numbered in order. Your client double-clicks it and has a folder with your gallery’s name on it, not a hundred loose files. One save instead of a hundred, so no permission prompts either.
You’ll see it collecting the photos, then preparing the folder. A large gallery takes a moment, and the wait happens before anything saves rather than during. (Thank you, Caryn — you tested it, told us it worked, and then asked the better question.) 🤍
See when a client opens or clicks an email you sent — July 26
Open any client, look at Emails, and a message you sent from MSB now shows Opened or Clicked beside it, the way your newsletters always have. It only applies to emails sent from here on — older ones can’t be traced back.
The tracking was never missing. When Resend accepts an email it hands back a reference number, and we were throwing it away — so when it later reported an open, there was nothing to match it to. Now we keep it.
Please read this part before you rely on it. Clicked is certain: someone chose to click a link. Opened is not. An open is a hidden image loading, and Apple Mail fetches that image by itself before anyone reads a word — so for a client on an iPhone or a Mac, “Opened” can appear when they haven’t looked. Treat it as a good sign, not proof. Hover any of these and it’ll tell you the same thing. We’d rather you knew than have you make a decision on a number that quietly lies. (Thank you, Kristina, for asking — and Caryn, for saying why it matters: a quiet client who is reading everything is a reassuring thing to know about.) 🤍
The tracking was never missing. When Resend accepts an email it hands back a reference number, and we were throwing it away — so when it later reported an open, there was nothing to match it to. Now we keep it.
Please read this part before you rely on it. Clicked is certain: someone chose to click a link. Opened is not. An open is a hidden image loading, and Apple Mail fetches that image by itself before anyone reads a word — so for a client on an iPhone or a Mac, “Opened” can appear when they haven’t looked. Treat it as a good sign, not proof. Hover any of these and it’ll tell you the same thing. We’d rather you knew than have you make a decision on a number that quietly lies. (Thank you, Kristina, for asking — and Caryn, for saying why it matters: a quiet client who is reading everything is a reassuring thing to know about.) 🤍
Download all actually downloads them all — July 26
Clicking Download all on a gallery could leave your client with a single photo — usually the last one — saved under a name like 1785085732092-118-c6ny2z__….jpg. Both problems came from the same cause: we were pointing a link at where the photo lives and clicking it once per picture, and a browser won’t let you name a file it’s fetching from somewhere else, so each click interrupted the one before it. Safari kept only the last.
Each photo is now collected properly before it’s saved, so they all arrive — named after the gallery and numbered in order: malin-family-2026-001.jpg, …-002.jpg, and so on, padded so they sort correctly in a folder. Single-photo downloads get the same treatment. It’s a little slower now, and worth it. Your browser may ask permission to save several files at once — that’s normal, say yes.
On the smaller dimensions: that’s a separate thing, fixed yesterday. Galleries used to store photos at 2000 pixels on the long edge and now keep 3200 — but only for photos uploaded since. The bigger originals of anything already in a gallery were never kept, so an older gallery needs re-uploading to come through at the new size. (Thank you, Caryn, who tested her own gallery before sending it to a client.) 🤍
Each photo is now collected properly before it’s saved, so they all arrive — named after the gallery and numbered in order: malin-family-2026-001.jpg, …-002.jpg, and so on, padded so they sort correctly in a folder. Single-photo downloads get the same treatment. It’s a little slower now, and worth it. Your browser may ask permission to save several files at once — that’s normal, say yes.
On the smaller dimensions: that’s a separate thing, fixed yesterday. Galleries used to store photos at 2000 pixels on the long edge and now keep 3200 — but only for photos uploaded since. The bigger originals of anything already in a gallery were never kept, so an older gallery needs re-uploading to come through at the new size. (Thank you, Caryn, who tested her own gallery before sending it to a client.) 🤍
Inquiry forms were broken for a day — and that was ours — July 26
If you have an inquiry form on your website, it stopped working for roughly a day and we owe you a plain explanation.
When we taught inquiries to remember which brand they came to, the change stored that brand in the wrong format for the database column holding it. The database refused it, and the refusal came at the very first step — so every inquiry failed, not only the ones from studios running two brands. Anyone who filled in your form saw “we couldn’t send that just now” and their message was never written down. It’s fixed, and this time the fix was run against a real database before it came anywhere near you.
If you use an inquiry form, it’s worth a test. And if someone told you your form was broken, they were right, and it wasn’t your website.
So this can’t cost you a client again: an inquiry that can’t be saved now still gets emailed to you with everything the person wrote and a note to add them by hand. A problem at our end should cost you a tidy record, not somebody who was trying to book you. (Found by Mandie, testing her own form.) 🤍
When we taught inquiries to remember which brand they came to, the change stored that brand in the wrong format for the database column holding it. The database refused it, and the refusal came at the very first step — so every inquiry failed, not only the ones from studios running two brands. Anyone who filled in your form saw “we couldn’t send that just now” and their message was never written down. It’s fixed, and this time the fix was run against a real database before it came anywhere near you.
If you use an inquiry form, it’s worth a test. And if someone told you your form was broken, they were right, and it wasn’t your website.
So this can’t cost you a client again: an inquiry that can’t be saved now still gets emailed to you with everything the person wrote and a note to add them by hand. A problem at our end should cost you a tidy record, not somebody who was trying to book you. (Found by Mandie, testing her own form.) 🤍
A second email and phone for a client — July 25
Some clients have two addresses — a personal one and a work one, or a couple who each want to hear from you. There was room for exactly one of each, so the second ended up in the notes or nowhere at all.
Open any client and you’ll find “+ Add a second email or phone” under the first pair. It stays tucked away until you want it, so nothing gets busier for anyone who doesn’t. Both show on their profile. When you write an email yourself, the To line becomes a little chooser so you can send this one wherever it belongs — and the Mail and Gmail buttons follow your choice.
Anything automatic — invoices, reminders, workflow emails — always goes to the first address, so nothing quietly changes course on you. If the other one should really be the main one, there’s a Swap them link. (Thank you, Crystal.) 🤍
Open any client and you’ll find “+ Add a second email or phone” under the first pair. It stays tucked away until you want it, so nothing gets busier for anyone who doesn’t. Both show on their profile. When you write an email yourself, the To line becomes a little chooser so you can send this one wherever it belongs — and the Mail and Gmail buttons follow your choice.
Anything automatic — invoices, reminders, workflow emails — always goes to the first address, so nothing quietly changes course on you. If the other one should really be the main one, there’s a Swap them link. (Thank you, Crystal.) 🤍
Consultation calls and sessions on the same day — July 25
Each block of time in your availability can now carry its own length. So Tuesday can be family sessions at an hour from 9 to 12, and twenty-minute consultation calls from 1 to 3 — every Tuesday, set once.
Until now there was a single slot length for your whole booking page. Our own setup instructions told you to “pick the days you’ll take calls and set a short slot length on them,” which simply wasn’t possible — the only place a shorter length existed was on one individual date at a time. Look for Length underneath each block of hours; leave it on default and nothing changes. A length on the block wins over one on a special date, which wins over your page default.
Fixed alongside it: changing a session type on a special date used to quietly reset that date’s own slot length, and a date that inherited your weekly hours forgot which session types they were for. (Thank you, Mandie — you told us this twice and you were right both times.) 🤍
Until now there was a single slot length for your whole booking page. Our own setup instructions told you to “pick the days you’ll take calls and set a short slot length on them,” which simply wasn’t possible — the only place a shorter length existed was on one individual date at a time. Look for Length underneath each block of hours; leave it on default and nothing changes. A length on the block wins over one on a special date, which wins over your page default.
Fixed alongside it: changing a session type on a special date used to quietly reset that date’s own slot length, and a date that inherited your weekly hours forgot which session types they were for. (Thank you, Mandie — you told us this twice and you were right both times.) 🤍
Sharper client galleries — July 25
Photos uploaded to a client gallery were being reduced to 2000 pixels on the long edge. On any modern screen a photo shown large needs roughly twice its on-screen width in real pixels — so 2000 was already being stretched before anyone thought to zoom. Galleries now keep 3200 pixels at a higher quality setting, and every image MSB resizes now asks the browser for its best resampling instead of its fastest, which it had never been told to do.
This applies to photos you upload from now on. The bigger originals of anything already in a gallery were never kept, so older galleries stay as they are — if one really matters, re-upload it and it’ll come through at the new size. (Thank you, Abby, who compared the same files side by side and trusted her eyes.) 🤍
This applies to photos you upload from now on. The bigger originals of anything already in a gallery were never kept, so older galleries stay as they are — if one really matters, re-upload it and it’ll come through at the new size. (Thank you, Abby, who compared the same files side by side and trusted her eyes.) 🤍
You’re told when someone inquires — July 25
A booking request and a booked time have always emailed you the moment they came in. Your inquiry form, your waitlist and your model call form never did — the only email any of them sent went to the client. So you could embed your contact form on your website, have someone fill it in, and not know until you next happened to open MSB. Worse, there was nothing to tell you which of your own forms would let you know and which wouldn’t.
All three now email you as soon as someone comes in, with their name, email, phone, session type and their message. Reply straight to it — it goes to them, not to us. They’re already sitting in your Leads either way. (Thank you, Cynthia — you embedded your form, got your first inquiry, and had no idea it was there.) 🤍
All three now email you as soon as someone comes in, with their name, email, phone, session type and their message. Reply straight to it — it goes to them, not to us. They’re already sitting in your Leads either way. (Thank you, Cynthia — you embedded your form, got your first inquiry, and had no idea it was there.) 🤍
When every price in your studio had the same wrong start — July 25
In Brand & settings, Currency symbol sits directly beneath Referral thank-you, whose example reads “$50 print credit.” A referral reward typed one box too low went in as your currency — and the box quietly cut it down to four characters and said nothing. From then on every price in your studio was that fragment glued to the number, so a mini priced at 149 read “$25149” and a $75 deposit read “$2575.”
The cruel part is where it sends you: the price looks wrong, so you go and check the price — and the price was right all along. Numbers can no longer be saved as a currency symbol, the field says plainly what belongs in it, and if yours already has one it will quietly right itself the moment you load MSB. Letters stay put, so A$, kr and CHF are all safe. (Thank you, Mandie — twice. Your second message is the one that found it, and I’d had it wrong until then.) 🤍
The cruel part is where it sends you: the price looks wrong, so you go and check the price — and the price was right all along. Numbers can no longer be saved as a currency symbol, the field says plainly what belongs in it, and if yours already has one it will quietly right itself the moment you load MSB. Letters stay put, so A$, kr and CHF are all safe. (Thank you, Mandie — twice. Your second message is the one that found it, and I’d had it wrong until then.) 🤍
Prices on your mini page read like prices — July 25
Your mini booking page was the one place in MSB that printed a price by simply sticking the currency sign onto the number. No comma, no pennies. So a mini priced at 25149 came out as “$25149” — which, at a glance, looks like a real number. It now reads “$25,149”, which does not, and would have been caught the moment it was published. Whole prices stay whole ($250, not $250.00), and pennies show only when there are any.
Two more found alongside it: your package prices on that page were printed with a hard-coded dollar sign no matter what currency your studio uses — so a studio in Australia or the UK saw the wrong money entirely. And if you’d chosen to call it a Retainer, the line under your title still said “deposit to book.” Both fixed. (Thank you, Mandie.) 🤍
Two more found alongside it: your package prices on that page were printed with a hard-coded dollar sign no matter what currency your studio uses — so a studio in Australia or the UK saw the wrong money entirely. And if you’d chosen to call it a Retainer, the line under your title still said “deposit to book.” Both fixed. (Thank you, Mandie.) 🤍
See your mini’s client-facing line as you type it — July 25
The line clients read under your mini’s title isn’t a box you fill in — it’s built from your Location, Price and Deposit stitched together. Which meant that when it came out wrong, there was nowhere obvious to go and fix it, because there was no “it” — there were three of them.
Editing a mini now shows you that exact line, live, as you type: “What clients read under your title.” No more publishing to find out. (Thank you, Mandie — you went looking for a field that didn’t exist, and you were right that it should have.) 🤍
Editing a mini now shows you that exact line, live, as you type: “What clients read under your title.” No more publishing to find out. (Thank you, Mandie — you went looking for a field that didn’t exist, and you were right that it should have.) 🤍
“None of these work” — July 24
If you let clients pick a time, your open dates were the only way through. Someone who couldn’t make any of them had nowhere to go but away. There’s now a quiet line under your dates — “None of these work — I’d rather choose a date later” — and it opens the preferred date & time fields right there on the same page. Everything she’s already typed stays put: her name, her answers, the package she chose. It arrives as a request for you to answer, exactly as it would from a studio that doesn’t use the calendar at all, and she can flip back to your open times with one tap if she changes her mind. Nothing changes if you don’t use scheduling — your page is already this page. (Thank you, Mandie.) 🤍
Copy the link to a prep guide — July 24
When you upload a PDF to a guide, it has always had its own permanent web address — there was just nowhere to see it, so the only way a client ever got it was inside a workflow email. Open any guide with a PDF and you’ll find Copy link next to the file name. Paste it into an email, a template, your newsletter, anywhere — and pair it with the new Link button in your email templates to make the words themselves clickable. (Thank you, Mandie, who asked for exactly this.) 🤍
Two businesses, properly apart — July 24
If you run two brands out of one MSB, an inquiry that came in through one of them was also turning up under the other as a brand-new inquiry. Nothing was ever duplicated — it was one contact appearing in two places, because the inquiry form never wrote down which brand it came to. It does now. And in Brand & settings, the “Share clients with my other brands” box finally does what it always said it did: turn it off for a brand and that brand shows you only the people you’ve actually put in it. Your main brand always keeps everyone, so nobody can ever go missing. Already have an inquiry sitting in the wrong place? Use Assign clients at the top of your client list to file it where it belongs — it’ll drop off the other side straight away. (Thank you, Cynthia — you found this while setting up your sports business.) 🤍
Bold, italic and real links in your email templates — July 24
Your email templates now have B, I, Link and List buttons, plus a Preview that shows exactly what your client will see. Here’s the part worth knowing: the formatting has always worked — there was simply nothing on the screen to tell you so. A web address typed on its own has always arrived as a working link, and it still does. The Link button is for when you’d rather the words be clickable — select “my Google review page”, click Link, paste the address. (Cynthia asked for this three times. She was right every time.) 🤍
Put MSB on your phone’s home screen — July 23
MSB is now a proper installable app. Open it on your phone and add it to your home screen, and it opens with your own icon, full screen, no address bar — straight into your studio. On Android, look for the new “Add MSB to my home screen” button at the top of Start here. On iPhone, open mystudiobooks.com in Safari, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen. Nothing changes about how MSB works — it’s the same studio, just easier to reach. This is also the groundwork for real phone notifications when a lead or a payment comes in, which is the next thing I’m building. (Your discovery and your idea, Kristina — and Cynthia, this is the one you wanted.) 🤍
Embedded forms that stop growing — July 23
If you pasted your gift card (or newsletter, booking or mini-session) embed onto your site and the page began stretching longer and longer, this is fixed. Our embed tells your website how tall to be — but it was measuring the box your site had just made, not the form inside it, so each measurement came back a little bigger than the last and it never settled. It now measures the form itself, stops talking once the height is right, and refuses to go past a sensible maximum no matter what your website builder does. You don’t need to re-copy anything — the embeds already on your site are fixed the moment this goes live. (Found, diagnosed and reported by Kristina — who fixed her own page first and told us anyway, so nobody else would lose an afternoon to it.) 🤍
Put gift cards straight on your website — July 22
Your gift card page now has an embed code, just like your inquiry form and waitlist. Open Money → Gift cards, expand Embed on your website, copy the code, and paste it into Squarespace, Wix, Showit or WordPress. It sizes itself to fit, so nothing gets clipped — and clients buy without ever leaving your site. 🤍
Gift cards moved to Money — July 22
Now that clients can buy gift cards themselves, they belong with the rest of your money. You’ll find Gift cards under Money, right after Sales, instead of tucked under Bookings. Nothing else changed — same cards, same balances. 🤍
Read back the emails you’ve sent — July 22
Your client’s Emails list showed that a message went out, but not what it said — so if you couldn’t remember what you wrote, there was nowhere to look. Now anything you Send from MSB saves its full message, and you can tap it to read it right there on their profile. (Thank you, Cynthia — exactly the right thing to ask for.) 🤍
Sell gift cards from your own page — July 22
Your clients can now buy a gift card themselves. In Gift cards, flip on “Selling online,” set the amounts you’d like to offer, and share your link. They choose an amount (yours or their own), say whether it’s for themselves or a gift, pay by card — straight to your Stripe — and their code appears the moment payment clears. They can check a balance on the same page, and every card you sell lands in your Gift cards list beside the ones you issue by hand, with its balance tracked as it’s used. (Your idea, Kristina — just in time to think about the holidays.) 🤍
Three things that were quietly confusing — July 22
All three found by using the app for real. One: the button that prepares a client’s invoice and contract said “Send,” but it actually opens an email for you to send — so it was possible to think your client had been emailed when they hadn’t. It now says “Prepare invoice + contract,” and the email opens with a clear note: one more step — press Send. Two: if the client you’re booking lives in a different brand, that box used to sit blank with no explanation — now it tells you which brand they’re in. Three: approving a request now files that client under the brand you’re working in, so they show up where you expect. 🤍
Approving a request now offers the next step — July 22
When you approve a session request, MSB now asks if you’d like to send them an invoice and contract straight away — so they can pay their deposit and sign, without you having to go looking for it. Say yes and the Send to book screen opens with their name, session type and date already filled in; say no and it opens the session as before. Approving is only half the job, so now the other half is right there. 🤍
See “paid & signed” right on a request — July 22
The last piece of the all-in-one, on your side: when a booking comes in through the new flow, its card in Requests now shows “\u2713 Deposit paid” and “\u2713 Contract signed” at a glance — so you can see it’s all done and simply approve, with no digging. Regular requests look exactly as before. (All you do is approve, Kristina \u2014 just like you pictured.) 🤍
Clients sign your contract while they book — July 22
Now the all-in-one really comes together. When you’ve chosen a booking contract (in your booking settings), a client who books and pays their deposit reads your agreement right on the booking page, ticks “I’ve read and agree,” types their name to sign — and it lands on their profile as a signed contract, with their name and the moment they signed. Their own details fill into the agreement automatically. So by the time a booking reaches you, they’ve picked a package, paid, and signed — all you do is approve. (Your vision, coming to life, Kristina, Caryn & Angela.) 🤍
