Concentrate on the photography, and on getting the shot.
Twenty-three years of real school and kindergarten photography experience, built into one service.
Hundreds of children in a day? Portraits, siblings, groups of friends, class photos? Who is who in the frames? Who is allowed to see whom online? Who ordered what? Which ones have I retouched already? How is production going at the lab? What deadline did I promise? An overpayment? A complaint? A repeat order?
Foto2Me exists to automate that entire process. From loading the name list to the delivered orders, genuinely all of it.
Where does the system take over, and how?
Let us walk through the main steps of a school or kindergarten shoot together, and what the system takes off your hands at each one. Not a feature list: these are the seven groups of work a photographer actually has to get through.
- 1Shoot preparation, name lists You copy the school's list into a simple spreadsheet and load it, and the albums are created. For every participant you print an A5 sheet carrying their album code and, for convenience, a QR code alongside it. On the morning of the shoot the sheets are already in your hand, and everyone gets theirs while being photographed. You never have to ask the school for the parents' email addresses: the child is handed their own code during the shoot, and that is what gets them in. Details
- 2On-site shooting, identifying frames, contact with the children Frames download from the camera automatically, and our system lets you attach them to the right child in moments. The queue keeps moving; the laptop and the admin never slow it down. Details
- 3Reviewing and uploading the frames You can work offline or online, and the frames upload from your laptop to the shop by themselves. That does not make them visible to your customers, not until you open them for it. But it does mean your work is safe from a failed drive or a lost laptop straight away. Details
- 4Parents order online Which ones, how many, what size, backdrops, captions, extras, paid online or even by bank transfer. No envelopes, no cash, no spreadsheet reconciled by hand, no hunting for discrepancies. Discounts, deadlines and delivery options handled conveniently. Automatic invoicing through the integrated invoicing systems. Details
- 5Retouch and production, driven by the order A paid order brings with it whatever has to be retouched on request before production. Technical retouching is best dealt with back at step three. Production through the integrated labs is fully automatic: one press submits everything in the right format. Details
- 6Enveloping and packing Sorting and enveloping the several hundred, sometimes several thousand prints and gift items that come back from the lab is a genuine time-killer for a photographer or their assistant. Now this part is straightforward too: in our own measurements we packed roughly 1,200 prints in an hour, without a single error. Details
- 7Reports, order tracking, closing the shop At the end you see, per school, per class and per album, how much of what sold. You decide how long the albums stay available online. You can switch delivery to the school off, while still letting people reorder by post or parcel point if you choose to. And when you close the shop, the school closes with it: nothing is left open that you have to come back to. Details
What makes it easy to live with is that it is not an island.
The payment provider, the invoicing, the lab and the courier are not separate worlds: the system is wired into all of them. An order runs from payment through the invoice and production to delivery without you carrying anything by hand from one system to the next.
- Barion
- SimplePay
- Stripe
- PayPal
- Bank transfer
- Cash
into your own bank account, not ours
- Billingo
- Számlázz.hu
- Or invoice by hand yourself
further providers on request
- FoxPost lockers
- GLS courier
- Postal delivery
- Collection at the school
each delivery method on its own deadline
- Onlinefoto
- Your own lab
- Any lab on request
order to lab, fully automatic
Your photographs do not get lost, and nobody sees them who should not.
When it comes to storing the photographs, there are two things people who do this for a living tend to worry about most. The system has a reassuring answer to both.
- Photographs go missing
- And it is always the one a parent or the head teacher comes asking for. So the frames can leave your laptop and reach us while you are still shooting: a laptop that dies or goes missing stops costing you a whole day of work. Keeping the photographs is our job now, not yours.
- A picture turns up on the internet
- The phone rings and somebody wants to know, angrily, how that could happen. The worst that can happen here is that you attach a frame to the wrong child and another parent at the school sees it. There is no bigger mistake available.
The photographs, the orders and the databases run on our own European servers. The security is our job. You get a data-processing agreement with it that you can hand to the school when you sign.
For twenty years we were one of your biggest competitors. So what changed?
Fair question, so here is the answer. We have been doing your job for more than two decades: we started out in 2002 as digiévkönyv and grew into one of the largest school photography businesses in the country. The system we are offering was not built at a software company from market research. It was built here, learning all of it the hard way, because without a good system this kind of volume cannot be handled sensibly.
We simply got tired of fighting over schools every September, and then getting up at five to drive to Baja for a shoot. So we decided to do what we are best at and provide the service behind the scenes rather than the photography.
Which means the important part: we no longer bid for schools. We are not your competitor and we will not become one again — from here on we have a stake in your success. Your schools stay yours. All we add is the system we built for ourselves over the years.
Everything stays under your own name, on your own domain.
One thing changes: behind the login and the shop, a modern, up-to-date system takes over. Beyond that, nothing. The shop runs on your own domain, under your own name and branding, and that is very much how we prefer it. Parents see your brand on the notification sheet, in the shop, in the automated emails, on the confirmations, on the invoice, everywhere.
Unless you want it there, Foto2Me appears nowhere. You never have to promote us or even mention us, and your customer stays your customer. We are simply the provider behind it.
You do not have to take our word for it. Go and look: sulipixel.hu is a school photographer's live shop, running on our system right now, on their own domain and under their own branding. The “Működteti Foto2Me” line at the foot of it is there because they decided to put it there, not because anything obliges them to. Say the word and we appear nowhere at all.
If a name list will not load on a Sunday evening, Sunday evening is when we help.
You are not writing to a ticketing system here. You are writing to people who know your work. We know that a delivery with a deadline on it — before Christmas, say — cannot wait, so you can reach us by phone too: +36 20 330 4272.
We deliberately work with only as many photographers as we can give real, fast help to. So it can happen that we put new applicants on a waiting list. We would rather grow slowly than find ourselves unable to help someone in time, on the day they genuinely need us.
The system is stable, so we are opening the door to new photographers. If there is a place free, we would be glad to have you. And if you have to wait a few weeks, it is for exactly the reason our current partners choose us. Because they can always count on us.
Fourteen percent at most. Nothing else.
No joining fee, no monthly fee, no minimum. Sell nothing in a month and you pay nothing. The software, the storage, the on-site applications and the support are all included.
As a new partner, your first 100,000 Ft of commission is waived. That is roughly one school's worth of sales: a real shoot with live orders is what decides whether the system is worth it to you, or whether you would rather go back to the old way. If it is the latter, you have paid nothing.
A purchase lands in your own payment account: your Barion, SimplePay, Stripe or PayPal account, or your own bank account for a transfer. Your takings stay with you throughout, and we invoice you afterwards.
That is the ceiling. Less at higher volume.
roughly one school's worth of sales at no charge, before you decide
If you leave, you leave with everything.
Honestly: this is the least exercised part of the system. Nobody has asked for it yet, so there is no real experience behind it we could point to.
What we do commit to: if you decide you would rather go back to the way you worked before, you get every photograph and every record — the name lists, the orders — in whatever form is genuinely usable and convenient for you.
Our whole business model rests on you staying because the convenience and the security our service gives you become indispensable, not because we will not let you leave.
Bring one school and we will walk it through together.
With your own name list, your own products, your own prices, your own invoicing and your own lab. Whatever gets set up during the demo, you can be working with it live as soon as the next day.
Or call us: +36 20 330 4272