Delivering a shoot (end to end)

This is the whole delivery workflow start to finish, tying together the individual guides. Each step links to a deeper page if you want the details.

If you’re brand new, the quick version is in Getting started — this page is the complete picture.

The flow at a glance

Create a shoot and pick how the customer gets the photos.
Upload your images.
They’re watermarked automatically (unless the shoot is prepaid).
Decide what’s for sale — packages, or individual per-photo pricing.
Add your customer to the shoot.
They preview, buy, and download — and you get paid directly.

1. Create a shoot

A shoot is one batch of images for a customer or session. Go to Shoots, click New shoot, give it a name, and set how the customer gets the photos with the Access & pricing selector. Pick the Date and Time, and a Duration from the list (half-hour steps from 30 minutes to 12 hours; a new shoot starts at 1 hour). Next to it Tobren shows when the shoot ends, and says “the next day” when it runs past midnight. The end shows once you have set a time. Contact details, the address, event details and notes are optional and sit under More details, which opens on its own when any of them is filled in:

Watermarked (default): the customer previews protected images and unlocks the originals after paying — per photo or by package. The normal “sell the photos” path.
Flat fee: the customer previews protected images, then pays one price you set to unlock the whole shoot at once.
Pre-paid / Contract: watermarking is skipped and the customer gets the full-resolution files directly. Use this when they’ve already paid you.

Full details: Customer access tiers.

Prefer to go one step at a time? Click Step by step instead at the top of the form to fill it in over six short steps: the shoot, how customers get the photos, packages, who is on it, delivery, and a final check. Create now makes the shoot from any step once it has a name, and Use the full form switches back without losing anything you typed. Tobren remembers which one you used last.

Delivering to a team, class, or family where one person pays for the group? Tick Group purchasing (shared photos) on the shoot so one member’s purchase unlocks those photos for everyone assigned — see Group purchasing (included on Professional plans and up).

2. Upload your images

Open the shoot’s media panel and click Upload files to add your photos (and videos, on plans that include them). You can keep adding to a shoot over time.

Big event? You can organize the shoot into folders — one per class, per shooter, per part of the day — and upload straight into them. Your customer’s gallery gets matching tabs with per-folder downloads. See Organizing with folders.

iPhone HEIC/HEIF photos are automatically converted to JPEG — on every shoot, whatever its access tier — so your customers always receive files that open everywhere.

3. Watermarking happens automatically

For a watermarked shoot, every image is processed with the watermark you’ve configured for your workspace, in the background — previews appear as each file finishes. You set your watermark once under Settings → Watermark (text or logo, sized and positioned how you like); it applies to every watermarked shoot.

Set it up in Watermarking. (Prepaid shoots skip this step entirely.)

4. Decide what’s for sale

For a watermarked shoot, there are two ways to sell (set per shoot):

Packages (default) — offer a set for one price (for example, “10 edited images”). Attach a package to the shoot and it shows up as a buying option in the gallery. See Packages.
Individual photo pricing — check Individual photo pricing (à la carte) on the shoot, then type a price on each photo in the shoot’s media panel. Customers buy exactly the photos they want and pay the total. A photo with no price isn’t for sale.

You can use packages that cover a set number of photos together with individual photo pricing, but a whole-gallery package (one price for every photo) can’t share a shoot with individual photo pricing. Want to sell the same images both ways — a whole-gallery deal for one client, per-photo pricing for another? Create a second shoot with the same photos, price it the other way, and add the other customer. Details in Customer access tiers.

5. Add your customer

In the shoot’s Assigned customers section, pick an existing customer, or click Add new customer and enter their email address — a brand-new customer is sent an invitation email to sign in. Once assigned, the shoot appears in their gallery — private to them, separate from any public portfolio. They don’t install anything; everything works in a mobile browser. (Customers can also be added and re-invited from the Customers page — see Managing customers.)

A customer you’ve invited who hasn’t accepted yet can be picked too; they’re marked (invited), and you see only their email until they accept. The shoot shows up in their gallery as soon as they accept. Gallery emails wait until then, so once they’ve accepted, press Notify customers to tell them about photos already there.

If you add photos to a shoot after a customer has been assigned, they’re emailed once the upload settles. If you assigned them after uploading, press Notify customers to tell them their gallery is ready — see The gallery emails below.

Want a public, no-login showcase instead of a private shoot? That’s a public gallery — great for portfolios and social links.

6. They preview, buy & download

In their gallery the customer can:

Browse watermarked previews,
Select images or a package,
Pay — the payment goes directly to your own Stripe or Square account, with no cut taken by Tobren, and
Download the full-resolution originals as soon as the payment clears.

Set up the account that collects those payments in Payment setup. On a phone or tablet, the gallery’s Download photos button (for up to 50 photos at a time) opens the device’s native share sheet so the photos can be saved.

Choose what clients can download

Each shoot has a Customer downloads setting. Open Shoots, click the pencil (Edit details) on a shoot — or fill it in on the New shoot form — and find Customer downloads in the shoot details. It has two tick boxes:

Original / print quality — the full-resolution file (or the watermarked preview, until the client has bought it).
Web size — a smaller copy, a 2048-pixel JPEG. Good for sharing online and cheaper to serve.

