Light Blue Changelog

What's new in Light Blue 2021.2.3

Oct 13, 2021

We’ve just released Light Blue 2021.2.3, which is a minor update that adds new features and fixes bugs reported since we launched Light Blue 2021.2. It includes the following changes:
Added an “Import Custom Translations” button to the “Template Translations” section of the Preferences window, to allow you to import a set of translations that another Light Blue user has exported and sent to you.
Added more mail-merge tags to the “Insert Mail-Merge Tag/Value” feature.
Updated the links in the Help menu to match our new online help resources.
Fixes a bug that could prevent the “Prices Include Tax” checkbox in the Preferences window from saving properly.

New in Light Blue 2021.2.1 (Aug 6, 2021)

New in Light Blue 2021.2 (Jul 14, 2021)

Welcome to your new Home screen:
Light Blue’s new Home screen lets you see your business in a completely new way. You can now customise the Home screen by choosing a selection of widgets that give you unique and powerful ways of looking at your business as well as customising the look of Light Blue.
Widgets include the classic “Current Events”, “Enquiries”, and “Task Manager” widgets from previous versions of Light Blue, plus exciting new options including customisable charts, inbox, lists, stats, or embedded web pages.
Sets of widgets are grouped together as Home screen layouts and you can customise their appearance with colour themes. We’ve provided a set of example layouts and colour themes that you can choose from by clicking the options button in the top right corner of the Home screen, and you can use any of these samples as a starting point to create your own!
Other changes:
We’ve optimised the speed of lots of everyday tasks in Light Blue, especially for customers with large databases that contain hundreds of thousands of records.
Added a way of sending Sale data to the Light Blue API.
Added a “Pronouns” field to the Contacts section, and for staff in the Resources section of the Preferences window. As with all of Light Blue’s fields that are shown as a combobox, you can pick from the supplied list of pronouns or type new sets of pronouns if you want to add to the list.
Added a block list for contact forms and the Light Blue API that allows you to block submissions from a list of email addresses. Please contact us if you receive messages from any email addresses that you want to block.
Replaced all of the “Import X Template” menu commands with a single “Import Light Blue Template(s)” command, which simplifies the import menu and also makes it possible to select several Light Blue template files to import at once.
The quick search feature now includes shoot custom fields.
Added financial year options to our charts.
Added “Bookings (by enquiry date)” and “Enquiries & Bookings (by enquiry date)” options to our charts.
Added a “Bookings (by confirmed date)” option to our charts.
The logged in user is now recorded when a record is moved to the trash, allowing businesses with multiple staff to see who trashed a particular record.
Added an option to include a list on printed invoices of all of the resources linked to the sale’s linked shoot.
Added an option to include the sale’s linked photographer on printed invoices.
Added an option to turn off the “invoice date is before today” warning.
Light Blue no longer offers to remove the online version of an invoice when you create a credit note, to allow your client to see that it’s been credited.
Importing orders from ProSelect or Fundy now uses a separate “last used folder” preference to importing other types of data.
Added “Go To Appointment” and “Go To Linked Records” commands to appointments’ contextual menu in our built-in calendar.
Added a “Print” command to the Inbox and Outbox contextual menu, for use on email or incoming data items.
Added %ShootStart%, %ShootNextAppointmentStart%, %ShootNextConfirmedAppointmentStart%, %ContactNextAppointmentStart%, %ContactNextConfirmedAppointmentStart%, %SaleNextAppointmentStart%, and %SaleNextConfirmedAppointmentStart% mail-merge tags. These tags combine the start time and date of the event, e.g. “09:00, 25/12/2021”
Added the %ShootSchedule% and %ShootRequests% tags to the “Insert Mail-Merge Tag/Value” dialog.
The appointment URL field is now included when publishing appointments as part of a calendar feed, or when publishing to the macOS calendar store or Google Calendar.
Reinstated OS standard contextual menus for paragraph text fields, so you now have access to standard OS spellchecking and other features.
In the terms & conditions that appear on our online contract signing service, we’ve changed the term “photographer” to “service provider” because our online contracts are sometimes used to agree services other than photography.
Fixed a problem on Windows where creating an email from a template that uses mail-merge tags that can include multiple paragraphs (e.g. the %ShootSchedule% or %ShootRequests% tags) would use a double line break instead of a single line break between each line.
Fixed a problem where using the “Insert Mail-Merge Tag/Value” or “Insert Template” buttons on an email could fail to place the insertion point immediately after the inserted HTML.
Fixed an error that could occur when querying for contacts with linked contacts.
Fixed a bug that could cause form contact fields to set the name field as required when you didn’t intend to.
Fixed a bug where using the “go to linked record” command from an unsaved email didn’t automatically set the status of the email to “Draft”.
Fixed a bug where the “go to linked records” command for an email in the Inbox could show a contact twice.
Fixed a bug where using the “preview mail-merge tags” checkbox on a workflow email could discard unsaved changes made to the email body.

New in Light Blue 2021.1.1 (Mar 2, 2021)

Light Blue 2021.1 is a major update that improves lots of the features that you use every day, including:
Adding a new shoot has been streamlined, with the “New Shoot” window efficiently guiding you through the process.
Dealing with contact form and API submissions has been made simpler, and it’s also much easier to use them to work with existing clients.
Mail-merge tags are easier to find and use in all of the places that they can be used from, making it even easier to personalise your messages to clients.
It’s easier than ever to compose emails and text messages, and use helpful new tools that make communicating with your clients faster.
Workflows are easier to set up and understand, which helps you to use this powerful tool to convert enquiries into bookings and deliver an excellent service to your clients.
We’ve made some of the most important parts of Preferences window easier to understand, to help you make the most of Light Blue’s powerful customisation options.
The Home screen now includes housekeeping tools that help you to manage a busy database by keeping on top of stale enquiries and overdue tasks.
Read on to find out more about the new features that we’ve added in Light Blue 2021.1!
Shoots:
When you add a shoot to Light Blue, the “New Shoot” window efficiently guides you through the process. You can also add an enquiry workflow that helps you to convert a new enquiry into a booking. If you prefer the old process for adding a shoot, you can turn the “New Shoot” window off via the Preferences window.
We’ve also made the following changes to shoots:
The date field is now positioned above type and status fields in the Shoots section.
When Light Blue automatically sets a shoot title for you, it now includes the shoot type in the name for all shoot types (e.g. “Jack & Jill’s portrait” for a shoot type called “Portraits”). You can customise the phrase that it uses for each shoot type in the Preferences window, or turn this option off for individual shoot types if you prefer to not include its name in your shoot titles.
Added hint text to the “Role” column in the “Linked Records” panel.
The + menu in the “Schedule” and “Requests” tabs on a shoot now include options to use a template.
Workflows:
Light Blue’s workflows are a powerful tool that help you to convert enquiries into bookings and deliver an excellent service to your clients. Light Blue 2021.1 makes them easier to set up and understand:
The new workflow visualiser shows how your default workflows will create tasks, appointments, emails, and text messages based on the key milestones for your shoots. You’ll find the workflow visualiser in the “Shoots” section of “General Preferences”, and in the “Shoot Types” section of the Preferences window you can set up different workflows for any types of job that need to be handled in their own unique way.
Workflows can now have a type assigned to them. If you use a lot of workflows, this makes it easier to apply them because only workflows of the appropriate type are shown.
When you’re in the “Workflows” section of the Preferences window, you can see where each workflow is being used and set it as a default without leaving the “Workflows” section.
Emails:
We’ve added buttons that make it easier to create emails and text messages from a shoot or contact.
You can now create emails and text messages from the “Activity” panel as well as the “Linked Records” panel on shoots and contacts.
When you’re composing an email or template, a button in the toolbar makes it quick and easy to insert one of Light Blue’s powerful mail-merge tags. Mail-merge tags are a fantastic time-saver because they pull information into your emails from the record that you’re sending a message from, and having them available within the app saves you from having to look up the available tags from our knowledgebase.
You can now insert an email template into an email that you’re composing. This allows you to set up templates that you can use as snippets and drop into emails as you’re composing them.
When you realise that you’re composing the perfect response to a client’s query, you can now save that email as a template. This makes it easy to reuse whenever you find yourself dealing with a similar query or situation.
You can now set your own default text size and line spacing for your emails.
Each member of staff can now be assigned their own default email signature that will be applied when they create a new email.
We’ve added a “Resend” button to emails that have been sent from Light Blue, which allows you to quickly create a copy of that email to send to the same or a different recipient.
We’ve made the “Insert Image” command in the email editor easier to understand.
When you insert an image into an email but don’t supply an alt tag, we now give it a blank alt tag to give your emails better compatibility with screen readers.
When you’re switching between different email signatures or saving an email as a template, the logic that removes the current signature from the email is now more tolerant of invisible characters that could make it harder to compare the HTML.
We’ve added a contextual menu to the Outbox to change the status of the selected messages to “draft”.
Text Messages:
You can now create emails and text messages from the “Activity” panel as well as the “Linked Records” panel on shoots and contacts.
When you’re composing an email or template, a new button makes it quick and easy to insert one of Light Blue’s powerful mail-merge tags. Mail-merge tags are a fantastic time-saver because they pull information into your emails from the record that you’re sending a message from, and having them available within the app saves you from having to look up the available tags from our knowledgebase.
You can now insert a text message template into a message that you’re composing. This allows you to set up templates that you can use as snippets and drop into messages as you’re composing them.
Mail-merge:
When you’re composing an email or template, a new button makes it quick and easy to insert one of Light Blue’s powerful mail-merge tags. Mail-merge tags are a fantastic time-saver because they pull information into your emails from the record that you’re sending a message from, and having them available within the app saves you from having to look up the available tags from our knowledgebase.
When you’re doing a mail-merge from a shoot, you can now pick out a contact with a specific role in a tag by using the format %ContactRole:RoleGoesHere:ContactTagName%. e.g. %ContactRole:Mother:ContactFirstName% would give you the first name of the first contact labelled as “Mother” on that shoot.
Added new mail-merge format options for date tags: you can append “Day”, “Month”, or “Year” to a tag to get the day of the month, month name, or year. e.g. %ShootStartDateMonth% would return “January” for a shoot that starts on 01/01/2021.
Added whole address versions of the “next appointment” mail-merge tags. e.g. %ShootNextAppointmentAddress%.
Added a %SaleNextPaymentDueAmount% mail-merge tag.
Appointments:
We’ve reorganised the appointment dialog to make it easier to understand.
Added phone number and URL fields to appointments, to make them easier to use for phone or online meetings.
Added a “Duplicate Appointment” command to the “Activity” panel contextual menu.
Double-clicking an appointment from the Home or Calendar screens now opens the appointment editing dialog, as well as taking you to the record the appointment is linked to.
When you delete an appointment, any tasks linked to it are now deleted as well.
Inbox:
When you’re dealing with form or API submissions, we’ve simplified the old “Import as a New Record” and “Update an Existing Record” buttons to a simple “Import” button that works out what you probably want to do with that incoming data.
We’ve made it much easier to use contact form and API submissions from existing clients. When you click the “Import” button, Light Blue shows you a list of existing contacts that match the details you’ve received and makes it easy for you to use or update an existing client’s details.
You can use a contact form or API submission that contains only contact parameters to create just a contact record, rather than a contact and a linked shoot.
Added an “Import” button to the incoming data preview dialog.
Added a contextual menu command to incoming data entries in the Inbox that allows you to unlink them from a record you’ve already linked them to, so that you can reimport them and link them to a different record.
The Inbox search field now includes the email “From” field in its searches.
When you accept an incoming payment, you’re now taken to the relevant sale.
Fixed a bug where the current value of the mailing list opt-in field was shown as 1/0 instead of yes/no when importing incoming data.
Fixed a bug that could cause the linked record description in the Inbox to include duplicates.
Home Screen:
The Home screen now includes housekeeping tools that help you to manage a busy database by keeping on top of stale enquiries and overdue tasks.
You can now adjust the range of dates covered by the “Current Events” list directly from the Home screen.
Contacts:
The “Websites” group of contact methods is now called “Links” and the list of default labels has been updated.
The contact “Status” field is now hidden by default, but can be shown again in the Preferences window.
Changed the “Maiden Name” field on contacts to “Previous Last Name”.
Added a confirmation dialog when you convert a contact to a company.
You can now import a full Name when you’re importing contacts from a CSV file, and Light Blue will automatically split it into the first name and last name fields.
Financial:
Added a contextual menu command that allows you to save a payment schedule from a sale as a new payment schedule template, which allows you to reuse that schedule on more sales in future.
Added a button to make it easier to reload a contact’s current details into a Sale, Quote, Purchase, or Payment record.
Added a “Cancel Sale” button to uninvoiced sales. Cancelling an uninvoiced sale gives you a choice between deleting it, or invoicing it and automatically creating a credit note that offsets it. The “invoice & credit” option means that you keep a paper trail that shows that you were going to charge your client but decided to write it off.
Added a shoot type override for the online invoice published and payment email templates.
When duplicating a purchase, you’re asked whether you’d like to use the current date or the original purchase’s invoice date.
Added a “Payment Method” field when importing purchases from a CSV file.
The “Please pay X on or before Y” text that appears on invoices now uses the unpaid amount of the invoice, rather than the gross total.
Preferences:
Added a “Preferences” button to the main window’s toolbar, to make it easier to find the Preferences window.
Renamed and reorganised various preferences, to make them easier to understand.
We’ve made the margin settings for printing and creating PDFs using Light Blue’s built-in templates easier to understand and customise.
Added separate top and bottom margin preferences for unbranded templates.
Added a search box to the “Template Translations” preferences section.
Any custom translations that you’ve set up are now more obviously highlighted in the “Template Translations” section.
Email and text message templates now list the places that they’re used (i.e. where they’re set as defaults) to make it easier for you to see how changes you make will affect the workflows, payment schedules, etc, that you’ve already set up.
When you’re composing a text message template, if it contains any Unicode characters we’re now listing those characters to make it easier for you to remove them from your template. Using Unicode characters in a text message reduces the number of characters that you get for each credit, so avoiding them helps you to send longer messages without spending more credits.
Changed the label of custom amount fields to “Custom Currency Amount”, to make their purpose clearer.
Document templates now display a warning if they’re larger than Light Blue’s 50MB document syncing limit.
Updated the list of Price List fields that can be imported or exported.
Reinstated the “Website URL” field in the Preferences window.
Contract and form template export and import features now include the “send email” checkboxes, so your decision about whether to send a notification email at each stage can be exported with the template content.
Fixed a bug where changing the colour of a shoot type, tag, etc, wouldn’t update the colour displayed in the Preferences window until you force a reload.
Querying & Reporting:
The quick search field in the main window’s toolbar now includes the contents of “Notes” field from all of the main sections.
Added contextual menu commands for hiding or deleting a quick query.
Added a new quick query for sales that don’t have a linked shoot.
Added “Shoot Day” and “Date Completed” fields to the shoots section, for use in the list view, queries, and data exports.
Added primary contact role, age, and date of birth fields to the shoots section, for use in the list view, queries, and data exports.
The “Stale Enquiries” quick query in the shoots section now includes any enquiries that have a shoot date before today.
Added a “Next Payment Amount” field to the sales section.
Reinstated the “Is Group Head” and “Group Head X” fields in the shoots section, for use in the list view, queries, and data exports.
Fixed a bug that hid the brackets in the advanced mode of the query dialog.
Other changes:
Updated macOS system requirements to macOS 10.12 Sierra.
On upgrading, Light Blue checks whether its window size can be optimised for your main screen.
If a custom text field contains a URL, an “Open” button is shown next to the field so that you can easily open it in your browser.
Added an option to the record linking dialog that allows you to include cancelled shoots when you’re searching for a shoot.
The “Submit Button Text” option for form templates is now applied to forms that you publish from a shoot or include in a contract, as well as contact forms.
The “Thank You Page URL” option for form templates is now applied to forms that you publish from a shoot, as well as contact forms.
The autocomplete menu for link fields now shows more information about matching records.
Text labels throughout Light Blue are now selectable, so they can be copied and pasted into other apps.
Added an optional field that shows which member of staff created a task.
You can now reschedule a selection of tasks at once from the “Activity” panel.
Renamed the “Add Document From Disk” command to “Add Document From Your Computer”.
Fixed a bug that caused spellchecking to not be enabled for some fields.
Fixed a bug where the “Add Task To Found Set” command could fail to link the tasks to a record.
Fixed a bug where a shoot in the “Unconfirmed Events” section of the Home screen could have its clash status overridden by the out of hours status.
Fixed a bug where marking an email or text message as read in the Inbox could immediately remove it if you’re using the “unread messages” filter.

