Light Blue 2022.2 release notes

Light Blue 2022.2 is a major update that expands the range of third-party apps that you can use with Light Blue.

New and updated integrations

• Light Blue’s new Zapier integration is the most comprehensive in the photography industry, with triggers and actions that allow you to use Light Blue for all of your day-to-day work while taking advantage of industry-leading apps and services in a totally automated fashion.
• Your online scheduling calendars can now create Zoom meetings when a client makes a booking, and automatically update a linked Zoom meeting if they reschedule or cancel their booking.
• We’ve added Square to the list of online payment processors that you can use with Light Blue’s online invoices, scheduling calendars, and contract signing services.
• Pic-Time joins the list of online photo galleries that can send client orders to your Light Blue account, allowing you to import them at the click of a button and keep all of your orders together in one place.
• Schools photographers using GotPhoto can now import batches of orders into Light Blue and automatically link them to the right shoot, enabling you to combine Light Blue’s planning and reporting tools with GotPhoto’s sales tools.

Please note that the minimum OS version required for Light Blue 2022.2 is now macOS 10.14 (Mojave) or Windows 8.1.

Zapier

Zapier is a service that saves you time by connecting the apps and services that you use and automating them for you. Light Blue offers a comprehensive set of triggers that allow you to use it with thousands of other apps. With Light Blue at the centre of your business, you can use it for all of your day-to-day work while taking advantage of industry-leading apps and services in a totally automated fashion. You can also use Light Blue’s Zapier integration actions to send information to Light Blue.

Here are few examples of how you can use Light Blue with other apps:

• When you add a new contact to Light Blue, add them to your email marketing system (e.g. Mailchimp, Mailerlite, ActiveCampaign, Sendinblue).
• When you create a new invoice or payment in Light Blue, add that transaction to your accounting system (e.g. Quickbooks, FreshBooks, Xero).
• When a potential client fills out your contact form, send that to your Light Blue Inbox so that you can import it as a new enquiry (Light Blue offers great contact forms that you can embed in your own website, but some photographers prefer to use the one that comes with a website provider like SquareSpace or a third-party such as Gravity Forms or Wufoo).
• When a client books a planning meeting with you, create a folder in Google Drive that you can use to collaborate.

Click here to find out more about how you can use our new Zapier integration to connect Light Blue to thousands of apps.

Zoom

Linking your Zoom account to Light Blue makes scheduling online meetings with your clients even more convenient. You can now configure your online scheduling calendars to automatically create a Zoom meeting when a client makes a booking. The meeting join link will be displayed on the booking confirmation page for your client, and you can also include it in your confirmation and reminder messages by using the %EventURL% mail-merge tag.

Click here to find out how to link your Zoom account to Light Blue and automatically create Zoom meetings when a client books an appointment.

Square

Making things more convenient for your clients makes them love working with you even more, and the feedback that we get from photographers is that their clients love using Light Blue’s online scheduling, contract signing, and invoice payment services. Using an online payment option with any of those services helps you to get paid more quickly, so we’re pleased to be able to add Square to the list of online payment processors that you can use with Light Blue.

Click here to find out how to set up online payment options for your clients.

Pic-Time

Pic-Time offer beautiful client galleries and art galleries with smart sales features, so we’re delighted that you can now link your Pic-Time account to Light Blue. Doing so allows Pic-Time to send client orders to Light Blue’s Inbox, from where you can import them at the click of a button and keep all of your orders together in one place.

GotPhoto

You can now import GotPhoto orders into Light Blue as sales, using the GotPhoto orders export CSV format. You’ll find the “Import GotPhoto Orders CSV” command in the Records menu and Light Blue will offer to set up one of your shoot custom text fields to store the GotPhoto job ID and automatically link all of the orders for a particular GotPhoto job to the correct Light Blue shoot.

Other changes

Data export

• Added an “Export Invoices for Xero” command.
• Improved the Quickbooks invoice export. The columns in the export file are now easier to match up with Quickbooks’ import tool, and credit notes are exported in a separate file.

