Every brand asks the same question before booking: how many images can we get in a day? The honest answer has always been, "it depends," which doesn't help anyone budget.
So we started recording the scope, asset quantity, and timing of every shoot. For the past year, we documented our own shoots. Which styles we were building. How long each set took to light and dress. How many products moved through it. How many finished images came out the other side. Patterns show up when you have a year of that. Products on white behave nothing like a built lifestyle set. A pour is not a package hero. Prepared dishes carry their prep with them, and the scope weighs in heavily if we are doing multiple set and lighting changes. But the number of people approving also matters.
We turned those patterns into the CPG Photo Shoot Planner with Claude's help. You input what you are shooting, the styles you want, your product's condition, and who is approving on the day. It gives you a realistic range of finished images per day and an honest day count, and you can download the whole thing as a one-page plan or send it to us.
Our new planner is ready for building libraries. Most brands do not need one photograph. They need a quarter year of assets that match each other across a website, ecommerce listings, email, social, and paid advertising. Planning the flow of styles up front is what turns that into one content sprint instead of five separate shoots, and it works the same way for a founder with four SKUs as it does for a national brand with forty.
The planner will never promise you something a camera cannot make. Every number assumes real product, real food, and real light, because that is what still earns customer trust. Claude says we can average 30-90 a day!
Try the CPG Photo Shoot Planner or get help - book a call!
Judy Doherty, MPS, PCII
Examples from our new shot planner.