New in Light Blue 2020.1.4 (Nov 26, 2020)

New in Light Blue 2020.1.3 (Oct 30, 2020)

Here’s a list of the changes that we’ve made in this update:
Fixed a runtime error that could occur on Windows when opening a window containing an HTML editor.
On Windows, reports are now opened in Light Blue’s reports viewer instead of in your default web browser.
Viewing an invoice that was created in a version of Light Blue before 2020.1 in the desktop app will make that invoice available online if it has an unpaid amount greater than zero and has payment reminders set up.
A warning is now displayed when you’re composing or viewing an email sent via your own SMTP server when you have Light Blue’s email tracking features enabled, because our email tracking features only apply to emails sent via our own email servers.
Added SaleNextPaymentDueDate and SaleFinalPaymentDueDate mail-merge tags, and made the old SalePaymentDueDate tag work as SaleNextPaymentDueDate.
Added support for ‘NextAppointment’ and ‘NextConfirmedAppointment’ address mail-merge tags in workflow emails.
Changed localisation of form address headings so that the notification email you receive when a client fills in a form will use your localised headings.
Wedding roles are now translated in the shoot linked contacts role menu.
Translated the “Are you sure you want to sign this contract?” confirmation dialog into French and German
Improved the automatic linking of Contact records by company name when importing Purchase records from a CSV file.
The “Ask Every Time” print branding option is now only applied for “real” printing: PDFs will always include branding.
The “Received Today” filter in the Inbox no longer shows items received yesterday and today if your current timezone is UTC+something.
When adding new contacts to a shoot on Windows, the Role field for additional linked contacts now includes a popup menu.
Fixed a bug where the bounding box for a selected image in an HTML editor wouldn’t move if you use the mouse wheel or trackpad to scroll the HTML editor.
Fixed a bug where a payment reminder email that crosses the daylight savings time boundary would be scheduled an hour earlier or later than intended.
Fixed a bug where the HTML editor text size menu would always show “12”, even when you’ve selected text that’s a different size.
Fixed a problem on Windows where changes made in an HTML editor could be lost if you click into it after making changes in a different control.
Fixed a bug where the “Mark As Paid” button was shown on instalments that have been overpaid.
Fixed a problem where Google Calendar publishing could stop working after several months.
Fixed an obscure bug where editing a record and saving it by clicking a quick query that the edit moves it into selects that record in the records list but not in the detail panel.
Fixed a bug that prevented contact photos from being included on the shoot detail printout.
Fixed a bug where loading a long list of items, scrolling to the bottom of the list and selecting an item would scroll the list back to the top.

New in Light Blue 2020.1 (Sep 22, 2020)

