9 Nifty Web Apps for the Modern Photographer

I’ve had a few people ask me on Twitter recently for useful websites and services for photographers, so here are my top 9:

Photoshelter

Photoshelter offers a bunch of useful tools in one place. You can use it to backup all of your images, to allow your clients to view the photos from their shoot via a password protected area, it handles your ordering for you securely and can take payments, and lots of other things.

Blinksale

Invoicing people when you’re just starting out or have a small photography company can be a headache. There are lots of products around that promise to help you do them easily and quickly, but they’re often something you have to install on your computer. Blinksale is a website that you pay monthly for and it means you can send someone an invoice from your iphone while you’re out and about.

Highrise

Keeping track of all of the exciting opportunities you’ve been offered, dates, emails, phone calls you’ve promised, the name of the best man on the wedding day, and so on can make for an overwhelming email inbox and lots of wasted time spent searching.

Highrise is another ‘software as a service’ tool that helps you keep track of everyone and everything in one place and means you don’t forget important stuff. And on the subject of forgetting things…

Evernote

Evernote is a great utility that helps you keep track of things you want to remember using your phone, laptop or desktop computer back at the studio. You can use it to take a photo of a receipt with your iphone (I should probably write another post about how useful that is), or write an email to yourself, or tag a website, anything – you can add it to evernote and then it’s permanently recorded and accessible from anywhere.

What’s more – if you photograph some text it has some built-in cleverness that scans through the image and converts it into real text, so you can search through hand-written details about a wedding (if your handwriting is good enough) on the road using your phone. Handy.

Booking Bug

One of the main questions that wedding photographers have to answer for a prospective couple is “are you available on our wedding day” – Booking Bug solves that question. It’s a calendar widget and ordering system that lets someone check if you are available and then make a booking. Easy. I’ve not yet used it because I’m waiting for a new version of their widget that lets you search for a date, rather than showing all of the bookings in your calendar, but the guys at Booking Bug tell me that’s a feature that should be coming soon. And on the subject of calendars:

Google Apps

I use Google apps for all of my email, calendars, writing documents to share with other people, spreadsheets, and it’s all free – a pretty great deal. A lot of people don’t realise you can use Google Apps email with your own domain name, so you won’t appear as joebloggs1234567@gmail.com!

Drop Box

Moving files around to other people when you’re shooting on the new high-end cameras that we’re using can be a pain – what used to be emailable files can now come in at over 10MB each. In the past you’d have to upload the files somewhere and then send a link, but just uploading the files can mean you’re sitting at your computer twiddling your thumbs while they all go up, and then one fails, and you have to click to start it again – it’s all a bit laborious.

So instead, I use Drop Box, which is a little utility that you install on your computer. It makes a virtual drive that you can use just like any other hard disk, except when you copy something into it, in the background it starts synchronising its contents with a version on the web. Much easier! Which leads me onto…

Backblaze

I’ve found the whole process of getting backups sorted out really quite difficult – too many files to move around, lots of different versions, hard disks that suddenly fail, having to keep two or more copies of everything, worrying about someone breaking in and stealing the backups, and so on… Back blaze is a tool that I use to give me some extra peace of mind. It runs in the background on my main computer and combined with a little script in Aperture it uploads all of my ‘starred’ images to the web while I sleep. So if the studio burns down the day after I’ve shot a wedding I’d still have the photos. I’m not sure that’s where the name comes from…

Twitter

And finally – Twitter. The best, loveliest and most useful place on the web I’ve found yet. Where would I be without it?

Do you have any useful places on the web that you find useful – leave them in the comments!