Scheduled downtime this weekend

We’re going to be carrying out some essential maintenance to our servers over the Easter weekend, and this will cause a short amount of downtime for our online services on the morning of Sunday 1 April (and, no, this isn’t an April Fool).

Because Light Blue is desktop software that you can use offline, most of you won’t even notice that our servers will be offline for a few minutes. You’ll be able to carry on using almost all of Light Blue’s features, and any changes that you make while our servers are offline will automatically be synced up to our servers as soon as they’re up and running again. However, our online contracts, forms, and invoices will be unavailable during the downtime.

We’ll be carrying out this maintenance early on Sunday morning, and our servers should unavailable for no more than a few minutes.

2 April update: Yesterday’s maintenance work went well, but we might need another short amount of downtime this afternoon. If so, it will be less than five minutes, and usage of our online services is currently very low due to today being another public holiday. TC

Light Blue 7.0.4

We’ve just released Light Blue 7.0.4, which is a free minor update for everyone who’s using Light Blue 7. It includes the following changes:

Added a ‘Remove Resources From Shoots’ command to the Housekeeping menu.
Updated some of our French translations.
The ‘Mark Found Shoots As Completed’ command in the Housekeeping menu can now be used to mark enquiries as completed, as well as confirmed shoots.
Restored the ‘Configure Proxy Server’ command, which had gone missing from the setup wizard.
Increased the timeout for sending emails via Light Blue from one minute to five minutes to make sending large attachments easier if you’ve got a slow upload speed.
For forms that are part of a contract, we no longer display the “you need to add some linked contacts” warning message, and instead display a message that reminds you that the form is part of a contract.
Duplicating appointment types or email signatures wasn’t setting the name field to “Duplicate of ‘original name'”.
Fixed a problem where, when using a comma as a decimal separator, closing a quote or sale item that has a quantity beginning with “0” and no description could delete that item.
We’ve changed the way that Light Blue prints on Windows so that, if you’re not able to set your page setup margins to zero, the printed content won’t be pushed down and to the right.
Fixed a problem where, when you duplicate a shoot, the shoot requests wouldn’t get duplicated.

The Photography Show 2018

The Photography Show at the Birmingham NEC is the UK’s biggest photography trade show, and we’ll be there on stand A68 from Saturday 17 March through to Tuesday 20 March.

If you’d like to find out more about how Light Blue can help you to run a successful photography business, we’d be delighted to see you there. We’ll be running demos throughout the show, and coming to see us at the show is the perfect opportunity to ask us any questions you might have about how you can put Light Blue to work for your business.

Admission to The Photography Show is free for professional photographers, and the deadline for registration is Wednesday 14 March. You can register for the show by visiting its website.

Free one-to-one training at the show

We’re going to be running demos throughout the show for people who are new to Light Blue, but we love seeing existing customers so please come and say hello!

This year, we’re also offering free one-to-one training at the show. If there’s anything that we can help you with, or that you’d like to talk to us about, you can book a free 20 minute session with us so that we can give you our undivided attention.

We’re only able to offer a limited number of one-to-one sessions at such a busy show, so please make sure to book in advance to avoid disappointment.