Light Blue 2020.1 is a major update that includes big new features and a whole host of other improvements, including:
Payment schedules that allow you to easily break an invoice down into several smaller payments, helping you to make larger sales and get bookings more easily.
Automated payment reminders help you to get paid on time.
Email tracking features that help you to gauge your clients’ engagement.
Read on to find out more about the new features that we’ve added in Light Blue 2020.1!
Invoicing, quoting, and payment improvements:
Payment schedules:
We’ve added a new payment schedule feature that makes it a lot easier for you to ask your client to pay an invoice in instalments.
A payment schedule can include as many instalments as you want. Each instalment can be for a fixed amount (e.g. £100.00) or for a percentage (e.g. 50% of the invoice total). The due date for each instalment is a number of days, weeks, or months after the invoice date, or before or after the shoot date.
When you apply a payment schedule to a sale, Light Blue automatically calculates the due dates and amounts for each instalment. The due dates and amounts appear on both the printed and online versions of the invoice.
We’ve supplied a few example payment schedules, and you can customise them or create your own in the “Payment Schedules” section of the Preferences window. We recommend having a “100% of the remaining balance” step at the end of all of your payment schedules in case anything changes on the invoice or your client makes some unscheduled payments along the way.
Your existing data works seamlessly with the new payment schedules feature. Old Sale records will display a single “100% of the remaining balance” payment step with the same due date and amount that you had in previous versions of Light Blue.
For online invoices, your clients have simple options to pay each instalment when it’s due, or to pay the full unpaid amount if they want to do it in one go. You can choose which online payment options are available for each instalment, so you could ask them to pay part of the invoice by card and another part by bank transfer.
For online payments, payment records are now created automatically in Light Blue. The payment will still appear in the Inbox so that you can see it’s arrived, and accepting the payment via the Inbox will offer to create a Purchase record for the transaction fee.
All of Light Blue’s built-in quick queries and reports have been updated to work with payment schedules. The “Overdue Payments” quick query in the Sales section now shows you any Sale records that have any overdue instalments. Reports such as “Contact Statement” now use the next payment due date to sort invoices, and for your old invoices this date will be the same as the old “payment due date” field. “Next Payment Due Date” and “Final Payment Due Date” fields are available to use in your own queries and reports.
If you don’t want to ask your clients to pay you in instalments, you can ignore payment schedules. The main change that you’ll notice is the new “Payments” tab on Sale records.
Examples:
Using a payment schedule with a single instalment of “100% of the remaining balance” is much the same as the old way of doing things. You have options to set the payment due date relative to the date of the invoice, the date of the linked shoot, or manually select a date.
A portrait photographer can ask a client to pay for a large order in any number of monthly instalments.
An event photographer can ask for part of the balance before the shoot and a final payment on completion.
A photographer who runs their business on a cash basis (i.e. using the payment date rather than invoice date to record their income) could use a payment schedule to set up instalments for a booking fee and as many balance payment instalments as they like. If you run your business on an accrual basis, you might still prefer to raise a separate invoice for the booking fee and balance if the tax points are months apart.
Automated payment reminders:
Our new payment schedules feature has given us an opportunity to build another popular feature request: you can now have Light Blue send automatic email payment reminders to your clients. You can set up simple rules for your reminders and your personalised messages will help you to get paid on time.
Payment reminders are set up in your payment schedules. Even if you don’t want to ask your clients to pay your invoices in instalments, you can still use a payment schedule: you can have a payment schedule with a single “100% of the remaining balance” instalment.
You can send a payment reminder before the due date, on the due date, and every X days after the due date if it hasn’t been paid yet.
Payment reminders include a link to view the invoice online, so Light Blue 2020.1 automatically makes invoices available online when you click the “create invoice” button. You no longer need to specifically publish an invoice to make it available online. Online invoices use a randomly generated ID number in their URL so clients will only be able to see an invoice if you send the link to them or set up payment reminders. The online version of the invoice is automatically updated as soon as you make any changes to it in Light Blue 2020.1 and it syncs to your account.
Percentage booking fees:
Quotes can still be split into separate invoices for the booking fee and the balance. This is especially useful if you want to have separate tax points for the booking fee and balance.
Booking fees can now be a fixed amount or a percentage of the quote. You can set up a default booking fee for each of your price lists, and when you raise a quote from a shoot Light Blue automatically fill in any booking fee you’ve set up for the price list you’ve chosen for that shoot.
Other financial changes:
Online invoices now have a handy “Print This Invoice” button to make it really easy for your clients to print or save a PDF copy of your invoice for their records.
Clicking the “Mark As Paid” button on a sale now displays the payment in a dialog, rather than taking you to the Payments section.
You no longer need to specifically publish an invoice to make it available online. Online invoices use a randomly generated ID number in their URL so clients will only be able to see an invoice if you send the link to them or set up payment reminders. The online version of the invoice is automatically updated as soon as you make any changes to it in Light Blue 2020.1 and it syncs to your account.
The “payment received with thanks” page for online invoices now displays the full invoice details.
The online payment receipt email now includes a link to the online invoice instead of including all of the invoice details in the receipt email. This helps to protect your clients’ privacy against email services that scrape the contents of incoming emails, and also avoids problems with displaying the invoice in some email clients. If your client wants to view or print the invoice, they can click that link.
The old “online invoice publication email” and “online invoice payment receipt” templates have been replaced by email templates. Your old templates are automatically converted on upgrading. You can choose a different publication email template for each payment schedule and different receipt templates for each instalment (e.g. so that you could use a different receipt template for the final instalment).
Email improvements:
Email event tracking:
When you send emails from Light Blue’s email servers, you can now track whether those emails have been opened or if the links in them have been clicked. This is optional, and you can turn the feature on from the “Email” section of the Preferences window.
To see whether an email has been opened or a link clicked, open it up from the Outbox or the relevant Activity panel. You’ll see a summary of the tracked email’s status that you can expand to see more details, including when the event happened and the IP address that triggered it.
It’s important to note that email open tracking might not be 100% effective, for a variety of reasons. For example, some email providers and email apps can block email open events from being reported back to us. We’ve also heard of email open events being triggered by some automated content filters. If you CC or BCC yourself into emails, be careful not to trigger open or click events yourself!
We’ve also been working hard to make sure that the deliverability of emails that are sent from our own servers is high, and this includes providing personalisation of the address from which these emails are sent. If you’re sending emails using our servers then we’ll use your unique @lightbluecustomermail.com email address, which you can personalise via your account page (e.g. [email protected]).
Behind the scenes, we’ve created an email suppression list to avoid sending emails to recipients that either don’t exist or have told you that they don’t want to receive emails from you. We’re automatically adding a recipient to your email suppression list if they (or their email provider) send a complaint to us or we receive a permanent bounce notification. Just like opens and clicks, bounces and complaints can only be tracked for emails sent via our servers. If you try to send an email to an address that’s on your suppression list, you’ll be warned and the email address will automatically be removed if you ignore the warning. You can remove an email address from your suppression list by going go the relevant contact record and using the cog menu that appears when you hover your mouse cursor over the email address.
Storing copies of client portal emails:
Copies of emails that are sent for Light Blue’s contact forms, questionnaires, contracts, and online invoices are now recorded in Light Blue’s Outbox and the Activity panel for the relevant records. We’re still CCing a copy of these emails to you so that you get an instant notification when your client has done something, but this gives you a clearer record of all of your communications with your client.
If you no longer want to have a copy of these emails CCed to you, there’s now an option to switch that off in the Email section of the Preferences window.
No more “add email template to found set”:
Light Blue is designed to send “everyday” emails to your clients and is very good at doing so: dealing with new enquiries, responding to your clients’ messages, automated appointment reminders, and so on.
However, when you’re interested in sending a message to a large group of contacts at once (we’re defining ‘large’ as anything more than about 20 contacts in this context) then specialist marketing tools are a better fit for making sure that those messages reach your audience. Sending lots of marketing emails from your own email address risks damaging the reputation of your email account, making it substantially less likely that your prospects (or paying clients) will receive your messages, that’s why it’s best to use a tool that’s designed for the job.
It’s easy to export email addresses from Light Blue to use with a dedicated email marketing tool.
We’ve removed the “Add email template to found set” command to make it less likely that someone could get themselves into trouble by trying to send lots of emails from Light Blue.
Other changes:
As always, we’ve included as many new features, customer requests, and bug fixes in this release. Here’s a list of the biggest changes.
Inbox, Outbox, and Activity:
The speed of loading or searching the Inbox has been massively improved for customers with large numbers of incoming emails, text messages, and forms.
Client portal emails sent on your behalf (e.g. when publishing a contract, or when an enquiry fills in one of your contact forms) are now recorded in the Outbox and linked to the Activity panel of any related records.
If an error occurs when sending an email or text message, you’re now notified by a dialog rather than have to spot the error badge appear on the Outbox. Email and text message sending errors are highlighted in red on their parent record’s Activity panel, as well as in the Outbox.
Added a button to the Outbox and email dialogs that allows you to dismiss email and text message sending errors. This will remove them from “Errors” category in the Outbox and also stop them from counting towards the count that appears on the Outbox’s badge, but leaves them in your database so that you can refer back to them in future. e.g. if you receive a hard bounce from an email that you send, you might want to have a record of that but not have that bounced email count as an error once you’ve dealt with it.
Added an “Automatically CC Client Portal Emails To Yourself” preference.
Added French and German translations of Light Blue’s contract signing service terms & conditions.
Light Blue’s contract signing service terms & conditions now refer to the text of the “submit” and “save” buttons, if you’ve customised or translated them.
Added an option to display your booking fee description on the “pay booking fee” step of online contracts.
Removed the indent and outdent buttons from the email editor toolbar. This is because the HTML and CSS used to implement this feature is not supported by some popular email clients (e.g. Gmail’s web interface) and we don’t want to encourage you to use formatting that might not appear correctly in all email clients.
When you create an email from a template, we’ve reduced the amount of vertical space between email template body and your default email signature.
Fixed a bug that could leave the old signature in place when you select a different email signature while composing an email.
Draft emails now appear in the “To Do” section of the “Activity” panel instead of the “History” section.
Clarified the warning that’s displayed when you delete an item from the Inbox or Outbox to make it clear that it will also be removed from any linked records too.
Contracts and forms can now be sent to contacts that don’t have an email address of their own, but belong to a group of contacts whose head has an email address.
You can now include VAT number in the list of contact fields that you can include in online forms.
Light Blue can now split name & email address combos of the form “Your Name >”
You can no longer include the “confirm email” field in a form that does not include the “email” field.
Fixed a bug where the “Accept Contract” dialog could open behind the contract dialog when you try to accept the signed contract from the contract dialog.
Checking and unchecking the “preview mail-merge tags” checkbox when editing one of the emails in the contract setup dialog now reloads the dialog much faster.
Finances:
Added a “print this invoice” button to online invoices, so that clients can more easily print or save a PDF copy for their records.
The sale “payment due” field has been replaced by the payment schedule features.
Added more fields that can be used in queries, lists, and custom reports: “Shoot Start Date” has been added to the Quotes section; “Shoot Enquiry Source” has been added to the Sales section; “Most Recent Payment Date” and “Most Recent Payment Method” fields have been added to the Purchases section.
Added new mail-merge tags: %SaleBillingTitle%, %SaleShippingTitle%
Added a “Copy Link for Online Payment” option to the “Create Invoice” dialog.
The “Export Financial Information” export now includes the purchase invoice number field.
QuickBooks invoice exports now show “None” for items that have no tax applied to them, instead of a blank value.
The “Mark Purchases As Paid” housekeeping command now offers you a choice of using today’s date or the purchase records’ invoice date.
Online invoices now display the linked shoot’s reference number, if you’ve turned the shoot reference option on in Light Blue.
The “Contact Financial History” report no longer shows a value in the “Days Overdue” column for invoices or purchases that have been marked as paid.
Removed the “Financial Details” heading and “Included in the items above at the rate shown” text from quotes and invoices.
Added a preference to include the purchase reference field in linked records and record selection lists that include purchases.
Shoots:
Shoots now display payments for their linked sales in their “Linked Records” panel.
The printed version of a shoot now includes linked resources’ full names, rather than their abbreviation.
When you confirm a shoot that has a single linked quoted, Light Blue can now automatically change the quote’s status to “Accepted”.
When you change a confirmed shoot’s status to “cancelled” or “enquiry”, the dialog that offers to tidy outstanding items now includes a clearer “Don’t Tidy” option.
The various tools in the Housekeeping section of the Records menu for changing the status of batches of shoots have had their names tidied up, and we’ve added a new “Change Status of Found Shoots to Enquiry” tool.
Fixed a bug where an enquiry with multiple sessions might not have its default workflow applied when a single session is confirmed.
You can now save a shoot schedule step that doesn’t have a description. A schedule step requires either a description, time, or linked address to be saved.
Fixed a bug where changing a shoot’s type from one that has a different default price list to a shoot type that uses the global default price list did not automatically change the price list.
Miscellaneous:
The ‘Finances’, ‘Printing’, and ‘Shoot Types’ sections of the Preferences window have been redesigned to make the options easier to find and understand.
It’s now possible to export and import saved queries and custom reports. If you’re sending a saved query or custom report to someone else, please bear in mind that the way Light Blue handles links to related records means that you should design your query to work based on the name of the related record rather than selecting it from a popup menu.
Improved the workflow and messages displayed when you’re going through the process of resetting a member of staff’s password from the staff login dialog.
Improved the warnings that are displayed when you turn on the “require password” option.
Our old static web gallery generator was deprecated more than two years ago and has now been removed from the app.
The record selection dialog now defaults its height to just a tad less than that of Light Blue’s main window when you open it.
When you go to related record, the first tab of that record’s tab panel is now always selected.
The workflow export and import features now include the member of staff assigned to a task.
The quick search feature now includes addresses in the list fields it searches.
The bulk text message setup dialog now includes an estimate of the number of credits that will be used.
Added the contact VAT number field to the contact import dialog.
Changed references to “setup code” to refer to “one-time password” instead.
Using the %BusinessAddressCommas% version of the %BusinessAddress% mail-merge tag now converts any paragraphs in the address into a single, comma-delimited line.
Company contacts are now displayed in lists using their company name, rather than the value from the “company” field of their address.
The list of localisations in the “Template Translations” section of the Preferences window is now in alphabetical order.
Fixed a crash that could occur when typing a reply to an email that contains emoji. Also fixed an error that could change the font settings back to default after typing an apostrophe in the email editor.
Fixed a bug that could cause the Inbox unread badge count to include text messages that don’t appear in the Inbox.
Fixed an obscure bug that could cause a product workflow to be added twice when that product was added to a sale.
Fixed a bug where duplicating an appointment with an appointment type adds the appointment type’s resources again.
Fixed a bug where going to list view, then double-clicking on the same record to go back to detail view, would display a blank detail panel.
Fixed a bug where clicking or tabbing into the “schedule step” field when adding a schedule step to a form would lose focus when there are unsaved changes in other fields.
Fixed a bug that could prevent the invoice date in the detail view list from being updated when it’s edited.
Fixed a bug where duplicating a shoot and using the “don’t group” option could still group the new shoot with the original.
Fixed a bug that could result in upgrading from versions of Light Blue older than version 7 from upgrading workflows properly.
Fixed a bug where adding an appointment via the calendar failed to display the full set of workflow options when you close it.
Fixed a bug where the “you need to link some contacts to this shoot” warning was displayed in a form setup dialog when it shouldn’t have been.