At least one box has to stay ticked; the form won’t let you untick both. The setting applies to photos only — videos always download as they are.

What the client sees: if both are ticked, the download button on each photo opens a small menu so they can pick a size. If only one is ticked, it’s a plain download button. If you tick Web size but not Original, photos uploaded before you turned it on may not have a web copy yet; the form warns you about this when you choose that combination.

It applies to every access tier, including pre-paid shoots.

Preview as client

To see a shoot the way a client who hasn’t bought anything sees it, go to Shoots and click the eye icon (Preview as client) on the shoot’s row. It’s read-only and uses the same gallery display clients get, so your layout, cover and watermark appear as they will for the client. There are no select, favourite, download or buy controls, and nothing from other clients’ purchases is shown. A bar at the top (which clients don’t see) reminds you it’s a preview. Back to shoot returns you to your shoots list at that shoot, with nothing opened.

Pair it with Gallery look & templates to check a look before you send the gallery.

The gallery emails clients get

When you add photos to a shoot that a client is already assigned to, Tobren emails them. There is no setting to switch on; it’s automatic.

The first email is “your gallery is ready”. The first time a client hears about a shoot, the subject is Your gallery is ready: shoot name, with a View your gallery button.
Later batches say what’s new. After that, the subject is New photos added to shoot name, with a See what’s new button.
One email per batch, not per photo. Nothing is sent while you’re still uploading. A check runs every 15 minutes and sends once the uploads have been quiet for 15 minutes and the photos have finished processing, so expect it roughly 15 to 30 minutes after your last upload. If uploads trickle in all day, it’s sent anyway once the oldest unannounced photo has waited 24 hours.
At most one per client per shoot every 2 hours. A batch that finishes inside that gap waits and goes out afterwards.
Who gets it: customers assigned to the shoot, and only for photos added after they were assigned. Nothing is sent for a shoot nobody is assigned to, or for a public gallery’s backing shoot, or while your workspace is inactive, suspended or cancelled.
Opting out: every one carries an Unsubscribe from updates about this shoot link. It opens a page with one Unsubscribe button, and nothing changes until the customer presses it. It stops mail about that shoot only, and it’s the same per-shoot opt-out the other shoot emails use.

Notify customers yourself

A client you add after uploading isn’t emailed automatically, because nothing on the shoot is new to them. In the shoot’s edit panel, under Assigned customers, the Gallery ready email section has a Notify customers button. It asks first, saying how many clients will be emailed, then sends the “your gallery is ready” email to every client on the shoot who hasn’t been told yet. Clients who were already told, or who unsubscribed from the shoot, aren’t emailed. If one is being emailed at that moment (by the automatic email, or a press a moment ago), the panel says so and the button doesn’t email them again. The button is unavailable until the shoot has at least one ready photo or video, and once everyone on the shoot has been told.

The button and the automatic email share one record, so a client is never told twice: after you press it, the automatic email only covers photos you add later, still at most one every 2 hours.

Once a client has been told, the shoot shows a Notified badge with the date, on the shoots list and in the shoot’s edit panel. Anyone on your team who can add customers to a shoot can press the button.

See what clients favourited

Clients can tap the heart on photos to build a shortlist, and on a hearted photo they can Add a note for you (for example “this one, but can you crop it”). You see all of it on the shoot:

In Shoots, click the camera icon (Media) on the shoot.
At the top of the media panel, Client favourites shows the total and how many clients made them, grouped by client. Notes appear right beside the photo they belong to. A photo picked by more than one client is marked with a count, and the panel says how many photos more than one client picked.
Click Show only favourited to filter the grid to hearted photos. Click Export CSV to download the list.

Favourites a visitor left on a public gallery that shares this shoot are marked Public gallery, because they usually come from someone who isn’t assigned to the shoot. Crew members whose role has no client-contact access see which photos were picked but not who picked them.

Favourites don’t buy anything, and Tobren doesn’t send you a notification when a client hearts a photo.

Download a whole shoot as a ZIP

In the same media panel, Download ZIP gives you the shoot’s original files in one archive, instead of downloading each photo one at a time. If a shoot is too big for one archive, you’re offered its folders; pick one and the button becomes Download folder ZIP, with Whole shoot to go back. Everyone on your team gets the original files, in the ZIP and when downloading one photo, whether the shoot is watermarked, flat-fee or pre-paid: the watermark is only what your clients see before they pay. Crew can only download shoots they’re assigned to. If your workspace has used up its download allowance for the month, the ZIP won’t start and the panel says so.

After delivery

You get paid into your own payment account — Tobren is never in the middle of your client revenue.
Your Tobren bill is separate: your subscription plus any storage/egress overage from hosting and downloads. See Pricing & overages.
Galleries stay available to customers; how long after cancellation is covered in the Account & billing FAQ.
A new shoot comes offline 14 days after you create it unless you say otherwise. Set your workspace default once — including never expire — in Gallery expiry & retention.

What’s next

Brand the experience → Branding your workspace
Deliver from your own domain → Custom domains
Bring in your staff → Team members & roles