As a professional photographer, your website is one of the most crucial tools that is used to gather and retain clients in an extremely competitive industry. Customers need to be able to easily access high-quality images and most of them expect to be able to do this without ever having to leave their couch.
Pixieset is a service that provides photographers with a platform for sharing high-quality images with their clients for a monthly fee. If Pixieset does what it is intended to do, then your clients will be satisfied with your service, and they may even return for more pictures in the future.
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Pixieset: The Basics
Pixieset is an online platform that photographers can use to create photo galleries of multiple clients’ pictures. The platform is designed as an easy way to deliver digital pictures to a multitude of clients and to do so remotely.
The platform will give clients the option to preview photos in the gallery, select them for download, or even to purchase prints directly from their website. Further, Pixieset is fully compatible with Lightroom, so if you use Lightroom (and if you are not are you even a photographer?) then you can actually upload client photo’s directly from Lightroom as you finish with edits.
Features of Pixieset
The basics of Pixieset may be enough to sell the beginning photographer on the platform, but the more established business, the features will probably do the trick.
Client Galleries
The main reason that most photographers choose Pixieset is because of the quality of the client galleries. This is certainly not the only amazing feature that Pixieset has, but it is the main event when you are looking for a service to create client galleries.
There are two main factors to think about when choosing the best client gallery service when it comes to the actual galleries: customer privacy and user accessibility. Pixieset is completely protected by passwords to keep just anybody from being able to view your client galleries. Further, the users of the system are huge fans of the ease of use for clients who are accessing their photos.
So, Pixieset gets an A+ on the two main concerns for client galleries, but what about extra features in regards to client galleries? One of the main draws of the client galleries is the ability to create various “sets” within a particular gallery.
For example, if you are uploading a wedding set of photography. You can add different sections such as “ceremony” or “reception.” This creates an entirely customizable experience for clients as they work with you on major milestones in their lives.
Collection Settings
Another great feature on Pixieset is the ability to control the settings for individual collections from within your photographer account. If you want to organize collections by date, type, or family you can do so here. You can also control the privacy settings and even the URL for the collection itself.
The ability to control the settings for certain galleries is important for the aspiring photographer. You may have certain clients who want their galleries to remain public while others want theirs locked from the general public. The ability to control these settings will come in handy.
Expiring Galleries
On Pixieset, you will pay different amounts of money for different amounts of storage. For this reason, you will want to be sure you communicate expiration dates to your clients. You cannot leave the collections online indefinitely because you will run out of storage, and that may prove to be a headache when you need to upload new pictures.
So, one of the best features of Pixieset is that you can set up your galleries to auto-expire after a certain amount of time on the website. This is a great feature for running your business on the day-to-day level as it keeps you from having to maintain your own galleries. Simply inform your clients of the expiration date ahead of time so that they are aware of their time frame for making purchases.
Design
The ability to control how the clients see the photos on the website is a huge advantage for Pixieset in the world of photography. From the design setting screen, a photographer has a variety of options that they can manipulate in order to better control the way their photos are displayed. As artists, photographers tend to be fairly specific in the way in which they want their work displayed. So, this is a huge plus on the Pixieset benefits.
Downloading Images
Clients just want to know how to download their images so that they can immediately share them on Social Media. As photographers, we hope that those photos are eventually printed and proudly displayed on their walls as well, but we see it time and time again that the download button is mostly used for social media.
Fortunately for you, Pixieset makes it easy and customizable for you to offer downloading options to your clients. Best of all, these options are safe and secure for both the photographer and the client.
For example, if you are sharing proofs with a client who needs to choose favorites for editing, you may want to completely disable the ability for that client to download images. This is simple for you to designate through Pixieset.
For an extra security measure, you can designate a four-digit pin# that clients must use before downloading images from their Pixieset galleries. Clients tend to enjoy extra security measures when it comes to certain photo galleries. Like children’s photos or even boudoir photos taken for a significant other.
Favoriting Options
Especially for a photographer who is working with clients through proofing, or with a corporate client for advertising purchases, the ability to enable image favorites can be a huge bonus when using Pixieset. When photographers upload images to the gallery they can simply enable favoriting for the client to be able to select their favorite images.
Further, if you are restricting your client to a certain number of edits, for example, you can limit the number of favorites the client is allowed to choose within a gallery. This will keep them from choosing every image and help them focus on only choosing the images that they truly cannot live without.
Pixieset Store
As a business owner, you should really consider the store feature of the Pixieset gallery as a valuable asset to your photography business.
One of the best things about the store is that it does not add pressure to your clients to feel as though they are being forced to purchase something additional from their photographer. However, they are given the option to purchase prints directly from you.
Clients who understand the value of professional printing over stores such as Walmart or CVS will value the option to print from places that have their photographer’s stamp of approval. Further, you can set your own prices which allows you to control how much commission your business makes from each purchase on the website.
Mobile App- Pixieset
Pixieset offers a mobile gallery app that is not just a mobile version of the website with all of the same features. On the contrary, the mobile app is a means through which your clients can see a very limited version of their gallery built for view on a phone, tablet, or computer.
These galleries are able to be viewed off of a wi-fi or data network, which is in general not a concern for most clients. However, it is a feature that Pixieset offers and we thought it was worth mentioning for the potential Pixieset user.
The Competitors
We will not get into specifics of the competitors in this article, but it is important to note that Pixieset is not the only option out there for hosting client galleries for your photography clients.
Many photographers use a service called Shootproof. The big advantage that Shootproof has over Pixieset is the ability to archive photos to free up storage without actually deleting the photos. However, deleting photos off of the Pixieset platform does not have to mean they are gone forever. There are other methods for storing photos, and Pixieset has Shootproof beat in many other ways.
Another major competitor for Pixieset is the platform called Zenfolio. Zenfolio is a decent option, but it is astronomically more expensive than Pixieset and unfortunately, it does not really have any advantages over the fantastic design of Pixieset.
There are competitors out there, as there are in any market, but the competitors for Pixieset just really do not have any kind of clear advantage over the top photography portfolio hosting service.
The Verdict
Pixieset is a wonderful option for the photographer who is looking to build their online gallery options for clients. Most clients have come to expect high-quality photos delivered in an online format, and in order to keep up with the times, you need to be willing to provide an online gallery for your clients.
Pixieset has an abundance of benefits built into the easy-to-use platform, and it even offers you the ability to make even more money by selling prints to clients after photos have been delivered. Pixieset is the best client photo gallery service for photographers, there is no doubt about it.