Your calendar, session types and availability
Put shoots, extra shoots and meetings on one calendar, and control when clients can book.
The calendar shows a day, a week or a month. Everything that takes up your time goes on it, not just paid shoots — a calendar missing your Tuesday consult will happily let a client book over it. It's in the rail on its own and as a tab under Pipeline; they're the same calendar.
Three kinds of entry
| Kind | Use it for | What it needs |
|---|---|---|
| Main Shoot | The shoot a job exists for | A client — pick an existing one or type a new name and email |
| Extra Shoot | A second shoot on work already booked | An existing job to attach to |
| Appointment | Consults, meetings, anything that isn't a shoot | Nothing — a client is optional |
Only a Main Shoot moves a job forward — booking one takes a lead to Booked and sets the job's shoot date. An Extra Shoot deliberately leaves the job's stage and date alone, so adding a second day to a wedding can't quietly rewrite the first.
An Appointment with no client attached sends no confirmation email — there's nobody to send it to. That's the one to use for your own scouting trips and edit days. Give it a Name (“Dentist”, “Venue walk-through”) — that's what shows on the calendar.
Public and school holidays
Press Holidays at the top of the calendar, pick your state or territory and a year, and the public and school holidays are added as all-day entries. You can also stop clients booking themselves in on public holidays, or during school holidays if you close for term breaks. Add the next year the same way when it comes round.
On your phone
- The month view lists each day's events by name — the client's first name, or an appointment's name.
- Tap a day to see its events in a panel from the bottom of the screen, with New event for that day.
- Swipe left or right to change month, or use the arrows beside the month name. Today brings you back.
- The week view becomes a list, day by day.
Session types
A session type is a shoot you sell repeatedly — its duration, price, colour on the calendar, and the buffer you need afterwards. Set them up once and booking gets faster, because the duration and price come with the choice.
Buffer time is the setting most people skip and then wish they hadn't. It's what stops a client booking a newborn session that starts four minutes after your last one ends, on the other side of town.
When clients can book you
- Working hours — the hours you'll take bookings, per weekday. A day with no hours is a day nobody can book.
- Blocked dates — one-off closures: a holiday, a wedding you're second-shooting, your own birthday.
These drive your public booking page, where a client picks a slot themselves. Slots you've already filled disappear automatically — the calendar is the source of truth, so you don't maintain availability twice.
Keeping it in step with your own calendar
On Google Calendar, connect your account once and then choose either direction, or both — they're separate switches because most photographers want one more than the other.
- Put my shoots in Google Calendar — every shoot and appointment appears on your phone within about a minute, and follows along when you move or cancel it.
- Block my availability when I'm busy — clients can't self-book over anything already in your own calendar, so a dentist appointment can't be booked over. Checked hourly, or on demand with Sync now.
Your shoots go into a new calendar of their own, named after your studio, which you can hide, recolour or share with an assistant like any other Google calendar. Lumi HQ can only add and edit events on that one calendar — it has no access to change your personal events, and it only ever reads *when* you're busy, never what the event is.
Change bookings in Lumi HQ, not in Google. Lumi HQ treats itself as the source of truth for the shoots it creates, so if you move one of its events in Google Calendar the next sync will put it back.
On Apple Calendar, Outlook, or anything else, use the subscription link on the same screen — a private read-only URL you add as a calendar subscription. It works everywhere, with one catch: calendar apps refresh subscriptions on their own schedule. Apple lets you set that to 5 minutes; Google only refreshes every few hours and can't be hurried, which is why Google users should connect their account instead.