New in Light Blue 8.2.7 (Feb 26, 2020)

New in Light Blue 8.2.6 (Jan 8, 2020)

New in Light Blue 8.2.5 (Dec 2, 2019)

New in Light Blue 8.2.4 (Nov 25, 2019)

New in Light Blue 8.2.0 (Sep 27, 2019)

We’ve just released Light Blue 8.2, which builds on the success of Light Blue 8 by adding new features, improving existing features, and squashing bugs.
Light Blue 8.2 is a free update for all of our subscribers. You can install the update by using the “Check For Updates” command in Light Blue (which is in the Light Blue menu on macOS, or in the Help menu on Windows) or by downloading the installer from your Light Blue account.
macOS Catalina compatibility
This update adds compatibility with macOS Catalina, which is expected to be released in October 2019. Please make sure that you install this update if you’re going to upgrade your Mac to macOS Catalina.
Online contract, forms, and online invoice translations:
All of the text in our online contracts, forms, and online invoices can now be translated so that they can be presented in any language! We’ve provided French and German translations as part of Light Blue 8.2, but please get in touch if you’d like to find out more about adding other languages.
Home screen and activity improvements:
Shoots displayed on the Home screen now include their location summary, so you can see where you’re going at a glance.
The task manager now includes totals next to its group headings.
The quick query totals for each of Light Blue’s main sections are displayed more quickly when you have large quantities of data.
Added a preference for displaying the time and date of all items in the Activity panel instead of just the date.
Email and text message improvements:
We’ve made it much simpler to include images in your emails and email templates. When you’re adding an image to an email, we can now host that image for you to save you from needing to host the image yourself.
Improved the performance of our HTML editor when working with large quantities of text.
The “Insert Link” button in our HTML editor now allows you to add links to images as well as text.
Removed the ability to add multiple levels of indentation to ordered and unordered lists in emails, because they’re not a standard HTML feature and some email clients (especially Gmail) don’t display them properly.
When you’re replying to emails where the email address is of the form “Someone’s name <[email protected]>”, we now strip the name part out automatically. We can also handle email addresses of the form “Someone’s name [mailto:[email protected]]”
Added support for GroupHead: prefixes for contact mail-merge tags in workflow emails and text messages.
Fixed a problem where a manually created text message could be displayed with the wrong time until it’s sent.
Fixed a bug where the “Insert Link” button in our HTML editor could remove the first letter of the text you’re adding a link to.
Other client portal improvements:
We’ve changed all references to “public forms” to “contact forms” because that’s what most photographers use them for!
When you receive a new lead from a contact form, we include the name of the lead in the subject line if you have a “main contact” control in your form.
The receipt email for online invoices now has more sensible headings when the invoice had previously been partially paid.
Worked around a problem where Gmail could fail to display the button text in our client portal emails in the correct colour.
Other improvements and bug fixes:
When importing a price list from a CSV file, we now automatically handle currency symbols and preserve the order of the items in your price list.
You can now save and reload import orders when doing a “shoots and contacts” data import.
When you use the “Mark Founds Shoots As Completed” housekeeping command, you now have an option to change the status of enquiries as well as confirmed shoots.
The “Add contact” dialog now allows you to set the label for any new addresses that you’re adding.
The “Save New Product” button in the sale item editing dialog now allows you to save items with a negative or zero price, as well as items with a positive price.
Our Australian English localisation now refers to “State” instead of “County”.
The “Update Linked Contact’s Address” command now explains why you can’t update the linked contact’s address when there are no changes to save.
Fixed a crash that could occur on macOS when creating a reply to an email containing emoji.
Fixed a bug that could prevent the Contacts, Calendars, or Reminders permission dialogs from being displayed on macOS Mojave or newer.
Fixed a problem where the records list contextual menu in the Preferences window would never enable any of its items and the “Move Record to Trash” menu item was also disabled.
Fixed the title of the calendar note dialog on Windows.
Fixed a bug where background threads the load the contents of the Inbox and Outbox could persist after they’ve finished their job.
Fixed a problem where the “Skip This Version” button in the Windows version of our autoupdater wouldn’t remember that you’ve skipped that version when you quit and relaunch Light Blue.
In the background activity window, if you’re doing a large sync and a temporary error turns the sync status text red, it’s now changed back to black as soon as the error is cleared.

New in Light Blue 8.1.2 (Aug 1, 2019)

Using “partner” as a contact role now supports all of the same features as using “bride” or “groom”. For shoots with a type of “wedding” or “weddings”, this applies to automatically setting the title, automatically selecting contract signatories when you add a new contract, mail-merge tags that use the couple’s details, and the “wedding couple” section in your forms and questionnaires. The default role for wedding couple controls on forms is now “partner” rather than “bride”. We’ve also added %ShootPartner1FirstName%, %ShootPartner1LastName%, %ShootPartner2FirstName%, and %ShootPartner2LastName% mail-merge tags, which use the first and second contacts with roles of “bride”, “groom”, or “partner” (or their localised equivalents) linked to a shoot.
Flagged more mail-merge tags as being available in workflow messages.
Added a “Mark As Unread” button to the Inbox and in the incoming email dialog.
When accepting a contract with a linked form, the form import dialog’s “Import” button is no longer disabled if there isn’t any updated information to import. This makes it simpler to get forms from repeat clients who haven’t changed their details off your Inbox’s pending list!
If you’re password protecting your copy of Light Blue, the staff login dialog is now displayed immediately after your initial data download or a client app reset sync.
On Windows, the “Check For Updates” command now downloads the installer much faster. n.b. this will apply to updates that you download from Light Blue 8.1.2 onwards, so downloading this update won’t be any faster.
When renaming the “Ungrouped requests” shoot requests group, default the name to that rather than “New group”.
Our QuickBooks export now includes separate rows for any percentage discount that has been applied to an invoice.
%EventX% tags in a workflow email preview could show the wrong value when linked to an event other than the shoot’s start date.
Fixed a rare crash that could occur when generating picture thumbnails.
Fixed a problem with the “Issue Refund” button on fully paid invoices, where the credit note would be created with the wrong sign.
Fixed some timezone irregularities with displaying incoming emails’ received dates.
Fixed a glitch where the calendar resource view includes column titles at top of timed section as well as the all-day section.
Fixed a problem where multi-date calendar notes linked to specific resources don’t show the note description on any day other than the first day.
Fixed an encoding problem that could occur when exporting a tax report to CSV.
Fixed unexpected quits that have been reported to us.

New in Light Blue 8.1.1 (Jun 5, 2019)

You can now create Purchase records from Sale records, using the cost information that you’ve entered into your price lists. In a price list, you can now specify the supplier, net cost, and VAT / sales tax cost of the products that you offer. From a Sale record, you can use the options menu in the Items section or right-click on an item to create Purchase records for the items in the Sale.
You can now create one-time setup codes from the “Manage My Devices” section of your account. This allows you to add a device to your Light Blue account without giving your account password to the owner of that device.
You can now set up automatic SMS credit top-ups yourself by logging into your account on our website.
Non-breaking spaces copied and pasted from other apps are now automatically replaced when you edit a text message template. These characters could make a message use the Unicode character set despite looking like they only contain characters from the standard GSM character set.
Workflow messages linked to a session or an appointment can now use contact and shoot mail-merge tags.
Added a warning message when you try to go to records that you don’t have access to from the Home screen.
The “Restore From Backup” and “Reset Your Light Blue Account” commands are now only available to staff who have full access privileges.
Clarified the “you can only submit this contract once everyone has signed it” message that appears on unsigned contracts.
Fixed a problem where non-https images included in emails couldn’t be previewed on macOS.
Fixed a problem where restoring a Contact record from the trash wouldn’t restore it to the group that it was part of.
Fixed a rare problem where an email could be sent via our servers rather than your selected email account.
Fixed a problem where the date of a scheduled text message in the Outbox could be displayed incorrectly.
Fixed a problem where the purchase net and tax amount calculator wouldn’t work with European decimal separators.
Fixed a problem where creating a credit note could create one with the wrong cents value if you’re using European decimal separators.
Fixed a problem where re-entering your account password in the “continue trial” or “your trial has expired” pages of the setup wizard wouldn’t successfully authenticate your account.
Fixed a problem with upgrading from Light Blue 4 to Light Blue 8.
Fixed a problem that could cause the “your trial has expired” setup screen to appear when you’re not actually using a trial account.
Fixed a race condition that could cause “The email hasn’t been synced to our servers yet” errors when trying to send emails in quick succession.

