Team members & roles

Bring your staff into your workspace so they can help manage shoots and customers. This page covers how to invite people, what each role can do, and how many team seats your plan includes.

You’ll find this under Team in your admin sidebar. Only workspace admins see the Team page.

Roles

There are five staff roles, from least access to most:

Role	Can do	Cannot do
Read-only	See customers, shoots and galleries	Change anything
Contractor	Work the shoots they’re put on	Manage the team, touch billing, or see shoots they aren’t assigned to
Team member	View and work with customers and shoots	Invite or remove members, or change studio settings and billing
Operations manager	Everything a Team member can, always sees every shoot, and manages the team on the Team page	Change, invite, disable or remove an Admin; billing, plan changes, payment setup, and studio settings
Admin	Everything — invite and remove team members, change studio settings, billing, branding, and manage all shoots and customers	—

Use Team member for staff who handle day-to-day delivery work, Operations Manager for whoever runs the schedule without owning the finances, and keep Admin for the people who run the business and its billing.

Who sees which shoots

Separately from the role, each person is set to see either All shoots or Only shoots they’re assigned to. The two settings are independent: the role decides what someone can do, this decides which shoots they can see at all.

Contractor is always Only shoots they’re assigned to — that’s the point of the role, and it isn’t a default you can widen; the app refuses the change. It’s fixed the other way for four of the five roles too: Admin, Operations manager and Read-only always see every shoot. Only Team Member is a role where you choose which of the two settings applies.

Someone limited to their own assignments sees only those shoots everywhere: the shoot list, the calendar, search, and their galleries. They can reach a shoot only for a set number of days before and after it — 30 each way unless you change it under Settings → Security → Assignment access window.

Your customers are not team members — they’re a separate kind of account that only sees their own galleries. Adding, editing, and removing customers is covered in Managing customers; inviting a customer to a specific shoot is in Delivering a shoot.

To make one of your customers a team member, remove them as a customer first, then invite their email from the Team page. They get an ordinary invitation and join the team only once they accept it.

Inviting a team member

1. Go to Team and click Invite member.
2. Enter their email and choose a role — any of the five: Read-only, Contractor, Team member, Operations manager or Admin. (An Operations Manager can invite every role except Admin.)
3. Click Send invite. We email them; the invite link is only ever sent to their inbox, never shown to you.

If the address has no Tobren account yet, the email carries an invite link that is valid for 72 hours. If it already has one (in Tobren Deliver or Tobren Operations), the email tells them to sign in the way they already do. There’s no code to enter — the invitation is matched to whichever account is signed in when the link is opened, by its verified email address:

• Already signed in as the invited address? One button — Accept invitation — and they’re in.
• Already have a Tobren account for that address? They sign in with it — Google, Apple, or email and password — and no new password is needed.
• No account yet for that address? They sign in with Google or Apple, or choose “Prefer a password? Create one instead”. Either way, the account that comes back is immediately offered the invitation to accept.
• Signed in as a different account? The page shows both addresses side by side and offers to sign out, so they can sign back in as the one the invitation is for.
• Your workspace sends email through its own SMTP server? (see Custom sender email) The email just arrives from your address instead of Tobren’s — accepting it works exactly the same way.

If an invite expires before it’s accepted, use Resend invite on their row in the team list.

While an invite is outstanding, the member shows as Invite pending in your team list (or Invite expired once its link has lapsed); once they accept, they become Active.

Managing the team

From the Team page you can:

• Change a role — switch a member to any of the five roles from the dropdown on their row.
• Resend an invite that hasn’t been accepted yet, or withdraw it.
• Remove a member — revokes their access to the workspace.

On a phone, each member shows as a card with their role, shoot access, status and actions, so everything above is reachable on a small screen too.

For your own safety, you can’t change your own role or remove yourself from the Team page — another admin has to do that. A workspace always keeps at least one admin: the app refuses a change that would leave it with none.

To leave a workspace yourself, use Leave this workspace on your Privacy & data page.

The workspace owner

One admin is the workspace owner, marked Owner in the team list. The owner gets the workspace’s billing and account email. The owner can’t be demoted, disabled or removed, and can’t leave the workspace — until they hand ownership on.

To hand it on, the owner clicks Transfer ownership on the Team page and picks another active admin. The previous owner stays an admin. Only the current owner sees this button.