Choose a contract for your bookings — July 22
A quiet piece of the all-in-one flow: under your booking settings, you can now pick which of your contract templates a booking should use. On its own it just remembers your choice; next, a client who books and pays their deposit will be asked to sign this on their portal — and it lands back on their profile, signed. (Setting the stage, Kristina, Caryn & Angela.) 🤍
Clients can pay a deposit to book — July 22
The heart of the all-in-one flow. When a client books an available time and picks a package that has a deposit to book, they now go straight to secure card checkout to pay it — and the booking lands in your Requests as pending, with the time held, for you to approve. Their deposit invoice is created and marked paid automatically, the money goes straight to your Stripe (never through us), and packages with no deposit book exactly as before. Contract signing and questionnaires join this flow next. (Building your all-in-one, Kristina, Caryn & Angela.) 🤍
Saving a gallery is more forgiving — July 22
A small but important fix: if one of a gallery’s newest settings hasn’t finished setting up behind the scenes, saving the gallery no longer stops with an error. It simply saves everything else and carries on, and the new setting starts working once it’s ready. So creating and editing galleries just works. (Thank you, Crystal & Kristina, for the quick reports.) 🤍
Set a deposit on each package — July 22
Next step toward self-serve booking: every package can now carry its own deposit to book. Set it when you edit a package in Brand & settings (leave it blank if a package needs no deposit). On your booking page, clients see the deposit right on the package they’re choosing — “$100 deposit to book.” Next, that deposit becomes a real pay-to-book step; this lays the groundwork. (Building toward your vision, Kristina, Caryn & Angela.) 🤍
Clients pick a package when they book — July 22
The first step of the all-in-one booking flow you asked for. When a client books through your booking page, they now choose a package for that session type — pulled straight from the packages you’ve set in Brand & settings, with names, prices and what’s included. Their choice arrives with the booking so you know exactly what they picked. For session types where you haven’t built packages yet, booking works just as before — no dead ends. Next steps (deposit, contract, questionnaire) build on from here. (Building toward your vision, Kristina, Caryn & Angela.) 🤍
Offer clients the whole gallery for one price — July 22
Alongside “images included + a price per extra,” you can now set a flat full-gallery upgrade price — a studio default in Brand & settings, and an optional override on any single gallery. When a client hearts more than their gallery includes, the gallery gently offers it: “Get your whole gallery for $250 — that saves you $50 versus paying per photo.” If they choose it, their submitted picks come to you clearly tagged “full gallery upgrade,” so you know to invoice the flat price. A kinder upsell that often earns you more. (Thank you, Caryn, Angela & Kristina!) 🤍
Watermark your galleries with your logo — July 22
Until now your gallery watermark was text (your studio name or a word like “Proof”). Now you can watermark with your actual logo instead. When you set up a gallery, tick “Watermark with my logo instead of text” and your logo (from Brand & Settings) is used for the watermark — tiled or centered, in whatever strength you’ve chosen. If there’s no logo on file, it quietly falls back to text, so nothing breaks. Works best with a logo that has a transparent background. (Thank you, Erin!) 🤍
See when a gallery’s been viewed — July 22
Your Galleries list now tells you whether each gallery has actually been opened. Each cover shows “\uD83D\uDC41 3 views · last Jul 22” (or “Not viewed yet”), so you can tell at a glance if your client has seen their photos yet — and spot the ones who haven’t so you can give them a nudge. Their favorites still show as the “new picks” badge, right alongside. (Thank you for asking about gallery analytics!) 🤍
Finished to-dos tuck themselves away — July 22
A small follow-on: your Done to-dos now start folded up, so your list shows what’s still ahead, not a pile of things you’ve already finished. The Done heading (with its count) is still right there — tap it any time to see everything you’ve checked off, and it’ll remember how you left it. (Thank you, Kristina.) 🤍
Your to-do days fold away now — July 22
Building on grouping your to-dos by day: tap any heading — Today, Tuesday · Jul 22, Overdue, Done — and that section folds up, with a count next to it so you still see how many are tucked inside. Fold away the days you’re not thinking about and keep just today open. Your choices are remembered between visits, so it stays how you like it. (Thank you, Kristina — the perfect follow-on.) 🤍
Two touches for your booking page — July 22
First step toward the all-in-one booking flow. If a client visits your booking page and doesn’t see a date that works, there’s now a gentle “Inquire about another time” link that drops them into your inquiry form — so they land in your Leads and your matching workflow starts, instead of leaving empty-handed. And when your page is set to request mode, the button now honestly reads “Request this time” (not “Book”), so no one thinks they’re confirmed before you’ve said yes. (Building toward what you sketched out, Kristina.) 🤍
Your to-dos are grouped by day now — July 22
Your to-do list used to bundle everything under “Upcoming.” Now the days ahead each get their own heading — Today, Tomorrow, then Tuesday · Jul 22, Wednesday · Jul 23, and so on — so you can glance at a single day and see exactly what’s on it. Overdue still sits right at the top on its own, so nothing that slipped ever hides. (Thank you, Kristina — lovely idea.) 🤍
“Draft with AI” on your booking page works again — July 22
If you added keyword tags to your brand, tapping Draft with AI on your booking page was throwing an error and doing nothing. Fixed — it now reads your keywords correctly (however they’re saved) and drafts your welcome line and session types as it should. (Thank you, Kelli — that error message was exactly what we needed.) 🤍
Emailing an invoice marks it Sent — July 22
When you hit Email invoice (or Email + PDF), the invoice now flips itself from Draft to Sent automatically — so your invoice list always reflects what’s actually gone out, without you changing it by hand. A Paid invoice stays Paid, so re-emailing a receipt never undoes that. (Thank you, Erin.) 🤍
Embedded forms fit themselves now — July 22
If you embed your inquiry, model-call, or waitlist form on your own website and the bottom was getting cut off (the Message box or Submit button vanishing), that’s fixed. The embed code now grows to fit your form, however long it is — so nothing clips, even after you add extra questions or the “which session” dropdown. Just re-copy your embed code from the Leads page and paste the fresh one in. (Thank you, Erin — you caught this on your Showit site.) 🤍
A little tidy-up on this page — July 20
A couple of these update notes were showing a stray bit of code where a little 🤍 should have been, and one slipped in a behind-the-scenes note meant just for setup. Both cleaned up — nothing changed in your studio itself. Thank you to whoever spotted it! 🤍
You choose what “booking a time” means — July 20
On your booking page’s availability tab there’s a new choice: When someone books a time. Leave it on Instantly booked (how it works today) — or switch to Send me a request first, and a booked slot instead lands in your Requests to approve, with the time held so no one else can grab it. Perfect if a client isn’t truly booked in your eyes until the retainer’s paid and the contract’s signed. And a fix along the way: an instantly-booked client now always shows in your Leads (they were quietly saved with a status the pipeline didn’t recognise, so they never appeared). (Thank you, Kristina — and Caryn and Angela, who asked for exactly this. 🤍)
Web inquiries never slip through — and can start the right workflow — July 20
Two fixes to your inquiry/contact form. First: if someone who’s already in your books inquires again, they no longer quietly update in the background where you can’t see them. They resurface in Leads — a past or lost contact comes back tagged Re-inquiry, and every repeat inquiry shows as fresh activity. (Thank you, Cynthia — this was your “I got the reply but nothing appeared” report; testing with an email that’s already yours was the tell.) Second: your form can now ask which session someone’s interested in — turn on “Ask which session they’re interested in” when you customize the form, and their choice lands on the lead and starts the matching lead workflow you’ve tagged for that session type. (Thank you, Kristina. 🤍)
Payment plans that save — on invoices and templates — July 20
Your payment plan now saves and sticks. Set a split like half to book, half on or before the session with your own due dates, and it stays on the invoice. Even better: it now saves onto an invoice template too, so the whole schedule fills in the moment you build an invoice from that template. And you can finally edit a template after you make it — open it from your Templates page, change anything, tap Save as template, and choose Update it. (Thank you, Cynthia — this was exactly your three-part ask. 🤍)
Two touches for your inquiry form — July 20
When you build your inquiry form, there’s now a Hide the header option — tidy for when you embed the form on your own website and your page already shows your logo and title. And on any dropdown question there’s a Fill with my session types button, so a “Which session are you interested in?” question fills itself from your Brand & Settings instead of you retyping them. (Thank you, Kristina. 🤍)
Send an email straight from MSB — and see when a lead came in — July 19
A few things you asked for, together. First: the Compose window now has a Send from MSB button. It sends the email from your studio through the same delivery your newsletters already use — no more popping out to your Mac Mail just to hit send — and it logs on the client’s profile under Emails so you have a record. (“Open in email” is still there if you’d rather.) Second: every lead and client now shows when they were added — on their card in Leads, at the top of their profile, and in their details — so you’re never left wondering how old an inquiry is. Third: a New client that quietly did nothing will now always open, and if any one field ever trips it tells us instead of failing in silence. 🤍
Add a lead by hand, and add emails to your list without a whole client — July 19
Two more you asked for. There’s now an Add a lead button right on your Leads page, so you don’t have to wait for a form to bring one in. And on your Newsletter page, under Your lists, you can now add subscribers by hand — drop in a single email, or paste a whole list from your old site. They join your Newsletter subscribers, tagged Newsletter, and stay out of your pipeline. (For a spreadsheet with names and details, Import a list is still the way.) 🤍
Your booking page knows a call from a shoot — July 18
A small finish to the consultation feature: when a client chooses your consultation call on your booking page, the page now says “Book a consultation call” and the button reads “Book my call” — so a quick call feels like a call, not a full session. Pick any other session type and it goes back to normal. 🤍
Let clients book a consultation call — July 18
You can now offer a pre-session consultation call that clients book from your real availability — the way you might have seen in Honeybook. On your booking page’s availability tab there’s a new Set up consultation calls button: tap it and “Consultation call’” is added as a session type, then you add a block of hours for your calls, set its Length to 15 or 20 minutes, and tag that block for consultations. The length lives on the block, so the rest of that day keeps your normal session length. A scheduled booking never asks for a deposit, so your calls stay free. (Thank you, Cynthia — and no, you hadn’t missed it; it just needed setting up. 🤍)
Add an invoice step to a workflow — July 18
Your workflows can now raise an invoice on their own. Add a step and choose Invoice as its type — then when you apply that workflow to a session, the invoice is created for that client, ready to send. Leave the amount blank and it uses the session’s own price; set an amount and it uses that. It only ever makes one, so applying the same workflow twice won’t double it up. (Thank you, Erin — you asked for the invoice to happen “once they’re booked,” and this is the first piece of that. 🤍)
One invoice per mini booking, never two — July 18
A mini booking could occasionally produce two invoices with the same number — if the app was working out invoices twice at almost the same moment, each attempt thought it was the first. Now a booking can only ever have one invoice, and the database itself enforces it, so even a double-tap can’t make a twin. If you already have a duplicate, the one-time cleanup removes the extra and keeps the paid one. (Thank you, Erin — you spotted two invoices for the same client while marking your deposits. 🤍)
Per-date slot length now sticks — July 18
A quick follow-up to this morning: when you set a slot length on a date and then added a second time to that same day, the length quietly slipped back to your page default. Worse, it did it without a peep — so you could set three hours, add your afternoon block, and not notice it had reset. It holds now, through adding times, removing them, and editing them. (Caught within minutes by Kristina — thank you. 🤍)
Different slot lengths on different days — July 18
You can now set how long each booking slot is per date, not just once for your whole page. Give your headshot Friday one-hour slots and your newborn Wednesday three-hour slots — each date holds its own length, and any date you leave alone just uses your page default. Look for slot length on each date in your one-off hours. (Thank you, Kristina — headshots and newborns really don’t fit the same length, and you were right that they should each get their own. 🤍)
The availability list starts tidy now — July 18
When you first opened your availability calendar, the whole long list of dates was still showing until you clicked a day. It starts collapsed now — just the calendar, clean — and the list fills in with whichever date you click. There’s a show all link whenever you want the full list, and a collapse to tuck it away again. (Thank you, Kristina. 🤍)
Two more on the availability calendar — July 18
Both from Kristina, and both right. 🤍
New dates now borrow the right hours. When you clicked a date to give it hours, it always came up 9 to 12 — so if you’d set three hours for a newborn day, every new date looked like it was copying that. It wasn’t really copying anything; 9 to 12 was just baked in, and it happens to be three hours. Now a date starts from your weekly hours for that weekday: click a Monday, get your Monday; click a Friday, get your Friday. Change one and your weekly pattern stays put.
The list stops piling up. The calendar is the manager now, so the panel underneath shows just the date you clicked instead of every date you’ve ever opened. There’s a Show all link when you want the full list back.
New dates now borrow the right hours. When you clicked a date to give it hours, it always came up 9 to 12 — so if you’d set three hours for a newborn day, every new date looked like it was copying that. It wasn’t really copying anything; 9 to 12 was just baked in, and it happens to be three hours. Now a date starts from your weekly hours for that weekday: click a Monday, get your Monday; click a Friday, get your Friday. Change one and your weekly pattern stays put.
The list stops piling up. The calendar is the manager now, so the panel underneath shows just the date you clicked instead of every date you’ve ever opened. There’s a Show all link when you want the full list back.
Booking no longer jumps down the page — July 18
When a client picked her time on a mini, the page scrolled her a little too far — landing her half-way down the questions instead of at the top of the form. It got more noticeable once the questionnaire fix made those forms longer. Now it settles gently at the top of the form, so she sees the time she chose and the first thing you’re asking. (Caught by Kristina, minutes after the last fix went in. 🤍)
Three fixes for your contract templates — July 18
All three from Amber, and she was right on every count. 🤍
Save without closing. There’s now a Save that keeps you in the editor and a Save & close for when you’re done — so you’re not thrown out and left hunting for which contract you were on. And no, it wasn’t secretly auto-saving; it only ever saved when you clicked, which is exactly why this needed fixing.
Put them in your own order. Little up and down arrows on each contract in the list — arrange them the way you think of them, and that’s the order they stay in.
Bullets that actually bullet. They weren’t working because a line starting with * wasn’t being recognised — only dashes were. Now *, - and • all make a bullet, and indenting a line gives you a sub-bullet underneath.
Save without closing. There’s now a Save that keeps you in the editor and a Save & close for when you’re done — so you’re not thrown out and left hunting for which contract you were on. And no, it wasn’t secretly auto-saving; it only ever saved when you clicked, which is exactly why this needed fixing.
Put them in your own order. Little up and down arrows on each contract in the list — arrange them the way you think of them, and that’s the order they stay in.
Bullets that actually bullet. They weren’t working because a line starting with * wasn’t being recognised — only dashes were. Now *, - and • all make a bullet, and indenting a line gives you a sub-bullet underneath.
The calendar fits your phone now — July 18
On a phone, the month calendar was running off the right-hand edge — Saturday and its sessions were sliced clean off, with no way to scroll to them. A long client name in one day was quietly stretching that column wide and shoving the rest of the week past the edge of the screen. Now every day keeps its share of the width, long names tuck away neatly, and the whole week stays on screen. (Thank you, Kim at Studio Uglow — and no, you weren’t doing anything wrong. 🤍)
Mini-session contracts are properly signed now — July 17
Two things, and the honest one first.
Until today, a contract on a mini session was for show. Your client read it, typed her name, ticked agree, and booked — and none of it was saved. No signed name, no date, no record of what she’d agreed to. It looked signed on her screen and left nothing behind. That’s fixed: her name, the moment she signed, and a snapshot of the exact agreement are all kept on the booking now.
And second, the part that prompted this: you can now put {initials} anywhere in a mini contract — after a cancellation clause, beside a model release — and your client gets a box to initial in that spot. She can’t book until every one is filled, and your record shows what she initialled and where. It’s the same clause-by-clause signing your portal contracts already had; minis simply never got it.
An honest note: contracts “signed” on a mini before today captured nothing, and there’s no record for us to recover — this puts it right from here forward. 🤍
Until today, a contract on a mini session was for show. Your client read it, typed her name, ticked agree, and booked — and none of it was saved. No signed name, no date, no record of what she’d agreed to. It looked signed on her screen and left nothing behind. That’s fixed: her name, the moment she signed, and a snapshot of the exact agreement are all kept on the booking now.
And second, the part that prompted this: you can now put {initials} anywhere in a mini contract — after a cancellation clause, beside a model release — and your client gets a box to initial in that spot. She can’t book until every one is filled, and your record shows what she initialled and where. It’s the same clause-by-clause signing your portal contracts already had; minis simply never got it.
An honest note: contracts “signed” on a mini before today captured nothing, and there’s no record for us to recover — this puts it right from here forward. 🤍
Take your invoices with you — July 17
There’s now an Export button on your Invoices page. It hands you every invoice as a spreadsheet — one row per line item, with who it was for, what it was for, what’s been paid and what’s still owed.
Your clients and your sessions already came out this way; your invoices were the one thing that didn’t, and that never sat right. This is your financial record, and it should be yours to carry wherever you need it — your accountant, your taxes, or simply your own peace of mind. (Prompted by Rachel, asking a fair question about moving her data around. 🤍)
Your clients and your sessions already came out this way; your invoices were the one thing that didn’t, and that never sat right. This is your financial record, and it should be yours to carry wherever you need it — your accountant, your taxes, or simply your own peace of mind. (Prompted by Rachel, asking a fair question about moving her data around. 🤍)
Copy, preview and publish from the Minis list — July 17
Your booking link, a preview, and a publish switch now sit on each mini session right there in the list — no opening it up, no scrolling to find them.
They’d been there all along, just locked inside the details screen, so grabbing a link to paste into a post took three clicks and a hunt. Copy link tells you if the mini’s still a draft rather than handing you a link that opens for nobody. Preview opens your page in a new tab. Publish flips it live, and warns you first if there are no days left to book.
(Thank you, Kristina — who is currently finding bugs, answering everyone else’s questions, and still filing better feature requests than we write ourselves.) 🤍
They’d been there all along, just locked inside the details screen, so grabbing a link to paste into a post took three clicks and a hunt. Copy link tells you if the mini’s still a draft rather than handing you a link that opens for nobody. Preview opens your page in a new tab. Publish flips it live, and warns you first if there are no days left to book.
(Thank you, Kristina — who is currently finding bugs, answering everyone else’s questions, and still filing better feature requests than we write ourselves.) 🤍
Empty a gallery without losing it — July 17
Open a gallery and you’ll find Remove all photos beside Grid and Masonry. The gallery itself stays exactly as it was — same link, same PIN, same watermark, same settings — and only the photographs go. Handy when you’ve uploaded the wrong folder and would rather start clean than click the × ninety times.
