Do you ever forget to run the X and Z report or the Orders Due report?
Are you looking for a quick and easy way to check the balance on a gift card?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions then this week’s P1 Action is for you.

PhotoOne Software is equipped with a convenient little Toolbar called “My PhotoOne Menu.”   This Toolbar can be customized for each workstation on your network.  On the owner’s workstation the Toolbar may be setup for easy access to financial reports, while on an employee’s computer it may consist of order tracking reports and/or the gift card balance query.

The Toolbar will remain on your PhotoOne screen unless manually closed. It serves as a great reminder to run reports and provides a very significant shortcut, especially for repetitive queries.

To populate the Toolbar with different items follow these few simple steps.

1. Decide what item you would like to put on the toolbar.
2. Find the item within your menu bar and while holding down the Control key on your keyboard, select the item.

The item has now been placed on your Toolbar for ONE click access.

EXAMPLE: Let’s put the Cash Report By Day screen as an entry on the toolbar.

1. Go to Reports > Daily Reports.
2. When you get to Daily Reports, hold down the Control key on your keyboard and click on Cash Report By Day.

Cash Report By Day now appears on the Toolbar.

Other helpful hints:

To remove an item from the Toolbar, right click on the item and select Delete.

To access the Toolbar if it has been closed, click on Misc found on the top left menu bar and select Show My PhotoOne Menu.  Click on Show My PhotoOne Menu and up pops the custom toolbar for that workstation.

1st Point:

Wow, we are coming up on our 75th blog post – that is roughly 35,000 words. You probably would have never guessed that your studio management software company could be so wordy. Go ahead and subscribe to our blog!

Please check your email inbox for a verification message from “FeedBurner Email Subscriptions”, the service that delivers email subscriptions for PhotoOne. You will need to click a link listed in this message to activate your subscription. If you don’t get the message in 10 minutes or less, please check your Junk folder.

2nd Point:

We have started to put our client’s names and website links up on our blog and at this point we have about 100 clients listed from the United States, Australia and New Zealand. We are trying to get up another 5 to 10 a day which should keep us busy for the balance of the year.

If you really like the post or it provokes some thought, leave a comment.

Blogs are quickly replacing newspapers as sources of great information or entertainment. But keeping up with them, and there are literally millions, can be tedious. To save you time, blogs have a way of allowing you to subscribe to them so that they are delivered in a format that is easy for you to read and enjoy them.

When you subscribe to our blog you receive useful and timely information that directly benefits your photography business.

But how do you subscribe? There are several easy ways.

Email

In the form you see in the top right corner of this page, type in your email address.

A window, with the Feedburner logo, will pop up asking you to confirm your interest in the subscription by typing in the text you see (see example of image below). Click on “Complete Subscription Request”.

Next, go to your email inbox and look for an email that Feedburner will send you. In that email you will be asked to VERIFY your desire to receive email updates from us whenever our blog has new content. When you have confirmed the email subscription you will automatically begin receiving emails from us. Should you ever want to unsubscribe, you can easily do so. Look for an “unsubscribe” option underneath each of the email updates you receive. Click on that option and you will be immediately taken off of our list.

RSS Readers

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. A RSS reader or aggregator is usually a desktop or online program that allows you to save your subscriptions to a list of blogs in one place, so that it is easy for you to access. RSS readers can either be desktop applications or web-based.

If you are already familiar with what RSS readers are, then simply click on the button at the top right hand side of this page (like the one you see to the right here) where you see the word “SUBSCRIBE.” You will be presented with an array of options and services to stream our feed into.

Some Popular RSS Readers

Netnews Wire for Mac
FeedDemon for Windows/PC
FeedFever
Google Reader
Bloglines

If you found this post useful, please feel free to share the post’s link with your friends and colleague. We also look forward to hearing from you directly with suggestions in the comments section below. Know of a resource that you use to subscribe or read blogs, tell us!

As busy business people, getting slammed with SPAM in your email inbox can greatly impact your ability to be efficient.

Companies like Spam Arrest make it possible for you to verify incoming emails, but the process can sometimes be tedious for your clients. True, they only have to go through the verification process once, but that one gatekeeping step can throw them off forever.

So what is your alternative? A Spam Filter.

If you are using a PC, our recommendation from daily use here at PhotoOne is Cloudmark. After downloading and installing the program, it simply works. Nearly 99% of the junk email that hits our server gets shunted to where it was meant to go; the Junk Folder.

If you are using an Apple Macintosh, we suggest looking at SpamSieve. Winner of a MacWorld Eddy, it is extremely accurate in discovering spam and eliminating it from your inbox. Read the MacWorld review here to learn more about it.

Do you use something other than what we have mentioned above? Let us know! If you feel this and other posts have been helpful to you, please share our blog’s link with your friends and colleagues. We welcome your support!

Based on a poll we ran back in May, we understand that a majority of you are either using Adobe Lightroom already or considering it to edit and manage your images. Bravo!

If you are the former, allow us to guide you to a few special Lightroom resources that will make your transition from whatever program you are using to Lightroom.

Live Training

For a quick primer, the one-day workshop hosted by the National Association of Photoshop Professionals and led by Lightroom guru, Matt Kloskowski is a must-see. The current dates are for Chicago and New York.

