In this Pic-Time review, we will be discussing everything you need to know about this online gallery platform designed to share professional image sets with portrait & wedding photography clients. 

We began using Pic-Time in its infancy, and since then it has grown to be a very impactful force in the professional photography industry – competing with other established companies like Pixieset and Shootproof by bringing new and innovative ideas to the table that help photographers do more for their clients (and make more money, too!). 

Our Backgrounds and How We Use Pic-Time

If you are just getting to know us at Shoot & Thrive, you should know that we are professional wedding photographers that serve other photographers with expert SEO and blogging services so they can THRIVE in their lives. 

Our team has operated different photography studios with combined time in the industry as professionals of over 20+ years, all using Pic-Time as a foundational tool for sharing galleries with our clients and earning additional income by selling prints and other physical products through their gallery store feature. 

At the time we changed over to Pic-Time from previous gallery providers (3+ years ago), we did so primarily for the better print sales experience they seemed to have. Since then, other competitors (like Pixieset) have advanced their own galleries. 

We are seeing these companies continue to aggressively expand their offerings and compete in the marketplace. While they all use subscription pricing models, they do pretty regularly make updates (both small and large) to what they offer. 

We have found Pic-Time to be a consistently good option for us as it gives a great client facing gallery, and allows us to do things like make additional sales and employ email marketing. 

While Pic-Time is not a perfect gallery solution (and we will talk about some downsides later in this post), we are overall very happy with our choice to use it and do it recommend it for professional photographers needing a clean storage solution with added features. 

Get to Know More About Pic-Time – Features Breakdown

In this section, we’re going to highlight our favorite Pic-Time features. 

These are the key things we use on this platform to run our wedding and portrait photography businesses. 

Personal Branding

When you set up your Pictime account, one of the first things you should do is go to Settings -> Brand & Style, and set up everything to align with your photography brand. Most importantly, import different versions of your logo, link your website & social media accounts, select your preferred gallery style, and set your watermark. 

Pic-Time also allows you to upload a generic Print Release Form – something that most wedding and portrait photographers give their clients so they can print their images anywhere they’d like. 

Online Galleries

The core of Pic-Time is built around their Online Galleries. As a photographer, we wanted a simple solution for uploading our clients images and getting them their photos. 

By using project templates, you can expedite this process. We have created gallery templates for weddings, portrait sessions and various sub-classes (like family, couples, senior, etc.). When we create a new gallery using a template, it will automatically populate certain things like the gallery cover design and color, our selection of automations and email workflows, gallery settings, and more. 

As a photographer, you have many options to customize the look and feel of your galleries, so they align with your ideal client experience. We’ve included some screenshots so you can see what things look like behind the scenes even if you haven’t signed up for an account yet. 

Most importantly, we care about how our galleries look and respond for our clients. Pic-Time offers a sleek, modern gallery that is simple to navigate. Clients can view all of their images, like, download, and share all from inside the gallery. You can also set up privacy settings to require email + password verification if you’d like. 

In the client facing gallery, there is also a built-in store – making it easy for your clients to order prints. We’ll be talking about this a lot more shortly!

Art Galleries

Art galleries are a unique feature that would be best utilized by portrait and headshot photographers looking to showcase a very select number of images for your clients. They are also suitable for photographers who want to sell premium prints to a wide audience – such as fine art, landscapes, and similar. 

In our businesses, we have not used Art Galleries, but do believe for the niche of photographers it would appeal to – it’s a very valuable tool. This is why we decided to highlight this feature here. 

Sales & Automation

The bread-and-butter of Pic-Time is its Sales & Automation suite. This is the reason why we moved our client galleries here in the first place, and remains the main reason why we recommend pictime to other photographers so regularly. 

While most online galleries for photographers work well for the actual delivery and storage of your clients images, few can really compare to the effectiveness of Pic-Time when it comes to making actual passive income sales of printed products. 

Let’s talk about the main features within Pic-Time’s Sales & Automation:

Integrated Print Labs to Choose From

You can customize all of the products you would like to offer your clients in their gallery store. They have a very wide range of products. From expected things like simple prints and wall art, to more elaborate offerings like wedding albums, and even seasonal products like Christmas ornaments. 

You will also have your choice of print lab – so you can ensure the best print quality for your clients. They have a wide range of partner print labs all around the world. Some of these include:

• Bayphoto
• Millers
• Floricolor
• Gicleeart
• GTA Imaging
• Loxley Colour
• Seldex
• Dekora
• Atkins
• Kiss
• QT Albums
• Profotonet
• WHCC
• Snap Albums
• Wooden Banana

Custom pricing

When you set up your storefront, you also have full control over your print pricing. You can set each products price individually or apply a percentage rate. In general, we recommend charging 300% – 500% more than the product costs, but your pricing will vary depending on your specific objectives and target audience. 