It tells you the number first, and it won’t let you past without saying so. If your client has already been in and marked favourites, or left you a selection list, it says that too — those are her choices, not ours to quietly bin. (Thank you, Caryn. 🤍)
It tells you the number first, and it won’t let you past without saying so. If your client has already been in and marked favourites, or left you a selection list, it says that too — those are her choices, not ours to quietly bin. (Thank you, Caryn. 🤍)
Minis with a questionnaire couldn’t be booked at all — July 17
This is the worst one we’ve found this week, and it was ours from top to bottom.
If you attached a questionnaire to a mini session, your booking page didn’t just look wrong — it died. No times, no packages, no pay button, just “We couldn’t load this page.” Your client couldn’t book. She had no way to tell you, and you had no way to know, because the preview you’d check is the very same page.
What happened: questions used to be plain lines of text. When we built the smarter questionnaires — the ones that know a date from a phone number — your booking page never learned the new shape and fell over the first time it met one. It had a guard meant to catch exactly this, and the guard let it through.
Fixed, and better than before: your questions now arrive as you built them. Ask for a date and she gets a date picker. Give her choices and she gets a list. Mark a question required and it says so.
(Thank you, Kristina — you wrote “Am I doing something wrong?” and the answer was no, never, not once. You’d found the biggest thing on the board.) 🤍
If you attached a questionnaire to a mini session, your booking page didn’t just look wrong — it died. No times, no packages, no pay button, just “We couldn’t load this page.” Your client couldn’t book. She had no way to tell you, and you had no way to know, because the preview you’d check is the very same page.
What happened: questions used to be plain lines of text. When we built the smarter questionnaires — the ones that know a date from a phone number — your booking page never learned the new shape and fell over the first time it met one. It had a guard meant to catch exactly this, and the guard let it through.
Fixed, and better than before: your questions now arrive as you built them. Ask for a date and she gets a date picker. Give her choices and she gets a list. Mark a question required and it says so.
(Thank you, Kristina — you wrote “Am I doing something wrong?” and the answer was no, never, not once. You’d found the biggest thing on the board.) 🤍
When your client pays, we know about it — July 17
If a client paid her deposit by card, we never found out. Her money reached your Stripe account exactly as it should — that part always worked, and no payment was ever lost. But nothing came back to tell your studio it had happened. So her booking sat here still marked unpaid, and her invoice asked her for the deposit again, on top of her balance.
Here’s the honest shape of it. Your clients pay you — your own Stripe account, your money, never ours passing it along. That’s deliberate and it’s right. But it means Stripe announces the payment on your account, and we had only ever asked Stripe to tell us about payments on ours. So every card deposit any of you has ever taken was announced to an empty room. Not failing. Not erroring. Just never arriving. The only deposits ever marked paid in this app were the ones somebody ticked by hand.
None of you could have reported this, because from your side there was nothing to see — an invoice that says unpaid looks exactly like an invoice. (Thank you, Caryn — you found $100 sitting in Stripe that we’d never heard about, and you pushed until we looked properly.)
Two things worth knowing. It’s fixed going forward, and it fixes something else too: a studio whose Stripe had gone live could have her clients turned away at the pay step, because the message saying “she’s ready now” was going to the same empty room. And it doesn’t heal the past. A payment that was never announced can’t be announced again. If a client of yours has paid a deposit by card, open her mini and use Mark deposit paid, and her invoice will read right. If you’re not sure which, tell us and we’ll go through it with you rather than leave you guessing. 🤍
Here’s the honest shape of it. Your clients pay you — your own Stripe account, your money, never ours passing it along. That’s deliberate and it’s right. But it means Stripe announces the payment on your account, and we had only ever asked Stripe to tell us about payments on ours. So every card deposit any of you has ever taken was announced to an empty room. Not failing. Not erroring. Just never arriving. The only deposits ever marked paid in this app were the ones somebody ticked by hand.
None of you could have reported this, because from your side there was nothing to see — an invoice that says unpaid looks exactly like an invoice. (Thank you, Caryn — you found $100 sitting in Stripe that we’d never heard about, and you pushed until we looked properly.)
Two things worth knowing. It’s fixed going forward, and it fixes something else too: a studio whose Stripe had gone live could have her clients turned away at the pay step, because the message saying “she’s ready now” was going to the same empty room. And it doesn’t heal the past. A payment that was never announced can’t be announced again. If a client of yours has paid a deposit by card, open her mini and use Mark deposit paid, and her invoice will read right. If you’re not sure which, tell us and we’ll go through it with you rather than leave you guessing. 🤍
Put your photographs in your own order — July 17
Yesterday we stopped your galleries showing up in a random order. Today you can choose the order yourself — which is what was asked for in the first place.
Open a gallery and drag a photograph where you want it. It saves as you go, and it’s the order your client sees. There’s an Order photos… drop-down beside Grid and Masonry too — filename A–Z or Z–A, newest or oldest first — for when you just want it sorted and not fussed over. On an iPad or a phone, where dragging doesn’t work, each photo has a ‹ and a › to nudge it along.
An honest word: our own “How do I…?” has been telling you to drag and drop your images since before it was possible. So this wasn’t a new idea — it was us describing a studio we hadn’t finished building, and then leaving you to wonder what you were doing wrong. You weren’t doing anything wrong. (Thank you, Caryn — asked on 13 July, and you bumped it because we’d gone quiet. 🤍)
Open a gallery and drag a photograph where you want it. It saves as you go, and it’s the order your client sees. There’s an Order photos… drop-down beside Grid and Masonry too — filename A–Z or Z–A, newest or oldest first — for when you just want it sorted and not fussed over. On an iPad or a phone, where dragging doesn’t work, each photo has a ‹ and a › to nudge it along.
An honest word: our own “How do I…?” has been telling you to drag and drop your images since before it was possible. So this wasn’t a new idea — it was us describing a studio we hadn’t finished building, and then leaving you to wonder what you were doing wrong. You weren’t doing anything wrong. (Thank you, Caryn — asked on 13 July, and you bumped it because we’d gone quiet. 🤍)
Mini bookings get their invoice — July 17
If a client booked a mini and paid you, there was every chance no invoice was ever raised — no record of what she’d paid, and none of the balance she still owed.
Here’s why, and it’s an ugly one. The invoice step was the last line of the routine that syncs new bookings, and that routine gave up early whenever there was nothing new to sync. So an invoice could only ever be raised on the single pass that also created the session. Miss that moment — and everyone did — and it became unreachable. Forever. The booking was fine, the session was fine, the money was in Stripe, and the invoice simply could never exist.
Fixed. Open your Minis page and any missing invoices are raised now, with what’s paid and what’s due two weeks before the session. (Thank you, Caryn — you had two live clients and real money riding on this, and you were right to keep pushing.) 🤍
Here’s why, and it’s an ugly one. The invoice step was the last line of the routine that syncs new bookings, and that routine gave up early whenever there was nothing new to sync. So an invoice could only ever be raised on the single pass that also created the session. Miss that moment — and everyone did — and it became unreachable. Forever. The booking was fine, the session was fine, the money was in Stripe, and the invoice simply could never exist.
Fixed. Open your Minis page and any missing invoices are raised now, with what’s paid and what’s due two weeks before the session. (Thank you, Caryn — you had two live clients and real money riding on this, and you were right to keep pushing.) 🤍
Your galleries, in your order — July 17
Your photographs weren’t uploading in a random order — we were showing them in one. We never sorted a gallery’s images. Not once. We asked for them and laid them out in whatever order they came back.
They now appear in filename order, the way you name them, and properly — so Scanlan_2 comes before Scanlan_10 instead of after it. Nothing for you to do; open a gallery and it’s right.
Sorting and drag-to-reorder are next; this was the part that was simply broken. (Thank you, Caryn — you told us on 13 July and you were right the whole time.) 🤍
They now appear in filename order, the way you name them, and properly — so Scanlan_2 comes before Scanlan_10 instead of after it. Nothing for you to do; open a gallery and it’s right.
Sorting and drag-to-reorder are next; this was the part that was simply broken. (Thank you, Caryn — you told us on 13 July and you were right the whole time.) 🤍
Where do to-dos come from? — July 16
Your To-dos page listed everything beautifully and never once said where any of it came from. So if you went looking for the place to set them up, there wasn’t one to find — because most of them write themselves, from your workflows, one for each step. Obvious once you know. Impossible to guess.
It now says so, and links you straight there. (Thank you, Caryn, for saying you were lost — and Kristina, for answering her before we did. 🤍)
It now says so, and links you straight there. (Thank you, Caryn, for saying you were lost — and Kristina, for answering her before we did. 🤍)
One client, one file — July 16
When you added a client from inside the New session window, we never checked whether you already had her — we just made another one. Book her a second session that way and she quietly became two people with the same email, her history split between them. Every other route into your client list already checked this; importing checked, session import checked. This one didn’t.
Now it does — carefully. If it’s plainly the same person, we use her file and tell you. But one email very often covers a whole family: a mum’s address on her newborn’s session and again on her toddler’s, or a maiden name beside a married one. Those are two real clients, and we don’t get to decide that for you — so if the name doesn’t match, we ask. (Thank you, Kristina — and sorry it sat for six days.) 🤍
Now it does — carefully. If it’s plainly the same person, we use her file and tell you. But one email very often covers a whole family: a mum’s address on her newborn’s session and again on her toddler’s, or a maiden name beside a married one. Those are two real clients, and we don’t get to decide that for you — so if the name doesn’t match, we ask. (Thank you, Kristina — and sorry it sat for six days.) 🤍
Your availability, on a calendar — July 16
If your weeks don’t repeat, your whole availability lived in One-off changes — and after a dozen dates that list was a wall of text. There’s now a rolling calendar above it. Click any date to give it hours; you can see your whole month at a glance, with the days you’re working marked and the days you’re away in clay. Flick between months with the arrows.
It’s the same availability, just somewhere you can actually see it — and every one of your session-type chips works exactly as before. (Thank you, Kristina, for describing it so precisely — and Angela, who asked for the same thing.) 🤍
It’s the same availability, just somewhere you can actually see it — and every one of your session-type chips works exactly as before. (Thank you, Kristina, for describing it so precisely — and Angela, who asked for the same thing.) 🤍
Remember what she said about sharing — July 16
Most of us ask it: “May I share your images on my website and social media?” Until now her answer lived in a questionnaire nobody re-reads.
There’s a new May I share her images? on every client, and your questionnaire can fill it in for you — set Save answer to: Photo sharing permission on the question. It’s a free-text field on purpose, because “yes, but don’t mention names” is neither a yes nor a no, and that’s exactly the bit worth remembering.
Then the part that matters: when you go to share her gallery, she tells you herself — her answer, in her words, right there on the sharing switch. No hunting back through a form. (Thank you, Erin, for asking — and Kristina, the gallery half was your idea.) 🤍
There’s a new May I share her images? on every client, and your questionnaire can fill it in for you — set Save answer to: Photo sharing permission on the question. It’s a free-text field on purpose, because “yes, but don’t mention names” is neither a yes nor a no, and that’s exactly the bit worth remembering.
Then the part that matters: when you go to share her gallery, she tells you herself — her answer, in her words, right there on the sharing switch. No hunting back through a form. (Thank you, Erin, for asking — and Kristina, the gallery half was your idea.) 🤍
Questionnaire answers can join your notes — July 16
A new Save answer to: Notes on any questionnaire question. Her answer lands on her profile with your question above it, added to your notes rather than replacing them — nothing you’ve written is ever overwritten. (Thank you, Erin.) 🤍
Links that read like words — July 16
Your emails and agreements understood bold and italic, but not links — so an address could only ever appear the long way, sprawled across the middle of an otherwise lovely note. Now there’s a 🔗 Link button beside Bold and Italic: select your words, press it, paste the address. Your client reads “book your newborn session” instead of a line of https. Newsletters have done this for a while — your emails and contracts do now too, and anything you’ve already written still works exactly as it did. (Thank you, Kristina.) 🤍
Your newsletter wears the right brand — July 16
If you run more than one brand, your newsletter was quietly dressing itself as your first one — whichever you’d switched to. The wrong name in the header band, the wrong colour, the wrong signature at the foot. And the cruellest part: the test send used the right brand, so it looked perfect right up until the real one went out to everybody. Now the newsletter follows the brand you’ve actually selected, top to bottom.
It also stops fibbing about who’s receiving it. “All clients” never meant all your clients — only the ones filed under the brand you’re in. Your Clients and Leads pages have always said when someone’s hidden; this one didn’t, so it looked as though people had gone missing. It now names the brand and tells you how many are filed elsewhere. 🤍
It also stops fibbing about who’s receiving it. “All clients” never meant all your clients — only the ones filed under the brand you’re in. Your Clients and Leads pages have always said when someone’s hidden; this one didn’t, so it looked as though people had gone missing. It now names the brand and tells you how many are filed elsewhere. 🤍
Your client’s favourites, kept safe — July 16
This one matters, and it was ours.
If we ever failed to read a client’s saved favourites — and a gallery with an access code is exactly where that happens — we quietly took that to mean she had none, and then wrote that emptiness back over the real ones. She could lose every pick she’d made and be told “✓ 0 favorites saved” for her trouble. A tick, and a claim of success, for a deletion.
Three things fixed. If we can’t read her favourites, we no longer touch them — she’s told to try again. A page that hasn’t loaded her favourites yet can’t save an empty list over them. And when a save to the cloud fails, we say so instead of throwing the error away, which is why nobody ever found out.
Separately: when she sent her selections we filed them under exactly the capitals she typed, which could split one person into two on your list. Fixed too. (Thank you, Kristina — you weren’t doing it wrong, and this was worth finding.) 🤍
If we ever failed to read a client’s saved favourites — and a gallery with an access code is exactly where that happens — we quietly took that to mean she had none, and then wrote that emptiness back over the real ones. She could lose every pick she’d made and be told “✓ 0 favorites saved” for her trouble. A tick, and a claim of success, for a deletion.
Three things fixed. If we can’t read her favourites, we no longer touch them — she’s told to try again. A page that hasn’t loaded her favourites yet can’t save an empty list over them. And when a save to the cloud fails, we say so instead of throwing the error away, which is why nobody ever found out.
