Light Blue 2024.1 release notes

Reviewing incomplete online bookings

Our scheduling calendars are very popular with lots of photographers because they make it really easy to book shoots and appointments with clients. When scheduling a shoot that includes a contract and/or booking fee, clients have up to 15 minutes to complete their booking, after which their slot is made available again. You can now review incomplete and expired bookings via the Inbox, allowing you to free up slots temporarily blocked by an incomplete booking, or import an expired booking.

Multiple Stripe & Square accounts

You can now link more than one Stripe or Square account to your Light Blue account. If you’re using client portal brands, you can link a different Stripe or Square account to each brand in the “Light Blue API & Integrations” section of your account settings.

New Stripe account linking process

Stripe are introducing some changes to the way that you link a Stripe account to apps like Light Blue. We’re preparing for these changes by making it possible for you to reauthorise Light Blue’s access to your Stripe account using their latest authorisation process. You can do this in the “Light Blue API & Integrations” section of your account settings.

Setup export & import

You can now export or import a comprehensive Light Blue setup, including shoots & appointment types, price lists, workflows, scheduling calendars, and templates. This makes it easy for photographers to share part of their Light Blue setup with others, e.g. in training workshops or when setting up a new franchise or branch.

Rescheduling workflows

You can now reschedule all of the tasks, emails, text messages, and scheduled forms from your workflows from the Activity panel. Workflows that are linked to the shoot date were already being automatically rescheduled if the shoot is rescheduled, but this change allows you to reschedule other workflows, e.g. an enquiry workflow that’s designed to nurture a lead and convert it into a booking.

Duplicate contact management

You can now mark a contact that looks like a duplicate (e.g. because they share a name with someone else) as not a duplicate.

Composing text messages

Added an option to open text messages in a document window, instead of a modal dialog window. This allows you to keep a text message that you’re composing open while you refer to information in other parts of Light Blue.

Miscellaneous changes

• When using the “Add Workflow To Found Set” command, you can now choose to base the workflow on a custom date or the shoot enquiry date field.
• Currency mail-merge tags now have an option to not include the currency symbol. To do this, append NoCurrencySymbol to the tag, e.g. %ShootSalesTotalNoCurrencySymbol%
• Added %ContactMailingListOptInURL% to the “Insert Mail-Merge Tag” window.
• The built-in calendar now allows you to drag and drop events in 15-minute increments, instead of 30-minute increments.
• If you’ve ticked the “Show Task Created Date & Created By” option in the Settings / Preferences window, the task dialog will show when the task was created and which member of staff created it.
• Commas and spaces are now automatically trimmed from the beginning and end of email addresses pasted into contact records.
• When importing contacts from the macOS Contacts app, you can now specify the value that will be written into the contact Source field.
• In online contract signing, quotes now use the “Group box styling” colours from your client portal branding.
• Importing multiple incoming data items via the Inbox now applies your default enquiry workflow to any shoots that are created.
• The text message dialog window now makes it clearer that the date & time shown for incoming text messages is when they were received.
• Improved upon the “update plan expired” message that could be displayed to make the reason clearer and explain how to resolve it.
• Fixed a bug where the confirmation email for appointments booked via a scheduling calendar would use your default client portal branding, instead of the custom branding selected for the scheduling calendar.
• Incoming emails no longer get linked to contacts that you have accidentally added your @lightbluecustomermail.com email address to.
• Fixed a bug where merging a contact with a picture assigned to it could lose that picture.
• Fixed a bug where accepting an online payment from Stripe or Square could fail to set the company name correctly on the Purchase record that’s created for the transaction fee.