Setting up online photo proofing on your photography website is a great way to share your work with clients, letting them browse the collection at a time convenient to them, and then review and select the photos they’d like you to edit.
After shooting photos, you can simply upload images on your website into a custom, private gallery and let clients browse all of the images, and select their favorites. You can then edit the selected collection and deliver the final images to your client in a timely manner.
Online photo proofing is more time efficient, more accurate, reduces administration, frees up your time, and makes the process more pleasant for the client – why wouldn’t you use an online photo proofing tool?!
In this article, you’ll discover a number of key online photo proofing tips and tricks to really help enhance your clients’ experience, and supercharge the efficiency of your photography business.
Best Online Photo Proofing Tips to Help Enhance the Client Experience
Let’s take a look at our top online photo proofing tips that you can put into place right away to offer a better, improved client experience on your photography website.
1. Integrate Online Photo Proofing on Your Website
For many photographers the process of photo proofing involves several emails, compressed thumbnails, endless back and forth messages, and the real risk of not knowing quite when the final deicsion has been made, or the last comment received. And there’s always the chance that a filename will have been copied incorrectly, involved more wasted time – time you could be better off spending behind the camera or attracting new clients.
This is where online photo proofing really excels. You can provide your clients with a seamless experience in which they can browse their photos privately, and at their own convenience, without having to open several emaisl, or view small thumbnail versions of their images. Online photo proofing is not only a massive win for you, as a photographer, but clients prefer the experience, and this is yet another win for you.
Additionally, online photo proofing reduces the need to jump around multiple pages on your website to view images and make selections. Clients can simply visit your website and proof their images from a central location. Once they’ve made their selection, and added any notes or comments, you can be notified immediately, and will be able to view their selection right away, letting you get started on the editing much sooner.
By integrating online photo proofing on your website, you can keep clients on your own website and will also have an easier time keeping track of everything.
2. Use a Robust Online Photo Proofing Tool
To successfully set up online photo proofing on your website, you will need to use a robust online photo proofing tool.
We built picu to be your professional online photo proofing tool that lets you reduce the time you’d otherwise spend going back and forth with your client over emails when getting images approved. It lets you send clients photo collections directly from your photography website and get approval from your clients so you can start the post-production process straight away.
It’s always better to self host your images on your own WordPress photography website using picu instead of using a SaaS platform. This gives you full control over your images and other data. As a result, you can deliver a better and more secure user experience on your photography website. It also presents your photography business as more professional, and more discrete and secure.
picu is very easy to set up and use, offering an all-in-one solution for photographers looking to set up online photo proofing on their website easily and without spending too much time and resources on getting photos approved by clients.
3. Let Clients Save Their Favorite Photos
When setting up online photo proofing you want to offer your clients an easy way to select and save their favorite photos from the shoot. This gives your clients a way to go back and review their favorite photos so they can forward their selection to you quickly for post-production.
Your photo proofing workflow might go something like this: you shoot photos, upload them to a private gallery, and then share the link to the gallery with the client. The client then selects their favorite ones, after which you receive a notification that their selection is finished, so you can see which images they’ve chosen, and get started on editing and delivering the final images to the client.
This streamlined process saves time for both you and your client, improving the client’s experience, and saving you considerable time.
4. Use Watermarking
If you share photos on the internet, protecting your work is essential. A great way to do this is by watermarking your images so people don’t end up using them for personal or commercial use. You also may have the concern that a less than scrupulous client might download your proof images from your photography website and decide to not move forward with the editing stage. Using a watermark on your images prevents people from misusing the photos.
Using a watermark on your images also helps you represent your brand’s work better and lets you offer clients the opportunity to download images from the gallery on your website. This does mean that they can share them with friends and family who may want to place orders themselves, gaining you additional orders. They may even be impressed with the quality of the images that they decide to book you for their next event – multiple wins!
picu offers a suite of robust features that help you protect your images on your photography website. Using picu’s Theft Protection module, you can add your logo or another image as a watermark on top of your images, reducing or even eliminating the risk of images being stolen.
In addition to this, picu also lets you protect your images by removing the option to “right-click” on your images to make it difficult for anyone to download them from your photography site. You can also enable hotlink protection which prevents other websites from directly embedding your images on their site.
5. Create Galleries From Lightroom
Creating galleries from Lightroom or any other editing tool you use is a great way to quickly deliver images to your clients and enhance the client experience on your photography website.
Galleries are a better way to display your images in an explorable layout. This way, clients can view your best work and select the images they’d like to download or save them for later.
picu offers a great way to not only send image collections to clients but also make it very easy to get the selected photos from your client back into Lightroom or another editing tool to start working on them. It reduces the time and effort needed to download the images from email and then import them into your editing tool.
For a detailed explanation of how picu makes it easier to view and import the images your clients select, check out our article on getting an accurate list of approved images.
#6. Share Photos Securely
In today’s digital age, protecting your images can be difficult. This is why you need a solid way to send your galleries via email, or copy the link and send it to the client through whichever channel you prefer. This means that all photos in galleries are private, safeguarding your clients’ privacy, and preventing anyone else from using the images themselves.
It’s also important to offer image download using your own domain instead of using an external service. It offers a more unique to your brand experience for clients and lets you securely share your hard work directly from your photography website.
You can use picu to let clients securely download images from your photography website, providing a seamless experience that never lets them leave from your brand’s unique style.
picu’s Download module lets you enable clients to download a .zip archive of all images that they had approved earlier. It automatically creates a .zip file from the collection or you can specify an external URL.
In addition to this, you can also use picu’s Brand & Customize module to add your own logo, adjust the colors, and use Google or Adobe fonts for customizing your collections before sending them to your clients.
Conclusion
Online photo proofing is a great way to enhance the client experience on your photography website. It saves you time and effort in sending emails back and forth to your clients when you need to get the images approved before you start editing them.
You can use a robust, all-in-one solution such as picu to easily set up online photo proofing for your photography site. It offers an easy way for photographers to quickly get their work approved from clients and deliver the final images quicker.
We shared our best online photo proofing tips and, hopefully, you’re in a good position now to take the next steps.
Ready to set up online photo proofing on your photography site? Get picu today!