Light Blue 2026.1 release notes

Light Blue 2026.1 is a major update that adds a public version of proposals, a new ProSelect integration, and a variety of improvements to the way you use Light Blue every day.

Public Proposals

Public proposals allow you to use your proposal templates to accept bookings or enquiries from cold leads, rather than publishing a proposal from a shoot that’s already in Light Blue.

Setting up a public proposal is really simple: go to the new “Public Proposals” tab in your proposal template, tell Light Blue what type of shoot it will create, and then click the button to copy a link to your public proposal or generate code that you can embed in your own website.

Public proposals allow you to use all of the features of normal proposals, including offering your clients a choice of packages, optional add-ons, image and text blocks that allow you to showcase your products and services, conditional display options, scheduling calendars, booking forms, contracts, and booking fees.

ProSelect integration

Light Blue now detects whether ProSelect is installed on the same computer. If it is, buttons that allow you to create a ProSelect album, update an existing ProSelect album, or import orders from ProSelect appear in the Shoots section.

Creating or updating a ProSelect album from a shoot allows you to automatically populate the album with the shoot’s linked contacts’ information. If you’ve linked a folder of pictures to the shoot, you can also import those into the ProSelect album at the same time.

Using the button to import ProSelect orders will automatically create sales linked to the shoot.

Other changes

Templates and Preferences

• You can now organise your templates into folders. Many photographers make extensive use of templates and have created a lot of them, so being able to group them together makes it easier to select the perfect template quickly.
• We’ve moved some sections in the Preferences window from the “Business Setup” group to the “Templates” group because they’re used more like templates and benefit from the new template folders feature. Payment schedules, scheduling calendars, and workflows are now part of the templates group.
• We’ve added a quick search tool to the toolbar in the Preferences window. You can use this to search for matching items in the current section, e.g. searching for a specific template in the “Email Templates” section.

Quick query folders

You can now group and sort the quick queries list into folders. To do this, click the “Customise Quick Queries” button at the end of the quick queries list, then select a query and click the “Select Folder” button to either create a new folder or move it into an existing folder. You can reorder queries within your custom folders and also reorder your custom folders. If you have any quick queries that aren’t in one of your custom folders, they’ll be grouped together in their default sort order in an “Other Queries” folder.

List view toolbar & other reporting features

We’ve added a toolbar of helpful buttons at the top of List View, to make its most important customisation and reporting options more accessible.

In the Charts section, we’ve:

• Added an “Appointments” series option and “Bar Chart (by Appointment Type)” option to charts.
• Added “Net Income”, “Net Expenditure”, “Net Profit”, and “Net Income, Expenditure, Profit” series to charts. These options are available if you’ve set “Prices Include Tax” and have a default tax rate set.

Proposals

• When a proposal only has one package, it’s now automatically selected.
• Added a %ProposalExpiryDateTime% mail-merge tag.
• Extending proposal expiry date now un-expires any linked contract.
• When you duplicate a proposal that’s not cancelled, expired, or complete, Light Blue now offers to cancel the original proposal after you’ve duplicated it.
• Fixed a database error that would occur when trying to create a blank email from a proposal, instead of using an email template.
• Added translations for payment schedule “£x due y days/weeks/months before/after shoot/invoice date” in proposals.
• Fixed a bug where the “Save As New Product” command doesn’t work within proposal optional add-ons block.

Other client portal features

• Added an option to view available time slots in scheduling calendars in a different timezone.
• Online forms now automatically capitalise postcodes.
• Completing a proposal or contract no longer displays a confirmation dialogue: these could interfere with the scroll position for public proposals or scheduling calendars embedded in an iFrame.
• When doing a mail-merge for a form or proposal linked to a wedding, the %ContactFirstName%, %ContactLastName%, and %ContactFullName% mail-merge tags now use both partners’ names.
• Corrected some USA localisations that appear on client portal pages.
• Shoot forms and contracts now send an email to the client if the “Automatically CC Client Portal Emails To Yourself” preference is turned off.
• Pressing the Enter/Return key no longer submits a form, clients will have to click the submit button.
• The Turnstile bot protection widget is now always shown on contact forms, rather than only being shown if it decides it needs to challenge the user to prove that they’re human. We’ve made this change due to a small number of reports of clients not being able to submit forms because they couldn’t see the Turnstile widget.

Miscellaneous

• Increased system requirements: Light Blue now requires macOS 11 (Big Sur), Windows 11, or Windows 10 (build 1903 or later).
• The “Save Query” button in the query window now lets you pick an existing saved query to update, or create a new saved query.
• Added “Copy X To Clipboard” commands to the contact method options menu, which allows you to copy an email address, phone number, or URL without clicking into the field.
• Added mailing list opt-in fields to the contact import dialog.
• Rewrote the import dialog to enable a live progress bar to be displayed during the import process.
• You can now resize the sale and quote item dialog windows.
• In the shoot “Linked Records” panel, when creating email from template to multiple recipients you’re now offered a choice between creating a single email to the selected contacts, or separate emails to each recipient.
• The “Send” button in the compose email window is no longer a default button (i.e. it won’t be triggered by the Return or Enter key if you accidentally press it while outside of the email body field).
• The option to create emails in Outlook or Mail is now deprecated: we recommend creating emails in Light Blue because that gives you access to all of our email-related features.
• Removed the email import filter options from the Preferences window, because importing from the Mail app was removed in a previous release.
• We’ve made some behind-the-scenes changes that eliminate rare bugs that could occur if linked items somehow ended up with an incorrect sort order.
• “Add To Found Set” commands now ask you to confirm the command by typing the number of affected records if it will affect 50 or more records.
• Added “Remove From Found Set -> Task” to the Records menu, allowing you to remove all incomplete tasks that have a particular description.
• The GotPhoto order import is now better at finding a matching contact from your database so that it can link the sale to the right contact record.
• The GotPhoto order import now uses your “Prices Include Tax” preference, instead of trying to work out whether to use it based on the contents of the GotPhoto orders file.
• Fixed a bug that prevented clicking on the horizontal scrollbar in List View.
• Fixed a bug where using the “Add To Found Set -> Task” command could create a blank task in addition to the tasks that you intended to add.
• Fixed a bug where the appointment confirmation workflow isn’t added when the appointment’s added via the calendar view
• Fixed a bug where clearing the contents of the “Contact Form Submitted Email” tab on a form template can fail to save your changes.
• Fixed a bug where the next task shown in lists could fail to match that shown in the Activity tab when there are multiple incomplete tasks due on the same date.
• Fixed a bug where duplicating a quote that has a fixed amount booking fee could duplicate the booking fee’s tax incorrectly.
• Fixed an issue where having more than a few recipients for an email would cause its subject line to not be visible in the Activity panel.
• Fixed an issue with scheduling calendars embedded in an iFrame, where clicking the “Add to Google Calendar” button on the booking confirmation page would result in an error. Clicking this button now opens Google Calendar in a new tab to avoid this issue.