My Pixieset Love-Hate Relationship

Pixieset has been on a crusade for the past few years, and it came about before AI became popular, but it's now accelerating. So Pixieset is one of the most popular image gallery hosting services out there. It's one of the old school platforms. There are others of course, but today I just wanna talk about Pixieset for wedding photographers and some of the pros and cons of Pixieset the way I see it and just about their strategy in general.

They've shifted from being pretty much a gallery delivery tool into building What you could call an all-in-one ecosystem, designed to lock photographers in for good. I would assume that's what they wanna do. Historically, a photographer had to stitch together all sorts of digital software and systems, a sort of patchwork of different subscriptions to run their business.

But Pixieset looked at that fractured workflow I guess and systematically built or even acquired tools to replace different pieces of it. And if you look at their core pillars now, they've created a direct competitor for almost every major software category in the industry. You've got the obvious competitors like ShootProof or SmugMug, but now they've got a website builder as well.

You can put your portfolio in there. It's got your blog builder connected, and of course that makes it a direct competitor to WordPress or Squarespace they've also got a Studio Manager, which is their name for their full CRM system, and that handles booking calendars, contracts.

You've got, intake forms and invoicing importantly. So they've even got that now in Pixieset in the Studio Manager. And just when you thought they couldn't do enough, along comes the imaginatively named photo editor, which of course is a rival to none other than Lightroom and Capture One, and it's built right into the ecosystem.

And it does culling, and you can apply unified edits and looks before publishing So what does Pixieset not have now for a wedding photographer more so than what it does have? But interestingly, with Pixieset, I've always found it, really reliable

it's always delivered for me. It's never let me down in the 10 or 11 years that I've used it. But I've shied away from using the other parts of the system, and I do feel, if I'm being completely honest, that the progress in these other areas has caused the hosting and delivery components not to suffer, but, perhaps not to get as much love as they might have deserved.

I mean, if you look at the original Pixieset UI and UX from way back, it's, it hasn't really changed much. With all the developments of CSS and browsers you think it might have just improved a little bit, whether that was in terms of speed of displaying photos or just, other little features they might have had.

But it, but it hasn't. It's stayed r- pretty much the same. But what they have done is they've built in all these other areas of the software that I mentioned to, to make it an all-in-one ecosystem, which I think is fascinating. But I just got some notes here about some of the things that kind of frustrate me a little bit about, Pixieset and the photo delivery gallery hosting service .

I just wanted to get them off my chest it's one of the perks of being a podcaster. You can vent about things, and these are things that have annoyed me over the years, and I just... When I look at it now, and because I'm app developer myself, 1pm.app, I just, look at that and go, "Why can't they do that?

Why wouldn't they do that? Is it because they don't want to complicate the software?" But surely if they did that, every time I delivered a gallery, it would save me seconds, and all those seconds add up. So, not saying they're doing a bad job, and I've got no intention of moving away from Pixieset anytime soon.

But, here's just a few things. This is one thing which, I'll give it to them, it, is challenging to get right. But the password option, so I'm always putting a password on my galleries. I'm sure you all do as well, for, every client, because you never know which client wants that password or needs that password and you didn't realize.

So I'm assuming that everyone has, if they're using Pixieset, their password to default. But it's this, 10-character, really difficult to read password. Imagine trying to type that on a mobile phone if you weren't able to copy and paste it, or to pass it to a friend who's next to you or whatever. They could use passphrases there.

I guess they could make it a little bit easier for people to remember the password. The password itself is an impediment to viewing the gallery. And let's think about, the types of situations my clients are in. So I shoot weddings, and I shoot corporate events, and pretty much every corporate event, you've always got someone that is working late at night just waiting for those sneak peek photos to come through, and quite often I'm able to deliver them within a few hours after the event because I live close to the city

so I get back, I import them, and I try to deliver corporate event photos quickly, I try to get them through within a few hours after the end of the event. And I'm just imagining, these poor people, the marketing people, whoever it is who's hired me, at home or still at work, just waiting for these photos to come through so they can post them on social, and they get an email from Pixieset, and they've got to click on it, and oh no, there's another password they've got to enter.

You might say, " there has to be a password because, it's confidential, all these photos." Yes, there does have to be a way to authenticate the person viewing the gallery, but I personally don't see why they couldn't have a tokenized link so that, the URL would consist of random characters of, maybe 64 characters or something.

So it's impossible to guess. It's the way that, password resets work commonly so once you've clicked on that, that would open up the gallery and gain access to it.

You'd be able to download and share the photos immediately. Now, just that alone is gonna save probably, 20 seconds for every person who's ever viewed a Pixieset gallery, and that's quite a few people. So if you think of it like that, that's a lot of time saved for anyone who's getting a Pixieset gallery.

