Hickory for photographers
Family, Newborn and Portrait Session Books, Without the Design Evening
A session ends, the gallery goes out, and the sale ends there. The client asked for a book, but designing one for a two-hour session costs an evening you can't bill. Hickory drafts it from the gallery you already delivered, so you can say yes the day you send it.
Start with a gallery you’ve already delivered.
The same engine you'd use on a wedding, on a two-hour session
There is no newborn preset and no family mode. The engine reads EXIF capture times and its own analysis of the frames, never the kind of shoot, so it sequences the gallery, spreads the selection across the whole session and picks one or two frames where you delivered eight near-identical ones. Newborn, maternity, senior, first-birthday and extended-family sessions all run the same path.
Grandparents are the second, third and fourth sale
One session, one designed book, and everyone who was there can order a copy from the book you send. Every extra copy costs you only the print, so there's no reason to decline the grandmother who asks in March. Print cost is flat per copy at any quantity, and you set retail on all of them.
It prints your photographs, nothing else
The page holds the frames you kept. Hickory invents no chapter names or section headings. You cut any frame, change the cover and switch the template.
What actually arrives at their door
An 8.5 x 8.5 inch square casewrap hardcover, press-printed in full colour on 80# coated stock, with a normal gutter. More sizes are coming soon. It is not a lay-flat flush-mount album. Length follows the gallery within our printer's 24 to 150 page range, and a single copy of a 36-page hardcover costs you $31.71 all in, and delivery runs two to three weeks straight to your client.
Questions photographers ask
A newborn session is 200 frames from one room in two hours. Does that work?
Yes. The engine paces the book on capture times, so a two-hour session spreads across its own two hours as a twelve-hour day spreads across twelve. If fewer than 60% of the frames carry a capture time, or fewer than 60% have finished analysing, it falls back to an even spread across the whole set, first and last frame included. The design run tells you which it used and how much of the gallery it had analysed.
Do I need to shoot or cull differently to use this?
No. Upload the finished, retouched gallery as you'd hand it over. Nothing unretouched can reach a printed page.
Can each grandparent get a different book?
No. A gallery has one book, and everyone who orders gets that book. A different edit means a separate gallery with its own photos and drafted book.
Does it name the parts of the session?
No. The printed book carries your photographs and nothing else. We don't print headings for parts of a shoot, invented or otherwise.
What does it cost me?
Your first 2 galleries are free: design the book, send it to your client and take their order before you pay anything. You set the retail price, and your studio shows one figure for what a copy costs you: printing, binding, US shipping to your client's door and our flat $12 per copy. On the 40-page hardcover a new studio starts with, priced at $89, that figure is $31.97 and you keep $57.03. The $12 is flat, never a percentage. From a third gallery on, running a studio is a flat $39/month. Billing is monthly, cancel anytime, and the pricing page has the full arithmetic.
Related
Try it on one gallery you’ve already delivered.
Upload a finished gallery and look at the book it drafts. Books print and ship to your client in two to three weeks.