🎥 Custom fields

Within Light Blue, there are already lots of helpful places to store relevant information about your shoots and contacts. However, every photography business is different, and has its own needs. We cater for those different needs by allowing you to create your own fields in Light Blue’s shoots and contacts sections.

Add your own custom fields to Contact and Shoot records

To create your own custom fields, first you must go to the Custom Fields preferences pane, where you’ll see options to add custom fields for contact records, and shoot records lower down.

Types of fields

There are several different types of custom fields that you can add.

Single line and paragraph fields allow you to record different amounts of text in a field.

A combobox gives you the option to add some new text, or pick a value that’s been entered in that field in another record, much like the other comboboxes that appear elsewhere in Light Blue, such as the enquiry source field. This is useful if you want to enter one of a few standard options in this field.

Checkboxes are helpful for recording simple yes or no choices.

Amount fields allow you to record a price or total.

Date fields are useful for recording date information that you feel is best kept in the shoot or contact record.

Displaying custom fields in their own tab

You may find that you end up adding a lot of custom fields, which can take up a lot of space in shoot or contact records. To free up space, we’ve made it possible for you to move the custom fields into their own tab in the shoot or contact record, which you can do by checking this checkbox. You’ll now see that the main view of this shoot record is a lot less cluttered, and all of my custom fields are neatly stored in this tab.

Print options

Returning to the Custom Fields preferences pane, you’ll see that we’ve got a few more options to choose from next to each field.

Firstly, when the print checkbox is checked, the contents of that field will be included in the print out when you print that shoot or contact record. Here’s a shoot record that I’ve printed, and you can see that these custom fields have been included in the print out, too.

When printing quotes, invoices & receipts that are linked to that shoot or contact record, you can also choose to print the contents of that custom field too. Here’s a sale record that’s linked to a shoot, which has information in one of my custom fields. When I print it out, you’ll see that information is included, because I’d checked the checkbox in my Custom Fields preferences pane.

Forms

If you’re using Light Blue’s forms to gather information from your customers about their shoot, you can include your custom field in those forms. We’ve got another tutorial that shows you how to do that in more detail.

Mail-merge tags

When sending emails, texts & documents to your customers, Light Blue’s mail-merge tags allow you to populate those messages with information from the relevant records, such as your client’s name or the date of the shoot. You can also populate those messages with information from your custom fields, too.

We have a handy reference guide showing how to include custom field information in your mail merges. There are also tutorials for sending emails, texts and documents, too.