Staff profile and working hours

On a member’s row in the team list, click Profile and availability. It opens a window with three tabs.

Profile. Keep a record of the person: Name, Phone, Secondary email, address, Time zone (or “Same as the studio”), and a photo you can add with Upload photo (PNG, JPEG or WebP). Click Save profile. Their sign-in email is shown but can’t be edited here; only they can change it, from their own account page. The top of this tab also lets you Disable a member without removing them and give them an End date. A disabled member can’t sign in, and Enable restores them with their record and shoot history intact. (The owner can’t be disabled or given an end date.)

Availability. Set Usual working hours for each weekday: use the plus button beside a day to add a time range, then Save hours. It is a guide, not a rule: scheduling someone outside these hours still works, and just shows a warning. Below that, add time off with a start, an end and an optional reason, so the same warning appears for those dates.

Shoots. The shoots the person is on, and ones they could be added to. Adding them here puts them on the shoot as its lead.

Working in more than one workspace

If your email belongs to more than one workspace, you choose one when you sign in. The picker lists each workspace with your role in it. Later, use Switch workspace at the bottom of the sidebar to move to another one. The button only appears if you belong to more than one.

When someone has invited you to a workspace, an Invites entry with a count appears in the same place, for as long as an invitation is waiting for the address you signed in with. Open it and click Accept to join in one click. Expired invitations are marked, and you’ll need to ask the workspace to send a new one.

An invite link that has expired or been replaced by a newer invite opens a page that says so, with a button to send a fresh link to the invited address. If the page can’t reach Tobren at all, it says that instead and offers Try again.

Putting people on a shoot

Open a shoot and add crew to it, giving each person a role on that job — lead, second shooter, assistant or editor. That’s separate from their workspace role above: someone can be a Team member in the workspace and the lead on one particular shoot.

They get an email as soon as you add them, with the shoot attached as a calendar file. Opening the attachment adds it to their calendar straight away — Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and Outlook all recognise it. They’re emailed again if you take them off a shoot.

If the shoot has no date yet, nobody is emailed when you add them; the email goes out once you set the date. Crew already on a shoot are also emailed when its date or time changes.

Changing someone’s role on a shoot they’re already on doesn’t email them again; only joining and leaving do. Re-saving a shoot’s crew without changing anyone sends nothing.

If someone would rather not hear about a particular shoot, the email carries a link to stop messages about that one shoot without affecting anything else.

Seat limits per plan

Each plan includes a set number of team seats. The workspace admin counts as one seat — and so does anyone with the Contractor, Team member or Operations Manager role. Read-only members don’t consume a seat, on any plan.

Plan	Team members included
Free	1 (admin only)
Starter	1 (admin only)
Professional	5
Studio	15
Enterprise	Unlimited

Team seats are a hard limit — when you reach your plan’s cap you’ll be prompted to upgrade before you can invite another member, move a Read-only member to a role that takes a seat, or turn a disabled member back on. Removing or disabling a member frees a seat. You can always invite Read-only members, even when every seat is taken.

An invitation holds its seat from the moment you send it, so you can’t invite more people than you have free seats. The seat is freed again when you withdraw the invitation, or when its 72-hour invite link expires unused. (An invitation to someone who already has a Tobren account has no link to expire, so it holds its seat until it is accepted or withdrawn.) If your workspace fills up before someone accepts (because your plan’s seat count went down, for example), their acceptance is refused with a message saying there is no free seat. Their invitation stays open, and they can accept it once you free a seat or upgrade.

To change the role of someone already on your team, use their role on the Team page. Inviting their email again with a different role is refused. See Pricing & overages for the full plan comparison.

If your team ends up over the limit

This can happen if a plan’s seat count is lowered, if you downgrade to a smaller plan while you have more staff than it includes, or if Tobren support adds or restores a member for you past your plan’s seats at your request. Either way:

• Nobody is removed. Every existing team member keeps working and can keep signing in, exactly as before.
• The only thing that’s blocked is inviting someone new — you can’t add another member until you’re back under the limit, by removing someone or upgrading.

Nothing is ever deleted or deactivated to bring a workspace back under a limit — the limit only ever stops you from adding more.

What’s next

• Require staff to use two-factor sign-in → Account security & MFA
• Walk a shoot from upload to download → Delivering a shoot