Group purchasing

Group purchasing turns a shoot’s assigned customers into one purchasing group: when any of them buys photos, those photos unlock for everyone on the shoot. It’s built for the team, class, and family cases — one parent pays for the team photos and every family gets them — and it’s off by default on every shoot.

Use it only when the customers are one party

Everyone assigned to a group-purchasing shoot shares everything anyone buys. Leave it off for weddings and any shoot where the assigned customers aren’t a single group — for separate clients on one shoot, the default per-customer purchasing is what you want.

Turning it on

When creating or editing a shoot, tick Group purchasing (shared photos) in the access-and-pricing section. It’s available on watermarked and flat-fee shoots (a prepaid shoot is already fully unlocked, so there’s nothing to pool).

The group is simply the shoot’s assigned customers (see Managing customers), and it’s evaluated live: a customer you add later immediately sees everything the group has already bought, and shoots you leave alone behave exactly as before.

Your shoots list shows a Group badge on any shoot that has it enabled.

Which plans include it

Group purchasing is included on Professional plans and up. On plans that don’t include it, saving a shoot with the box ticked shows an upgrade prompt.

If you enable it on a shoot and later move to a plan without it, that shoot keeps working — your customers’ shared photos never disappear. You just can’t enable it on new shoots until you’re back on an eligible plan.

How it works for your customers

• Watermarked shoots: photos anyone in the group has bought show as unlocked for every member, marked with a small Group pill (“Unlocked by your group — someone else on this shoot bought this photo”). Everything the group hasn’t bought yet stays locked and available to purchase — the group’s collection is the sum of everyone’s purchases, and nobody is ever charged for a photo the group already owns.
• Flat-fee shoots: one member’s payment unlocks the whole shoot for everyone. As soon as anyone pays, the unlock button disappears for the rest of the group and every member has full access — nobody else can be charged for that shoot.
• Pooled photos count as unlocked everywhere: gallery filters, downloads, folder and gallery ZIPs, and Drive export.

A couple of boundaries worth knowing:

• Public galleries don’t pool. Purchases in a public gallery are always per-buyer.
• Everyone else on the shoot is emailed when a purchase unlocks photos for the group, so nobody has to keep checking the gallery. It’s one email per purchase, not one per photo, and the buyer isn’t emailed about their own purchase. Each message carries a link to stop emails about that shoot.

Money and refunds

Payment attribution doesn’t change: the buyer is the buyer, the order is theirs, and it shows on their receipts as usual. The pool is a convenience for access — not a discount or a split payment.

If you fully refund a group purchase, the shared access it granted is revoked for the rest of the group — and the buyer loses their own copies too, the same as any other full refund. A partial refund withdraws neither.