🎥 Using calendar feeds to share your Light Blue events

Introduction

Calendar feeds are a great way of viewing events from Light Blue in another calendar app because they’re automatically created from the data on our servers. So, no matter where you add or edit information about your sessions and appointments – on your Mac, PC, or in our mobile app – the feed will update to reflect the changes you make. Our calendar feeds are updated very quickly once you’ve synced a change from Light Blue to your account.

One thing to note is that you can have several different feeds, e.g. one for your enquiries, one for your confirmed shoots, one for your appointments and so on. You can also have different feeds for events linked to different staff, rooms and equipment, which is helpful for when your staff want to view just their own events.

Creating a calendar feed

Calendar feeds are set up in the “Calendar Feeds” tab of the “Integrations” section of the Preferences window. Clicking the “Copy Feed URL” button shows you the available options for a calendar feed:

• First of all, you can choose which types of events from Light Blue to include.
• Next, you can choose which resources you want to include. This is how you have different feeds for different members of staff.
• You can include all of your shoot types, or filter the calendar feed to only include particular shoot types.
• The “Detail Level” option allows you to choose how much information to include in the calendar feed. e.g. you might use “Full Details” if you’re subscribing to it in your own calendar, but use the “Show Only That I’m Busy” option for a calendar feed that you use to show someone when you’re available for freelance work.
• You only need to use the “Time Zone” setting if you’re wanting to subscribe to your calendar feed in Google Calendar, or give it to someone who works in a different timezone.

When you’ve selected the options you want, click the “Done” button. That’ll copy this feed’s unique URL to the clipboard, and you can then subscribe to it in your calendar application.

Subscribing to a calendar feed in popular apps

macOS Calendars app

If you’re using a Mac and want to subscribe to your Light Blue calendar feed in your own Calendar app, there’s a handy shortcut – just click the “Subscribe in iCal” button. That will show the same setup dialog as clicking the “Copy Feed URL” button, and will then perform the relevant actions to subscribe for you in the Calendar app.

In the Calendar app, you can choose how often it refreshes your calendar feed. We recommend using the “every fifteen minutes” option.

If you set the location of your calendar feed subscription to iCloud, the calendar feed will be available on all of the devices that you use your iCloud account on.

Outlook for Windows

In the Calendar view, right-click on the “My Calendars” link, and add a calendar, from Internet. Paste in the URL of your calendar feed and click OK. After another confirmation dialog, Outlook downloads the information and subscribes to the calendar.

Google Calendar

Although Google lets you subscribe to calendar feeds, it can take a while to update them when they change, sometimes hours or days. It’s a known Google problem, but they haven’t seemed inclined to fix it for the past several years. Publishing directly to Google Calendar might be a better option for you, and that’s described in this knowledgebase article.

To subscribe to a calendar feed in Google Calendar, click the popup arrow next to ‘Other calendars’, then ‘Add by URL’. Paste in the URL of your calendar feed.