Collect Gallery Visitor Emails

You can activate a feature for your client galleries that requires visitors (including your clients) to input an email address before they can access it. This will enroll the visitors into your email marketing list, which we’ll talk about more. 

While this is an optional feature, it is essential if you are a photographer wanting to make passive income with your online gallery. 

Email Campaigns

Email campaigns in Pic-Time are pre-designed to be easy to set up promotions, typically to take advantage of print sales during holiday seasons – such as Mother’s Day, Valentines Day, Black Friday, and similar. To set these up, you can review and accept everything as is (making it just a couple clicks to set up), or go through and modify the email text, colors, etc. to align with your brand more.

These campaigns are very easy to set up, and a great tool to get sales at peak times where people will already be looking to purchase prints for their family. 

Automations

Pic-Time’s Automations are more elaborate processes that include emails and other actions that may be taken. Many of these automations have been designed with direct support by some leading photographers such as Sam Hurd, Annemie Tonken, Isle Studio, and more.

Our favorite automations include…

• Abandoned Cart
• Post Order Promotion
• Anniversary Gift
• Early Bird
• The Simple Sales System
• Existing Gallery Backup

To learn more about these in depth and how we use them in our businesses, check out The 6 Best Pic-Time Sales Automations to Make More Print Sales

Easy to Navigate Store for Your Clients

All of these great features would be for nothing if clients didn’t actually want to place orders in your store. Fortunately, we have seen regularly recurring income through the sales of prints through our online galleries – resulting in thousands of dollars a year in added revenue for our businesses.

You can see it for yourself by checking out some screenshots from our Pic-Time galleries below. 

You can also view some full galleries hosted there below:

• Pic-Time Sample Gallery #1
• Pic-Time Sample Gallery #2

Pic-Time Blogs

Released in early 2023, Pic-Time blogs is a new feature that has been getting a lot of attention on social media. In simple terms – it is a blogging solution that leverages Pic-Time essentially as a content delivery network for images and blog content.

With Pic-Time blogs, you can create simple wedding/session blogs using pre-templated designs. Included are some tools to modify the post aesthetically, include text, and SEO integrations for mapping things like alt text.

This is a tool we have played around with as Pic-Time users. While there are some merits (and frankly it’s implementation is very good overall from what we’ve seen), it is also a risky solution for photographers wanting long term control over their content. We will be discussing this in more detail in a future article on our website.

Common Questions We’re Asked about Pic-Time

In this section, we’re going to give some answers to the biggest questions we’ve been asked about Pic-Time. 

Have you had any negative experiences with Pic-Time?

Yes. While we love Pic-Time, our time with the platform has not always been smooth or perfect. We have experienced things like downtime, emails not triggering, payment renewals at the wrong time, and similar. Admittedly, these can be frustrating in the moment. We have fortunately had positive experiences with their customer service to address our problems, and see consistent updates on the platform fixing things and expanding their offering. 

How much does Pic-Time cost?

Pic-Time has a free 30 day trial for any service level. For users just needing 10GB storage (like new photographers) with some limited features, it is also free. For more professional users, rates range from $7/month to $58/month (for multiple brands). 

As professional photographers with a relatively high volume of work, we are enrolled on their Advanced Plan for unlimited storage. 

How long is Pic-Time free for?

Pic-Time has a free 30 day trial, and is free forever if you just need a small amount of storage. 

Is image quality good on Pic-Time?

Yes. Assuming you upload full resolution images, your clients will have options to download photos at the full resolution or compressed web size. 

How does Pic-Time compare to other online gallery services for photographers?

This is a question that’s a little challenging to answer without doing a full deep dive into every gallery platform available. What we can say is this…

In our combined 20+ years of professional photography experience, after trying out several online galleries ourselves, we have settled on Pic-Time as it complements our businesses well. Over the years, we’ve been able to see consistent passive income through the sales of prints, as Pic-Time’s store is well designed for clients to navigate and visualize their images in print. 

Other online gallery services that are often recommended by professional photographers include…

• Pixieset
• Shootproof
• PASS Gallery
• SmugMug
• Pixellu Galleries
• Zenfolio

To learn more about the options available to you, check out our post 10 Online Galleries for Professional Photographers. 

Conclusion

In this Pic-Time review, we’ve showcased how this is a great online gallery service for photographers needing to host client images and looking for extra tools that help make the promotion and sale of printed work easier.