Light Blue 2025.1 release notes

Light Blue 2025.1 is a major update that adds a major new proposals feature that improves your clients’ booking experience.

Proposals

Light Blue’s new proposals feature lets clients build their own quote by selecting a package and optional add-ons, creating a more interactive booking experience. This makes it easier to upsell additional products and services while giving clients more flexibility in choosing what’s right for them.

By including customisable image, video, and text blocks, proposals also give you the flexibility to showcase your work and sell your services to clients. You can keep a proposal simple or create a booking experience that feels more like a brochure that presents your unique talents.

Proposals streamline the quoting and booking process, allowing you to combine contracts, forms, payments, and scheduling into one seamless workflow. They’re perfect for wedding and commercial photographers and filmmakers, and many other types of photographer and professional creative will appreciate how they can use proposals to showcase their work and sell their services.

Improved HTML editor

The HTML editor that powers our emails and proposals has been updated to a new editor that offers new formatting options and improved performance.

Other changes

Client portal

• You can now increase the maximum width of your client portal pages to 1200px, up from the previous maximum of 800px. To do this, go to the client portal branding section of your account on our website and look for the “Maximum Width” heading. Existing client portal brands default to the old maximum width of 800px to avoid any layout issues that could occur with graphics you designed for that size.
• Added Spanish as a new built-in translation for client portal pages. We now have translations for French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
• Our API now includes ContactTag and ShootTag parameters that allow you to add tags to contacts and shoots as part of an API request.
• You can now add hidden shoot and contact tag fields to forms. Shoots and contacts created or updated by the form will have those tags added to them.
• If a paragraph in a proposal, quote, or sale item begins with a bullet point, the online version of it is now formatted with proper bullet points (i.e. an HTML unordered list).
• If your client portal group box colour options match the form background colour, the padding for group boxes is set to zero.
• Downloading a calendar feed used to block availability in scheduling calendars can now follow redirects.

Home screen

• The “Current Events” widget on the Home screen now has an option to not include time off.
• Added an option to sort the Enquiries widget on the Home screen by enquiry date, instead of the event start date.

Calendar

• When double-clicking an appointment on the Home screen or Calendar, Light Blue now defaults to highlighting that appointment in the linked record’s Activity panel instead of opening the appointment in its own window. You can hold down the Option / Alt key to make it open in a window.

Inbox & Outbox

• You can now block the import of emails and text messages from particular email addresses or phone numbers by using the “Edit Block List…” option from the Housekeeping menu.
• Improved performance of loading large numbers of items into the Inbox and Outbox.
• In the Inbox, the “Mark As Read” button is now available when you select multiple incoming data items.

Shoots

• When you delete a session from a shoot, you are now shown the same scheduled activity tidying window that appears when you cancel a shoot. This makes it easy to cancel any outstanding tasks, messages, etc, that were based on that session’s date.
• In Detail view in the Shoots section, using the records list contextual menu to change a shoot’s status (e.g. confirming an enquiry) now updates the shoot’s icon in the list.
• When exporting records, shoot tags and contact tags are now separated by commas instead of semicolons.

Contacts

• The “Links” section in the Contacts section now shows an “Open URL” button when you hover your mouse over any of the contact’s links.
• When exporting records, shoot tags and contact tags are now separated by commas instead of semicolons.
• Fixed an error when trying to query for contacts using both “Contact” and “Linked Contact” fields.

Sales & Purchases

• Added an optional “Dispatch Date” field to the Sales section. You can show this field by going into the “Finances” section of the Preferences window, going to the “Sales Options” tab, and ticking the “Show Dispatch Date” checkbox.
• Fixed a bug where ampersands in invoice number prefixes were not displayed on the Sale detail panel.
• Improved the tab order within the sale item editing window.
• Fixed a bug where the “Issue Refund” button doesn’t appear in the Sales section when the sale was duplicated from a sale that’s been credited.
• Fixed a crash that could occur when duplicating a Purchase record that has a blank invoice date.

Templates & Mail-Merge

• Templates in the Settings window no longer have their own export buttons: you should use the Records -> Export -> Setup command to export templates.
• You can now export and import email signatures.
• On an email template, the “update the scheduled workflow messages that use this template” link now only appears if there are scheduled emails that use this template and have a different subject or body. i.e. it only appears when clicking it will do something useful.
• You can now use sale mail-merge tags (e.g. %InvoiceURL%) in proposal confirmation emails. This allows you to do things like include a link to the invoice generated by a proposal in the confirmation email.
• Date mail-merge tags can now use the DayName formatting option to give you the day of the week. e.g. %ShootStartDateDayName% for a shoot that begins on 01/01/2025 would return “Wednesday”.

Miscellaneous changes

• Added an option for combobox fields to not show your most used values at the top of the dropdown menu.
• When moving a record to the Trash, you will only need to confim this once. Previously, in some cases you needed to confirm this twice. We’ve now combined those warnings into a single confirmation dialog.
• Added a Housekeeping command to delete attachments from old emails sent from Light Blue. This allows you to reclaim disk space.
• Added an option to not save and sync mail-merge templates used for “printing”, to save disk space.
• Improved performance when working with dates and times by cacheing your current timezone.
• Clicking in the blank space below the list of records in Detail view no longer deselects the current record.
• When you open a Note from the Activity panel, the window opens at the same size that you last opened it at.
• When typing in a date field that expects a future date, the year is now limited to 5 years in the future to resolve an issues where a year in the far future could be autocompleted.
• When a prerelease version of Light Blue has expired, the button to download the latest version now works as expected.
• On macOS, the Window menu now includes the latest macOS window positioning options.