Separately: when she sent her selections we filed them under exactly the capitals she typed, which could split one person into two on your list. Fixed too. (Thank you, Kristina — you weren’t doing it wrong, and this was worth finding.) 🤍
To-dos moved where you actually work — July 16
Your To-dos were filed under Setup & more, next to Locations and Golden hour — as though they were something you configure once. They’re not: they’re the list of what you have to do today, and they’re created by your sessions. They now sit under Work, right beneath Sessions. (Thank you, Caryn.) 🤍
Send a client straight to her portal — July 16
There’s a new {portal_link} merge field for your email templates. Drop it into a welcome email and each client gets her own portal link, without you fetching it by hand. It sits with the others under your email templates. If a client hasn’t a portal yet it simply stays empty, rather than sending her somewhere broken. (Thank you, Kristina.) 🤍
When a client hits Reply, it reaches you — July 16
This one we’re not proud of. Our emails went out from an address that cannot receive mail — so if a client replied to her mini booking confirmation, or your contact form auto-reply, or a second shooter replied to an agreement, it bounced into nothing. You never heard. She assumed you’d ignored her. Every email MSB sends now carries your own address as the reply-to, so a reply lands in your inbox where it always should have. Invoices and newsletters already did this; the other eight didn’t, and there was no way for any of us to know. (Found while chasing down why Gmail was flagging our emails — thank you, Kristina, for the screenshot that started it.) 🤍
Ask your clients to initial a clause — July 16
Some clauses deserve more than a tick at the bottom. Type {initials} anywhere in a contract template — right after “V. Styling”, or wherever it matters — and your client gets a box to initial in that exact spot. She can’t sign until every one is filled, and your signed copy shows you what she wrote and where. We did have an Initials field before, but it printed a blank line at the foot of the page that nobody could actually type into — it looked fillable and wasn’t, which was worse than not having it. (Thank you, Cynthia — you’re moving years of careful process over to us and you were right to expect this.) 🤍
Say where your clients really come from — July 16
“How did they find you?” used to be a list we chose for you: Facebook, Instagram, Google, Referral, and so on. But a great deal of this work arrives through people — a midwife, a hospital, an agency, another photographer — and “Referral” doesn’t tell you which one. So now the list is yours. In Branding & settings, just under your session types, write your own — one per line, with your referral partners by name. Your Leads page counts them, so you can finally see who’s actually sending you work. Leave it alone and nothing changes. (Thank you, Christine — your newborn clients come through Cara, and there was nowhere to say so.) 🤍
Packages and Products, finally explained — July 15
Two of you asked the same question today, and you were both right to. We’d been telling you to add your sessions and packages in Products & services — and then giving you nowhere to do it, because that isn’t where they live. That was us sending you to the wrong room and then wondering why you couldn’t find the door. It’s clear now, in all three places: Packages are what a client picks when she books, and they live in Branding & settings. Products & services are the extras you add to an invoice afterwards — prints, albums, USBs, digital files. (Thank you, Cynthia and Christine — and Heather, who had the right answer before we did.) 🤍
A setting found its way home — July 15
Auto-add requests to Leads was sitting on your Payments page, tucked between tips and PayPal — which made no sense, because it has nothing to do with getting paid. When we moved payments off the booking page a while back, this one was sitting right beside them and quietly came along for the ride. It’s back on your Booking page now, right under the request switch it’s actually about. Your setting is untouched. (Thank you, Kristina — “should it be there?” is a very good question and the answer was no.) 🤍
Your signup form fits, and it’s yours — July 15
Two things about the newsletter form you paste on your own website. The scroll bar is gone — the form was stuck at a fixed height we’d guessed at, and no amount of editing the embed code could fix it, because a form-in-a-box has no way of knowing how tall it is. It measures itself now and tells your website, so it simply fits. And there are two new tick boxes: hide my logo and hide the header image. On your own site your branding is already right there — the form doesn’t need to say it twice. (Thank you, Kristina — you found this on your own website, which is the only place it shows.) 🤍
Choices, however you like to type them — July 15
We had three places to list out choices for a drop-down, and each one quietly wanted something different: Forms wanted commas, Questionnaires and your Booking page wanted one per line. Nowhere said so clearly. So you’d type them the way our other screens taught you, get a single choice, and assume you’d done it wrong. All three now take whichever you reach for — commas or line breaks. And if a choice of yours contains a comma (“Yes, I’d love that”), just put each on its own line and it stays exactly as you wrote it. (Thank you, Tracy — you were the one who asked, and you fixed it for everyone who didn’t.) 🤍
Your watermark, in your own words — July 15
There’s a new Watermark wording box on every gallery. Leave it empty and nothing changes — we’ll keep using your studio name, exactly as before. But if you’d rather it said just your name, or © and your initials, you can. A word or two is far quieter than a full studio name across someone’s photograph, and quiet was always the point. Pair it with Delicate tiled and Whisper and it all but disappears. (Thank you, Caryn — that’s the last piece of what you asked for, bar the logo, which is still coming.) 🤍
The app stops keeping secrets — July 15
Today we found a booking feature that had never worked for anyone. Not because it was hard to fix — the fix was one line — but because when it broke, it said nothing. It caught the error and calmly showed a different page, so it looked like a setting rather than a fault. Three studios had it switched on. Only one told us, and she apologised while doing it. We’ve now gone through the whole app and found 97 places where something could go wrong quietly. They all still behave exactly as before — but now they write down what happened. If something ever feels off, click the build number in the bottom of your sidebar and send us what you see. Nothing hides now. (Thank you, Hannah, Angela and Caryn — you found today’s. This is so the next one finds itself.) 🤍
Your to-dos now move your pipeline — July 15
Any to-do can now carry a stage with it: tick “Send contract” and the client slides to Consult; tick “Deliver gallery” and she moves to Past client. Set it on a workflow step, or on any to-do you write yourself — there’s a new “When you tick this off, move the client to…” option. Unticking never drags anyone backwards, because that’s almost never what you meant. As Caryn put it: a pipeline you have to remember to update is a pipeline you’ll stop trusting. Now you don’t have to remember. (Thank you, Caryn — and Kristina, who wanted it too.) 🤍
Clients can actually book your times now — July 15
If you turned on “Let clients book these times” and your page stubbornly kept showing “Request a session,” you weren’t imagining it and you weren’t doing it wrong. The part of our database that works out which times are already taken was crashing — every time, for everyone who switched scheduling on — and the booking page caught that crash and quietly showed the old request form instead. It looked like a setting. It was a fault, and it had never worked. Your hours were saved correctly the whole time. It’s fixed, and the page can no longer hide an error like that from us again. (Thank you, Hannah — you were the only person who told us, and you found it for Angela and Embry & Olive too.) 🤍
Internal agreements tell you the truth — July 15
Yesterday’s internal agreements marked themselves sent the moment you made them — before the email had even been tried. So if a send failed, the agreement sat there claiming it had gone. That was our mistake and it’s fixed: nothing says sent until the email has actually left. Your list now shows Not sent, Sent · not signed yet, or Signed — three different things you’d want to know apart — with a Try again button, and if a send fails we now tell you why instead of shrugging. The subject line carries the job now too, so a template picked by mistake shows up before you send rather than after. (Thank you, Kristina — you tested it within the hour and found all of it.) 🤍
New mini bookings now knock on your door — July 15
When someone grabs a mini spot, your dashboard now says so — by name, with a Review button. Your Requests alert only ever watched the “request a session” pile, so a mini booking could arrive, email you, and leave no trace on your dashboard at all. It clears itself once you’ve opened your Minis page, because that’s you having looked. (Thank you, Hannah — you were right that one could slip past.) 🤍
The switch that makes your times live — July 15
If you’ve set your weekly hours and your page still says “Request a session,” this was why: the switch that turns your times into bookable slots sat right at the bottom of the page, underneath the whole week and the one-off changes panel. You could set everything up, see it sitting there looking ready, and never know there was one more thing below the fold. It’s now the first thing on that tab — and if your hours aren’t live, we tell you so, right there, instead of letting you find out from a client. (Thank you, Hannah — you weren’t doing anything wrong.) 🤍
No more silent saves — July 15
Two things that were keeping quiet when they shouldn’t. If your studio was ever missing a database update, saving your booking page would drop your availability without a word and still tell you it saved — now it says so plainly. And the Calendar page used to greet you with “Run the Google Calendar SQL first”, which is our language, not yours, and not something you should ever be asked to do. It speaks like a human now. (Thank you, Caryn.) 🤍
Soft finally means soft — July 15
A confession: our watermark strength setting only ever changed the opacity. Underneath, the mark stayed bold with a heavy shadow around every letter — so turning it down made a loud thing quieter without ever making it quiet. That’s fixed. Strength now lightens the lettering and lifts the shadows too, on every style. There’s also a new level below Soft: Whisper. It’s for exactly what Caryn described — a mark that reminds, but that your client isn’t peering around to see her own family. Nothing to switch on; your existing galleries just got gentler. (Thank you, Caryn — twice over.) 🤍
A watermark that whispers — July 15
There’s a new watermark style on every gallery: Delicate tiled. Small, light, wide-set, hairline-ruled — a quiet reminder that these images are yours, instead of a fence across your client’s first look at her family. Pair it with Soft strength and it’s barely there. Honest note: our old “Soft” setting only dimmed a bold word that had a heavy shadow around every letter, so it never really went quiet. This one is built light from the start. Your other two styles are untouched. (Thank you, Caryn — you were right, and the example you shared is exactly what we built.) 🤍
Internal agreements, for your team — July 15
Second shooter? Assistant? Open any contract template, tick “This is an internal agreement”, pick the job it belongs to, and send it straight to them. They get their own private link to read and sign — no account, and no sight of your client’s portal. Your client never sees it either: an internal agreement is stored with no client attached at all, which is what makes it invisible, and the database itself now refuses to let one carry a client’s name. Your day rates stay yours. You’ll find them under Contract templates, with who’s signed and who hasn’t. (Thank you, Kristina — you thought about the whole studio, not just the client side.) 🤍
Minis now write their own invoices — July 15
When a client books a mini, you now get a real invoice for it, automatically: her package on the line, her deposit already marked paid, and the balance sitting there with a due date two weeks before the session. If a deposit lands later, the invoice updates itself. Nothing is invented — we only ever mark money as paid when the booking genuinely says it arrived. Your existing mini bookings will catch up on their own next time you open Minis. (Thank you, Caryn — you asked exactly the right question: where’s the record?) 🤍
Every invoice loads, however long your history — July 15
The same quiet truncation that made Hannah’s leads disappear was sitting in your invoices too — past a thousand, the oldest ones simply stopped loading. They were always safe in the database; we just weren’t asking for all of them. Now we do. 🤍
Returning clients now book minis properly — July 15
This one matters. When a client who was already in your book grabbed a mini spot, we quietly failed to turn that booking into a session — no session, no workflow, no deposit recorded, and no error to tell you. Brand-new clients came through fine, which is exactly why it hid so well. It’s fixed, and every affected booking will finish syncing on its own next time you open Minis. (Thank you, Caryn and Kristina — you two found this together.) 🤍
Leads stay put when your book is big — July 15
If you have more than a thousand clients, a new lead would appear on your Leads page and then vanish a second later. Your lead was always safe — we were just re-reading a shortened version of your client list right after drawing the page. We now read every last one of them. (Thank you, Hannah — a thousand clients is a beautiful problem to have.) 🤍
Your wording, your currency, on the pay button — July 15
If you call it a session fee or a retainer instead of a deposit, the button on your mini booking page now says so too — it was the last stubborn spot still saying “deposit.” It also shows your currency, so a £99 session fee no longer reads as “$99.” And if a card payment can’t start, your client now sees a kind, plain sentence explaining why instead of a scary code. (Thank you, Hannah!) 🤍
Invoices now offer the right brand’s packages
If you run more than one brand, the invoice’s “Add from products or packages” list was always showing your default brand’s items, even when the invoice was set to a different brand. It now follows the brand you picked, and updates the moment you change it. (Thank you, Kim!) 🤍
Copy packages between session types
Built the same collection for five different genres? Not anymore. Next to any session type’s packages there’s now a Copy to… button — tick the types that should get them and they’re copied across in one go. Choose to add alongside what’s there (duplicates skipped) or replace entirely. Copies are independent, so you can tweak a price for one genre without touching the rest. (Thank you, Cynthia!) 🤍
Tie your hours to session types
Newborns in the morning, outdoor sessions at golden hour — now your booking page knows the difference. On any time you set (weekly or a one-off), tap the session types it’s for. When a client picks “Newborn,” they only see your newborn times. Same day can hold Newborn 11–3 and Maternity 4–6, and each client sees only theirs. Leave it on All types and nothing changes. (Thank you, Kristina!) 🤍
Your clients now see their own photo count
If a gallery has an image limit, your client now sees it as they heart photos — “3 of 10 included · 7 to go,” and once they go over, “5 extra × $30 = $150.” Before they send their picks they get a friendly note explaining you’ll invoice the extras — so nobody’s surprised, and you’re not the one breaking the news. (Thank you, Kristina!) 🤍
One-off changes to your availability
Real life doesn’t run on a weekly grid. Under Booking → Availability you can now block a single day you’re away, or give one date special hours — a late start, an evening only, whatever you need. Your weekly pattern stays put; these just win for that date. (Thank you, Angela!) 🤍
Invoice emails now come from your studio
Emailed invoices were going out under one shared name — now your client sees your studio name in their inbox, and hitting reply comes straight back to you. The “view & pay” link is also a proper clickable button now, instead of a link they had to copy and paste. (Thank you, Kristina!) 🤍
Contracts: no surprises, and you can remove one
Two fixes here. When you book a client, the contract box no longer quietly pre-picks your first contract — it now matches the session type you chose (or sends nothing if there’s no match), and tells you which it’ll send. No more wrong contract going out by accident. And on any client’s profile, sent contracts now have a Remove button, so you can pull one off their portal if it shouldn’t be there. (Thank you, Heather!) 🤍
Sync your sessions to Google, Apple & Outlook
Under Brand & settings → Calendar sync, grab your private calendar link and subscribe to it in Google, Apple, or Outlook Calendar. Your sessions then flow in automatically, right next to your personal life — and update on their own as you add or change them. (One-way for now; a live two-way sync is coming.) 🤍
Hands-off workflow emails
Your workflow emails can now send completely on their own, even when you’re not in the app. Mark any email step “send automatically” and give it a subject line, flip the master switch at the top of Workflows, and due emails go out on schedule. There’s a safety guard so it only sends emails dated after you switch it on — nothing old gets blasted. 🤍
See the profit on each session
Open any saved session and you’ll now see a Profitability box: your revenue (price after any discount), minus the expenses and mileage you’ve linked to that session, equals your net profit. Link a few expenses to a shoot and you’ll finally see what it actually earned you. 🤍
Tidier session types on your booking page
If your booking page ever showed a session type twice — once as “Maternity” and again as “Maternity Session” — that’s cleaned up. We now match them to your real session types automatically, so you’ll see one tidy list. Your on / off choices carry over untouched. 🤍
Take payment by bank transfer
Don’t use Stripe? Under Money → Payments there’s a new Bank transfer / direct deposit box. Add your account details once — account name, BSB / sort code, account number, a reference — and they appear automatically on every invoice (print, PDF and email) and on your client’s portal. Perfect for direct deposit. 🤍
Bill for extra gallery images automatically
On any gallery you can now set Images included and a price per extra image. If a client hearts more than their package allows, you’ll see it right on their selection — “picked 15 of 10 included, 5 extra × $30 = $150” — with a one-tap Invoice the extras button that opens a ready-to-send invoice for that client. No more giving away extra images by accident. 🤍
Attach an expense to a client or session
When you add or edit an expense, you can now link it to a client and a specific session — no more typing it into the notes. Linked expenses show the client right on the row, and each client’s profile now has an Expenses section so you can see what a shoot actually cost you. (Thank you, Kristina!) 🤍
Mileage now shows what it’s worth
A drive costs $0 out of pocket — but it’s a real tax write-off. So a mileage-only expense now shows its write-off value (miles × your rate) right on the row instead of a confusing “$0.00,” and the expense form shows the math live as you type. Your rate now defaults to the 2026 IRS business rate (72.5¢/mile) — change it anytime on the Expenses page. (Thank you, Kristina!) 🤍
Get paid with PayPal, Square & Venmo
Under Money → Payments, add your PayPal, Square, or Venmo once. Every client then sees a one-tap Pay with PayPal / Square / Venmo button on their portal — with the invoice amount filled in for PayPal automatically — right alongside card payments. A note: unlike Stripe, these don’t auto-mark an invoice paid, so you’ll tick those off once the money lands. Full built-in Square & PayPal (with automatic reconciliation) is what we’re building next. 🤍
A calmer Booking page & multiple times a day
Your Booking page is now organised into tabs — Booking page, Availability, Access & types, and Away — so it’s far less to scroll. And your availability now takes as many time windows per day as you like: set Saturday 9–12 and 1–3, add a break, whatever fits your day. Just tap + Add another time. 🤍
Clients can now pick a time — self-scheduling
On your Booking page, turn on “Let clients choose a time slot” and set your weekly availability once. Clients see your open times and book a real slot, which becomes a session on your calendar — no more back-and-forth on dates. Every session type shares the same availability, already-booked times disappear automatically, and you set the slot length, how far ahead people can book, and your minimum notice. (Thank you, Angela & Kristina!) 🤍
Invoice emails now have a view & pay link — and a PDF
When you email an invoice, it now includes a link to view the full invoice and pay online (right on the client’s portal). You’ll also find Download PDF for a clean one-tap PDF, and Email + PDF to send it with the PDF attached. Discounts show correctly throughout — subtotal, discount, and the right total. (Thank you, Nadine!) 🤍
Add a photo to a client
Open any client and tap Add a photo — their face now shows on their card instead of initials, and a bigger version greets you at the top of their profile. A little thing that makes remembering who’s who so much easier. (Thank you, Erin!) 🤍
Payments moved to Money — where it belongs
Connecting Stripe and setting your deposits now live under Money → Payments in the sidebar, instead of tucked inside the Booking page. Same setup, a home that actually makes sense. We also refreshed the How-do-I help so every answer points to the right place. 🤍
Questionnaires are now real forms
Every question can be a type — short text, long answer, multiple choice, yes/no, dropdown, or date — and you can mark any question required. Even better: a question can save its answer straight to the client’s profile — their partner’s name, kids’ names, Instagram, phone, or address — so the client fills those in for you instead of you typing them. (Thank you, Kristina & Hannah!) 🤍
Workflow steps can now wait for an event
A step no longer has to run on a date. In the When menu you’ll find “After deposit is paid” and “After contract is signed.” Those steps sit quietly as “waiting” to-dos, and the moment we see the payment or the signature, they release and become due — sending on their own if you’ve set them to. So your contract can follow the deposit, your prep guide can follow the signature, and each studio’s flow can be its own. 🤍
Save gallery welcome messages & let clients redeem codes
On any gallery you can now save your welcome message as a template and pull a saved one back up — never rewrite the same warm note twice. And on the client portal, clients can enter one of your discount codes right on their balance, and it comes off before they pay. 🤍
Discount codes on quotes
Your discount codes now work on quotes too, not just invoices. When you send a quote, any active code can be entered by your client right on the quote page — the prices update in front of them, and the discount carries straight into the invoice they get. Create and manage codes with Manage codes (in the quote builder or on any invoice). 🤍
Send a quote — let clients pick their package
Open any client and tap Send a quote. Tick the packages you want to offer, add a note (and a contract, if you like), and we’ll email them a beautiful page where they choose the one that’s right for them. The moment they pick, we create their invoice and contract and send them to their private portal to pay the deposit and sign — and it’s a step in your workflow too. (Thank you, Heather!) 🤍
Quick-add steps when building a workflow
Adding a step no longer starts from a blank line. Tap a Quick add chip — questionnaire, contract, invoice, prep guide, gallery, reminder, review, rebooking, and more — and the step title fills in and picks the right type for you (emails open the email fields automatically). A faster way to lay out your whole timeline. 🤍
Mark a session as complimentary
Not every session comes with an invoice — model calls, gifts, and giveaways are their own kind of yes. Open any session and tick “Complimentary — no payment” and it’s clearly marked as no-charge, with a soft Complimentary tag on your sessions list. You can still record the session’s value if you like, without it ever showing as owing. (Thank you, Chrissy, for the idea!) 🤍
Questionnaires can now live on the client portal
Open any questionnaire and tick “Show this on the client portal” — your client can then read and answer it right from their own private page, no email attachment or back-and-forth. Once they submit, they see a gentle read-back of what they shared, and their answers land on their profile under Questionnaire answers — so everything you need for a session is in one place. A hands-off way to gather due dates, wardrobe notes, and the little details that make a session feel prepared. 🤍
Attach your own PDF to a prep guide
Already have a beautifully designed prep guide? You no longer have to rebuild it here. Open any guide and Upload PDF — your typed guide stays exactly as it is, and now an optional PDF rides along with it. When that guide goes out in a workflow email, your client gets a link to download the PDF. 🤍
Questionnaires: no more doubled questions
When you pasted questions in from somewhere else, they could arrive twice — paste 2, end up with 4. The box now quietly cleans what you paste: it strips “1.” and “2)” numbering, drops blank lines, and removes duplicates. A live question count sits under the box so you can see exactly how many you have, with a Tidy up button whenever you need it. 🤍
Tutorials now open to read
Tapping a tutorial now opens it as a clean, readable how-to — numbered steps with the screenshots shown full-width, not the editor. Use Edit on the row when you want to change one. 🤍
A Tutorials space of your own
A new Tutorials page (under Setup & more) where you can write your own how-tos — a title, a series of steps, and a screenshot on each step. Perfect for training yourself or your team on the way you like to work. They’re private to your studio. And in your gallery settings, two new hints now show where your client taps to download, and warn you if a watermark won’t appear in downloaded files. 🤍
Discounts now reach your client
A serious one, and we’re sorry. Your invoice screen took your discount off correctly — but the printed invoice and the emailed invoice were both quietly ignoring it, showing your client the full subtotal. A £30 discount, and they were still asked for the whole amount. Both now show the discount and the right total. If you’ve sent an invoice with a discount on it recently, it’s worth checking what your client actually received. Thank you Nadine for catching this. 🤍
Your clients can download their photos
