Light Blue 7.1.2

We’ve released Light Blue 7.1.2, which is another free update to everyone who subscribes to our online services or has bought Light Blue 7.

Like all of our minor updates, Light Blue 7.1.2 includes a variety of feature updates and bug fixes. We’ve also added a bigger feature that will help photographers who are keen to keep clients on their mailing list while making sure that they’re complying with the new GDPR regulations.

New Mailing List Opt-In Form

You can now send your clients to a special form that allows them to opt in to your mailing list. Each of your contact records has a special URL that identifies them, and you can get that URL in two different ways:

• If you want to send mailing list opt-in links to lots of clients, you can export a CSV file of contact names, email addresses, and URLs from Light Blue. You can then import this spreadsheet into a service like MailChimp to email it to your clients. To do this, find the contacts or shoots that you want to send this to, go into the Housekeeping section of the Records menu and use the ‘Ask Clients To Opt-In To Mailing List’ command.
• If you only want to send mailing list opt-in links to a small number of clients, you can use the %ContactMailingListOptInURL% mail-merge tag in an email template. If you want to customise the text of the link in your email templates, you can do so be using a tag like %ContactMailingListOptInURL:Click here to open the form%. We’ve included a sample email template in this update.

Your client portal branding is automatically applied to your mailing list opt-in form, and can customise the text that appears on the form by logging into your account on our website.

You can find out more about this feature in our blog post that explains how to use it.

Other changes

• You can now customise more of the text that appears in your client portal when clients are signing contracts. You’ll find these customisable text options in the ‘Template Translations’ section of the Preferences window.
• The following Sale reference values are now available in the query dialog, list views, and data exports: purchase order references, shopping cart references, courier references, client job number references, and quote references.
• Added support for reading the original sender details from emails forwarded from Outlook for macOS to your unique Light Blue email address.
• When you’re running a tax report, you now need to confirm that you want to mark the included records as claimed.
• Added an option to use the shoot reference as the default prefix when you’re importing pictures for a shoot.
• When creating a Sale record from a Quote, you’re now warned if the booking fee is greater than the quote’s total.
• Added a “Email & Client Portal Branding” heading to the ‘Printing’ section of the Preferences window. This is to make it bit clearer where you need to go to adjust those branding settings.
• Revised the wording of the “database upgrade required” dialog to make it less intimidating.
• Fixed a rare problem where publishing an appointment to macOS calendars could make it appear at 12:00 instead of the correct time.
• Fixed a problem on Windows where the email templates panel could end up with its scrollbar set to the wrong position.
• Fixed a problem where clicking the “Save and add another” button in a form field dialog could fail to add the new item.
• When you’re composing an email, the subject field is now always saved before you click the ‘Send’ or ‘Schedule’ button so you won’t see warning about having a blank subject. (unless you really do have a blank subject, of course!)
• When changing a form field from a type that includes a ‘Description’ option to one that doesn’t, the description is now removed properly.
• Fixed a problem that could affect rounding numbers to zero.
• The quick sale dialog now works with European decimal separators.
• The ‘add workflow’ dialog no longer gets stuck if you try to add a workflow based on a really old date.
• Fixed unexpected quits that have been reported to us.