I just wanted to start this post with a disclaimer: there are TONS of different ways to go about delivering images to your clients, and not all of them are going work well for everyone. PASS works great for me, but it may not suit your business model, and that’s totally fine!! Variety is the spice of life:)

Disclaimer aside, when I first started my business I was on a pretty strict budget. I was funding what started as a hobby and then grew into something more with money from my paychecks at a job where I made $12 bucks an hour! Money was pretty tight for us at the time, so I had to be really creative! The first form of image delivery was just a DVD with a plain CD label you can buy pretty much anywhere, with my business name, the client’s names, and the session date all typed onto it with my typewriter!! It was definitely cost effective, but it took a lot of time. At that time I was typing out the dvd labels, printing and cutting stickers for the dvd cases, and printing and cutting my print releases on a thick linen cardstock.

Does sound like a lot of work to you?? It was! I really didn’t have a lot of clients back then though, so it was manageable. Now that my business has grown and I’m a lot busier, I’ve had to sit down and really take a look at the things that are “bottlenecks” as Mary would say. For me, a huge one of these was the whole workflow surrounding my image delivery! After I graduated to dvds with my logo printed onto them, I still spent a lot of time optimizing the images into both web and print resolution images, burning the dvds, packaging the dvds, driving to the post office, waiting in line, and THEN uploading them to an online gallery when I got home. I could spend an entire afternoon just on image delivery! One thing I’ve learned since taking my business full time, is that TIME IS MONEY. The more time you spend on projects like this, the less money you are making!

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m a huge fan of the motto “Work SMARTER, not harder”. PASS is working SMARTER! I will admit to being a skeptic at first, especially since it kind of seemed like a trend thing, or something that everyone was jumping on the bandwagon for, so I just kind of stuck to my DVDs through almost the end of my 2012 season. Once I tried PASS though, I was surprised to find that I genuinely like the concept and think the product is great!  I hate, hate, HATE going to the post office, and now I go half as much! My image delivery workflow is so much simpler and my clients are happy too because they get their images really fast. I don’t know about you guys, but I love to surprise them with how fast I’m done with their images! It makes your clients feel so special, like they are the most important clients that you have!

This is what PASS looks like when I log in. I just drag and drop to create a new event, put in the event name and the clients email, and sit back and relax! Okay, I’m not really relaxing, but you know what I mean. This process literally only takes me two minutes. While the pictures are actually uploading I just move on to another task.

If you’re reading this and you don’t know what PASS is (first of all, congrats for reading this far without even knowing what I’m talking about or why I’m capitalizing the word pass!) it’s a cloud storage based image delivery service that’s focused on allowing clients to share their images quickly and efficiently while retaining photographer credit. Some recent controversy about PASS is that it wouldn’t really be all that great for photographers whose sales are very product based because part of PASS’s main thing is that clients can download their images from the galleries very easily…and you know what? I actually agree with that. PASS is NOT a gallery service like smugmug or zenfolio. It’s something that essentially replaces flash drives and DVDs. You upload your client’s images to a PASS gallery, and they are active in a gallery for either one year (for$29) or five years (for $99). After that time is up, your clients can choose to extend the gallery by paying an additional fee. Or they can skip extending it and just make sure all of their images are backed up multiple places.

This is what it looks like! Kind of like a pinterest or something, huh?

PASS allows my clients to email ALL of their wedding pictures to anyone they’d like to see them! Those people can also download pictures they’d like! So if Grandma really wants a print of one of the images from the family formals, she can either download it herself, or order it from me (that feature is coming soon, I’m told!). The MOH can take one of the bridal party pictures and make it her Facebook profile picture and my info will stay attached to the photo!!  

I love PASS because I love techy things. I love my ipad, iphone, etc and the idea that my clients can take ALL of their images wherever they go, is so exciting to me! I also really love PASS because it’s something cool and modern that makes me look better to my clients! I don’t ever want to seem like I’m behind the times! My clients get so excited when they get their PASS galleries, because none of their friends had anything like it. I become the “cool photographer who USES CLOUD STORAGE THAT MAKES THE WEDDING LOOK LIKE ITS OWN PINTEREST BOARD”. So not only do my clients hopefully share their images using PASS, which gives me exposure, but they’re also talking about me to all of their friends and family, which is actually even better because word of mouth is so powerful! I always want to earn my clients love and make them excited about working with me, and PASS is a way to do both while also making my life simpler. It’s a win/win.

The main downside to using PASS is that for a lot of weddings this year I won’t be sending out my beloved DVD packaging! I know that’s a really silly downside but I loved those little packages! I’m a really big fan of sending tangible things in the mail, so I’m working on some ideas for some things I can send in the mail instead of DVD packages.

SO! I have one last PASS invite I still haven’t given away! If you’d like it, leave a comment sharing your favorite thing about Spring! I’ll pick a winner tomorrow morning! For the rest of the day, I’m going to be working with the windows open and pretending I’m outside:)