The last step of a shoot, finally in your studio. Each gallery now has a Clients can download their photos switch. Leave it off for proofing — your client hearts their favourites and sends them to you, but can’t take the files. Turn it on for the finished gallery, and they get a download button on every photo plus Download all. Every existing gallery stays off until you say otherwise. Expired galleries and the wrong PIN hand over nothing. 🤍
A sidebar you can actually read
Twelve links sat in one unbroken column before the first heading. They’re now gathered into Clients, Work and Money, open by default, and every group folds away if you don’t use it. Brand & settings has moved into Setup & more, where it belongs. Nothing was removed — every page is still one tap away, it just doesn’t all shout at once. 🤍
Brand & settings, in eight clear sections
Your settings were nineteen fields and eight switches in six unlabelled boxes, with everything from your currency to your client portal in the last one. They now read as eight numbered sections — Studio details, Logo & voice, Session types & packages, Brand colours, Keywords, Currency & referrals, Galleries and Client portal — each with a line telling you what it’s for. Nothing moved. It’s just findable now. 🤍
Everything has room to breathe
A gentle pass over the whole studio. Softer corners on every card — your Dashboard was the only page that had them, and now they all do. A quiet shadow so cards lift off the page. More space inside panels, around lists, and down the edges of every screen. Status chips are rounded pills. Your cursor lifts a button as it hovers, and clicking into a field draws a soft clay ring. Same colours, same words — just more air. 🤍
Your forms have a home — and “Requests” is now “Booking page”
You did have a contact form. It was hiding at the bottom of your Leads page, where nobody would ever look for it. There’s now a Forms page in your sidebar holding all three — your contact form, your Model Call form and your waitlist form — each with a Customize form button to change the wording, switch fields on or off, and add your own questions. And “Requests” is now called Booking page, which is what it actually is. 🤍
The Requests page breathes
Everything on your Requests page lived in one long stack — payments, your link, your page, session types, away message and incoming requests all running together. It’s now laid out in numbered, softly shaded sections with room around them — and three little pills at the top tell you at a glance whether your page is live, whether Stripe is on, and how many session types your clients can see. No more scrolling to find out. Thank you Kristina. 🤍
Newsletter header switch fixed
The new Show your studio name in a coloured band switch was drawn wrong — its label collapsed into a thin column, overlapped the options beneath it, and couldn’t be clicked. That was our mistake and it’s put right. Thank you Kristina for the screenshot. 🤍
Disconnecting Stripe no longer loses your account
If you disconnected Stripe and connected again, we were quietly asking Stripe for a brand new account each time and leaving the old one behind. Some of you ended up with several Stripe accounts in your name without ever knowing. Now we remember yours: disconnect as often as you like, and reconnecting picks the very same account back up, with your money and payout history untouched. 🤍
Questionnaire notes read as notes on your booking page
Yesterday we let you start a questionnaire line with # to make it a note or heading rather than a question. On your mini booking page those lines were still appearing as questions, with an empty box underneath. Now your clients simply read them, as you intended. 🤍
Find your deposits: View my Stripe payments
Something we should have said much more clearly. When you connect Stripe here, Stripe creates a new account for your studio — it isn’t the Stripe account you may already have with another tool, and your deposits will never show up in that one. So a paid deposit could look like it had vanished. There’s now a View my Stripe payments button on Requests → Payments & deposits that opens the right account, where your money and payouts are waiting. Thank you Caryn for chasing this — your $100 was never lost. 🤍
Clients added while booking now show in your Leads
When you added a new client from inside the New session window, we saved them without a pipeline status — so they never appeared in Leads at all, in any column. Now they arrive with a status that matches the session you’re booking them for: an Inquiry session makes them an inquiry, a Booked one books them. Thank you Kristina for a very sharp catch. 🤍
Your new Jobs page — your whole day on one screen
A new Jobs page in your sidebar. Every job on one scannable line: when it is, its name (use the internal label on a session — Smith — Cake Smash · DAIRY-FREE CAKE), the session type, a progress bar, and the very next thing to do. Overdue steps go red. Filter to Needs attention and only jobs with something overdue remain — perfect for batching all your print orders at once. Every step comes from your workflows, so it’s your way of working, not ours. Reach it from Jobs board at the top of any page, or Jobs in your sidebar. Thank you Hannah, this was your design. 🤍
See how far along every job is, at a glance
Your Sessions list already shows each job’s internal label and its Next: step. Now each one also carries a slim progress bar — 3 of 8 — turning green when the last step is done. The steps come from your own workflows, so it fits how you work, with nothing to set up. Sessions without a workflow stay exactly as clean as before. Thank you Hannah 🤍
Your newsletter preview text now sticks
The Preview text box — that little line the inbox shows after your subject — was going out with your newsletter, but it was never being saved. Write it, save your draft, come back, and it had quietly vanished, so your newsletter went out without it. Now it saves with everything else and is waiting for you when you return. Thank you Caryn — you were right that it’s half the battle. 🤍
The CODB calculator, by name
It was there all along on your Sales page — but it never called itself a CODB calculator, so it was easy to scroll straight past. It’s now titled What you need to charge — your CODB, and searching “CODB” in Help finds it. Thank you Ania for asking; if you couldn’t find it, others couldn’t either. 🤍
Mini sessions: deposits, paying, and the contract
Three fixes from one thread. A deposit is now only ever recorded if it was actually paid — before, booking a mini wrote the deposit onto the session whether the money arrived or not. The Pay button works on embedded booking pages: Stripe won’t open inside a website frame, so we now open it properly instead of showing a blank screen. And your mini contract fills in as your client types — their name, email and phone appear in the agreement instead of {client_name}. Thank you Caryn, all three were yours. 🤍
Let your logo speak for itself
If your newsletter header image already carries your logo, that coloured band with your studio name above it was saying your name twice. There’s now a switch on your newsletter to turn the band off — your logo, clean, at the top. Leave it on and nothing changes. Thank you Caryn. 🤍
No more duplicate clients when someone books
When a client you already have booked a mini session or sent a request, we checked our loaded client list to recognise her — but that list only holds your first thousand clients until the rest arrive a moment later. With a big book, we could miss someone who was plainly there, and quietly create a second record. Her contract would land on one, her session on the other. Now we ask your books directly, every time. Thank you Caryn for finding this one. 🤍
Your clients never disappear again
If your studio has more than one brand, any client who hadn’t been assigned to a brand yet was only visible under your default brand. Viewing another brand made them vanish from Clients and Leads — appearing for a second on load, then gone. Nothing was ever deleted; they were simply filtered out of sight. Now an unassigned client shows under every brand, and when a brand view is hiding anyone, we tell you so plainly. Thank you Hannah for chasing this down and for the screenshot — it found it. 🤍
Add notes and headings to your questionnaires
Every line in a questionnaire used to become a numbered question — so a warm word of welcome arrived as “1.”. Now, start any line with # and it becomes plain text: an intro, a heading like Wardrobe, or a kind note. Your questions carry on numbering around it, and your questionnaire list counts only the real questions. Thank you Julia for spotting this. 🤍
Model Call submission buttons now work
The Open profile and Add to Leads buttons on your new Model Call submissions list weren’t responding when tapped. Fixed — they open the applicant and move them into your pipeline exactly as they should. 🤍
Your clients are charged in your currency
We found something while fixing Stripe for our photographers overseas: every payment was being charged in US dollars, no matter where you are. A £150 session quietly billed a client $150. That’s now put right — Stripe charges in your account’s real currency, and your Payments & deposits card tells you exactly which one. If your displayed currency symbol and your Stripe currency ever disagree, we’ll say so plainly rather than let you find out on a receipt. Thank you Kelli for pushing on this. 🤍
Stuck halfway through Stripe? You can start again in the right country
A follow-up to yesterday’s fix. If you’d already begun connecting Stripe and it stalled — asking for a bank or tax number from a country you’ve never lived in — you can now choose your country and connect again, and we’ll set you up freshly in the right place. Your country picker stays visible until your account can actually take payments. Studios already accepting payments are never touched. 🤍
Stripe now works for our photographers outside the US
If you’re in the UK, Canada, Australia — anywhere beyond the US — Stripe was quietly setting your account up as an American one, then asking you for a US bank and social security number you’d never have. No wonder it wouldn’t finish. Now, before you connect, you simply choose the country your bank account is in, and your money settles in your own currency to your own bank — straight to you, never through us. Do choose carefully: Stripe locks that country in and it can’t be changed later. Thank you for your patience while we chased this one down. 🤍
See every Model Call submission — goodbye, Jotform inbox
Your Leads page now has a Model Call submissions list at the top — every application that comes in, newest first, with their answers, photo and details laid out just like Jotform showed them. We read them straight from your applicants, so nothing can slip through the cracks: if someone applied and wasn’t showing in your pipeline yet, they’ll appear here now, with an Add to Leads button to slide them into your workflow in one tap (or move them all at once). You can Export CSV too. Thank you to everyone who asked to actually see their applicants. 🤍
Model call applicants can add a photo
Your Model Call form now lets applicants attach a photo — a bump photo, a headshot, or an inspiration shot. It uploads safely with their application, and shows right on their profile in your Leads, so you can see who you\u2019re considering at a glance. 🤍
Export your sessions to CSV
On the Sessions page there’s now an Export CSV button next to Import — download your sessions (client, type, date, status, price, label, notes and more) as a spreadsheet. Lovely for a backup, your accountant, or moving data around. It exports whatever’s in your current view (upcoming, past, etc.). 🤍
Custom job labels + next to-do on your sessions
Two for your sessions list: give any session a custom label (like “Due mid-Aug,” “Cake Smash · DAIRY-FREE,” or “NO MODEL RELEASE”) — it shows as the session’s name in your list and becomes the calendar event title. And each session now shows its next to-do right on the list, so you can see what’s next at a glance without opening it. (Thank you, Hannah!) 🤍
Newsletter preview text
There’s a new Preview text field on your newsletter — the little line that shows in the inbox right after the subject. A good one can noticeably lift your open rate, and now you control exactly what it says instead of it grabbing the first line of your message. (Thank you, Caryn!) 🤍
Mini setup respects your currency
When you set up a mini session, the Price and Deposit labels now show your currency symbol (£, €, $…) instead of always saying “$”. So if your studio’s set to pounds, that’s what you’ll see. (Thank you, Hannah!) 🤍
Remind clients about a payment
On a payment plan, each upcoming payment now has a Remind button — one tap emails your client a warm reminder of that payment’s amount and due date. Perfect for clients who’d rather not leave a card on file. (Fully automatic reminders are on the way, alongside auto-charging.) (Thank you, Caryn!) 🤍
Add images right into your newsletter
Beyond the header image, you can now drop images anywhere in your message — tap “Insert an image in your message,” and it lands where your cursor is. Add as many as you like, between paragraphs, for a rich, Flodesk-style layout. They resize neatly and look lovely in the inbox. (Thank you, Caryn!) 🤍
Picks now show the real filename
When a client favorites a photo, your selection list now shows the photo’s original filename (like IMG_4276) instead of just a position number — so it matches the files on your computer and you’re not hunting. New uploads carry their filename reliably now. (Thank you, Janine!) 🤍
Clearer newsletter sending
Before a newsletter goes out, the confirmation now spells out exactly how many people it’s going to and which audience — and reminds you that contacts who aren’t in that audience won’t receive it. (So “why did it only send to some of my contacts?” has a clear answer right there: it goes to your chosen audience, like Newsletter subscribers, not everyone automatically.) 🤍
Format your newsletters beautifully
Your newsletter message now supports formatting — make text bold or italic, add headings, bullet lists, and links, right from the little toolbar (or just type
**like this**). It all renders cleanly in the email your readers open, so your words look as considered as your images. (Thank you, Caryn!) 🤍Payment plans on invoices
Open an invoice and you’ll find a new Payment plan section — break the total into scheduled payments (a retainer now, one a month out, one before the session), each with its own amount and due date. Tap Split total into 3 for a quick start, or add your own. Mark each one paid as it comes in, and the invoice shows the next payment due at a glance. (Thank you, Caryn!) 🤍
Call it a “Retainer” if that’s your word
In a mini’s details you can now choose whether the up-front payment is called a Deposit or a Retainer — the wording carries through to the booking page, the confirmation email, and reminders. (Some studios — and some states’ laws — need “retainer” specifically.) Your “Reserved” deposit mode now takes effect on the client’s page too. (Thank you, Caryn!) 🤍
Set an expiry date on galleries
Each gallery’s share panel now has an optional expires on date. After it passes, the client’s link shows a gentle “this gallery has expired — reach out to re-open it” note instead of the photos, and the gallery gets an Expired tag in your list so you can spot it at a glance. (Thank you, Heather!) 🤍
Portal progress follows the real booking status
The client-portal progress tracker used to jump to Booked for any session that wasn\u2019t cancelled — even one still marked Inquiry or Pending. Now it only shows Booked once the session is actually Booked or Completed (or a payment\u2019s been made), so a client set back to an earlier stage reads correctly on their portal. (Thank you, Caryn!) 🤍
Document uploads work now
Uploading a document to a client\u2019s portal was failing with a security error — the file was being saved to the wrong folder path, which your storage rules (rightly) blocked. Fixed: documents now save under your own secure folder like everything else. (Thank you, Caryn!) 🤍
Import your sessions from another tool
Moving your calendar over? On the Sessions page there\u2019s a new Import from CSV button. Upload a spreadsheet of your sessions, match up the columns (we guess them for you), and import — it matches each session to an existing client by email or name, creates the client if they\u2019re new, and can even apply a workflow to every imported session so you pick up right where you left off. Dates and times in almost any format just work. (Thank you, Kristina!) 🤍
Duplicate a template
Email and contract templates now have a Duplicate button — make a copy, tweak a line or two (a different location, a different tone), and save it as its own template. No more rebuilding from scratch when most of it\u2019s the same. (Thank you, Caryn!) 🤍
Two quick fixes
The Add a to-do box now opens in front when you\u2019re inside a session (it was hiding behind the session window), and your mini session description now keeps its line breaks and bullets on the booking page instead of squishing into one long paragraph. (Thank you, Caryn & Kristina!) 🤍
Delete confirmations that always work
Some browsers quietly block the little “Are you sure?” pop-up, which made Delete buttons look like they did nothing. Deleting a client, session, invoice, product, workflow, to-do, guide, questionnaire, expense, location, gift card, or brand now confirms in a clean in-app window instead — so it works everywhere, every time. 🤍
Edit workflow steps right where they live
You can now tap any step in a workflow — email or to-do — and edit it right there: reword the email in your own voice, change the timing, toggle auto-send, then Save changes. No more bouncing between Templates and the workflow to tweak wording. (Starting an email from a template still works as a jumping-off point.) (Thank you, Hannah!) 🤍
Decline a request with a kind note
Turning down a session request no longer has to feel abrupt. When you decline, you can now choose “Decline & email a kind note” — it opens a warm, ready-to-send message to them (their name already in it), so no one\u2019s left on read. And approving/declining now confirm right in the card instead of a pop-up. (Thank you, Caryn!) 🤍
Tidy up actually tidies now
The Tidy up remove buttons now confirm right in the window (no browser pop-up that some setups were silently swallowing), and they show you the result on the spot — how many were removed, or a clear reason if any couldn't be. (Thank you, Caryn!) 🤍
Two tidy-up fixes
Fixed two things from your notes: Tidy up now tells you clearly what happened when it removes duplicates — and if any can't be removed (say they're linked to a session or invoice), it says so instead of looking like nothing happened. And duplicating a Lead workflow now keeps it a Lead workflow, instead of dropping the copy under Shoot. (Thank you, Caryn!) 🤍
Know exactly what to charge
Your Sales page has a new “What you need to charge” calculator. Pop in your yearly business costs, the take-home pay you want, a tax set-aside, and how many sessions you plan to shoot — and it shows the revenue you need for the year and the average price per session to get there, then tells you how your current bookings stack up. One tap sets it as your revenue goal. (Thank you, Kristina & Hannah!) 🤍
Mini sessions can start a workflow on their own
In a mini session's setup there's now a Workflow picker. Assign one, and the moment someone books a spot, that workflow's steps start automatically for their new session — prep notes, reminders, follow-ups, all queued without you lifting a finger (and they'll auto-send too, if you've turned that on). (Thank you, Kristina!) 🤍
See every email a client's received
Open any client and you'll find a new Emails section — a running history of the newsletters and automatic workflow emails that have gone out to them, newest first, each marked Delivered, Opened, Clicked, or Bounced where we can see it. No more wondering what a client has (and hasn't) received. (Thank you, Kristina!) 🤍
Newsletter subscribers are clearer now
When someone joins from your signup form, they were quietly counting as a “new lead” and adding an untraceable entry to your Leads pipeline — confusing! Now newsletter subscribers stay out of your sales pipeline and don't trigger the new-lead alert, and they carry a clear Subscriber label wherever they appear. Your real inquiries are unaffected. (Thank you, Kristina!) 🤍
Deposit reminders send again
Fixed a bug where tapping Send reminder on an Awaiting deposit booking threw an error instead of sending. Your warm deposit nudge now goes out as it should. (Thank you, Kristina!) 🤍
Dial your watermark's strength
Each gallery's share panel now has a Watermark strength setting — Bold, Medium, or Soft — so you can protect your proofs while letting clients see the images clearly. It applies on the grid and full screen. Bold is the default, so your existing galleries look exactly as they do now until you change them. (Thank you, Nadine!) 🤍
Single, centered watermark now stays that way full screen
If you set a gallery's watermark to single, centered, it kept that look on the grid but flipped back to the tiled style the moment a client opened a photo full screen. Now the full-screen view matches your chosen style — single stays single. (Thank you, Nadine!) 🤍
Snappier with a big client list
A couple of speed fixes for larger studios: searching clients no longer re-scans your whole list on every keystroke, so typing stays smooth, and the rest of your client list now loads in parallel in the background instead of one chunk at a time — so everything's ready faster after you sign in. 🤍
Block out a range of dates at once
When you add Blocked time or an Event, there's now an optional End date — so a vacation, a workshop, or any multi-day block goes in as one entry and shows across every day on your calendar, instead of adding each day separately. (Thank you, Debby!) 🤍
Your currency now shows on mini sessions
Mini session prices — on your list, on the booking page your clients see, and on booked-spot edits — now use your studio's currency symbol from Brand & settings, not a hard-coded $. (Thank you, Marnie!) 🤍
Skip unsubscribed people when importing
Importing a client list now has a “Skip anyone who's unsubscribed” option, so people who've opted out don't get quietly added back. Your import summary tells you how many were skipped. 🤍
Drop a gallery link into any email
When you write a client email, there's now an Insert a gallery link picker — choose one of your shared galleries and its link (and access code) drops right into your message at your cursor. It shows the galleries for whoever you've picked in To, so it's always the right one — and it works even after you've started from a template. (Thank you, Heather!) 🤍
Sales — see what's really working
A brand-new Sales page pulls your bookings together into the numbers that actually help you run the studio: revenue booked, average booking, and repeat-client rate up top; a revenue-by-month chart to spot your busy and quiet seasons; best-selling packages, revenue by session type, and by referral source; plus booking lead time and new vs repeat revenue. Flip between Booked and Paid, and set a yearly goal to watch it fill as you book. (Thank you, Hannah — and Kristina for the goals idea!) 🤍
Your email templates now show up from the gallery too
When you draft a client email straight from a gallery, your saved email templates now appear in the picker — just like they do everywhere else you email a client. Pick one and it drops right in. (Thank you, Heather!) 🤍
Send a test newsletter to any address
The newsletter test now has a little “Test to” box next to the button. Leave it blank to send to yourself as before, or pop in any address — a Gmail, a friend's inbox, or a checker like mail-tester.com — to see exactly how your newsletter looks and lands elsewhere. 🤍
Newsletters that land in the inbox, not junk
Your newsletters now go out from a fully verified studio address, carry a proper one-click unsubscribe (the thing Gmail & Yahoo now look for), and include a plain-text version alongside the pretty one — all the quiet signals that keep you out of the spam folder. Your recipients still see your studio's name, and replies still come straight to you. Nothing to set up on your end. (Thank you, Hannah!) 🤍
A roomier contract editor for long agreements
If you paste in a full attorney-drafted contract, the editor now gives you room to work. It opens as a wide workspace, your contract text expands to its full length so you can read straight through from the top — no more tiny scrolling box — and the Signing fields (initials, signature, date) and Save stay right where you can reach them. (Thank you, Christine!) 🤍
Build your own forms — your fields, your words
Your inquiry, launch waitlist, and newsletter forms now have a Customize form button. Rewrite the title, description, and button; turn standard fields on or off; and add your own questions (short text, paragraph, dropdown, checkbox, or date) — with a live preview as you go. Each brand keeps its own version, and answers land right on the lead. 🤍
Switch brands from anywhere
If you run more than one brand, there’s now an Active brand switcher right at the top of your sidebar — on every page. Switch it, and your whole studio follows: your clients, your leads, and your embeddable forms all reflect that brand. No more wondering which brand you’re working in. 🤍
Mini sessions with one shared arrival time
Some minis don’t need individual appointments — everyone just arrives at, say, 5:30 and you photograph them as they come. Now when you add times to a mini, you can choose “Same arrival time”, set the time and the number of spots, and families book & pay individually but all share that one arrival time. On the booking page they simply see one time with the spots left — perfect for team, cheer & school minis. 🤍
A “How do I…?” helper, right on your dashboard
New How do I…? button at the top of your dashboard. Type what you’re trying to do — “booking link,” “send a newsletter,” “turn on tips” — and get a quick answer with exactly where to click. You can also ask in your own words and a little AI helper points you the right way. 🤍
See exactly which photos your clients picked
When a client submits their favorites, you can now tap any selected photo to see it full-screen, every pick shows an image number (or its filename), and a Copy list button hands you the whole selection to paste into your editing notes or order. Going forward, new uploads keep their original filename, so your picks list matches your files exactly. (Thank you, Janine!) 🤍
Mini dates keep themselves tidy
Past dates never show on your booking page anymore, so no one can accidentally book a day that’s already gone by. In your mini’s time slots, past days are now marked Past, and each day has a quick Remove day button so you can clear out old dates in one tap and add fresh ones. We’ll also gently warn you if you try to add slots for a date in the past. (Thank you, Kristina!) 🤍
Clients can add a tip when they pay
When a client pays an invoice by card, they now see a gentle, optional “Add a tip” step — 10%, 15%, 20%, a custom amount, or none at all. The tip rides along in the same secure checkout and lands straight in your Stripe account, shown separately on the receipt. Totally optional for them, lovely for you. (Thank you, Kristina!) 🤍
Note: this needs the updated invoice-checkout function deployed to work.