New in Light Blue 8.1 (May 7, 2019)

Improved staff access restriction options:
For businesses that have members of staff, you now have much more control over the parts of Light Blue that your staff can access. The new “Restricted” access level allows you to choose which features they can access, so you can disable access to sensitive information (such as finances) or entire sections of the app.
Windows performance improvements:
We’ve made big improvements to our Windows app, making it more responsive and improving its graphics performance.
Simplified account password management:
Changing your Light Blue account password no longer requires you to re-enter your password in the desktop app. This used to be a common source of confusion, and the new approach also allows you to permanently remove Light Blue 8.1 and above devices from your account without needing to change your account password. We’ve also introduced a new one-off setup code feature that allows you to add a device to your account without having to type your account password into it. This is perfect for adding members of staff or contractors without letting them know your main password.
Other changes:
Light Blue 8.1 includes lots of other new features and bug fixes. Here’s a summary of the improvements that we’ve made:
Light Blue launches more quickly and the Preferences window takes less time to open.
The Preferences window has been reorganised, and the “General Preferences” and “Custom Fields” panels have been split up into tabs to make it easier to find the settings you’re looking for.
The speed of processing large data syncs has been improved, making the initial download of data onto a new computer much faster.
Client portal emails (for example, the ones that are sent when you publish a contract) are now sent from your default email account, so they can come from your email address rather than using our email servers.
Form and API submissions in the Inbox that contain a shoot date are now colour coded to show whether they clash with an existing event or enquiry.
Orders from theimagefile can now be sent to your Light Blue account and imported as new Sale records.
Your current SMS credit balance is now displayed in the text message dialog.
Improved our VAT report for use with the UK government’s new Making Tax Digital initiative.
Added a preference that lets you choose whether to allow members of staff that don’t have a password set to log into Light Blue.
In the staff login dialog, if you fail to enter the right password the existing password is automatically highlighted for you so that you can immediately start typing to correct it.
Added a staff-level default email account setting, so members of staff can automatically use their own email address when they create an email.
Contracts and contract templates now have an optional thank you URL. If you specify this, your client will be taken to that URL after they have completed the contract (and paid their booking fee, if you’re charging one). You could use this to take your client to a custom thank you page that you’ve created on your own website.
When publishing a contract that includes a form, you’re now warned if the selected form template has been deleted.
When accepting a contract, the “Mark Shoot As Confirmed” checkbox is now displayed for cancelled shoots as well as enquiries.
Added a second confirm dialog to the “Send All” and “Schedule All” buttons in the Outbox.
Fixed a timezone-related problem where items in the Outbox could be displayed as being sent on the wrong day.
Added a “Copy Email Address” command to the Linked Records contextual menu.
Added a “Load In Query Dialog” command to the quick query list’s contextual menu.
When parsing an email address, Light Blue now recognises email addresses formatted like “Name [[email protected]]” as well as “Name <[email protected]>”.
Improved support for macOS 10.14 Mojave’s AppleScript security restrictions.
Added a preference for whether you want to include prices in a printed production order.
Added default photographer and salesperson options for new Sale records. When you create a sale, if there’s an assigned resource with the role “photographer” or “salesperson” then they are always used, otherwise we use the new default staff.
The “Add New Contact” dialog now includes the contact notes field.
Added an “Automatically Check For New Versions Of Light Blue” checkbox to the Preferences window, to give you the option of only manually checking for updates.
When you trash a shoot, if its linked contacts aren’t linked to any other records then we now offer to move them to the trash as well.
Fixed a problem where the first item in the Inbox could have its details appear to be repeated appear to be repeated.
Fixed a problem on Windows where if you have the staff login dialog enabled, Light Blue could quit after doing a database upgrade instead of carrying on.
Fixed a character encoding problem with the export financial data tool.
Fixed a problem where the EventX mail-merge tags could use the wrong event’s details when used as part of a shoot that has multiple upcoming sessions and appointments.
Fixed a problem that could occur when querying for contacts using linked contact criteria.
Fixed a problem where un-ticking the mailing list opt-in box in the add contact dialog behaved as if you were ticking the box.
Fixed a bug where the contract dialog “you need to add contacts” label is displayed on all tabs, not just the signatories tab.
Fixed a rounding error that could occur when using the “Calculate Net & Tax Amounts From Gross Total” button in a purchase item.
Dragging an event in the calendar to another date or time is no longer interrupted by the calendar getting reloaded during the drag.

New in Light Blue 8.0.3 (Apr 1, 2019)

You can now use the “Add To Found Set” section of the Records menu to add a Resource to a selection of records, and the “Remove From Found Set” section to remove a Resource from a selection of records.
Our QuickBooks invoice export now includes the invoice due date and the linked shoot’s title and shoot type.
The “Tidy Popup Menus” housekeeping command now allows you to tidy the purchase item Name field.
Added .cr3 and .raf file extensions to the list of unprocessed file extensions supported by our picture renaming feature.
The background activity window no longer contains an item unhelpfully labelled as “Description” when you first open it.
Updated the printed version of workflows to show email and text message steps correctly.
On Windows, the staff login dialog now focuses the password field when it opens to save you needing to click or tab into it.
Fixed a problem where underscores in contract mail-merge values could appear as _
Fixed a problem where charts section could fail to take percentage discounts into account.
Fixed a problem with the “Staff Shoots” report that prevented shoots from being included more than once if multiple staff are assigned to it. Enquiries and cancelled shoots are no longer included in the report.
Fixed a bug that could cause macOS contacts to be published to an account other than the default account.
Fixed a database error message that could appear when using the Sales list view with both the Photographer and Salesperson columns.
Fixed extra text that could appear when printing a contact record.
Fixed a bug that could cause an attachment to be duplicated when sending emails in quick succession.
Fixed a printing problem that could cause the rightmost column to be cut off the Purchases section of a tax report.
Fixed a bug that could cause unsaved changes to be lost when dragging an attachment into an email.
Fixed a problem with updating workflows when upgrading from an early Light Blue 8 beta.
Fixed a problem where setting a custom label for a contact method wouldn’t display that custom label until you enter the phone number or email address.
Fixed a couple of unexpected quits that could occur in unusual circumstances.

New in Light Blue 8.0.0 (Jan 4, 2019)

Other email and text message improvements:
Requires a subscription to our online services:
Sending emails and text messages is much faster because they are now sent in the background, freeing you up to carry on using Light Blue while they’re being sent.
Emails can now be composed in a separate window, rather than in a dialog box. This allows you to compose multiple emails at the same time, or carry on using other parts of Light Blue while you’re composing an email.
You can now use one of your email templates when you’re replying to an email.
You can easily add contacts’ email addresses to an email by clicking the new + buttons that appear next to the To, CC, and BCC fields.
We’ve added a reply-to field for emails sent from Light Blue.
Text messages are now included in the Outbox.
The number badge on the Outbox shows the number of draft messages and messages that have errors. It’s shown in grey if there aren’t any errors, or red if there are any errors that need your attention.
On macOS, Light Blue’s dock icon now shows you the number of items in the Inbox that need your attention.
If you’re using the “Pending Items & Unread Messages” filter in the Inbox, marking an email or text message as read no longer makes it disappear straight away. It will only get hidden when you reload the Inbox or change your filters.
The “go to linked record” contextual menu command for emails in the Inbox now includes any contacts that Light Blue has automatically recognised based on the sender’s email address.
We’ve improved how timezones are handled when you manually schedule an email or text message to be sent in the future.
Images in emails can now have alt text.
When you reply to an email that included attachments, you now have an option to include those original attachments in your reply.
Fixed a problem where adding a signature to an email reply could put the signature below the quoted text.
When emails or text messages are sent or scheduled, their status in the Activity panel now updates as soon as it happens.
When you duplicate a text message template, the new template is now named as “[Original name] copy”
Other new workflow features:
You can now export or import workflows, which allows you to share your workflows with other photographers or import a Light Blue workflow that someone else has shared with you.
Added “Add Workflow” buttons to shoot sessions (instead of making you go into the session’s options menu to add a workflow to it), custom date fields, and the appointment date field.
When you click an “Add Workflow” button for a field that allows you to specify a default workflow (e.g. the shoot enquiry date), instead of only allowing to add that default workflow the “Choose Workflow” dialog is now presented and the default workflow is pre-selected for you. This means that you just need to click the “Add” button if you want to use the default, but can select an alternative workflow if you want to.
The “Add Workflow to Found Set” menu command now allows you to add workflows to shoots based on their start date or enquiry date. Any shoots in the found set that don’t have your selected type of date are skipped.
You can now set a default confirmation workflow for appointment types.
Added a “Today” option to the list of key dates you can base a workflow on. The “Custom Date” option already defaulted to today, but this new option will provide a more understandable option.
Changed the “Delete Outstanding Tasks” command from the Activity panel options menu to “Delete Outstanding Items”. This will delete uncompleted tasks and unsent scheduled emails and text messages, but leaves any future appointments.
When you change the status of a shoot from “Confirmed” or “Completed” to “Enquiry”, Light Blue now offers to tidy up outstanding items (in exactly the same way as when you cancel a shoot).
You can now reassign multiple tasks to another member of staff from the Task Manager, or change their category.
Added an “Assign Workflow Tasks Without Allocated Staff To Logged In User” preference to the “General Preferences” section of the Preferences.
Online contract signing, forms, online invoice payments, and API:
Requires a subscription to our online services
Shoot and contract forms can now include image and file upload fields. You add these to your form or template like any other field (although they can’t be included in contact forms, mostly for security reasons) and clients can use them to upload an image or file to you. If a client uploads a file to you, the filename will be included in your notification email and in the Inbox, and the uploaded file will appear in the shoot’s Activity panel. Being able to request an image or file from a client is useful in lots of situations, such as asking a client for a picture of a room they want to hang wall art in for a viewing session. Warning: although we’re not allowing image or file uploads in contact forms, you should always treat files that have been sent to you by anyone else with a certain amount of caution!
Added a setting to contract templates that allows you to choose whether (and which type of) booking fee you want to charge for that contract.
Added support for separate Stripe and PayPal details for each client portal brand, so you can have payments going to separate accounts for different shoot types. Please get in touch if you might be interested in this feature.
We’ve added an option to not CC you into client portal emails that we send on your behalf (e.g. when a contract is published, etc).
Incoming data sent to your account via Light Blue’s API now includes a date field that you can use in queries.
Fundy client order import:
You can now import Fundy Design Suite orders into Light Blue. You’ll find commands for importing Fundy files in the Import section of the Records menu.
Speed improvements:
Upgrading Light Blue’s database is much, much faster than before. In our tests with large databases, it’s now 20x faster to upgrade your database.
Loading the Inbox and Outbox is now much faster when they contain large numbers of items.
Inbox and Outbox features:
The Outbox date filters have been changed so that you can more quickly find what you’re interested in. The “Today”, “Yesterday”, “Last 7 Days”, and “Last 28 Days” options no longer display messages scheduled to be sent on future dates, and you now have “Tomorrow”, “Next 7 Days”, and “Next 28 Days” options that will show you scheduled messages. The default option is now “All Dates”.
Added “Create Enquiry” and “Link To Existing Record” buttons to emails opened up from the Inbox, to save you needing to close the dialog and use the buttons in the Inbox.
When you’re previewing incoming data (e.g. from a contact form) that includes an email address, a new “Reply” button allows you to create an email to the first email address included in the data.
Text messages that you open from the Outbox now display their linked record and can be linked to a different record.
Sales and invoicing:
You can now export a set of invoices in a format that is easier to import into QuickBooks.
We’ve improved the “Issue Credit” button on invoices to make it easier to credit or refund a wider variety of invoices.
You can now choose to include the Payment notes field when printing a receipt.
You can now choose to include the shoot type on a printed invoice or quote.
Calendar and Home screen:
Added an option to display week numbers in Week and Month view.
We’ve added an option that allows you to display cancelled shoots in the built-in calendar.
We’ve added an option to include cancelled shoots in the results of quick searches. This is turned off by default, to avoid cluttering your search results with cancelled enquiries unless you’re specifically searching for one.
Reporting:
The various data export commands that used to live in the File menu have been moved to a new “Export” sub-menu in the Records menu. This is a more logical place for them to live, is more consistent with the “Import” sub-menu, and removes clutter from the File menu.
The list view now remembers any column widths that you manually adjusted, and restores them when you go back to that list.
In list view, selecting a quick query that doesn’t include any records no longer takes you back to detail view.
In the query dialog, you can now query on the “role” of resources linked to a shoot.
You can now use “Invoice Number (without prefix)” and “Invoice Number Prefix” in the query dialog, lists, and data exports. You’ve always been able to use the full “Invoice Number” field in these situations, but these new options give you more flexibility.
We’ve added new fields that you can use in queries, lists, and data exports: “No. of Confirmed Shoots” has been added to the Contacts section, “First Appointment Start Date” has been added to the Shoots section; and “Shoot Start Date” and “Most Recent Payment Method” have been added to the Sales section.
When you’re running a report, the report options dialog now defaults the most recent reporting period and output options to the options that you used for that report.
Calendar notes are now included in the “Today’s Information” report.
Other changes:
Google are making a small but important change to their Google Calendar API, and Light Blue 8 is now ready for this change.
Improved the design of the staff login window to make it more welcoming when you launch Light Blue, as well as clearer in its purpose.
We’ve updated the APIs that we use to publish contacts to the macOS Contacts app, which makes publishing contacts much faster (and future-proofs this feature in case Apple decides to stop supporting their old API). This requires macOS 10.11.
You can now import individual contacts from the macOS Contacts app, as well as importing an entire group of contacts.
Added a housekeeping command that marks any Sale records in the current found set as paid.
Notes fields on Windows now have spell-checking enabled.
Added a timezone setting to the Preferences window and setup wizard. This allows us to implement the %CurrentDate% and %CurrentTime% mail-merge tags in workflow messages.
Added %ShootAcceptedQuoteTotal%, %ShootNetAcceptedQuoteTotal%, %ShootPaidTotal%, and %ShootOutstandingBalance% mail-merge tags.
We’ve made our German localisation more comprehensive, and included both formal and informal options to give you a choice as to how formal you want to be when printing invoices, sending contracts, etc.
When you set up a new database, we now create a default email signature for you.
When you’re merging two contact records, spaces are now ignored when deciding whether to deduplicate a phone number.
When linking a shoot to a purchase item, the “new record” button shouldn’t be available.
The field label for custom paragraph text fields can now wrap onto extra lines if the label you’ve specified is long.
Fixed a bug where duplicating time off wouldn’t publish the duplicated event to Google Calendar or the macOS Calendars app.
Fixed a bug where printing a single record from the list view could print the wrong record.
Fixed a crash that could occur when trying to attach a PDF of the built-in calendar to an email.
Fixed a database error that could occur when using an unusual combination of related sections in the query dialog.
Fixed a bug where shoots created via the API might not use their shoot type’s default session length.

