AI Products
PixCrew — CRM & Selection Albums for Photo Studios
A studio suite for wedding and event photographers — enquiries to contracts, crew scheduling, post-production and finances — plus a local agent that turns a 110 GB shoot into a 1–2 GB client gallery.
Challenge
Event photography studios juggle enquiries, quotes, contracts, crew calendars, payments and post-production across WhatsApp, spreadsheets and memory. Photo selection hurts most of all: a 5,000-photo wedding is about 110 GB of originals, far too much to upload so the client can pick favourites.
Process
I delivered the product in four planned phases, followed by a set of “beyond the roadmap” additions:
- Front office. An enquiry pipeline with a public landing-page builder and Google Sheets lead import. Also packages and quotes that sync into project totals, and e-signable contracts with merge fields.
- Operations. Crew scheduling with a no-login PIN portal where each crew member sees only their own shoots. A post-production pipeline, client requests and moodboards, and tracking of where each crew member’s shoot data is stored.
- Finances. Client payments, team payouts and expenses, with net profit per project and across the studio.
- PixCrew Agent (selection albums). A local agent runs on the studio machine:
- It hashes files and asks the server which ones it already has, so re-runs upload only new photos.
- It makes WebP previews with libvips, handling RAW (via the embedded JPEG) and HEIC (via WebAssembly libheif).
- It resumes after crashes using a local SQLite log.
- When the client submits their picks, it copies those originals into
Selected/folders ready for editing.
Outcome
The originals never leave the studio, and a 110 GB wedding uploads as 1–2 GB. That is what makes a single-server, affordable selection-album product possible.
Cover: illustrative mockup in PixCrew’s brand language.