Note: this needs the updated invoice-checkout function deployed to work.
Deposits on minis, done gently
For any mini with a deposit, you can now choose how it reads to clients — “Booked” (deposit secures the spot) or “Reserved” (deposit confirms it) — right in the mini’s details. Their confirmation email now includes a Pay your deposit button, and your dashboard shows an “Awaiting deposit” list so you can send a warm reminder or mark one paid in a tap. (Thank you, Kristina!) 🤍
Mini bookings now flow into your whole studio
When someone grabs a mini session spot, it now becomes a real session on your Calendar and Sessions list, with a client created and marked Booked — so it shows up on your Dashboard, Board, and Leads too, not just on the mini itself. Any spots booked before this update get tidied into place automatically the next time you open your studio. (Thank you, Kristina!) 🤍
Simple new pricing — and a warm welcome for new studios
As we step out of beta, new photographers can join for $29/month or $290/year (two months free) — everything included, cancel anytime. And a polished “welcome, let’s set up your studio” flow greets anyone who signs up. If you’re one of our lifetime members: you’re grandfathered in for good — nothing changes, and thank you for being here from the very start. 🤍
My Studio Books is out of beta 🤍
After months of building this together with you, My Studio Books is officially a real product — no more “beta.” Same warm home, same steady stream of improvements, just all grown up. Thank you for shaping it every step of the way. Here’s to your studio, running itself.
Past clients who come back get their own spotlight
You asked a great question: what if someone already in your book applies for a model call or reaches out again? Now they don’t hide in Past or Booked — they pop up in a new “Re-inquiries” row at the top of your Leads, marked with a warm rose Re-inquiry tag, and they always trigger your new-lead notification (even though they’re not a brand-new person). So a returning client raising their hand never slips by. Works for both your Model Call and inquiry forms. 🤍
Get a heads-up when a new lead comes in
Never miss a new inquiry again. When you log in, if any new leads or session requests have come in since your last visit, you’ll see a warm welcome nudge, a banner right on your dashboard, and a little count on your Leads tab. Tap through and they’re right there. Opening Leads marks them as seen, so the count always reflects what’s genuinely new. 🤍
New leads show up the moment you open Leads
No more wondering “where did my new inquiry go?” Your Leads page now refreshes itself every time you open it, so anyone who just filled out your inquiry, model-call, or request form appears right away — no reload needed. (Little tip: when you test a form with your own email, it merges into your existing client instead of making a new one — use a fresh email to see a brand-new lead.) 🤍
A simple inquiry form for your website
You asked for a plain “get in touch” form — here it is. Under Leads you’ll find an Inquiry / contact form embed: just name, email, and a message (no session type or dates like the request-a-session page). Paste it on your site, and everyone who reaches out drops straight into your Leads as an Inquiry and starts your matching lead workflow — and they get a warm auto-reply too. Clean, script-free, and no passcode gate. 🤍
Tap a lead source to filter your pipeline
Those “Where leads come from” chips on your Leads page are now buttons. Tap Model Call (or any source) and your whole pipeline instantly shows just those leads — so you can spot exactly who came from where. Tap it again, or show all, to clear it. Handy for checking a new model-call applicant landed. 🤍
Model call leads — truly caught now
We found the last piece: model call applications were quietly noting themselves in a client’s notes rather than as a lead, so they slipped past your Leads list. Now we read that too, and every model call applicant — past and future — lands in your Leads as an Inquiry the next time you open your studio. (Thank you, Heather — that video was exactly what we needed!) 🤍
Model call leads — now caught every time
A little follow-up to the last update: we widened how we spot Model Call applicants so they land in your Leads no matter how they were tagged — any past applicants get tidied in automatically the next time you open your studio. If you ever don’t see one, open that person in Clients and it’ll be sorted on the spot. (Thank you, Heather, for staying on this!) 🤍
Lead workflows now speak “lead,” not “session”
When you build a Lead workflow, the timing choices finally make sense: instead of “before/after the session” (there isn’t one yet!), you’ll pick Right away (when they apply) or a set time after they apply. Perfect for an instant auto-reply the moment an inquiry — or a Model Call application — comes in. And those model-call leads now start your lead workflow automatically, so your welcome email is ready (and will send on its own once your auto-send switch is on). (Thank you, Heather!) 🤍
Client favorites now follow them to any device
Your clients can favorite on their laptop and pick up right where they left off on their phone. In their gallery there’s a gentle “Save / find my favorites on any device” link — they pop in their email and their list is saved to the cloud. Open the gallery anywhere, enter the same email, and everything merges together (nothing gets lost). Once they’ve done it once, new hearts keep syncing on their own, and submitting their picks saves them too. 🤍
Model call applicants land in your Leads
When someone applies through your Model Call form, they now show up in your Leads pipeline as an Inquiry (with their source marked Model Call), right alongside your other enquiries — so you can work them, follow up, and watch your model calls convert. Anyone who already applied gets tidied into place automatically too. (Thank you, Heather!) 🤍
Delete labels, not just add them
Tidy up your lists any time. Tap a label chip on your Clients page and a Delete “…” button appears — it lifts that label off every client at once (the clients stay, only the label goes), so a duplicate or a typo disappears cleanly. And in Select mode there’s a new Remove label… action to pull a label off just the people you’ve checked. (Thank you, Heather!) 🤍
See who still owes you a signature
A new Waiting on a signature panel on your dashboard gathers up every client you’ve sent a contract to who hasn’t signed yet — oldest first, with how long ago it went out — so nothing quietly stalls. Tap Send reminder and a warm, ready-to-go nudge (with their sign link) opens for you to send. It tucks itself away when everyone’s signed. 🤍
Client favorites stay put between visits
Your clients can now favorite images one day and come back the next to keep going — their hearts are remembered right in their browser, so the View my favorites button and their whole list are still there after a refresh or a return visit on the same device. Perfect for a couple who favorites 30 photos, then comes back later with their spouse to narrow it down. (Thank you, Kristina!) 🤍
Workflow emails that send themselves
The big one you’ve been waiting for. On any email step in a workflow, tick “Send this email automatically when it’s due” — and flip the new master switch at the top of Workflows — and those emails go out on their own, right on schedule, so your prep notes and follow-ups land without you lifting a finger. Steps you leave unticked still wait as a ready-to-send to-do, just like before. It’s careful on purpose: it only sends to clients with an email, never sends the same step twice, skips anything that was already overdue when you switch it on, and pauses instantly the moment you turn the master switch off. (Thank you, Kristina — this was your idea!) 🤍
Import a CSV straight into a brand
If you run more than one brand, the import screen now has a brand picker — choose one and everyone in that CSV is tagged to it, so a separate list (like a photographers list under its own brand) lands exactly where it should from the start. Single-brand studios won't see it — nothing changes for you. (Thank you, Heather!) 🤍
Turn session requests into Leads automatically
If you'd rather not catch every request by hand, there's a new switch on your Requests page: Auto-add requests to Leads. Flip it on and every new request also lands in your Leads as an Inquiry (tagged “Session request”) and starts your matching lead workflow right away, so your follow-up steps are ready and waiting. You still approve every request before anything hits your calendar — nothing books on its own. Leave it off and everything works exactly as before. If one turns out to be spam, just don't approve it (and you can mark the lead Lost). (Thank you, Kristina, for such a thoughtful request!) 🤍
Delete clients in bulk — and tag them in bulk too
Cleaning up after a big import just got easy. Tap Select on your Clients page, check everyone you want gone, and hit Delete — with a clear confirmation (and a “type DELETE” safety step for large batches) so it never happens by accident. While we were there, Add a label now takes several labels at once — just separate them with commas. (Thank you, Heather!) 🤍
Import a CSV into more than one list
When you import contacts, the list / tag field now takes several lists at once — just separate them with commas (like “Photographer List, Newsletter”). Every imported contact joins all of them, so you can sort your import into the right audiences from the start. (Thank you, Heather!) 🤍
Your gallery watermark is easier to see now
A couple of you noticed your studio name was barely showing on bright galleries. We gave the watermark more presence — a touch bolder, a little brighter, with a soft outline so it reads clearly over light and dark photos, on the grid and full screen alike. It's still tasteful, just no longer invisible. (It stays on for every shared gallery; you can still switch it off or change the style under Brand & settings and each gallery's share panel.) (Thank you, Christy & Kristina!) 🤍
A couple of small fixes
Your dashboard’s Requests tile now updates right alongside the new-request banner, so the two always agree on how many are waiting. And the Feature a Photographer form submits properly again — no more error at the end. (Thank you, Kristina, for catching both!) 🤍
Mark image use & release right on the client
No more tucking image permissions into a notes field. Every client now has an Image use / release picker — choose Full release (portfolio, social, website, ads & teaching), portfolio, social & website, social only, private only, or declined. It shows at a glance on their profile, so you always know what you're allowed to share before a photo goes out. Open a client to set it. (Thank you, Debby!) 🤍
A note in your inbox the moment a request comes in
You asked to never miss a new session request — now you won't. When someone requests a session on your booking page, a warm, on-brand email lands in your inbox right away with their name, session type, preferred date and message, so you can approve it fast. It arrives the same way your booking notices do. (Thank you, Kristina!) 🤍
New session requests now greet you on your home page
A few of you asked to make sure a new request never slips by. Now when someone requests a session, a gentle banner shows right on your dashboard — “2 new session requests waiting” — that taps straight through to approve or decline. We also made your Requests page refresh the moment you open it, so a request that just came in shows up without reloading, and quieted a little flicker where the Stripe box briefly said “Connect Stripe” before catching up to Connected. (A heads-up on emails: a note straight to your inbox when a request lands is coming next — for now the dashboard banner and the Requests badge keep them front and center.) (Thank you, Kristina!) 🤍
Your Board View is now just your active pipeline
If you brought in a big client list, your Board used to stack everyone into the first “An inquiry comes in” column — hundreds of past families all in one spot. Now the Board shows only the clients you’re actually working: anyone marked Inquiry, Consult or Booked in your pipeline, anyone with an upcoming session, or anyone whose first workflow step you’ve checked off. A brand-new inquiry drops in the moment you set their status — and your past clients stay tucked in your Clients list, not cluttering the board. Need the full view? Tick Show all clients up top and everyone’s right back. Your clients and their steps are untouched. (Thank you, Kristina — 701 clients in one column was a lot! 😅) 🤍
Newsletters now greet each person by name
Type Hi {first_name}, at the top of a newsletter and every subscriber gets their own name filled in when it sends — not a blank. You can use {client_name}, {partner}, even {children} too, and they personalize per person. Tap the fields above the message to drop them in; the Preview shows a sample name so you can see it working. A warmer newsletter in one small tap. 🤍
Customize your contracts with fill-in fields
Open a contract template and scroll to Signing fields to add exactly what you need — initials lines, a date, a checkbox to agree to a specific clause (like your retainer policy), a short answer, or extra signature lines. Reorder them, and they appear on the contract your client signs, the preview, and the printed copy. Your existing contracts are untouched. (Thank you, Amber!)
Attach any guide to a workflow email
The attach-a-guide option on an email step is now a full picker. Choose your session-type guide (auto-matches the session) or pick a specific guide straight from your Guides — like your Maternity Prep Guide — and it rides along automatically when that step comes due. Any workflows you’ve already set up keep working exactly as before. (Thank you, Janine!)
Your own Model Call form — goodbye, Jotform
There’s now a built-in Model Call signup form you can embed right on your website — a clean, full-width form in your studio colors that blends into your page. Applicants land straight in your Leads, tagged Model Call, with their session type, dates & details — and if they tick the box, they join your newsletter too. Everyone gets a warm thank-you email automatically. Grab the embed under Leads → Model Call signup form. (Thank you for the idea!)
A confirmation email for new subscribers — in your words
When someone joins from your signup form, they now get a warm confirmation email right away. Write your own under Newsletters → Confirmation email — drop in {first_name} and {studio} and they fill in automatically — or leave it and we’ll send a lovely default. Prefer not to send one? Flip it off with a single switch. We also tightened up the signup form so it only says “You’re on the list!” once you’re truly saved. (Thank you for catching this!)
See who opens & clicks your newsletters
Your newsletters now show real results. Open any newsletter you’ve sent and tap Stats to see how many opened, how many clicked — and the part you asked for — exactly who hasn’t opened yet, so you know who to gently follow up with (or text down the road). New sends are tracked automatically. (Thank you, Kristina!)
Every client list now reads A–Z
Anywhere you pick a client — booking a session, starting an invoice, sending a contract, creating a gallery, adding a to-do — the list now sorts alphabetically by name, so you can find someone fast instead of scrolling. It reads that same friendly order no matter how you’ve sorted your Clients page, and folks without a last name (or a brand-new add) tuck in right where you’d expect them. (Thank you, Crystal!)
Clients can see where they are in the process
Your client portal now shows a friendly progress tracker — Booked → Session → Gallery → Finished — that fills in automatically as things happen (a session gets booked, the shoot passes, a gallery goes up, the balance clears). It answers “where are we?” before they even ask. On by default; toggle it under Brand & settings → Client portal. (Thank you, Kristina!)
Contract preview now shows your color & font (and two fixes)
A few things you asked for: the contract Preview now actually uses your chosen accent color and font, and section headings (the H button) pick up your accent color — on the preview and the real signed contract. We also cleaned up the calendar: cancelled sessions no longer clutter it (they’re still under the “Cancelled” filter on your Sessions page). (Thank you, Amber & Kristina!)
The Board — see where every client is at a glance
There’s a new Board in your menu: a card for each client, sorted into columns that match your workflow steps. As you check off a client’s steps on their profile, their card moves to the next column automatically — or nudge it yourself with the arrows (or drag it on desktop). Customize your workflow and the board reshapes to match. Flip on Hide finished to focus on who still needs you.
A friendly “what’s new” welcome
When we deploy something new, you’ll now get a little pop-up on your next visit showing what changed and where to find it — so you never miss an update. Tap Got it and it won’t show again until the next deploy. You can always revisit everything here on the Updates page.
A tidier menu, and a floating “where am I” tracker
Your day-to-day stays up top (Dashboard, Start here, Clients, Leads, Sessions, Calendar, Invoices, Galleries), and everything else tucks into tidy, collapsible sections — Bookings, Content, Marketing, Setup & more — so the sidebar isn’t overwhelming. And a little workflow tracker floats in the corner showing how far along you are and what’s next; tap it to jump to your workflow, or tap × to tuck it away.
