Collect details with a questionnaire
Ask the questions you always ask, once, in a form the client fills in themselves.
Every shoot needs the same handful of facts — addresses, timings, who's in the family shots, what the client is dreading. A questionnaire collects them in one place instead of across nine text messages you have to scroll back through on the day.
Building one
Add fields of the type that suits each question: short text, long text, dates, times, single or multiple choice. Mark the ones you genuinely can't shoot without as required, and leave the rest optional — a form that demands twenty answers gets abandoned halfway.
Keep it to what changes the photographs. Every question you ask out of curiosity costs you completions on the ones that matter.
Sending and reading answers
Send it to the client and they fill it in on their own page — no account, no app. Answers come back attached to the job, so on shoot day the timings and the family-group list are with everything else about that booking rather than in your inbox.
Templates
Save a questionnaire as a template and reuse it for every shoot of that type. Refine the template each time something surprises you on a shoot — after a season it's a genuinely good pre-shoot brief.