I’m pretty excited to share this with you today — something new that is 100% to benefit our clients. And that makes me really happy!

In the past, we’ve blogged about how much we love using PASS to deliver our photographs simply, gorgeous, and extremely quickly to our couples. Now PASS has rolled out a feature we’d been waiting for: Prints, directly from our very favorite professional lab.

Here’s what this means for our clients:

• You can order professional (as in, superior to Walmart, Walgreens, and any other non-professional print lab) gift prints with a click of the mouse in your gallery.
• You can not only get professional quality prints, but you can get them at really affordable prices — because, as we said, this is to benefit our clients, not to generate revenue for our business.
• Your family and friends can also order professional prints straight from your gallery.

And here’s what it looks like:When you first open your gallery, you’ll see a welcome sign letting you know about the print option. (Thanks for the idea, and the design, Alicia!) Once you choose an individual picture in your gallery, you’ll see a menu bar pop out on the right side of the screen. See that last (tiny) icon with the arrow (mine!) pointing to it? That’s the print option. If you want to add this picture to your print order, click that button. You’ll be prompted to login, and you can choose to login using either Facebook, which is the fastest and easiest method, or using your e-mail address. If you don’t already have an account set up with PASS, it only takes a few seconds to get one started. Once you’re logged in, you’ll see the print options:
A quick note about sizes: PASS currently offers the option for small gift prints — the sizes you would typically get printed up at your local drugstore lab. When it comes to picture frames, 4″ x 6″, 5″ x 7″ and 8″ x 10″ are the most common sizes, but currently, PASS offers an 8″ x 12″ instead of an 8″ x 10″, because 8″ x 12″ matches the true dimensions of photographs from DSLR and SLR cameras — which means you don’t have to crop off part of the picture to fit the paper size. You can buy 8″ x 12″ frames at specialty framing stores and online, but if you’ve already got an 8″ x 10″ frame you can’t wait to fill, don’t worry: 8″ x 10″ prints should be available in PASS once they work out a solution with the lab to ensure that you, the client, will be able to dictate exactly where your photograph gets cropped.Once you’ve put a picture in your print cart, a little print symbol will show up on that image in your gallery, so you won’t accidentally add the same photograph multiple times. Nifty, huh?!

When you’re ready to checkout, this is what your cart will look like:You will clearly be able to see which photos you’re ordering, and at what size, and in what quantity. From there, checkout is a simple process, with low flat-rate shipping within the US.

The reason we love this new feature of PASS so much is the ease with which it allows our clients to get their photographs professionally printed, and at such affordable rates that going to Walmart doesn’t even seem worth the time.

Now, some people might wonder how we, as professional photographers, can afford to give our clients the option to order professional prints so inexpensively, especially when we charged higher rates for our prints in the past. The reasons for that are very straightforward. With our business model — giving our clients their digital images and charging what we need to make from each wedding or shoot before the shoot ever happens, rather than relying on print sales after the shoot to generate our income — selling prints wasn’t ever a big revenue source for us. In fact, we were losing money by paying for print ordering galleries for all our clients, and spending a lot of time and energy whenever we personally placed a print order. So about a year ago, we just stopped offering prints. But we missed being able to provide that option for our clients. Now, with PASS, we don’t have to spend our time or money to get our clients professional prints — it happens automatically, which makes it simple for us, and as a result, extremely affordable for our clients. Win-win!

If you’re a past client who received a PASS gallery from us, you can order prints through PASS at any time while your gallery is active! Have any more questions about ordering prints through PASS? Let us know, and we’ll be happy to help!

~ Laura