Clearer: there’s no payment link to hunt for
The Send to book screen now tells you exactly how your client will pay. If your Stripe is connected, it confirms they’ll get a Pay button automatically on their portal — you don’t create or paste any link. If Stripe isn’t connected yet, it points you to Session requests → Payments & deposits to turn card payments on. No more wondering where the payment link comes from.
Booking now pulls from your packages & session types
The Send to book screen just got smarter. Your session type and package are now dropdowns pulled straight from your own settings — pick a package and it fills in the amount for you. And you choose whether this payment is a deposit to hold the date or the full payment. Building your workflow now asks that too, so booking defaults to the way you work. Plus: your client gallery now has a clear close button on enlarged photos, so viewers can always get back to the gallery.
The workflow, simplified to how you actually book
We collapsed the confusing separate steps. Now it’s: an inquiry comes in — and right after you add them you choose Save & close (just an inquiry) or Book the client. Booking is one screen that sends the invoice, contract, and payment link (deposit or full) all at once, and they’re marked Pending until they pay and sign. No more doing payment, then contract, then booking as three steps. To load the new flow, open Start here, tap Start over, then Use the recommended flow.
Send to book — payment and contract, together
Booking a client shouldn’t mean juggling a separate invoice and contract. The Send to book step now opens one screen: set the amount to hold the date, pick the contract, and send — and your client gets both in their portal to pay and sign in one place. The booking stays Pending until they’ve done both, then it’s truly booked. You’ll find it as the Send to book button on the booking step, or on any client’s workflow.
Every workflow step is now a real button that does the thing
No more being sent to a page where you can’t act. Each step on your workflow now opens the actual form, right there: New inquiry pops open the new-client form, Send payment opens an invoice, Book a session, Send a contract, Send prep, New gallery — each one launches the step for you. Check it off when you’re done and move to the next.
Your workflow now runs each client, step by step
Open any client and you’ll see their workflow — your steps, tracked just for them. Each step has a button that actually does the thing for that client: Book a session, Create invoice, Send contract, Email prep, and so on — already pointed at the right client. Check off each step as you finish it, watch the progress bar fill, and Reset when you start the next family. Start here still defines your flow; the client’s page is where you run it.
Check off your workflow — and never lose your place
Your workflow now has a checkmark on every step and a progress bar, so you can tick off where you are with a client and see how far along you are at a glance. There’s a Start fresh for a new client button to reset, and a little workflow card right on your dashboard showing what’s next — tap it to jump back in. We also added a note on invoices: if your Stripe is connected, you can leave the payment link blank — clients get a Pay button automatically.
Build a workflow that fits how you work
On Start here, tap Build my workflow and answer five quick questions — when clients pay, when they sign, whether you send questionnaires or prep, whether you sell prints — and we lay out your client flow in your order. Reorder any step with the arrows, turn steps on or off, and jump straight to each one. Brand-new? Tap Use the recommended flow and you’re on the proven path with zero setup. Either way, nobody starts from a blank page.
Clients can keep their own details current
The client portal now has a Your details section where clients can update their own email, phone, and mailing address. It saves straight to their profile in your books — no more chasing people for a new number or address. (Their name stays yours to manage, so records don’t get scrambled.)
Make the client portal yours
Under Brand & settings → Client portal, you can now add a header image, show your phone number, add an “Email us” button, and a “Book another session” button that links to your booking page. Your clients’ portal now feels like an extension of your studio, not a generic page.
Clients can pay their invoice by card — in one tap
Once your Stripe account is connected, every unpaid invoice on a client’s portal now shows a Pay button. They tap it, pay securely by card, and the invoice marks itself paid automatically — the money goes straight to your account, never through us. No Stripe yet? Your own PayPal or Venmo link still works as before. Connect on Session requests → Payments & deposits.
Start here, rebuilt so it actually guides you
The Start here page now splits into two clear parts: set up your studio once (your brand & packages first, then your templates), then the same simple flow for every client — book, invoice & get paid, contract, the session, gallery, their order & delivery, and how the portal ties it together. Every step has a Take me there link that drops you right onto the matching screen, so there’s no more hunting through the menu.
Send a portal to any client — even a brand-new one
The Send portal and Copy portal link buttons now show on every client’s profile, right from the moment you add them. If a client doesn’t have a portal link yet, we create one for you automatically the first time you send or copy it — so the “seven steps” walkthrough works start to finish with a fresh client.
A "Start here" guide, right in your sidebar
New to My Studio Books, or not sure where a feature fits? There’s now a Start here page at the top of your menu that walks the whole app in seven simple steps — add a client, book a session, invoice, contract, gallery, and how the client portal ties it all together. The short version: you don’t set up anything special to begin; everything else is an optional layer. New accounts get a gentle nudge toward it too.
Email a contract your client can sign online
Open any contract template, tap Use for a client, pick the client, and hit Email. We now drop the contract straight onto their private portal and draft an email with the live link — your client opens it, reads the agreement, ticks “I’ve read and agree,” types their name, and taps Sign. The signed copy lands back on their profile under Signed contracts, ready to view or print. No more “I’ll send it separately.” (Thank you, Heather & Kelli!)
Open your emails straight in Gmail
If your studio email lives in Google, there’s now an Open in Gmail button right beside Open in email in the composer. It opens a fresh Gmail message with everything filled in — no more drafts landing in Outlook. Prefer your desktop mail app? Open in email still works exactly as before. (Thank you, Amanda!)
Private booking pages with a passcode
Set a Booking passcode on your request page (in Requests) and only people you share the code with can open it — perfect for invite-only or waived-fee sessions. Leave it blank for an open page. (Thank you, Angela!)
Attach a guide to a workflow email
When a workflow step is an email, tick “Also attach my session-type guide” and your matching guide (like a Maternity Prep Guide) rides along automatically when that step comes due. (Thank you, Janine!)
Colour your calendar by session type
Give each session type its own colour in Brand & settings, then flip on “Colour by type” on the Calendar to read your month at a glance. Toggle it off for the usual by-status colours. (Thank you, Debby!)
Email straight from a session
The Email button inside a session’s workspace now opens the composer properly — a little fix so you can fire off a note without leaving the session. (Thank you, Hannah!)
Golden hour — the best light for every shoot
A new Golden hour tab: pick a date and location and see sunrise, sunset, and your morning & evening golden and blue hour windows — so you can book sessions in the prettiest light. (Thank you, Kim!)
Lead workflows & shoot workflows
Workflows now split in two: lead workflows start when someone inquires, and shoot workflows auto-apply the moment a session is booked — each grouped by session type. Set it once and the right steps land on their own. (Thank you, Kristina!)
A workspace for every session
Tap any session to open its own space — that booking’s to-dos, workflow progress bar, and notes together, with edit one tap away. Multiple bookings for the same family stay perfectly separate. (Thank you, Hannah!)
Galleries: favorites, sharing & watermark options
Clients get a View my favorites button in their gallery. You can share a gallery with extra viewers (or a whole set with one person), choose a watermark style (tiled or single, centered), and screenshots are gently discouraged. (Thank you, Christine & Crystal!)
Follow-up reminders on your dashboard
The Leads to follow up panel on your dashboard now watches the follow-up dates you set. Anyone who’s due (or overdue) jumps to the top with a little reminder, so no enquiry quietly slips through the cracks. (Thank you, Janine!)
Jump from a session to the full client
Open any session and tap View client to land on that client’s whole profile — their sessions, invoices, galleries, to-dos, and notes, all in one place — where you can hop right back into editing this or any of their sessions. (Thank you, Kimberly!)
Add lots of clients to a list at once
No more opening every profile one by one. On your Clients page tap Select, tick everyone you want, then Add to newsletter list or Add a label (like “Santa waitlist”) in a single go. Perfect for grouping last year’s clients before a send. (Thank you, Kristina!)
A real Leads pipeline & reporting
New Leads tab in your sidebar. Set a client’s pipeline status (now with Lost / cold), where they came from (Instagram, referral, Google…), a follow-up date, and a lost reason. The Leads page then shows your whole pipeline at a glance — enquiries, booked, lost, your conversion rate, which sources actually book, and any follow-ups that are due so no enquiry slips through. (Thank you, Janine & Hannah!)
Snap a photo of your receipt
Logging an expense? You can now add a receipt photo right on it — snap it with your phone or upload one. It’s saved with the expense (look for the little receipt icon in your list) so everything’s ready come tax time. (Thank you, Kristina!)
Each session’s to-dos, on their own
When a client books more than once, their workflows used to pile into one long list. Now every session has its own view: from the Sessions list (or when you open a session) tap the checklist icon to see just that booking’s to-dos — check them off, add one, or apply a workflow, all in that session’s own space. (Thank you, Hannah!)
Our community, one tap away
There’s a new Community button up top that takes you straight to our Facebook group — where all the ideas, questions, and updates live. Come say hi. \uD83D\uDC9B
Mini bookings & sessions stay in sync
They now talk to each other both ways. Free a mini time slot and that client’s session is cancelled too, so it drops off your Sessions list and calendar. Cancel or delete a session that came from a mini, and its time slot reopens for the next family. (Moving a booking already updated the session — now the whole loop is closed.) (Thank you, Kristina!)
Send a client their portal in one tap
Open any client and tap Send portal — it drafts a warm email with their private portal link and a tidy list of their upcoming sessions (dates and times) already filled in. Tweak if you like, then send. (Thank you, Kristina!)
Add a client without leaving the session
Creating a session for someone new? Tap + New client right under the client picker, pop in their name (email and phone optional), and they're added and selected on the spot — no more leaving to set them up first. (Thank you, Hannah!)
A calmer to-do count
Your dashboard To-dos number now shows what’s due this week (including anything overdue), not your entire all-time list — so the number actually means “here’s what needs you.” (Thank you, Hannah!)
Your currency, everywhere
Set your currency symbol in Brand & settings (£, €, $, anything) and it now carries through your discount codes and gift cards too — not just invoices. (Thank you, Ashton!)
Gift cards — issue & track
A new Gift cards tab. Issue a card (generate a code, set the amount, note who it’s for and who bought it), and the balance updates as it’s used. Redeem one right on an invoice with the Gift card field, or record a redemption by hand — each card keeps its own history. Great for cards you sell in person, by phone, or through your own payment link. (Letting clients buy one online and pay through the app is coming with payments.)
One-tap birthday & re-book notes
Your dashboard already spots who’s due — a client’s birthday coming up, a family it’s been about a year since you saw, a little one turning one. Now tapping Send a note, Invite back, or Reach out opens a warm, ready-to-send email with their name already in it. Tweak a line if you like, then send. (Hands-off sending while you sleep is a bigger piece we’re building toward — for now this finds them and writes it, you tap send.)
Locations — your scouting library
A new Locations tab to get those go-to spots out of your head. Save a place with its address, notes (parking, best light, which season), and a few reference photos — tag it as one you use or one you want to try. Then when you’re planning sessions, it’s all right there, ready to grab. (Thank you, Tracy, for the idea!)
Discount codes on invoices
Run a promo without doing the math. Create codes under Manage codes on any invoice — a dollar amount or a percentage off — then just type the code and tap Apply. Switch a code off any time to pause it without deleting. (Codes for your booking pages are coming next.)
Upgrade one client without redoing the session
The last piece of Christine’s wish list. In a mini’s Days & times, tap any booked spot to open it \u2014 you can switch that one client to a different package, adjust their price, or jot a note like “added 5 bonus images.” It only touches that single booking; your mini and everyone else’s spots stay exactly as they are. Perfect for VIP perks and one-off thank-yous.
Add a bonus to any mini package
The second half of Christine’s idea \u2014 you can now add a bonus to any mini package, like “5 complimentary images.” It shows right on the package your clients choose, with a little sparkle, so your early-bird or VIP offer feels special. Pair it with the early-bird limit and your first few bookings get the lower price and the bonus, automatically.
Clearer gallery preview
When you preview a client gallery and it can’t open, the page now tells us exactly why instead of a vague message — so if a link ever misbehaves, we can pinpoint and fix it fast. Your clients never see any of this; it only shows when you’re previewing.
Early-bird pricing on mini sessions
Run a flash sale or reward your fastest bookers without juggling separate links. On any mini package you’ll now see “offer only for the first ___ bookings.” Set, say, your $195 package to the first 3 \u2014 once three spots are claimed it steps aside automatically and the next family sees your regular price. While it’s live, your clients see a gentle “only 2 left at this price” nudge. One link, no spreadsheets. (Thank you, Christine, for the idea!)
Watermarks on your client galleries
Your proofs are now protected. When a client opens their gallery — and when they tap a photo full screen — your studio name now sits gently across each image, so your work stays yours while they choose their favorites. It’s on for every shared gallery, and your clean, watermark-free files are still yours to deliver however you like.
Feature a Photographer — photos load again
A few of you told us the Feature a Photographer form opened the file picker but never actually placed your photo — the slots stayed empty no matter what you chose. That’s fixed now: pick your images and they drop right into place, ready to submit. Thank you for flagging it.
Auto-save while you work
Your Brand & settings and Session requests pages now save themselves a moment after you stop typing — you’ll see a quiet “✓ Saved” note. Your Save buttons still work exactly as before; this just means a stray click or refresh won’t cost you your work.
Label your clients
Give clients labels like Sport, Newsletter, or VIP — type them on any client, or assign one to a whole CSV import at once. Labels show on each client, and a new filter bar lets you view just one list at a time. Perfect for keeping separate groups, well, separate.
See new selections at a glance
When a client submits their favorites, that gallery now shows a little “new picks” badge right on its cover in your Galleries list — so you can spot who’s waiting without opening each one. The badge clears once you’ve marked the selection as seen.
Clients can send you their favorites
After a client hearts the photos they love, a clear Submit to your photographer button appears. They add their name and email, and their list comes straight to you — you’ll get an email and see every selection inside that gallery, with the exact photos they picked. No more “where do I click to send these?”
Tidier packages & clearer gallery picks
Package descriptions now keep your line breaks on the booking page — lists and spacing show exactly as you wrote them, no more wall of text. And in client galleries, the heart now clearly means “favorite,” with a note that their picks are saved as they tap.
A calmer Session requests page
Your request-a-session settings are now grouped into clear, spaced sections — Share your page, your welcome message, session types, and custom questions — so nothing feels crowded. The embed code tucks away under a tidy toggle until you need it.
Disconnect Stripe anytime
A Disconnect button now sits on Payments & deposits once you’re connected. It removes the Stripe link here so deposits pause — your Stripe account itself stays untouched, and you can reconnect whenever you like.
Deposits ready for the real world
The Pay deposit step now appears only once your Stripe account is fully connected and ready to accept cards — so a client never lands on a pay button before your studio is set up to receive it. Connect once on Payments & deposits, finish the quick Stripe steps, and your minis are ready to take deposits straight into your account.
Deposit reliability fix
The deposit amount and the Pay deposit step now read from a reliable source, so they show up whenever a mini has a deposit set — the amount appears on the booking page and the pay step appears after a client grabs their slot.
Deposits show up front
When a mini has a deposit, clients now see the amount right on the booking page, and the Pay deposit step appears after they grab their slot — as long as the mini has a deposit set.
Take deposits at booking
You can now connect your own Stripe account and collect a deposit when a client books a mini. Look for Payments & deposits on your Session requests page — connect once, and any mini with a deposit shows a Pay deposit step after booking. The money goes straight to your account; we never touch it.
Clients can favorite their photos
In their gallery, clients now tap a ♥ on the images they love — their picks are saved automatically. When you open that gallery, every favorited photo is marked with a heart, so you know exactly which ones to retouch, print, or build their album around. The first step toward a full gallery store.
Not sure what to write? Need ideas.
On your request-a-session page, the welcome message now has a Need ideas? button. Tap it for a warm, ready-to-use message you can keep or tweak — tap again to see another. No more staring at a blank box.
Brand your contracts
Each contract template can now carry its own accent color and font, and your logo now sits at the top of the contract clients sign on the booking page. Set the color and font right in the template editor — they flow onto the contract you print or email.
Format your contracts
Your contract editor now has formatting: bold, italics, underline, section headings, bullet lists, and centered lines. Select text and tap a button (or type **bold**, *italics*, ## Heading, - bullets). Tap Preview to see exactly how it’ll read on the signed contract — both the page clients sign and the copy you print or email.
Get an email when someone books
The moment a client books one of your minis, you get a little heads-up email — who booked, which mini, and when — so you’re never caught off guard. (The booking already lands in your studio automatically; this just taps you on the shoulder.)
Newsletter signup form — now it actually works
The embed in your Newsletter section is real now. Paste it on your website (Squarespace, Wix, Showit…) and visitors who enter their name & email land straight in your Newsletter subscribers list — branded in your studio name and colors. It’s a clean, script-free embed, so it won’t choke your site builder.
Newsletter unsubscribe — built in
Every newsletter now carries a tasteful unsubscribe link. When someone opts out they see a warm goodbye, and they’re skipped automatically on every future send. You’ll find everyone who opted out in a new Unsubscribed list in your Newsletter section — keeping you compliant and your sends clean.
Schedule a mini to go live later
Set everything up now and pick a Publish at date & time in the mini’s details. Until then the page shows a warm “opening soon” note — then it opens for booking on its own. Perfect for a Christmas-in-July mini you want to drop on a certain day. Also fixed your social link preview so sharing mystudiobooks.com shows your logo, not a placeholder.
Booking confirmation emails
When a client books a mini, they now get a warm confirmation email in your studio name — their session, date, time and location, all in writing — so the details land in their inbox, not just on screen.
Set a closing time on a mini
In a mini’s details you can now set an optional Booking closes date & time. After that moment the booking page politely shows it’s closed and stops taking new bookings — perfect for “reserve by Friday” minis and Santa sessions. Leave it blank and nothing changes.
New smart field: your booking link
Drop {booking_link} into any email or newsletter and it fills in with your studio’s “request a session” booking link — no more pasting it by hand. It’s in the smart-field chips below your message, right alongside {signature} and {studio_phone}.
Embed your mini booking page on your own site
Open any mini’s Days, times & share screen and you’ll find a new Embed box. Copy that snippet into your website builder — Squarespace, Wix, WordPress, Showit — and your booking page lives right on your site, on your domain. It sizes itself to fit and always shows your latest times.
Feature a Photographer — fixed
Two fixes here: photos now upload when you add your six images (the uploader was saving to the wrong place), and there’s a clear “Back to My Studio Books” button so you can step out of the form any time without feeling stuck.
Galleries loading again
Fixed a hiccup where a shared gallery could refuse to open with a “couldn’t load” message. The gallery page is now hardened so a single missing detail can’t take down the whole gallery — your clients’ links open reliably.
