Five Awesome Business Apps for Photographers!

I posted this blog on Photography Awesomesauce last year and I wanted to re-visit it today, with a few alterations to the business tools I use and how they help me run my business and allow me to have a life! Evernote and Wunderlist I covered in the article (which I put here as well) and I’m also going to speak about BlogStomp, NameChanger, and Spotify! These Business Apps for Photographers are so awesome and I just had to let you know about them!

Evernote

Oh how I love Evernote. It seriously has changed my personal and business life, I love how it allows me to create notes for things that I do all of the time. I keep a notebook with client info for the year “JWP Clients 2013” and there I have one template that I copy/paste for all clients. It contains my workflow for each wedding or portrait session.

I also keep in a physical folder just to have a backup – but evernote backs up my data across all of my platforms which is amazing!

And I can keep their name, email and details about the event, as well as an electronic copy of their contract. I also keep a notebook with shoot ideas, breakdowns of my financial plans, copies of all receipts and blog post ideas. I have separated them into business and personal notebooks. There is so much more that you can do with Evernote though (the Evernote king, Matt Roberts, has an amazing intro video to the world of Evernote and I would HIGHLY recommend checking it out!)

Evernote is available for iPhone, Android, Mac and PC.

Evernote – FREE

Wunderlist

Wunderlist is another great application that creates to-do lists and allows you to check them off as you complete your list. You can create many lists and keep them separated.

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I use this for all sorts of to-do lists and things that I need to keep in mind, such as grocery lists and songs that I hear on the radio and want to buy on iTunes. I love the feeling of checking off the list when I complete something (but that may just be me!) I also use this for my business to remind me of what I need to do in my business as well and you can set due dates – this is great for me when I need to keep in mind image delivery dates.

Wunderlist is available for iPhone, Android, Mac and PC.

Wunderlist – FREE

BlogStomp

BlogStomp is a great way to quickly get your photos ready for your blog, I love it because I can arrange photos in different collages and I can have my blog ready to go in less than 10 minutes rather than taking hours to place photos in a diptych arrangement. You can also add your watermark (if you watermark) easily and create borders and tabs for spacing purposes. The customer support is great and the program is not very expensive. The only downside is that for a while I noticed a loss in quality but they put out an update that fixed that right away, this has been a lifesaver for my business as I try to blog quite often! And there is a trial available if you would like to test it out first.

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You can create different settings for the stomp, such as my blog ready one, a facebook setting and some of the stock ones it comes with – there are tons of customization options!

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BlogStomp is available for Mac and PC.

BlogStomp – $49

NameChanger

NameChanger is a great app for literally changing the name of JPG files to whatever you wish them to be. Since I use BlogStomp to make my files ready for my blog, I like to change the names (as they come out of BlogStomp in a date_number format) to something more SEO friendly. NameChanger was free and handles this for me pretty much instantly. This little tool has saved me hours of frustration. The only downside (well for you PC users) is that it is Mac only for now. But hopefully one day they will get it on over to Windows so everyone can use it!

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NameChanger is available for Mac ONLY.

NameChanger – FREE

Spotify

Spotify is my newest obsession, it’s a music app that let’s you stream and listen to almost anything you want. Seriously, I’ve only found a few songs that I can’t get on there but you can add in your iTunes library and listen to the music you have on your computer as well. There is a free version that lets you listen to any of the music, but it has a few limitations – there are ads, and although you can listen to the music offline, all of your playlists are shuffled and you cannot download the playlists. With the paid version ($10 a month) you can listen to any music you want, online or offline, you can download the playlists to your phone or computer and there are no ads. I have the paid version and I could not imagine functioning without it, it is always open and I have it on about 15 hours a day. I don’t even listen to the music I own anymore, I listen to it on Spotify instead. It has changed my life!

It’s like Pandora but 100 times better 🙂

Screen Shot 2014-05-22 at 1.57.31 PMScreen Shot 2014-05-22 at 1.57.19 PM Spotify is available on iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac and PC.

Spotify – $10 a month, free limited subscription available.

I love how these apps have helped me with organizing my life and my business, they work well together for me – what are some of the apps and methods you have for organization?

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