Inbox, email, and data import

• In the Inbox, you can now select multiple incoming data items and import them as new records in a batch, rather than having to import them individually.
• Added a button to the Inbox that allows you to import incoming emails and link them to a new contact, instead of linking them to a new enquiry and contact.
• Added an option to automatically invoice orders imported from ProSelect or Fundy.
• Added a “Create Contact Record” option to the sale import window.
• Importing incoming data from the Inbox now matches existing company contacts if the company name has been supplied.
• Added a “Delete” button to the incoming data import window.
• When importing contacts, shoots, or sales from CSV, creating a quick query for the imported records is now optional.
• Added a “Set Mailing List Opt-In For Contacts From CSV…” command to the Housekeeping section of the Records menu. It expects a CSV file that contains email addresses in its first column and can be used to set the mailing list opt-in status for all of the contacts that match the supplied email addresses.
• You can now import from CSV files that contain escaped line breaks.
• Added an “Open URL In Browser” button to our HTML editor link dialog, which allows you to test the URL you’ve entered.
• Improved handling of email bounce notifications for emails sent via our servers. The bounce notification now includes more information and appears to be “from” the email address that you sent the original email to, making it easier to work out what went wrong.
• Added a contextual menu command to export a copy of an email attachment.
• Removed the old “Import From Mail” / “Import From Outlook” features that were deprecated in Light Blue 2021.1. Sending emails to your Light Blue account is much more flexible and reliable way of importing emails into Light Blue.
• Fixed a bug where clicking the “No Linked Record” label in a text message didn’t open the record linking dialog.

Online scheduling calendars

• Scheduling calendars usually use the selected shoot or appointment type’s duration, but you can now specify a different duration for specific scheduling calendars.
• Scheduling calendars that create shoots now have an option to override the shoot type’s default location. For example, portrait mini-sessions that take place in different places on different days can now have their own scheduling calendars but share the same shoot type.
• Added options to copy additional available and additional blocking settings to or from other scheduling calendars.
• You can now use a different name to describe a scheduling calendar within Light Blue without changing the title that’s shown to clients.
• The “Send Confirmation Email To All Contacts” option for scheduling calendars now also applies to the rescheduling and cancellation emails.
• A warning is shown if you choose to charge an online booking fee but haven’t set up any online payment methods.
• When moving an appointment booked online to another record, its booking form is now moved to the new record too.
• Fixed a bug that caused the :URLOnly option to not work for URL mail-merge tags to not work properly in online scheduling calendar confirmation emails.

Preferences

• The new “Integrations” section in the Preferences window replaces the old “External Programs” section and clearly presents the various ways that you can link Light Blue to other apps.
• Added a “Warn Before Quitting” option.
• Added a “Go To Template” option in the contextual menu for workflow emails and text messages.
• Added an option to display quote reference numbers in the list of records in Detail view.
• Added an option to not automatically create Purchase records for online card processor fees.
• Added a “Warn If Appointments & Time Off Have No Assigned Resources” option, for businesses where it’s important to assign a member of staff to every appointment. This option highlights the “No Linked Resources” label in the appointment window in red.
• In the workflow visualiser, the “Go To Workflow” option is now at the top of the popup menu that appears when you click the “Change” button.

Miscellaneous

• Improved the speed of the initial data download for accounts that contain lots of data.
• Added a contextual menu command to the Activity panel that allows you to right-click on an appointment to create an email or text message about that appointment. This lets you use a template that includes %EventX% tags and make them refer to the appointment, instead of the parent record.
• The “New Shoot” window now lets you customise the resources assigned to the shoot.
• Added “On Or Before Today” and “After Today” options to date queries.
• When you click a link in a Home screen web view widget, you can hold down the Alt key to open the link in your default browser instead of in the web view widget.
• Added a version of the shoot requests list that can be used in queries, list view, and data exports.
• When using the “Next” and “Previous” buttons to go through items in the Activity panel, moving between incoming and outgoing emails no longer closes and reopens the window.
• When you add an unscheduled payment to an invoice, you’re no longer asked if you want to remove the invoice from your client portal.
• You can now specify custom link text for the %InvoiceURL% mail-merge tag by using %InvoiceURL:Custom link text%, just like all of our other URL mail-merge tags.
• Addresses now use “County” and “Postcode” if you’re using Canadian English.
• Added a Home screen announcement to encourage anyone who’s still using the 32-bit version of our Windows app to update to the 64-bit version. This announcement is only shown if you’re using the 32-bit app on a 64-bit version of Windows, so it shouldn’t be shown to anyone who can’t take advantage of the 64-bit version.
• Improved the performance of clicking the “Insert Mail-Merge Tag” button on long contracts on Windows.
• Printing from an Apple Silicon Mac that doesn’t have Rosetta 2 installed now displays a more helpful error message.
• Fixed a bug that could cause all-day events that only last one day to fail to publish to the macOS Calendar app on macOS Ventura.
• Added a Home screen announcement to warn anyone who’s using our macOS contacts publishing feature not to upgrade to macOS Ventura until Apple fix a bug that can cause errors or a crash with that feature. macOS contacts publishing continues to work well with any other version of macOS.
• Fixed a bug where the “Find Duplicate Contacts” menu command can sometimes show too many contacts based on a company name match.
• Fixed a bug that could cause some time-dependent features (e.g. the “next appointment for shoot/contact” fields) to not take timezones into account.
• Fixed a bug where typing a curly quote into a text message could move the insertion point to the end of the message.
• Fixed a bug where deleting an appointment might not delete its workflow emails.