Scheduling & crew assignments

Give a shoot a date and it appears on your calendar. Assign crew to it and they get an email — with the shoot attached so it lands on their own calendar right away — and access to the shoot’s details and photos.

This page covers scheduling a shoot, assigning crew, what crew can see, and the calendar subscription you can add as a planning view alongside all of that.

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:

No end date (the default) : Access lasts as long as the assignment does, with no date attached to it at all. This is what a new assignment gets unless you change it — including on an undated shoot, where there’s no shoot date for a window to follow yet.

Follows the shoot date : 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. Pick this when you want access to automatically tighten around the shoot itself.

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

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 — this setting only affects that one option, not “No end date” or “Fixed window”. 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.

A planning-view calendar subscription

Open Calendar (planning view), near the bottom of the sidebar alongside Your account and Privacy & data, to get a private calendar URL you can add to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook, so your shoots show up alongside everything else in your day.

This is a planning view, not how you find out you’ve been booked. That job belongs to the assignment email above — it’s immediate, and it’s what puts a shoot on your calendar the moment you’re added to it. The subscription is for glancing at what’s ahead later; how current it stays depends on the calendar app, not on Tobren:

• Apple Calendar can be set to check every 5 minutes (Get Info → Auto-refresh, on Mac; the account’s Fetch schedule on iPhone/iPad).
• Outlook desktop honours the 15-minute refresh hint the feed sends; Outlook on the web checks about once a day and isn’t adjustable.
• Google Calendar has no refresh setting — it polls on its own schedule, commonly every several hours, and there’s no way to make it check sooner. Removing and re-adding the subscription is the only way to force a check.

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. Treat it like a password — anyone with the URL can see your shoot schedule without signing in, which is what makes it work in a calendar app that can’t log in on your behalf.

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.