As entrepreneurs, the first years of building a sustainable business are the hardest and most challenging. We ourselves had to research, learn, and find ways to improve our business. Our goal was to create a workflow for a lasting, sustainable company, that would allow us to save precious time and energy and focus on the most important tasks of our business, the ones that bring us income.

We wanted to help our fellow photographers get to a place of productivity the most efficient way possible, so we decided to compile our TOP 5 business apps for photographers that we uses on a daily basis and that we wish we had known about a lot sooner!

Ready to dive in?!

DUBSADO

“From capturing leads on your website, to automatically following up with a questionnaire based on the client's input, or sending them a proposal that will make them eager to select those big ticket packages, we've got you covered.”

Dubsado is a client management software with infinite possibilities. When it comes to managing your client workflow and business it covers all the bases. We won’t lie, it takes a bit of time to implement it and get everything set up. But the sooner you have this system in place the better will it be for you AND your clients.

Amongst it’s powerful features you will find: automation workflows, client portals, lead tracking, calendar sync, invoicing and online payment, contracts and forms, task manager, accounting, appointments and call scheduling.

Best of all: their customer service is TOP, they always make sure you get your questions answered and are always super helpful.

We highly recommend them! If you want to give it a chance you can use our referral code and get 20% off your first year! (Ref. Code: THEARCHIVERS20 or click here )

01

NARRATIVE

When it comes to apps for photographers the number 1 that will save you precious time is Narrative. It is THE app you absolutely need for your blogging. As creatives it is super important (we might even say VITAL) to blog regularly for SEO and marketing purposes. We will be first to admit we really dragged our feet when it came to blogging. We dreaded the time it would take us and how tough we thought it would be to get an aesthetic post in a timely fashion. But guess what? All of those issues are behind us!

With Narrative you can easily build aesthetic and creative blogposts in a super fast and intuitive way. The software even resizes the photos before exporting the blog to your website so you have a quick loading post. Therefore improving your SEO and lowering your bounce rate.

Oh and speaking of SEO, they have a built in space to add keywords, metadata and so on to make sure your blog posts are super SEO friendly. What are you waiting for? A discount? Well, here you go: use code “alison42” for 15% off or click here!

02

PLANOLY

If like us, you aren’t gifted when it comes to being consistent with your instagram, you're going to love this one!

Let’s face it, for the inconsistent poster the Instagram algorithm isn’t your best friend. If you want your engagement to grow you need to post regularly and consistently. As instagram wants to keep users on their app for as long as possible, they prioritize people who give highly engaging content to their audience on a regular basis. Those “influencers” keep users scrolling endlessly and Instagram can keep showing them more paid advertisements.

Planoly allows you to plan your feed and schedule your posts. Many other apps offers you this kind of service but we admit that we just loooove Planoly’s interface and design. We also love having a library of our selected hashtags and simply being able to copy and paste them. You can start for free if you’d like, however, not every feature would be available to you. We personally love that you can put hashtags in the first comment to keep your posts minimalistic and clean. We hope you’ll give it a try. Instagram is a huge tool for photographers and one of the top platforms for bringing you organic inquires (and therefore income) so it’s important to invest in it. The good news is Planoly is super affordable even with the paid version, so we feel it’s totally worth it! Click here to check it out.

03

Amongst apps for photographers, this one is the most profitable one.

Please don’t make the same mistake we did on our first two years of photography. If you don't have it, go get yourself Photomechanic NOW.

Photomechanic is a desktop software application that allows you to import, copy and sort thought your photos in the fastest way possible. Yes, way faster than Lightroom! Imagine if you have 4000 photos from a full day wedding. If it takes on average 5 seconds to fully render an image in Lightroom it renders instantly in Photomechanic . So on just one wedding you can save yourself so much time.

The great thing is that as your photos begin to import you can start sorting them as they go. Once your selection is made you can move that selection to another folder, that you will then import in Lightroom. Therefore, instead of sorting through several thousands shots and clogging up your catalog, you can quickly shift through the several hundred essential photos you selected while you edit, thus saving you hours. (Ps: for more tips regarding Lightroom check this post)

The great thing is the licensing fee is a good for life. It truly is one of the best investments you can make for your business, as it saves you so much time and headache. Click here to check it out.

04

FLODESK

Flodesk is an incredible tool when it comes to building a mailing list. We used Mailchimp before but never really worked on it or wanted to invest too much time on it. With Flodesk it couldn’t be easier. The designs are super modern and trendy. They are also customizable and super intuitive. Flodesk. isn't quite as strong in data tracking as others platform, so we wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for more corporate entities.

However, as photographers working in the visual arts the aesthetic is soooo important can make a huge difference. That's why we really recommend you add it to your arsenal of apps for photographers. We started to use it after receiving a newsletter from a fellow photographer and enjoying reading it much. I (Alison) am really not the kind to read a newsletter with much pleasure. I hate just having a block of text and a picture of the author as a signature. Being a visual person I wasn’t drawn to those kind of emails. But with a Flodesk it's day and night!

All of this to say, if you plan on building a mailing list for marketing purposes (and you DEFINITELY should!) we think there’s nothing better out there for us creatives. It will showcase your work and information in a cohesive and aesthetic way.

Also, we have a referral code of 50% off available from our account so here ya go: Flodesk

05

Final Notes

If you already knew about all of these efficiency boosting timesaving tools, then we apologize for wasting your time. But if like us a year ago, you didn’t know about any of them, then we are very happy you are here. We truly think these are must have apps for photographers! We are quite picky about which apps and software we allow into our lives, specially because it's a budget. So you can trust our recommendations.

If you have any questions regarding a particular tool listed above please reach out to us and we’ll be happy to answer.

Also we want to point out that we did NOT get sponsored by any of them. You can probably find discount codes everywhere online for them. If you decide to try them, using our codes would be super helpful to us so we can keep providing you free content! If you do so, then thanks a lot for your support! We are CONVINCED you won’t regret using any of them!

XoXo

Alison & Lance