Solia — Wedding Photography

Solia is a booking and shoot-day app for wedding photographers. It carries a job from the first enquiry to the final invoice, and it works in a field with no signal. ON THE DAY A call sheet built for one hand and bright sunlight. The running order with the current item marked, the family groups to tick off as you photograph them, and everyone else working the day — planner, second shooter, hair and make-up, venue coordinator — each one tap from a phone call. Golden hour is calculated on the device from the venue's coordinates. No signal needed, which matters, because country house venues rarely have any. THE MONEY Invoices take their figures from the job and then keep them: editing a fee in March will not rewrite an invoice you sent in January. Bill in stages — deposit now, balance after the day — with what is left worked out from what you have invoiced rather than what has been paid, so nobody is billed twice for the same deposit. VAT rounds once, at the total, not per line. Your trading name, bank details and tax note are yours to enter; Solia arranges them and does the arithmetic. It knows nothing about your tax position and never pretends to. PAPERWORK Contracts from your own wording, with the blanks filled in per job and frozen the moment you prepare one. Invoices, contracts and the running order all export as proper PDFs you can send from your phone. The running order goes out in two versions. Notes you marked private — a grandmother who uses a wheelchair, two relatives who should never be in the same frame — stay off the copy the couple sees, and come with you on yours. YOUR CLIENTS' DATA STAYS ON YOUR PHONE Solia has no account and no server of its own. Nothing about a wedding, a couple or a fee leaves your phone unless you share a file yourself. The app sends only two things on its own, and neither contains anything you typed: an anonymous crash report if something goes wrong, and a check of whether you have Pro. The only permission it asks you for is notifications, and it uses the system photo picker, so it never gets access to your photo library. Back the whole season up to a single file whenever you like, and restore it on a new phone. REMINDERS THAT KNOW WHEN TO STOP The evening before a shoot. An unpaid balance at one week and three. A gallery still undelivered after two. That is all — an app that nags daily is an app whose notifications get switched off. TWO LOOKS, BOTH FREE Chroma is bright and geometric. Rosewood is warm and editorial. Both in light and dark. The design is not the paid tier. FREE AND PRO Free: up to three active jobs at once. Archived jobs never count against it, and nothing you have entered is ever locked away — if you stop paying, every job you have stays readable, editable and exportable. Pro: as many active jobs as you like. €79 a year, or €9.99 a month. WHAT IT IS NOT Not a gallery — delivering photographs to couples is your gallery host's job, and doing it badly would be worse than not doing it. Not a CRM. There is no e-signature, and no legal wording is supplied, because what belongs in a photography contract differs by country and by how you work. Fewer features than the big studio suites, and considerably more care in the ones that are here.