Scheduling & crew assignments

Give a shoot a date and it appears on your calendar. Assign crew to it and they get an email, an entry on their own calendar, and access to the shoot’s details and photos.

This page covers scheduling a shoot, assigning crew, what crew can see, and how to subscribe to your shoots in the calendar app you already use.

Putting a shoot on the calendar

A shoot doesn’t need a date. Undated shoots are perfectly normal — a booking that hasn’t been pinned down yet, or an archive you’re still delivering — and they stay in your shoot list as usual.

Give a shoot a date and time and two things happen: it appears on the calendar, and anyone assigned to it gets told.

You’ll find the calendar under Calendar in the sidebar. It opens on the week view, because that’s usually the unit you’re planning in, and everything shows in your workspace’s time zone (named in the header, so there’s no guessing).

You can drag a shoot to a different day to reschedule it. If a shoot can’t be moved, nothing changes and you’ll be told why.

The shoot list hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s still the better place to search, take bulk actions, and work with undated shoots. The calendar answers a different question: who’s working Saturday, and is anyone free Thursday?

Assigning crew to a shoot

Open a shoot and use the Crew panel.

Pick a staff member, choose their role on this shoot, and add them:

• Lead
• Second shooter
• Assistant
• Editor

These describe the job on the day. They’re separate from a person’s workspace role — a team member and a contractor can both be a second shooter, and being a Lead on one shoot doesn’t change what someone can do anywhere else.

How long crew can reach the shoot

Each assignment has an access window — the period when the assigned person can actually open the shoot and its photos. Three options:

Follows the shoot date (the default, and the one to reach for) : Access opens a set number of days before the shoot and closes a set number of days after it. If you reschedule the shoot, the window moves with it — nothing to remember and nothing to update.

Fixed window : You pick exact start and end dates. Useful when someone needs access on a schedule that isn’t the shoot’s own.

No end date : Access lasts as long as the assignment does. Reach for this for a long-running collaborator rather than a one-day booking.

Undated shoots are always reachable by their assigned crew — there’s no date to measure a window against, so access isn’t withheld.

Choosing your access window

Under Settings → Assignment access window, set how many days before and after a shoot the “Follows the shoot date” option covers. The default is 30 days either side.

Before the shoot, crew need the address, the contact and the gear list in time to plan around it — a week is usually too late. After it, they’re still culling and delivering for a few weeks.

Changing these takes effect immediately, for every shoot. There’s nothing to re-save and no backfill: widen the window and access re-opens for shoots that had closed; narrow it and it closes again.

Note

This setting only affects people limited to their assigned shoots — contractors, and anyone you’ve set to that access level on the Team page. Staff who can see all shoots are unaffected by it entirely.

What crew see

That access level is set per person on the Team page, in the Shoot access column:

• All shoots — the whole workspace, regardless of assignments
• Only shoots they’re assigned to — exactly what it says

Contractors are always limited to their assigned shoots; it isn’t optional for that role. Any other team member can be set either way.

Someone limited to their assignments sees only those shoots — in their shoot list, on their calendar, in their photo galleries and in their calendar subscription. This is enforced on our servers, not just hidden in the interface.

Emails your crew get

When you assign someone to a dated shoot, they get an email with the shoot’s details and a calendar invitation (.ics) attached, so they can add it to their calendar.

When you add a date to a shoot someone is already assigned to, they’re told then — the assignment email couldn’t carry a date it didn’t have yet.

When you remove someone from a shoot, they’re told that too, so nobody turns up to a job they’re no longer on.

After rescheduling, check your calendar

When a shoot moves, we send an updated invitation. How your calendar app handles that varies — Google, Apple and Outlook each treat updates differently, and some add a second entry rather than moving the first.

Tobren’s own Calendar page is always the source of truth. If you or your crew rely on a subscribed or imported copy, glance at it after a reschedule and delete a stale entry if one is left behind.

Subscribing to your shoots

Under Calendar, choose Subscribe to your shoots to get a private calendar URL you can add to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook. Your shoots then appear alongside everything else in your day.

The link is shown once, when you create it. Save it then; if you lose it, create a new one and the old link stops working.

Two things worth knowing:

• Treat it like a password. Anyone with the URL can see your shoot schedule without signing in — that’s what makes it work in a calendar app, which can’t log in on your behalf.
• Calendar apps refresh on their own schedule, often hours apart. The Calendar page in Tobren is always current; your subscribed copy may lag behind it.

Admins can subscribe to the whole studio’s calendar. Everyone else gets their own shoots.

Double-bookings

When you schedule or reschedule a shoot, we check whether the crew you’ve assigned are already booked at that time, and say so before you commit.

This looks at the shoots themselves, not at anyone’s private calendar — we can see that someone is on two of your shoots at once, not that they’ve a dentist appointment.