The Automated Emails add-on has a new trigger called After gallery is published. Set it up once, and every gallery you publish from then on sends the "your photos are ready" email for you.
I hear from a lot of photographers that this email is one they write by hand for every single gallery. It's a small task, but it's one more thing to remember at the end of an upload, and it's easy for it to slip to the next day. This trigger takes it off the list.
After gallery is published
The important part of this trigger is that it doesn't fire when you hit Publish. It fires when the gallery is actually finished, which is a different moment.
Publishing a gallery and finishing a gallery aren't the same thing. Plenty of photographers publish first and upload afterwards, and if you publish and then add two hundred photos, hitting Publish is the start of the work rather than the end. An email sent at that moment points your client at a gallery that's still filling in.
So before anything goes out, the trigger checks three things:
- The gallery actually has photos in it
- Every one of those photos has finished processing
- Uploading has stopped for a few minutes
That third check is there because a pause between two batches of uploads looks exactly like being done. Waiting a few minutes lets Sunshine see whether more photos are on the way before it decides the gallery is complete.
Only when all three are true does the email get queued, so your client's first click always lands on a finished gallery.
Delayed image processing improvements
The "finished processing" check is tied to delayed image processing, which is worth a closer look because it changed in the same release.
With delayed processing on, uploads finish quickly because Sunshine saves the original file and builds the thumbnail and preview sizes afterwards in the background. On a large shoot the difference is noticeable.
Previously, a photo that hadn't been processed yet fell back to showing the full-resolution original. That meant a client who opened a gallery mid-upload could be served your untouched, unwatermarked files. As of Sunshine 3.7.1, those photos aren't shown at all until they're ready. You get a placeholder sized to match the real photo so the layout doesn't jump around, and in the gallery admin they're labelled Processing so you can see what's still being worked on.
Background processing is also faster now. It runs continuously instead of in short bursts, and large uploads finish in roughly a third of the time they used to take. If you tried delayed processing before and turned it off, those two changes are a good reason to try it again.
Setting it up
The setup is the same as any other automated email:
- Go to Sunshine Photo Cart > Emails and add a new one
- Set the trigger to After gallery is published
- Choose your timing (right away makes sense for this one)
- Write the email
For the content, [gallery_name] and [gallery_url] are the two you want. [gallery_featured_image] pulls a real photo from the gallery into the email, and seeing one of their own images is a stronger prompt than reading about them.
A few things worth knowing about how it sends:
- It goes to the clients assigned to that gallery, so it's for private galleries where you've assigned someone. If nobody is assigned, nothing is sent.
- Each client gets it once per gallery. If you add more photos next week they won't get a second email, but someone you assign afterwards will still get theirs.
- You won't see the gallery picker on this trigger, because the galleries it applies to don't exist yet when you're setting the email up.
Limit an email to specific galleries
That gallery picker is new in this release too, and it works on every other trigger.
Until now an automated email applied to every gallery on your site. Now you can pick which ones it should run for, and child galleries are included automatically, so selecting a season or an event covers everything underneath it without choosing each one by hand.
This makes it easier to run different wording for different work. A favorites reminder on wedding galleries can say something quite different from the one on school galleries, and a sample gallery can be left out of follow-ups entirely. Leave the field empty and nothing changes from how it works today.
Password-protected galleries and the Messaging add-on
This trigger only sends to clients you've assigned to a gallery, so it doesn't cover a password-protected gallery where nobody has an account. For those, the Messaging add-on is still the tool. It lets you send a gallery message to any email address you type in, with the gallery password included through a template tag, and it shows an invite button on the gallery right after you publish.
The two aren't really competing. If you assign clients to private galleries, the new trigger means you don't have to remember the email at all. If you hand out passwords instead, Messaging gives you a one-click send from the gallery screen. Plenty of photographers will end up using both, depending on the job.
Getting the update
The trigger needs Sunshine Photo Cart 3.7.1 or later plus version 3.3 of the Automated Emails add-on. Both are out now, so updating from your WordPress admin is all it takes.
If you already have automated emails running for favorites or abandoned carts, this one slots in alongside them. And if you've never set one up, this is a nice first one to try, since it replaces something you're already doing by hand.
Happy delivering!
