Helpful Tips for Ordering Your Modern School Portraits from Loft Creative
Our modern school portrait program has been serving schools and preschools in the New Braunfels, Austin, and San Antonio and surrounding hill country since late 2019. Going into 2024 marks our fifth year of offering school portraits through Loft Creative. To be honest, we started the program thinking we would serve a handful of schools, but quickly found that we loved offering this unique approach to school portraits for Central Texas schools and the families in their respective programs.
A few questions come up year after year as we move into the school season, so we wanted to take a moment to educate our school portrait program families on details that will help your ordering process go smoothly.
You do not fill out an order form or pay anything until you see your student’s school portraits online!
We want every parent to LOVE what they order from their student’s school portrait gallery. With this in mind, we do not require you to place orders before seeing your gallery. You will NOT receive an order form ahead of time, or be required to make any sort of online purchase before or during school portrait day. Student portrait galleries are emailed out to each parent from your school simultaneously. These galleries will be emailed to the email address that the school provides us as your contact address.
We recommend ordering on a computer vs. a phone.
You can 100% order photographs from your phone while waiting in the car line at school. However, if you are interested in prints and/or cropping photographs, or really want to look at fine details, we recommend ordering on a desktop. We have searched high and low for a school gallery platform that provides both efficiency and organization for the back end of our program, but also ease of use for parents viewing their student’s galleries. The system we are on currently is one of the best in the industry, however, like every system, it’s not perfect, and we find that viewing/ordering school portraits on a computer is much easier.
There are both collections & a la carte options.
We do not set minimum orders for our school portrait program. If a parent wants to order one set of wallets or a 5x7 of their student they can do so. From our experience as moms ordering school portraits of our own kids, we have never loved the minimum order requirement structure for school portrait day.
We’ve seen other providers offer a la carte options only as an add on to collections or packages, and personally didn’t want high minimum order price points to keep families from ordering prints. That being said, all a la carte products are found under the Individual Products tab inside your online galleries. Our gallery platform doesn’t display this very well, and we think it’s easier to see on a desktop vs. a cell phone.
Collections are designed to help school portrait families save money. The larger the collection the larger the percentage of savings. Some collections are set with one pose of one student - meaning every image printed is of one pose from that student’s school portrait gallery. Others include options for multiple poses of one student. And of course, if you select a collection you can always add a la carte prints of other poses as well.
Retouching services are available as an add-on purchase.
We understand that some parents may want to add retouching to their images. This option is available for individual images. We work with a 3rd party editing company for all retouching. We do not increase prices on their services, but are happy to offer this to our school families at cost. Please keep in mind that any retouching does add a few extra days to your orders production time.
Check the crop of your print product orders!
All images are uploaded to be printable up to 16x20 inches.
However, images are uploaded in a 4x6 crop constraint which is standard straight out of the camera.
If you order a 5x7, 8x10, or 16x20 the crop constraints are not directly proportionate and you will want to double check that you are satisfied with the crop of your image. You will have the option to change crops after you’ve added products to your shopping cart, not before.
We do include some photographs of your student with more negative space for a modern feel and some more traditional school photographs with a closer crop. We do not recommend cropping an image in super tight from these images as it will result in poor quality resolution.
Digital Download Purchases are non-refundable.
Your can purchase individual portrait downloads of your student or the entire gallery of one student through your online gallery. Due to the nature of these digital print products, all purchases are final and non-refundable. Please note that the “all digital downloads” of one student applies to one unique student gallery.
If your student has photographs taken on a regular portrait day and on a makeup day and you decide you want to purchase all of their files, each unique gallery is purchased separately.
All downloads come with personal reprint release for you to print products elsewhere. Digital downloads are a great option if you are wanting to store your images for your own personal archiving.
They also are a great option if you are wanting to purchase holiday gifts for grandparents or family members. We’ve put together a blog post with a list of some of our favorite gift ideas to order with your school digital downloads.
All galleries from your respective school are emailed simultaneously.
All galleries from portrait day are released at the same time. And we ask the school to also email you the same day to let you know that portrait galleries have been emailed. That means if you have one, two or more students at the school their galleries will be emailed simultaneously! If you receive one student but not another, please reach out via our contact form with your missing student’s name so we can get you their gallery login info.
If you hear friends talking in the school pick up line about receiving their school portrait galleries, but you still haven’t seen your student’s gallery in your inbox, please don’t wait several days thinking your galleries will come later. Use our contact form to get in touch ASAP!
A few things to note:
Emails will be coming from Loft Creative.
Check your spam and promotions folders!
You will receive multiple reminder emails over a 16 day sale cycle, usually it’s about 5-7 emails in total.
Since we send emails with a link to an online gallery, some email providers flag these as SPAM or undeliverable. If you haven’t received your email, please reach out to us on our contact form with your student’s first and last name, grade and school.
If you missed the ordering window please reach out to us.
If you are reading this thinking, “I never ordered my student’s school portraits.”, please reach out to us on our contact form.
Though we do not archive school portraits indefinitely due to storage constraints, we may still have your student’s gallery if you missed the ordering window. Please email us if you are interested in placing an oder for school portraits from this school year or the previous year. Again, we cannot guarantee the gallery is still available, but are happy to look if you forgot to purchase!
We offer an Annual Fall School Portrait Pop-Up at our downtown New Braunfels, TX Photography Studio.
If your student is phasing out of a school we partner with for school portraits, but you still want to document them annually in this unique style, we recommend joining us at our annual school portrait pop-up event at our studio in downtown New Braunfels.
This event is also great for documenting other students in your home that may not be attending one of our partnering schools.
Dates are announced in August, so be sure to join our email list to get first dibs on all the details.
Whew, if you are still reading, good for you! That is a lot of info, but it is super helpful info to help you make the most informed purchase decisions from your student’s school portrait day photographs. We are so grateful for the opportunity to bring our school photography team to so many wonderful schools in Central Texas. We really do love being able to play a small part in documenting your students during the school year, and cannot say thank you enough for all the ways you support our small business & our families through your purchases.
We are always happy to help in any way, so please reach out with any other questions that might come up in the viewing and ordering process.
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