Why I Switched to Pixieset

What is Pixieset?

Pixieset is an online gallery delivery service for photographers where you can digitally send entire galleries of images to your clients—no more DVDs or USBs!

Galleries can be stored in your Pixieset account for as long as you want and up to whatever amount of storage you’ve purchased. Once you’ve sent a Pixieset link to your clients, they can view, download, and purchase print copies of their images in a storefront you control. They can access the images again and again!

I love Pixieset as a photographer and a business owner because the site is super user-friendly, aesthetically pleasing, and includes sorting features that make managing hundreds of client galleries much easier when we need to find a particular image for an Instagram post or blog.

We chose Pixieset over other gallery delivery services because of its combination of features that we believe make it a step above most everything else in the industry right now—so whether you’re looking to switch gallery services or looking for an online gallery delivery option, Pixieset is a great option!

First, though, having an online gallery delivery service is helpful for so many reasons:

1. Having a print storefront & gallery delivery service in one means your clients don’t have to download their prints & re-upload them anywhere else to order physical prints, albums, & other products with their images on them. 
2. A digital delivery service is instant gratification. As soon as you send the email, your clients have access to their gallery of images.
3. If you work with the same clients multiple times, you can deliver all their galleries in the same collection. This includes sending previews—so your clients will not need to create a new gallery login every time they work with you or receive images.
4. Having all client galleries accessible in one place makes finding images for social media posts & blog posts MUCH easier!

What Pixieset Has That Other Gallery Programs Miss

We didn’t always use Pixieset at Adventure Instead. We made the switch as we grew because it was one of the only client gallery platforms that allowed us to add individual “tags” to each gallery collection—we can now label our gallery by location, environmental feature, or something else that can help us find specific images much faster in the future.

For example: if we need to find a photo of a couple by a waterfall in Oregon, we can search specifically for images in galleries tagged “Oregon,” and “waterfall.” With three photographers photographing 100+ elopements a year all over the world, being able to tag the galleries with location, scenery, activities, attire, length of elopement, who was there, etc. helps greatly when searching for social media posts and blog submissions.

Pixieset Gallery Features:

Design – Personalized branding, gallery cover photo, & minimalist layout.

Sharing –  Social sharing is built into the gallery for clients to quickly & easily share their images—directly from the source.

Digital Delivery – You upload, they download. Clients can download images at whatever size & resolution you set, and you can keep track of what images they “like” most, which images they download, & how often they view their gallery.

Online Proofing –  Save & download images your clients mark as “favorites.”

24/7 Print Store – Set your prices, don’t pay commission on sales (for paid accounts), & fulfill orders through integrated print labs or your own local printing lab.

Pros & Cons of Pixieset

Pro:

1. Clean & Simple User Interface – All in all, Pixieset has been very user friendly for clients and family to navigate and order through as well as easy to design and use on the back end! As the photographer, you can split up photos into albums for super simple organization.
2. Sensible Gallery Storefront – Over the past year Pixieset has greatly improved their storefront and marketing. We were able to build an entire storefront of products, individually price, and set it to auto fulfill each order at the print shop of our choice. We can also create coupons to send to clients when galleries are delivered (or in the event of a sale), create notification banners in individual galleries about the sale, and track how each coupon was used for marketing purposes.
3. All-In-One Platform – Pixieset is not only a gallery delivery program, it is a website hosting space. If you want to integrate everything into one super simple place, Pixieset has it all. 

Cons:

1. Cost – Pixieset doesn’t have the lowest cost for an “unlimited” plan, but it’s not far off from industry competitors. When compared to other data storage sites, cloud storage, & adding in Pixieset’s features, it becomes very affordable.
2. Simplicity – This can be both a good or bad thing, depending on your goals. Pixieset has a super simple interface, but it’s not as customizable aesthetically as some competitors. If a working, aesthetically pleasing site is your goal, then Pixieset will deliver. If you want total control over all of the layout, then it might be limiting.

How to Use Your Pixieset Gallery

I’d recommend starting with a free account, because there are so many online gallery delivery services available that you really want to find the one that works best for your workflow, client communication, & design choice.

The free account has no time limit – you only need to upgrade if you want the paid features or more storage. If you want to make sales without giving Pixieset a commission, or you want to be able to store more than 3GB of images in your account, then you’ll want to upgrade.

There’s a pretty significant discount for billing annually instead of monthly, so I definitely recommend investing in a paid gallery delivery service once you’ve decided it’s the one for you.

Trust me – we know from experience how frustrating it can be to switch services!

Free Pixieset Account:

• Cost: $0/forever
• Storage: Up to 3GB
• Commission: 15%
• Online Payments
• Gallery Storefront
• Unlimited Galleries (up to 3 GB)
• Coupons

Unlimited Pixieset Account:

• Cost: $40/month
• Storage: Unlimited
• Commission: 0%
• Online Payments
• Gallery Storefront
• Unlimited Galleries
• Coupons & Gift Cards
• Custom Branding
• Connect Your Domain

Once you’ve set up your account, it’s time to begin uploading galleries. You can customize this by choosing a cover photo that will be the first image your clients see, altering some aspects of the layout, and dividing images into albums for clear sorting and delineation within an event.

Then choose what file sizes you want couples to download—and remember that anything ordered from your storefront will be printed from the maximum resolution size of the image. So, this means that even if you set a couple’s gallery to only download at a certain size, any prints they order  will be full-resolution.

Once you have begun delivering galleries, set up a workflow for each gallery—you can automate coupons to go out to couples for their anniversary or the holidays. Digital gallery services also collect a lot of great information that you can learn from when it comes to how your clients interact with the images you send—you can access how often they view certain galleries & albums, which images they “favorite” or download, and especially which images they choose to print.

A digital gallery delivery service like Pixieset automates so much of what takes a lot of time post-event. You don’t have to schedule a time to hand-deliver a DVD or USB of images. Couples don’t have to wait on the mail to arrive if you’re shipping a USB, and you don’t have to worry about anything being lost in transit. A lot has changed in the world of photography over the last decade and online gallery delivery is one of my FAVORITE upgrades.  Even if couples choose to download and print their images elsewhere (it might be worth educating them that the quality coming from Pixieset’s printers is much better than Walgreens),  the sales that do come through your gallery service are additional income. 

I hope that if nothing else, you’ve become convinced that an online gallery delivery service like Pixieset has the potential to seriously up your game as a professional photographer.

After using many different programs, we believe Pixieset is the service that best fits our needs as a group of photographers who document hundreds of elopements each year all over the world—Pixieset is the only service that could support, organize, and present our work as we wanted it to be presented to our clients. 

Curious about what other online services could seriously level-up the backend of your photography business? Check out this blog post comparing two of the most frequently recommended customer relationship management (CRM) programs—Honeybook & Dubsado!