For years I tried every booking and gallery tool a photographer is supposed to try. Big-name CRMs built for wedding photographers in the US. Simple gallery hosts that looked nice but couldn’t handle a booking flow. Spreadsheets held together with formulas I’d half-forgotten how I’d written. None of it fit how I actually work, and I don’t think that’s unusual — most of these tools are built for one kind of photographer, and I’ve never been one kind of photographer.
Between LemonLens, LemonShark Studio and the personal work on this site, I shoot portraits, weddings, corporate events and branding sessions, often in the same week. Every tool I tried assumed I’d pick a lane. So I built lemon.gallery, and I want to explain why, because it’s turned into the piece of software I now rely on more than any camera body.
UK-based, working across more than one brand
I’m UK-based, working out of London, and shooting under a few different names depending on the job — LemonLens for weddings and events, LemonShark Studio for headshots, and this site for everything personal. That’s exactly the setup most existing tools assume nobody has.
The actual problem wasn’t the tools — it was me, without a system
I want to be honest about this: the missing piece wasn’t a fancier booking form. It was that I had no single place where an enquiry, a shoot, and a gallery were connected to the same client record. A bride would enquire, I’d book her in one tool, deliver her gallery through another, and if she came back a year later for a different kind of shoot, there was no history — just me trying to remember details from memory.
That’s a genuinely bad way to run something you’re trying to build a reputation on. Clients notice when you remember them. They also notice, just as sharply, when you clearly don’t.
What I actually needed
I needed one system that could take a booking for any kind of shoot, hold onto the client’s history, generate a proofing gallery without me manually uploading to three places, and quietly remind me when I’d dropped a thread. Nothing on the market did all four. Most did one well and treated the rest as an afterthought.
Building lemon.gallery started as solving my own problem, not a product idea. I wanted to stop losing enquiries and stop sending clients to a gallery link that looked like it belonged to somebody else’s brand.
How it actually runs my week now
An enquiry comes in through whichever site it lands on, and lemon.gallery logs it against that client, even if I’ve shot for them before under a different brand. A booking gets confirmed, the session goes into my calendar with the right details attached, and once the shoot is done, the gallery is live within a day. If someone I shot for eight months ago hasn’t been back in touch, I get a nudge rather than realising by accident six months later that I never followed up.
It sounds unremarkable written out like that, and it should. The best infrastructure is the kind nobody notices — clients just experience a studio that replies quickly, delivers on time, and remembers who they are.
What this means if you’re booking a session with me
If you’ve ever asked yourself what to check before booking a branding session, one thing worth asking any photographer is simply how organised their delivery process actually is. On my end, that’s no longer a question I have to think hard about — it’s the system running underneath every enquiry that reaches me.
For anyone else stuck patching tools together
I didn’t set out to build something other photographers would want, but enough people asked what I was using that lemon.gallery is now open for other studios to run on, not just mine. If your current setup is a booking form here and a gallery host there, held together by you remembering things, it’s worth a proper look.
And if you’re here because you’re considering booking a shoot with me, you can head to the contact page — you’ll be going through the exact system this post describes, wherever in the UK you’re based.