New in Light Blue 7.1.3 (Jul 27, 2018)

When you’re publishing a contract or form but not sending an email to your client, you can now open the contract or form in your browser as well as copying its URL to the clipboard.
The “Print/Send” checkbox in the print dialog now defaults to whatever you last set it to, so if you prefer to create invoices without printing them then you no longer need to un-check that box every time.
Added a 24 hour option to the built-in calendar’s week and day views.
If an email doesn’t already have attachments, you can now drag attachments onto the ‘Add Attachment’ button. You could already drag attachments into the list of existing attachments.
In the query dialog, you can now search on incoming data fields when you’re querying for shoots.
You can now query for records that have notes, tasks, or documents that are linked to a particular member of staff.
Added %ContactBirthDateDay%, %ContactBirthDateMonth%, and %ContactBirthDateYear% mail-merge tags.
Added support for detecting forwarded messages from the iOS version of Mail and the macOS version of Outlook.
The dialog for setting up sending a batch of text messages now closes automatically after you send or schedule your messages.
When you open the appointment editing dialog, the cursor will default to the start time field if the appointment doesn’t already have a start time.
If your country setting is set to one of France’s international territories, we now apply the French address format.
Fixed a problem where pasting text into an HTML editor on Windows could paste it in the wrong place.
Fixed a problem where you couldn’t paste formatted text into an HTML editor.
Fixed a problem that meant that you could only drag-reorder form fields if you kept your mouse near the left hand edge of the list of fields.
Fixed a problem on macOS where tabbing into an HTML editor required hitting the Tab key twice.
Fixed a problem where reschedule tasks that are scheduled for the same day could fail to reschedule some of those tasks.
On some dates, the “Last 12 months” date range in Charts view could show the wrong results.
Fixed a problem with the HTML editor that could make it hard to add a space in a specific place.
Fixed a crash that could occur when opening the Charts view.
Fixed a bug where the %ShootRequests% mail-merge tag didn’t include some requests.

New in Light Blue 7.0.4 (Mar 22, 2018)

New in Light Blue 7.0.2 (Mar 12, 2018)

Fixed a problem on Windows where editing the content of an HTML editor, and then immediately clicking on another record, could update the wrong record.
Fixed a problem where viewing the Outbox with a particular combination of filters set could cause a crash.
When you copy and paste text in one of our HTML editors (e.g. when editing an email or email template), the formatting of the copied text is now preserved.
When you export a form template, it now includes the public form submitted email, submit button text, and HTML versions of the form emails.
Fixed a problem on Windows where printing from a computer that includes accented characters in the username could cause an error.
The margins for unbranded emails sent from Light Blue are now more standard.
If a client uses the ‘I will pay offline’ button on a contract that includes a booking form, the confirmation page that appears now includes your alternative payment information.
The business hours preferences menus now include 30 minute intervals.
Fixed a problem where, if you’re using using a localisation that includes translations of the “weddings”, “bride”, and “groom” keywords, the English versions of those words wouldn’t trigger various special features (e.g. setting the shoot title to the bride & groom’s name, selecting the bride & groom as signatories for a contract, and mail-merge tags that would include both the bride and groom’s details).
Linking an incoming email or text message to a record, or creating a new enquiry from it, now marks the message as read.
When printing or mail-merging custom field checkboxes, show their values as “yes” or “no” (or the localised value) instead of “1” or “0”.
Added a ‘Reply All’ button to the email dialog.
When trying to send or schedule an email, you’re now warned if it doesn’t have a subject line.
Fixed a problem where editing custom dates in the report dialog was producing database errors.
Fixed a problem where billing names and net amounts on a tax report could be displayed incorrectly if the report is run on a cash basis and includes sales that include items with more than one tax rate.
On printed templates, we’ve made your client’s VAT number & contact details part of the same chunk of text as the contact name and address. This means that they will use the same margin settings as the main address, but you might need to adjust your ‘first page top margin’ setting to accommodate the extra height.
Removed a rogue # on the printed version of a purchase record.
When creating an email from a sale or quote record, its linked shoot is now automatically included in the list of linked records. This means that the email will appear in the shoot’s Activity panel as well as that of the sale or quote.
When importing into a custom checkbox field, we’re now treating “1”, “true”, “yes”, and the localised value of “yes” as “1”
When parsing a full name into parts (e.g. when importing a contact’s full name from an API submission), we now assume that a single word name is the first name.
If you’re sending emails via your own outgoing mail server, we’ve now raised the maximum number of attachments to 50, and the maximum total size of the attachments to 25MB.
Incoming Data records (from forms and API submissions) are now handled properly when you merge or delete the record that you’ve linked it to.
If your ‘Prices Include Tax’ preference is set to true, display gross income, expenditure, and profit in charts. Otherwise, display net income, expenditure, and profit.
Fixed a crash that could occur when loading the Outbox.
Corrected the French spelling of our “form unavailable” message.
Fixed a problem where Cmd-Tabbing out of Light Blue when you’re clicked into an HTML editor, and then going back to Light Blue, treated it as if the Cmd key was still held down.
Fixed a problem on Windows where hitting the Return key while editing a form or contract email would be treated as if you clicked the Publish button.
Fixed a problem where the alignment of text in an email could be ignored when you send it.
Added support for yyyy/mm/dd formatted dates to our API.
Fixed a problem where the email sent out when a client fills in a form didn’t use any custom text colour that you’d set.
When sending an email via your own outgoing mail server, the reply-to address is set to that email account’s email address instead of the default email address for your Light Blue client portal.
We’ve adjusted the padding around checkbox controls in our forms.
Fixed a problem where multiple paragraphs in a static text block on forms could fail to be displayed properly.
If you’re charging your client a booking fee as part of an online contract, and your client clicks the “I will pay offline” button, we now display your alternative payment text on the confirmation page.
Fixed a problem where clicking ‘Add Payment’ on a sale that’s been included in a tax report could erroneously warn you that the sale hasn’t been invoiced.
When you credit a sale that’s been published for online payment, you’re now asked if you’d like to remove the sale from your client portal.
Fixed a problem with trying to import from CSV files that contain quoted line breaks.
Fixed a crash that could occur when using the ‘Split Day View Into One Column Per Resource’ option in the calendar.
Fixed any unexpected quits that have been reported to us.