Books

There are various books, as you can imagine, about the subject. Victoria Bampton, is the Lightroom Queen and her book, Adobe Lightroom 2: The Missing FAQ, is a terrific read. Martin Evening’s book, The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book, is also quite popular. Scott Kelby’s Adobe Photoshop Lightrom 2 Book for Digital Photographers is also on my bookshelf.

Online Tutorials

If you are looking for a tutorial, Luminous Landscape’s Guide to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2, by Michael Reichmann and Jeff Schewe, for $39.95 is a bargain that shouldn’t be passed up. The two of them are incredibly knowledgable about the subject. Check out this video preview.

Blogs

Then there are blogs. Lots and lots of blogs about using Lightroom.
Lightroom-News, Lightroom Blog, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips, Inside Lightroom and The Lightroom Lab are favorites.

These should get you started and set up to use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom in your studio. By the way, did you know that our partner LabPrints gives you the ability to move edited images from Lightroom to LabPrints Digital Studio with the help of a free plugin? Very cool!

If you have any resources you think we should take a look at, please list them in the comments section below. We look forward to hearing from you.

To make it easier for you to locate and use the recent blog posts about the PhotoOne and LabPrints integration, I’ve decided to list and link all of the posts with a short description here:

Part 1 – Downloading and installing PhotoOne and LabPrints

Part 2 – Linking PhotoOne to LabPrints Digital Studio

Part 3 – Setting up multiple price lists in PhotoOne

Part 4 – Linking LabPrints Digital Studio to PhotoOne

Part 5 – Matching your prices to your products

Part 6 – How to add an order in LabPrints Digital Studio and transfer the data back to PhotoOne

The integration between PhotoOne and LabPrints gives your business the seamless workflow it needs to succeed. It will save you time because of the efficiencies built into it. And that in turn will make you money. If you want to learn more about the integration please click the graphic you see below.

Your questions or comments are always welcome. Please post them below.

One of the crucial steps that you must take as a photographer integrating PhotoOne with LabPrints is to price match your products. Without this step, the flow of information from LabPrints to PhotoOne will remain incomplete and your workflow will stall.

To walk you through the steps required for you to be able to match your prices to the products you offer in your studio, we have Lia Sacco, Marketing Manager of LabPrints guest blogging for us today.

Matching your price list in LabPrints with your price lists in PhotoOne is another great way this integration will save you time. In LabPrints, you have the ability to work with multiple labs. And, for those of you not familiar, you also have the ability to have multiple price lists in LabPrints (i.e. wedding, portrait, holiday, etc…). It is assumed you will use the same price lists within PhotoOne. To start, you need to sync up your lab’s available catalog (embedded within LabPrints) with your price list in PhotoOne.

To start you need to send an order from LabPrints to PhotoOne (see previous blog posts). This will allow PhotoOne to acquire the most recent lab catalog from your preferred lab. If you are using more than one lab with LabPrints, you will need to send an order to PhotoOne for each lab.

Under “Setup” > “Pricing” > “Prices” you can bring up your Studio Price List and click on the “LabPrints” tab.

On the left dropdown, you will want to select a lab and then click on the “Import Lab Prices” button in the lower left-hand corner. This will auto-populate the field with your lab’s current catalog of products.

Now you are able to drag and drop the lab product onto the specific price you have assigned in PhotoOne. You will want to do this for each category you have in PhotoOne. Repeat this process for every lab you work with (select the appropriate lab from the dropdown).

After you have matched your lab products with your PhotoOne price list you are ready to go. Now when orders from LabPrints are sent to PhotoOne, the prices you previously assigned will automatically appear. Fast, easy, and convenient!

This video tutorial will also help you understand how to set up PhotoOne to match the data with what LabPrints Digital Studio generates for your client orders:

Did you find this post helpful? Help us spread the word. Subscribe to our blog feed and follow us on Twitter. And, come back tomorrow for Part 6 of this series.

We hope you have enjoyed Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of our series about the PhotoOne and LabPrints integration.

In this blog post, I’ll show you how to link LabPrints to PhotoOne.

Now that you have linked PhotoOne to your installation of LabPrints, let’s launch Digital Studio through PhotoOne. In PhotoOne select any one of your client contacts by double clicking on their name. In the window that reads “Update Customer,” you will find the LabPrints button for Digital Studio in the lower right hand side (see image to the right). Simply click on the button and you will be transported to LabPrints Digital Studio.

As soon as Digital Studio launches, you will be presented with the option of creating a new project for that particular client. For the sake of this example, go ahead and click on “Create A New Project.”

Enter a project name and the customer ID number.

Then click on ADD IMAGES. Locate the folder where you have stored the images for your client and click on OK.

The images in that folder will appear in what is called your LIGHT TABLE. You will also see the following other tabs at the top: Edit/Order, Digital Products, Invoicing and Storefront.

To continue to set up LabPrints, go to SETUP in the menu bar and select PREFERENCES. In the left hand side of the resulting window, you will see an option for PhotoOne. Select it. The window on the right hand side will now give you a few options to choose.

Under PhotoOne Integration, go ahead and check the box. Left unselected, you will not be able to link your data back to PhotoOne. The next step is to let LabPrints know where your installation of PhotoOne is. Using the BROWSE button, locate and select your PhotoOne installation and click on OK.

Save and close the window and you should be all set up now.