I also get, complaints from clients who can't, open the gallery 'cause they haven't seen the password. They haven't seen the password, which is at the bottom of the email. But it's not really very prominently displayed. So it's there, but it's pretty easy to miss, especially when you've got a template in there with lots of text.

Just being able to click on a link and have the client just fly straight into the gallery, still authenticated, would be amazing, and I just don't know why they haven't done that yet. But that would be probably at the top of my list of suggestions for Pixieset that would make my life easier and the life of my clients a lot easier.

Another thing is email templates.

If you're not using the email templates feature of Pixieset, then you definitely should. It's buried in the settings, so you might not have seen it. But, I have, a set of templates that I send out. The great thing is that you can mark them up with, bold and put in links in there, so you can make them look pretty, they're just absolutely invaluable.

But the one thing you can't do is put, "Hi, gallery name." Now, if you're a wedding photographer, you would most likely just call your gallery, Bob and Sue. Bob ampersand Sue. And to be able to put a field in there that would insert the gallery name, just even just one field, the gallery name, would be magic.

Then you could just put, "Hi, Bob and Sue," using a field, and it would populate that. So every time I deliver a gallery, I've got to go to the top, and I've got to put a line in, and I've got to put a line return in, and I've got to write, "Hi," and then I've got to remember the name of the client, which I know is terrible that I would forget the name of the client I've just shot a few hours before.

It is possible to make mistakes in that department, especially when you're hurrying at nighttime and trying to get photos out. So that would reduce mistakes as well. So that would be really valuable for me to be able to do that. And then it got me thinking, I looked at the structure of a gallery in Pixieset, and I noticed that actually there's not even a first name or, a contact name associated with a gallery.

And then I digged a little deeper, and I noticed that under Quick Edit, when you edit the gallery, there's actually an Advanced section, and in there you can associate a gallery with a contact. But that association doesn't seem to flow through to using that as a main contact when you're sharing the gallery, and it doesn't flow through to being able to insert a field which would then use that contact name in the email template, which I think it should.

So it's not much help in those two areas.

this is the Wiser Wedding Photography Podcast. I'm Chris Jack. I've shot over 1000 weddings and corporate events in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia since 2015, and I'm the founder of 1PM.app. 1PM, that's the number one PM, 1PM.app, is event management software for event professionals like wedding photographers, caterers, celebrants, et cetera.

Now, the other thing is when you're creating a gallery in Pixieset, event date, it doesn't default to today's date.

You gotta click on the calendar drop down. It does highlight today's date, which is great, otherwise that would really be bad. But, how about a today and a yesterday button? Like the two most common times that you're gonna be delivering the gallery is, in terms of the sneak peek, and that's when you normally create the gallery, it's gonna be today or it's gonna be like yesterday effectively, 'cause it's one day after.

So just a button to go, "Oh, it was today," or, "It was yesterday," and to populate that date would be fantastic. And I've made mistakes, again, maybe late at night, maybe after a few glasses of wine, where I've clicked the wrong date and, they've got the wrong date on their gallery. So that would eliminate that and just make it a little bit quicker to send through a gallery.

I'm sure it's happened to you if you use Pixieset, and it may have happened to you with other gallery hosting providers. And that is when you share the gallery with a client, it sends an email to them directly.

Now, to Pixieset's credit, if the email doesn't deliver for whatever reason, then I've actually received an email pretty soon after, like within half an hour or so, from Pixieset saying that email was undeliverable for whatever reason, normally because the server has bounced it. So that means that Pixieset has web hooks going on in the background that are tracing the emails, and they're understanding through a ping back to their server that the email wasn't delivered, which is great because not all software does that.

So Pixieset has that information, and it passes it on to you immediately with an email. So fantastic feature. But that's not the problem. The biggest problem is actually that in some cases, and it's the minority of cases, but based on the number of bookings I get each year, which, let's say it's 75 or 80, I would say round about two of those, don't receive that email.

It goes to their spam folder, and I think the reason is because there's an image that goes along with that email. Normally, it's like a cover image, and as we all know, when you start sending images in emails, that's when things get put in the spam folder, and that's why it's not a good idea to include an image in your email signature.

It's just not a good idea 'cause it does impact on deliverability overall. But Pixieset does it, and it does look great when they first open the email and they see that, pretty cover pic, and it's that first impression. But you know what? I would, take deliverability any day over a pretty first email because I've had several...

cases a year, and it's more often corporate clients because they've got, the email blocking or the email filters that are a little bit tougher with emails, whereas, people's personal email doesn't tend to have that.