New in Light Blue 7.0 (Jan 5, 2018)

Light Blue 7 is a major upgrade to our desktop app. With improved email and text messaging features, a brand new charts section, expanded options for online forms, and a whole host of other new features and enhancements, Light Blue 7 is focused on helping you to communicate with your clients and grow your business.
Charts:
Light Blue’s reporting features have been enhanced with a new Charts section, which allows you to generate insightful reports that help you to grow your business in just a couple of clicks. They’re really quick and easy to use, and give you an intuitive understanding of how each part of your business is performing.
Improved email sending (requires a subscription to our online services):
You can now send emails via Light Blue, and make use of great features like HTML formatting and being able to schedule emails to be sent in the future.
Emails that you send via Light Blue are automatically saved to the Activity panel of the record that you sent it from, which helps you to keep a complete history of all of your dealings with your client together in one place. You can use a variety of HTML formatting options within the emails that you compose in Light Blue, and the emails that you send can also have your client portal branding applied to them.
Send emails directly to your Light Blue account (requires a subscription to our online services):
Emails can now be sent to your Light Blue account, which removes the need for importing them from Mail (on a Mac) or Outlook (on Windows).
Each Light Blue account has a unique email address (e.g. [email protected], you can find your account’s unique email address in the ‘Email’ section of the Preferences window) and any email sent to that address will be automatically imported into your account. Records from the main sections in Light Blue also have their own unique email address (which you can get via the options menu on each record’s Activity panel), and any email sent to this address will be automatically linked to that record. You can forward an email from a client to this address to import a copy of the message into Light Blue, and any emails sent from Light Blue will automatically include your unique email address in the reply-to header so replies from your clients will come back to both your normal email address and your Light Blue account.
Multiple brands for forms, contracts, and online invoices (requires a subscription to our online services):
Your client portal can now include multiple brands, allowing you to use different formatting and branding options for your forms, contracts, online invoices, and emails.
Scheduled sending of text messages (requires a subscription to our online services):
Text messages can now be scheduled to be sent in the future, allowing you to set up reminders in advance or prepare a campaign to be sent out at a specific time.
Sending text messages via a dedicated phone number (requires a subscription to our online services):
Text messages can now be sent via a dedicated phone number. This is particularly helpful for customers in countries that aren’t supported by our existing text messaging service (e.g. the USA and Canada) because it’s available in a wider range of countries. You’ll rent a dedicated phone number from us, and any text messages that you send from Light Blue will come from that number. Replies will be imported into Light Blue’s Inbox, and you can also have them forwarded to your own phone.
If you’re interested in this feature, please contact us for further details.
Shoot tags:
You can now apply your own customisable tags to Shoot records, and use those tags to quickly find a batch of records.
More customisation options
Light Blue’s detail views are more customisable than ever, so you can simplify them even further to show just the information that’s relevant to your business.
We’ve also added new types of custom fields (custom text fields can now be turned into single line fields, paragraph fields, comboboxes, or checkboxes) and added an option to move your custom fields into their own tab to free up valuable space in the Shoots and Contacts sections.
Trash:
We’ve added a trash can feature to Light Blue where, instead of being deleted immediately, records from the main sections in Light Blue are moved to the trash. This gives an opportunity to restore those trashed records if you realise that you made a mistake.
Record duplicating and merging:
We’ve made Light Blue’s helpful ‘Duplicate Record’ command more handy by promoting it to the toolbar, so whenever you want to create a new record that’s similar to an existing one (e.g. setting up a new price list or form) then you can save yourself a load of typing by using this feature. We’ve also add a record merging tool that can help you out when you realise that you’ve accidentally ended up with duplicate contacts, bookings, etc. Light Blue’s record merging tool allows you to quickly combine the useful information from a pair of records.
64-bit support for macOS
The macOS version of Light Blue 7 is now a 64-bit application, which should ensure that it continues to run well on future versions of macOS that reduce support for 32-bit applications.
Hi-DPI support for Windows
Light Blue now supports Hi-DPI screens on Windows, as well as Retina displays on Macs.
Other changes:
Behind the scenes there are thousands of tweaks and refinements to make Light Blue faster, better and more intuitive. Here’s a quick run-down of the highlights…
Forms
You can now add checkbox fields to forms. Custom fields that have been set up to display as a checkbox in Light Blue will automatically display as a checkbox on your forms, and you can also add miscellaneous checkbox fields.
You can now add popup menu fields to forms. The shoot ‘Location’, ‘Enquiry Source’, ‘Referral Source’, and custom fields can be displayed as popup menus in your forms by supplying a list of the options that you want to include in the menu. You can also add miscellaneous popup menu fields to your forms.
Form fields can be hidden, by supplying a default value that will be imported into Light Blue when the form is imported. This can be applied to the shoot ‘Location’, ‘Enquiry Source’, ‘Referral Source’, and custom fields.
You can customise the ‘Submit’ button’s text for your forms.
Each form template can now have its own ‘thank you’ URL, which is used to take your client to the specified page when you use the form as a contact form.
You can make clients confirm their email address by forcing them to type it twice into forms.
Name fields in the contact sections on your forms are now optional.
Shoot type menus on forms can default to “Select a type” to make your client pick something rather than just go with whatever your default is.
When you’re adding a form to a shoot, you can now see which contacts will be included for each contacts section. This is a handy way of checking, for example, whether you’ve correctly labelled the bride and groom for a form that includes a ‘Wedding Couple’ section. We’ve also made it more obvious when a contacts section doesn’t include any matching contacts.
We’ve added customisable versions of the %ContractURL%, %FormURL%, and %InvoiceURL% tags that you use in the emails that are sent when you publish a contract, form, or invoice. You can now specify your own custom link text (e.g. %ContactURL:Please click this link to open your contract%) and you can also specify a button that has the same styling as the submit button in your client portal (e.g. by using %ContractURLButton%, or %FormURLButton:Click here to open the form%).
We’ve removed the automatic “preamble” text from the email we send you when someone fills in one of your public forms, to make the preview that appears in email apps more useful.
We’ve added an optional email template that can be used to send a customised acknowledgement email to the ‘Main Contact’ of a contact form.
Submitted forms can now be printed from the Activity panel
Contracts:
Requiring a drawn signature (as well as a typed one) is now optional for contracts and contract templates.
We’ve added a %ContactSignatoryFullNameAddress% mail-merge tag.
Calendar:
We’ve added an option to the Day view, which allows you to split your calendar into one column per resource. This is particularly helpful for businesses with multiple photographers, rooms, etc, who want to easily see which times are booked up for each resource.
The ‘All-Day’ part of the Day and Week views automatically resizes depending on the number of all-day events.
The currently selected event is now more obvious.
Enquiries are now more distinct from confirmed bookings.
Days that aren’t part of the current month are more obvious in the Month view.
The calendar can now be filtered by shoot type and appointment type.
Displaying events from macOS calendars is now opt-in, to avoid confusion from newcomers who might think that they’re seeing duplicate events if they’re publishing events from Light Blue to a calendar on their Mac.
Improved loading speed if you’re displaying lots of events from your macOS calendars.
Appointments, time off, and calendar notes can now be duplicated from the calendar or Home screen.
Added a “Personal” category to time off.
Calendar feeds:
You can now create calendar feeds that only show that you’re busy, without including any details for the events. This is handy if you want to give someone a feed that they can use to see when you’re available, without giving them any confidential information.
You can now include Calendar Note records in your calendar feeds.
Shoots:
You can now import shoots (as well as contacts) into Light Blue. This is helpful if you want to import historical data into Light Blue when you’re first setting it up, but it’s also helpful for anyone who wants to import a set of leads into Light Blue as shoots rather than contacts.
Added an option to highlight shoots and appointments that are scheduled outside of your business hours, by colour-coding the event’s date and time. If the event clashes with another confirmed or unconfirmed event then that colour-coding takes priority, otherwise out-of-hours events are highlighted in purple on the Home screen, Shoot records list, and Activity panel.
You can now specify multiple default resources for your shoots, so that when you select a shoot type you can now have multiple staff, rooms, and equipment added to the shoot.
We’ve added a ‘Mark Found Shoots as Completed’ command to the Housekeeping menu, to help you keep the ‘Current Events’ list on the Home screen manageable.
When you add a member of staff to a shoot, the ‘Role’ field now defaults to the job title that you set up for that member of staff in the Preferences window.
Added a ‘Copy All Email Addresses’ command to the options menu on the Linked Records panel.
When cancelling a shoot, linked appointments are now cancelled instead of deleted. We’re also offering to delete scheduled emails and text messages that have yet to be sent.
Contacts:
We’ve added an optional ‘VAT Number’ field, which you can enable or disable in the ‘Finances’ section of the Preferences window. If it’s displayed, it appears on Contact, Quote, Sale, Purchase, and Payment records. When you link a contact to a Quote, Sale, Purchase, or Payment, their VAT number is copied across along with their name and address. If the VAT Number field is being displayed, it will also be visible on your printed records, and included in the ‘Export Financial Data’ and ‘Tax Report’ commands.
When an address is linked to more than one record, the number of linked records is displayed and you can use the options menu for that address to quickly find all of the records that share that address.
We’ve added options for including a contact’s notes, history, and to-do list in our built-in printing template.
Added a ‘Default Website Label’ preference.
Improved importing from the macOS Contacts app for contacts with company details.
Sales, quotes, and purchases:
We’ve added “A Different Percentage Of The Balance…” to the list of options for the ‘Create Sale’ button on Quotes.
We’ve added a ‘Calculate Net & Tax Amounts From Gross Total’ button to the purchase item editing dialog, as an alternative to typing in the net and tax amounts of the item separately.
Added an optional product code field to price lists, sale items, and quote items. You can enable this feature from the ‘General Preferences’ section of the Preferences window.
Added an optional production instructions field to sale and quote items. This is included in the new production order. You can enable this feature from the ‘General Preferences’ section of the Preferences window.
You can now track both the salesperson and photographer on Sale records. We’ve also added a new sample custom report called ‘Photographer Sales Performance’ that allows you report on each photographer’s sales. You can enable this feature from the ‘General Preferences’ section of the Preferences window.
Added an optional production order, which is a new built-in template that can be printed or saved as a PDF from a Sale record. You can enable this feature from the ‘Printing’ section of the Preferences window.
We’ve added an option to include a space for a client signature on invoices, production orders, and quotes. You can enable this feature from the ‘Printing’ section of the Preferences window.
You can now choose to include your client’s primary phone number and email address on our built-in invoice and quote templates. You can enable this feature from the ‘Printing’ section of the Preferences window.
Custom fields can now be included in our built-in invoice, quote, and receipt templates.
When you’re invoicing a sale, Light Blue now warns you if the invoice date is older than today, or older than your most recent invoice date (if that date is in the future).
You can now save a bespoke product from a sale or quote item to your price list.
You can now select a different email template when you’re setting up an invoice for online payment.
When you add a new contact to a purchase, we now default the Type field to “Supplier”.
We’ve changed the default VAT reporting period for Ireland to four months.
Added a method of bulk changing the Sale Status field to the Housekeeping menu. This is only displayed if you’ve enabled the Sale Status field.
Sale Status-related quick queries are no longer displayed if you haven’t enabled the Sale Status field.
Fixed a problem where, if the decimal separator is not set to ‘.’, applying credit to a sale would ignore the pennies.
When using the ‘Export Financial Information’ command, if the contact name is blank we now include the company name instead.
First name mail-merge tags (e.g. %SaleBillingFirstName%) now work when the name is a single word.
Activity:
You can now filter the Activity panel to show or hide specific types of activity.
The Task Manager can now be filtered by task category.
You can now reschedule a selection of tasks in the Task Manager to the same date.
Documents can be exported from the Activity panel.
We’ve added a ‘Bulk Delete Documents…’ command to the Housekeeping menu, which allows you to delete all documents with a particular file name from particular sections. This is helpful if you’ve mail-merged lots of large documents, and want to delete them to free up some disk space.
Inbox:
Added ‘Received in the last 3 months’ and ‘All received dates’ options to the filter menus.
The Inbox’s count of unprocessed items is no longer limited to items from the last 28 days, because you can now display items of any age in the Inbox.
The default action for emails and text messages in the Inbox is now to preview the message, instead of linking it to a record.
You can now create a new contact record from an email in the Inbox, as well as being able to add a new enquiry.
When you import a contact form submission that only includes contact details, Light Blue now gives you a choice between importing just the contacts or linking them to a new enquiry for you.
When you accept an online invoice payment via the Inbox, creating a Purchase record for the transaction fee is now optional.
We’re no longer creating the ‘Light Blue incoming emails’ folder in the macOS Downloads folder if you haven’t enabled importing emails from Mail.
Templates:
Added a link to our mail-merge documentation to the Contract Templates, Document Templates, Email Templates, and Text Message Templates sections.
Localisation:
All of the text that appears on forms can now be translated.
You can now specify the words that will be recognised by Light Blue for “weddings”, “bride”, and “groom”.
Other changes:
When you’re typing in a time field, Light Blue is better at preserving any minutes value that you’ve typed if you edit the hour.
Saved queries, custom reports, data exports, and import orders can now be renamed in the dialogs that you use to load and save them.
Improved the efficiency of the ‘Backups (Previous Versions)’ folder, by only keeping backups from the last five Light Blue upgrades.
The ‘Export Records’ dialog now remembers that last set of fields that you exported for each section.
Added a hidden feature to the ‘Export Records’ dialog, where holding the Alt key down while opening the dialog will export just the currently selected record.
Light Blue’s static web gallery generating features are now hidden by default, because we’re planning to remove them in a future version of Light Blue.
We’ve hidden our product workflows feature by default, because it’s not used by many customers and sometimes causes confusion to people who are new to Light Blue.
We’ve changed the default left margin for your clients’ details on invoices, quotes, and receipts. Hardly anyone seems to use windowed envelopes now, so we’re now defaulting the left margin of their name and address to match the rest of the invoice.
You can now specify a mail-merge template that will appear in the Print dialog for all sections, not just sales, quotes, purchases, and payments.
We’ve removed averages from most of the reports that are available in the Reports menu, because they often didn’t add anything useful.
Fixed a layout glitch that could cause the detail panel tabs to appear underneath other fields.
Added an email template export / import feature.
The ‘Export Records’ command is now renamed to ‘Export Single Record’ when you open the File menu with the Alt key held down, to make that hidden feature a bit more discoverable.
On Windows, saves that trigger an immediate data sync (i.e. the app isn’t already syncing or waiting to do a data sync) no longer suffer from a delay before reloading the saved record.
Added ‘Next’ and ‘Previous’ buttons to the template translation editing dialog.
Added a ‘Mark as Completed’ / ‘Mark as Uncompleted’ command to the Task Manager options menu.
On Windows, we’ve changed that way that Light Blue monitors its documents, template files, etc, for changes to make it more efficient. You shouldn’t notice any changes, apart from lower CPU and power usage.