Mini sessions — three fixes from your testers
Simpler signing: clients now sign your contract with the name they already entered — no confusing second name box. Free a time: if someone cancels, tap the × on their slot to reopen it for the next family. Back-to-back welcome: a new switch on each mini lets the same person book more than once — perfect for Santa or family sessions. (Off by default.)
Duplicate a mini
Run the same minis every season? Tap Duplicate on any mini and get an exact copy — your price, packages, sample photos, questionnaire and contract all carried over — ready as a fresh draft. Just add your new dates and publish. No more rebuilding from scratch.
One booking per person
A gentle guard so the same email can’t grab several spots in one mini. If someone tries to book twice, they’ll see a warm note pointing them back to their first booking — keeping your sessions fair and your day predictable.
“Spots left” on your mini booking page
Your booking page now nudges clients to act — it shows how many spots are left (with an urgent note when a session is almost full), a count per day, and a warm Fully booked message when every time is taken. A little scarcity helps your minis fill faster.
Pick your mini\u2019s cover photo
In a mini\u2019s sample photos, hover any image and tap Set cover to make it the big hero photo at the top of your booking page. The current cover is marked with a \u2605 Cover badge.
Sign-to-book contracts on minis
Attach any of your contract templates to a mini session. Clients read it and type their name to sign before the Book button unlocks — and a filled, signed copy (with the date) is saved on the booking and noted on the session. No more chasing signatures after the fact.
Add a questionnaire to your minis
Attach any of your saved questionnaires to a mini session and clients answer it right while booking. Their answers land on the auto-created session notes, so everything you need is waiting for you before the shoot.
Move a mini booking to another time
Need to shuffle a client? In a mini’s time slots, tap the move arrows on any booked time, then tap an open one. The booking hops over, the old time frees up, and their session date & time update automatically.
Clearer mini booking links
A mini’s booking link now stays greyed out with a “Publish above to activate this link” note until you publish it — so you never share a link that isn’t live yet.
A bigger, more beautiful booking page
Your mini booking page got an editorial refresh — a large cover photo, a bold title, and a roomy, magazine-style layout. Your first sample photo becomes the cover automatically, and everything reads bigger and warmer for your clients.
Clients can add their mini to their calendar
Right after booking, clients now get Add to Google Calendar and Apple / Outlook buttons on their confirmation — their time, date, and your location, saved to their own calendar in one tap. Fewer no-shows, no extra work for you.
Mini sessions: sample photos + packages
Your mini booking pages can now show off sample photos and offer multiple packages clients choose from. Add samples and packages from the mini editor — clients see your work, pick the package they want, and the price flows onto their session automatically.
Mini bookings flow straight into your studio
When a client books a mini-session slot, My Studio Books now creates a client and a session for you automatically — dated, timed, and ready in your Sessions and Calendar. Returning clients are matched by email, so you won’t get duplicates.
Mini sessions — clients book their own time
Set up a mini-session day, add bookable time slots, publish, and share the link. Clients see your open times, grab the one they want, and it locks instantly — no double-booking, no back-and-forth. Find it under Mini sessions in your sidebar.
Image SEO
Add alt text, keywords, and a description to any gallery photo — hover a thumbnail and tap SEO. Your alt text now travels with the image on shared galleries, so they read better for search engines and screen readers.
Password reset, polished
Reset emails now arrive from your own studio name, and the reset link takes you straight to choosing a new password — no more dead ends.
A welcome page for your galleries
Your clients now arrive at a warm, branded welcome before they step into their gallery — a gentle intro to viewing their images and reaching you for prints and albums. It shows once, then remembers them. Turn it on or off and set a default message in Brand & settings — or write a personal note for one client right in the gallery editor.
Your signature, in newsletters too
The email signature you save in Brand & settings now works in newsletters — type {signature} (or tap the field below the message) and it fills in when you send, right alongside {studio_name}, {studio_phone}, and more.
The Workflow Wizard
Not sure what a full client workflow should even look like? In Workflows, tap Build with the guide, answer a few quick questions about how you shoot, book, and deliver, and your whole timeline — every email, reminder, and to-do — is laid out for you, ready to tweak and save.
Workflows, leveled up
Steps can now be days, weeks, or months before or after a session — perfect for wedding sequences like 6 months out. Reorder steps with up/down arrows, duplicate a whole workflow for a new session type, and apply one right from the Sessions tab.
Smarter emails — smart fields & a saved signature
Drop in fields like {first_name}, {session_date}, {session_time}, and {studio_phone} and they fill in with the client’s info when you send. Save an email signature once and insert it anywhere with {signature}. And the template dropdown is now grouped by your categories.
Newsletters got beautiful
Add a photo and a button to any newsletter, and it goes out as a branded email in your studio name and colors. Hit Preview to see exactly how it'll land in inboxes.
Email & newsletters now send — for real
Send a newsletter to your whole list, your subscribers, a session type, or a custom VIP tag — right from inside your studio, from your own verified domain, with replies coming back to you.
Custom questions on your booking page
Ask for exactly what you need per session type — a venue for weddings, a contact preference for portraits — and the answers arrive right on the request.
Client tags & VIP lists
Group clients into your own lists — like a VIP group for first dibs on minis — then send a newsletter to just that tag.
Expense & mileage tracker
Log expenses and mileage as they happen — they total up by year and category, with an estimated mileage write-off, so tax time is already done.
Your client profile is now a command center
Open any client and check off their to-dos, fire off a chase email, add new tasks, and manage their newsletter status — all without leaving their profile.
Private sessions & session end times
Flip any session type to Private so it stays off your public booking link, and add an end time so events block the full span on your calendar.
Coming next
On the workbench. Have an idea? Tell me in the community 💛
Smarter workflow automations
Pause, resume, or stop a running workflow, plus if/then branching — so a client who doesn’t reply can drop into a different follow-up.
Image SEO
Add keywords, alt text, and descriptions to the images you use across your studio, website, and sessions.
Online payments
Take deposits and payments right on your invoices, and let client coupon codes work at checkout.
Clients choosing images for online sales
Let clients favorite and order their photos right in the gallery.
A welcome email that sends itself
When someone subscribes through your signup form, a warm welcome note goes out automatically — no clicks from you.
More newsletter layouts
A few more designed looks to choose from — stacked photo-and-text blocks and more — for newsletters with extra polish.
Log your business expenses and mileage as they happen, so end-of-year write-offs are already done. Everything stays private to your studio.
Outstanding
$0
awaiting payment
Collected
$0
marked paid
—
Flag a contact
Private — clients never see thisWent cold
leads & clients who went quietDo not book
private — clients never see thisWhen you open a session for a flagged contact, a heads-up appears automatically so you (or anyone on your team) catch it before booking — nothing relies on remembering.
Your scouting library. Save the spots you shoot — address, notes, and reference photos for different seasons — so when you’re planning, it’s all in one place instead of in your head.
Plan your light. Enter a place and a date to see sunrise, sunset, golden hour, and blue hour \u2014 so you can book the session at the prettiest time of day.
Don\u2019t know the coordinates? Open Google Maps, right-click your spot, and the first line is the latitude, longitude.
Issue and track gift cards you sell — the balance updates as each one is redeemed. Perfect for cards sold in person, by phone, or through your own payment link. Letting clients buy one online and pay through the app is coming with payments.
Sell gift cards on your website
Give clients a page where they can buy a gift card themselves and pay by card. It goes straight to your Stripe, and the card activates the moment they’ve paid. They can check a balance there too.
Total referrals
0
sent by other clients
Top referrer
—
no referrals yet
Thank-yous pending
0
rewards not yet given
Top referrers
Thank-you tracker
Where clients come from
Write once and send to the people already in your books — import a list, pick an audience, and the recipient list builds itself from your contacts.
Your lists
import & organize your audienceLists come from tags on your contacts. Import a list from Flodesk or any other tool and name it (like “Seniors” or “Children”), or open any contact and add a tag — then send straight to that list below.
Or add subscribers by hand — one email, or paste a whole list from your old site. They join your Newsletter subscribers, tagged Newsletter, and stay out of your Leads pipeline. 🤍
Paste a whole list of emails…
We skip anyone already in your books and any address that isn’t a valid email. Got a spreadsheet with names and other details? Use Import a list above instead. 🤍
Keep your list healthy
Remove every email that has bounced, failed, or reported spam — in one click. This protects your sender reputation so your good emails keep landing in inboxes.
Compose
Turn this off if your header image already carries your logo — no need to say your name twice. 🤍
Tip: **bold**, *italic*,
# Heading, - bullet, or paste a link — it all formats beautifully in the email your readers get.Drops the image right where your cursor is — add as many as you like, between paragraphs, Flodesk-style.
Insert a field — it fills in when you send:
Add a button (optional)
Recent newsletters
drafts & scheduledA prep guide for every session type, in your brand voice. Write your own, or let AI draft a starting point — then turn on the ones you want. Auto-sending and PDF uploads arrive with the workflow + file-storage backend; the guide content you build here is ready for them.
Your session guides
tap a type to write or draft itBuild and AI-draft them now; sending them to clients arrives with the email backend. For now, “Email to a client” drops the questions into a ready email.
Auto-send workflow emails
Master switch. When on, any workflow email step you’ve marked auto-send goes out on its own once it’s due — only to clients with an email, and never twice. Steps that were already overdue when you flip it on are skipped, so nothing old goes out in a rush; only steps due from here on send. Turn it off anytime to pause all automatic sending.
Apply a workflow to a session and every step lands in To-dos with the right dates. Email steps become a to-do with your draft ready — they'll send themselves once the email backend is live.
01· CONTACT FORM
A simple “get in touch” form. Everyone who fills it in lands in your Leads as an inquiry and starts your matching workflow. Tap Customize form to change the wording, switch fields on or off, and add your own questions.
Inquiry / contact form
A simple “get in touch” form for new inquiries — just name, email, and a message, no dates or session picking. Everyone who fills it out lands right here in your Leads as an Inquiry (and starts your matching lead workflow). Paste it anywhere on your website.
Bottom of the form cut off on your site? Some website builders (Zenfolio, and a few others) block the little script that makes this grow to fit. Find height: in the code above and put a bigger number in — nothing breaks if it’s too tall, you just get a bit of space underneath.
02· MODEL CALL FORM
For casting calls. Applicants land in Leads tagged Model Call, with their answers, photo and details.
Model Call signup form
embedPaste this on your website (Squarespace, Wix, Showit…). Everyone who applies lands right here in your Leads, tagged Model Call — with their session type, dates & details. If they tick the box, they also join your newsletter list. It’s a clean, script-free embed, so it won’t choke your site builder.
Bottom of the form cut off on your site? Some website builders (Zenfolio, and a few others) block the little script that makes this grow to fit. Find height: in the code above and put a bigger number in — nothing breaks if it’s too tall, you just get a bit of space underneath.
03· WAITLIST FORM
For dates you haven’t opened yet. Collect names now, email them the moment you do.
Launch waitlist form
A “notify me at launch” form with a newsletter opt-in — perfect for a coming-soon page. Sign-ups land in your Leads (tagged Launch waitlist) and join your newsletter.
Bottom of the form cut off on your site? Some website builders (Zenfolio, and a few others) block the little script that makes this grow to fit. Find height: in the code above and put a bigger number in — nothing breaks if it’s too tall, you just get a bit of space underneath.
Model Call submissions
Every model call application that comes in — with their answers, photo & details — lands right here, newest first. Nothing hides. 🤍
Set up a mini-session day, add bookable time slots, publish, and share the link. Clients grab an open time and it locks instantly — no double-booking. Every booking drops a client and session into your studio automatically.
Take a deposit when a client books. The money goes straight to your own Stripe account — never through us.
Payments & deposits
Checking your Stripe status…
More ways to get paid
Add your PayPal, Square, or Venmo once and every client gets a one-tap Pay button for each on their portal — with the invoice amount filled in where possible. (These don’t auto-mark an invoice paid the way Stripe does — you’ll confirm those yourself once the money lands.)
Square links are usually a fixed amount — great for a set session fee.
Build 564. If you take payment by bank transfer or Zelle, write here how a client should pay you — they’ll see this at booking, with a box to tick once they’ve sent it. It arrives in Requests marked says they’ve paid — needs confirming, so you check your bank and approve; it never books itself on their word alone.
This one is public, so put here only what you’re happy for anyone to read. Your bank details above stay private and are never shown on your booking page — that’s deliberate.
This one is public, so put here only what you’re happy for anyone to read. Your bank details above stay private and are never shown on your booking page — that’s deliberate.
Anything you type here appears on every invoice (print, PDF, email) and on your client’s portal — perfect if you take bank transfer instead of card.
Saved 🤍
Auto-add requests to Leads
When on, every new request also drops into your Leads as an Inquiry and starts your matching lead workflow — so your follow-up begins right away. You still approve each request before anything hits your calendar.
01· Your booking link
Share this anywhere, or paste the embed into your own website.
Your welcome message (optional)
02· Your booking page
The words your clients read, and who can see the page.
· Let clients pick a time
Set your weekly availability once — clients see open slots and book a real time, and every session type shares this one calendar.
\u2615 Offer a consultation call
Let clients book a quick pre-session call from your real availability — the way Honeybook does it. It uses the same calendar below, so you set it up once.
Tick the days you offer sessions and set your hours — add as many time windows per day as you like (e.g. 9–12 and 1–3).
One-off changes
Real life doesn’t run on a weekly grid. Block a day you’re away, or give one date special hours — these win over your weekly pattern above. You can tie each time to certain session types too.
Choose request if a client isn’t truly booked until you’ve confirmed (retainer paid, contract signed). Their booking lands in your Requests to approve, and the slot is held so no one else can grab it. 🤍
When set, a client who books and pays their deposit will be asked to sign this on their portal. Choose one of your Contract templates.
Requests
Incoming requests
Everyone who has asked to book with you.
01· STUDIO DETAILS
How you appear to clients — on emails, invoices, contracts and your booking page.
Studio details
Leave blank and your email goes out from the shared My Studio Books address, with your studio name on it. To use your own, verify the domain below first — until it’s verified we’ll quietly keep using the shared one rather than send something that lands in junk.
Send from your own address
Gmail and Outlook decide whether to trust an email by looking up records on the domain it claims to come from. Publishing these tells them we’re allowed to send for you — it’s the same thing every studio system asks for, and it only needs doing once.
Just the domain — not your email address, and no https://
02· LOGO & VOICE
Your mark, and how our AI drafts sound when it writes as you.
Logo
No logo yet
PNG or JPG, ideally under 500 KB. For watermarking, use a PNG with a transparent background — a JPG can’t hold transparency, so its background will show as a box over your photos.
Brand voice
03· SESSION TYPES & PACKAGES
What you offer. These fill your booking page, your sessions and your pricing.
Session types
The types you can choose when creating a session — one per line. Delete any you don't offer and add your own.
How clients find you
One per line. These are the choices in How did they find you? on a client’s profile, and what your Leads page counts. Add your referral partners by name — a midwife, a hospital, an agency, another studio — so you can see exactly who’s sending you work, not just “Referral”. 🤍
Calendar colours
Give each session type its own colour, then flip on “Colour by type” on the Calendar.
Packages
What a client picks when she books with you. Prints, albums and other add-ons for an invoice live in Products & services instead. 🤍
Add packages under each session type. They save automatically and appear on a session once you pick that type.
04· BRAND COLOURS
Used across your galleries, client portal and emails.
Brand colors
Pick a color, or type/paste a hex like #B06A4A. Tap any saved color's code to edit it.
05· KEYWORDS
Words that describe your work. They help our AI write in your world.
Brand keywords
06· CURRENCY & REFERRALS
What you charge in, and what you give the people who send clients your way.
Client-facing
Just the symbol — $, £, €, A$, kr. It goes in front of every price in your studio.
07· GALLERIES
What your clients see when you send them photographs.
Show my logo on invoices
Adds your logo to printed & PDF invoices
Use my brand color on invoices
Accents headings & the Pay button with your first brand color
Watermark client galleries by default
Saved now, applies when galleries launch
Turns the watermark off on every gallery you’ve already made.
Show a welcome page on client galleries
A warm intro screen before clients enter their gallery
A flat “buy the whole gallery” price offered to clients who pick more than their gallery includes. Any gallery can override it with its own price.
Client portal
Personalize the private page your clients see.
08· CLIENT PORTAL
Your client’s private page — their sessions, invoices, contracts and galleries in one place.
Show your phone number
Displays your studio phone at the bottom of the portal
Show an “Email us” button
Opens a new email to your studio address
Show a “Book another session” button
Links to your public booking page (turn booking on under Requests)
Show a progress tracker
Clients see where they are: Booked → Session → Gallery → Finished
Calendar sync
Subscribe to your sessions in Google, Apple, or Outlook Calendar. Every session flows in automatically, right alongside your personal appointments — and updates on its own as you add or change sessions.
This feed goes one way
My Studio Books sends your sessions out to Google, Apple, or Outlook. It doesn’t read anything back in — so an appointment you add straight into Google is invisible here, and won’t stop that time being booked.
Until two-way sync arrives, block personal dates inside My Studio Books and let your other calendar be the mirror. Anything you add here flows out; nothing out there flows in.
Until two-way sync arrives, block personal dates inside My Studio Books and let your other calendar be the mirror. Anything you add here flows out; nothing out there flows in.
Keep this link private — anyone with it can see your session times. You can reset it anytime. Reset link
Google Calendar
On a computer: Google Calendar → next to Other calendars click + → From URL → paste your link → Add calendar. It appears within a few hours and refreshes on its own.
Apple Calendar
Mac: File → New Calendar Subscription → paste your link. iPhone: Settings → Calendar → Accounts → Add Account → Other → Add Subscribed Calendar.
Outlook
Outlook.com: Add calendar → Subscribe from web → paste your link → Import.
Note: subscribed calendars are one-way (your sessions flow into your calendar) and calendar apps refresh on their own schedule, usually every few hours.
Google Calendar — live two-way sync IN PROGRESS
The version where your sessions appear in Google the moment you save them, and changes you make in Google come back the other way. It isn’t finished yet — the link above is the one to use today, and it works.
Checking…
We only ask for access to your calendar events — nothing else. You can disconnect any time, and we’ll never touch events we didn’t create.
Photos are optimized to a crisp web size on upload, so galleries load fast and stay light on storage. Shareable client links (a clean, no-login view your clients open) and downloads + favorites are the next two phases.