PASS is a new photo sharing service for photographers that has been garnering quite a bit of press lately. I recently got my easily on an invite to the invite-only beta and have had a chance to endeavour it out. I will warn you though, this is not a fanboy post – I have some concerns that I retrieve deserve some thought. So I suggest you read the mail before jumping on the Pass bandwagon with all your friends.

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Pass is a photo sharing service marketed heavily for hymeneals photographers. The idea is that it is a uncomplicated desktop application, y'all tin can upload, share and cheque analytics for your galleries all in one place. From this standpoint information technology is hard to see anything wrong with Pass, but information technology'due south when you look deeper that you start to discover chinks in the armor.

My start effect with Pass is the insane lack of information bachelor near it to people who are interested in it, and finding out more data fifty-fifty after getting an invite is frustrating. Laissez passer is only in Beta, so a lot of this could just be considering they are focusing on getting the system setup before spending fourth dimension writing about it and its features. Just when researching Pass the best information bachelor well-nigh information technology came from outside sources, and that is not usually a good sign.

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Specifically when I was looking for information on how much galleries cost to upgrade – PASS is heavily marketed as being a free service – after the initial 30 days on each event is upwardly, and what happens to the galleries if yous don't upgrade them. I was finally able to discover out the price to upgrade each gallery is $29/year. But many other things that I looked for information about in that location was simply no information to come up by.

This leads me to my other upshot with Laissez passer and that is the $29 per gallery upgrade. When you lot upload a gallery to share with your clients you get all of the Pass features complimentary for the get-go 30 days, after that you must upgrade the gallery – which costs $29 – in society to keep almost of the features. That in itself is not an issue, they have to make their coin somewhere later on all. But where I outset to accept problems is the fact that I could non discover anywhere what exactly happens to galleries that are not upgraded later on the 30 days. What features are taken away? How long does the gallery last? These are pretty big questions that I could not observe answers to.

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The other thing with $29 per gallery upgrades is that it is a rather steep price, unless you upload TONS of photos in your galleries. I empathise that PASS is heavily marketed towards wedding photographers who routinely upload thousands of photos in a gallery, and then this may just exist a case of my workflow not meshing with their market. For example, with ShootProof for $threescore/month ($720/year) I am able to upload up to 50,000 photos. Let's say that I upload l weddings in a twelvemonth each with ane,000 photos in the gallery – in order to have full access to those galleries for the entire year at PASS I would pay roughly $1450.

Now many wedding photographers upload galleries with 2-five 1000 images in them, for them $29 per year is a steal! Simply if y'all are uploading galleries with less than k images in them, as most portrait photographers would be, and so that $29 can turn out to be much more expensive than other options available to yous.

In Conclusion

I know this mail is starting to sound like a bash on PASS, simply that is but not the case. I did rather similar the desktop app, it was simple and easy to apply. I similar how the galleries looked, and over all I enjoyed Pass. Merely I accept merely concluded that Laissez passer is non just heavily marketed towards wedding photographers, it is optimized for them besides. The pricing of the galleries is a pretty proficient proof of that. So my proposition to all of y'all non-wedding ceremony photographers is take a serious look at Pass and weigh if it is worth information technology to you and fits your shooting style.

In my example I can say that while I dear PASS and would dearest to find a reason to use it. I would love for someone to come out with a Pass like service optimized for portrait photographers. I would be all over that. I just simply can't justify the added cost based on my shooting way, where I upload galleries of nether 500 photos for clients to view. So, cheers Laissez passer – but I volition take to pass.