New in Light Blue 6.2.3 (Sep 22, 2017)

New in Light Blue 5.5.3 (Aug 21, 2015)

New in Light Blue 5.5.2 (Jul 16, 2015)

In Light Blue 5.5, we updated the database engine behind Light Blue, and some people have reported slow performance. This was fixed for most people in Light Blue 5.5.1, but some people were still experiencing slow performance. We've changed some things behind the scenes to try to improve this.
We've added a new field, for the date of the most recent payment to a Sale. That's useful for mail merges, with the tag %SaleMostRecentPaymentDate%.
When importing emails from Outlook on Windows, some messages could fail to be imported.
Mail merge documents could become large if you were using PNG files. We now strip out some redundant data within the file.
We've added ages to the %ShootContacts% mail merge tag.
We've had a few people recently who've accidentally deleted Shoot records, even though there's a warning. We've added an extra warning for Shoots which have linked information, to make sure that deleting the Shoot record is what's intended.
Printed address blocks could sometimes contain blank lines. They're now trimmed.
We've added support for the Wordpress email field with the 'confirm' option.
Special characters in subjects of emails sent as part of the contract publication process weren't coming out properly. Now they do.
When publishing a contract, if you weren't connected to the online services, an error about syncing would come up. We've made that more friendly.
If a contract is viewed in a browser without JavaScript enabled, we now warn about it.
Changing the suggested name when saving a PDF could cause it to be saved without a file extension.
Increasing the font size on printouts wasn't working. Fixed.
Printing emoji would give a segmentation fault. We now strip out emoji :-(
We've added the shoot date summary as a subheading to the Shoot printout.
Shoots where only one contact had an age would print ages for all contacts.
In rare circumstances, tax rates could print on reports with some spurious decimals (eg 7.85% would print as 7.8499999905). (The tax amounts themselves were fine.) Fixed.
The 'net value' for zero-rated tax items was printing as zero on the cash-based tax report. It now correctly reports the net value of zero-rated items.
Right-clicking on the Task Manager was the same as left-clicking, which was rather confusing. Right-clicking now doesn't do anything.
When maring several tasks as completed in the Task Manager, we now warn of what's going to happen, to try to prevent mishaps.
We've slightly reformatted the dialog which shows incoming data from the Light Blue API, which makes it easier to read.
Deleting a Resource from a Shoot wasn't updating iCal or Google Calendar.
Updating a Contact which had been published to the Mac's Address book would only work on the machine on which the Contact was first published.
Deleting a phone number or address from a Contact wouldn't republish it to the Address Book.
We've also fixed various unexpected quits which have been reported to us.

New in Light Blue 5.5 (Mar 26, 2015)

Online contract signing:
When a client decides to book a shoot, you want to make sure that confirming their booking is as simple as possible. It needs to be really easy for your client to sign your contract and pay a booking fee, so they don't hold up your business by taking ages to email or post things back to you. And, of course, you don't want to spend more time than you have to on boring admin tasks! Our new online contract signing service makes the whole process of confirming a booking really simple.
Our great new online contract signing features are included in a subscription to our online services, which starts at just £7.50 + VAT per month. As well as contract signing, the online services mean you can hook up your web contact forms to Light Blue, sync data between devices (Mac, PC, iPhone and iPad) and get all the updates we release in future for free!
Other new features added in Light Blue 5.5:
We've added an 'Import Price List from CSV File...' command to the Records menu.
We've added a 'Reprint Invoice' button to invoiced Sale records, to make it clearer that you can reprint an existing invoice.
We've added a 'Contact Source Analysis' report that will be particularly useful to MPA Cherubs partners.
When printing a Shoot record, each linked Contact's primary address is included.
Printing a Contact record now includes the contact picture.
You can now create a linked Purchase record directly from the Linked Records panel on a Shoot record.
When importing Contact records from a CSV file, you can now re-use an existing Source.
The built-in calendar and date picker can now use any day as the first day of the week, rather than just Monday or Sunday.
You can now export a Contact's primary URL.
When using the contextual menu in a record's Activity panel, only the options that are relevant to the specific type of record that you clicked on are shown.
We've added 'first reference' preferences for the Quote, Purchase and Transaction sections. These work in much the same way as the 'first invoice number' preference, and are especially helpful for anyone who wants Light Blue's reference number to carry on from those that they used in a previous system.
You can now specify whether you want to use miles or kilometres when you're recording and reporting on mileage.
We've added preferences that allow you to choose whether to include the notes field when printing Shoot, Quote or Sale records.
We've added a default Purchase category preference.
You can now specify a default Quote 'balance due' workflow.
Bugs fixed in Light Blue 5.5:
When linking a company to a Quote, Sale or Purchase record, the company's name is now used more helpfully in lists and reports.
On Windows, the quick search dialog now triggers its query when you press the Enter or Return keys.
When linking an existing Contact to a Shoot, the search dialog now displays company names properly.
If Light Blue encounters any problems while upgrading your database when you install a new version, it now gives you more helpful error messages.
When there are clashing events in the built-in calendar, they're now sorted so that confirmed events come before enquiries.
Fixed a problem where importing emails from Outlook could cause an unexpected quit.
In some cases, if you go to another record when you have unsaved changes in the current record, the changes would be saved and the right record details would be loaded, but the wrong record would be selected in the list.
Fixed a problem where using the 'next appointment' mail-merge tags from a Sale record could use the wrong Appointment record.
When editing items on a Quote, Sale or Purchase record, the description field now resizes correctly when you add additional lines of text.
Fixed a problem where the cash-based Income & Expenditure report could double-count purchases that included both capital and non-capital items.
Fixed a problem when using the 'All Records' option in the Inventory report where using a two-digit year in your operating system date format could cause a problem.
The Income Forecast report now groups records together by the month of the quote balance due field, not the quote date field.

Light Blue Changelog

What's new in Light Blue 2021.2.3

New in Light Blue 2021.2.1 (Aug 6, 2021)

New in Light Blue 2021.2 (Jul 14, 2021)

New in Light Blue 2021.1.1 (Mar 2, 2021)

New in Light Blue 2020.1.4 (Nov 26, 2020)

New in Light Blue 2020.1.3 (Oct 30, 2020)

New in Light Blue 2020.1 (Sep 22, 2020)

New in Light Blue 8.2.7 (Feb 26, 2020)

New in Light Blue 8.2.6 (Jan 8, 2020)

New in Light Blue 8.2.5 (Dec 2, 2019)

New in Light Blue 8.2.4 (Nov 25, 2019)

New in Light Blue 8.2.0 (Sep 27, 2019)

New in Light Blue 8.1.2 (Aug 1, 2019)

New in Light Blue 8.1.1 (Jun 5, 2019)

New in Light Blue 8.1 (May 7, 2019)

New in Light Blue 8.0.3 (Apr 1, 2019)

New in Light Blue 8.0.0 (Jan 4, 2019)

New in Light Blue 7.1.3 (Jul 27, 2018)

New in Light Blue 7.0.4 (Mar 22, 2018)

New in Light Blue 7.0.2 (Mar 12, 2018)

New in Light Blue 7.0 (Jan 5, 2018)

New in Light Blue 6.2.3 (Sep 22, 2017)

New in Light Blue 5.5.3 (Aug 21, 2015)

New in Light Blue 5.5.2 (Jul 16, 2015)

New in Light Blue 5.5 (Mar 26, 2015)

New in Light Blue 1.5.2 (Oct 22, 2009)