So I don't think I've ever had it with a wedding client, but I've had it multiple times with corporates, often with government, where they just don't receive the email. And then what happens is, 'cause I've already promised them the gallery that night or maybe the next morning- And what happens is they will delay and they'll delay, and then maybe in the afternoon they'll say, "Hey, Chris, thanks for shooting last night.

That was great, but where is the sneak peek?" And I'm like, "I sent that." And luckily in Pixieset, you can go in there, you can view the email history, and it's got a timestamp, and do a screenshot of that and I send it through and say, "I'm so sorry.

I did send it. Here's the timestamp. It must be in your spam folder or it must have been blocked by your, email software or filter ." And you know what? What I've found from that is indignation from clients. I don't think I've ever had a client say, "Oh, sorry, you know, my fault,"

It just peeves them off because they've missed their deadline. Now, I reckon that could be mitigated substantially by Pixieset not including an image, not including a cover image, when they send the gallery preview through, when you publish the gallery.

And yes, I did check Pixieset, and I did check to see whether you could switch off the cover image for a gallery. You can in the presets, and I thought that would be the solution. So I switched that off. I set it to none. I then created a new collection associated with that, collection category, which is called Wedding.

But what it does is it puts in an image, a blank image, basically. So it still inserts an image. So unfortunately, that will not solve the problem. So even if you choose no cover image, you're still gonna get an image inserted into the gallery preview that gets sent when it's published

Now, one more thing about Pixieset, when you upload photos to the gallery, wouldn't it be great if Pixieset renamed them to, whatever defaults you had? If you've looked in Lightroom or Capture One and seen how complex renaming can get, I accept that it can get a little bit out of control.

And once you think you've provided, the right kind of syntax for naming that's gonna satisfy all your clients, along comes another one and says, "Yeah, but I wanna do this, and I wanna do a counter, and I wanna do a unique code," or, "I wanna do something completely different in terms of the naming."

But wouldn't it be great if you knew that every single photo you uploaded to Pixieset had the same naming, and you didn't have to worry about how it was exported?

Let's say every year, two, three, four times, I accidentally export the photos with the wrong naming, and then I upload them to L-Lightroom, and then, on one occasion, the client complained and got someone else's name, fair enough. Then I've gotta go through and do the export and do the upload all over again.

It causes anxiety for me. I've gotta check every time I export photos. I've gotta make sure they're named correctly. As we know, it's really easy to export from Capture One, for example, that will use the previous defaults, and it's a really easy mistake to make. So, the ability for Pixieset to take whatever name you've provided, but actually override that and use default naming would be amazing.

Now, in terms of integrations, Pixieset does offer some integrations, but when you look at it, and let me just explain what integration is typically for a SaaS product, like a software as a service product like Pixieset, an integration is where they provide a connection to an external third party, normally through what's called an API, which connects to that service.

They shake hands, a password's provided to get access to it. And that would mean that, say, Pixieset could talk to something else like QuickBooks or Xero or Zapier. But it doesn't. It doesn't offer many integrations at all at both ends. So it doesn't have its own API.

You can't log into Pixieset programmatically, is another way of putting it, and get data out or get photos out. That means that, other app providers can't integrate with Pixieset, and you can't, for example, sync your invoices from Pixieset to Xero.

I use Xero, and my app, 1pm.app, it syncs with Xero. It's a one-way sync at the moment for invoices, so it'll send the invoice to Xero so that I don't have to. And, that's what my accountant uses here in Australia. Xero's not quite so popular, in the US. Obviously, it'd be QuickBooks mainly is the most popular platform there.

My app supports Xero, and it works great. It means another step is avoided. But you can't do that with Pixieset. So if you create an invoice , in Pixieset through the invoicing, you can't then connect that to your accounting system. So it's frustrating, and, they've obviously made a conscious decision to do that over time.

I can understand why they have, and I guess they've proven that they're capable of doing that because they have built this whole ecosystem around Pixieset now. It'll be interesting to see what is next for Pixieset.

Just from my perspective here in Australia. I won't spend too much time on this 'cause most listeners aren't in Australia, but, they only support, one lab here in Australia

one thing I will say about Pixieset is their pricing is pretty fair and reasonable. They haven't hiked up their prices like some of their competitors have. I think I understand that HoneyBook and also SmugMug have seen a little bit of criticism for, increasing their prices, in some cases quite substantially.

So Pixieset's managed to maintain their pricing , I applaud them for that. I think they understand their market so well. They understand who their customers are , just look at their name it's got a sort of casual personal vibe about it.

Certainly fits for weddings, but I always just feel that little bit embarrassed saying, "Yeah, I use Pixieset," you know? It's a little bit up there with the fairies , but, that's what it's called. It works, that's what I use and what I would recommend other people use.