I like the price per photo approach because it alleviates sticker shock by putting the customer in charge of the price. They will understand pretty quick that the more photos they give you, the more it will cost. It also compensates you fairly for your work (i.e., the time you spend with each photo).

What to charge is a little tougher. $2.00 USD per photo means a 15 minute photo montage is roughly $360. That is 5 seconds per photo and 180 photos. The biggest cost to you is the time it takes to scan the photos in. If you use a tool like Still Motion, it will literally take seconds to give them a Ken Burns style pan & scan that will really add life to the video. The scanning is the bulk of the work.

The other thing that will help you is being well organized. When you meet with the customers about a anniversary photo montage, you know they will want to include families but you have no idea who is from what family. Show up with zip-lock freezer bags (the ones with the white area that you can write on). Tell them to place all of one family in each baggie and label it with the family name. Then scan them into separate directories on your hard drive so you don't mix up someone’s kids with the wrong parents. Then take good notes about the family tree.

If you see some pictures are badly cracked or stained, here is an opportunity to charge a little more for photo restoration. If you are really feeling nice you might want to give/sell them a CD with the restored photos on them so they can make new prints and give them out as gifts or you can offer a photo gift package. All you’ll be doing is sending them to somewhere like Ofoto.com and ordering 5x7’s and marking up the price to pass on to them. If you are good in photoshop, you can make some extra cash this way. Even photos that just need color fade correction can be a priceless gift when they see the original colorful photo back in all its glory and it takes minimal time for you. (remember they are paying you for your knowledge and skill, not for how much work you physically do. Think smarter, not harder)

Check the web to see what people are charging. Check if there is anyone else in your area. You may only be able to get away with $1 a photo but I believe that charging per photo benefits you. If they have $400 to spend then that’s all they have to spend. Would you rather them give you 200 photos at $2 each for $400 or 400 photos at $1 each? Either way you only make $400 but one is twice the work in scanning. Make sure the price is worth your while.

Good luck and make sure you have insurance in case you loose or otherwise ruin a priceless family photo. (you never know)

~jr

We charge by the hour at our regular editing rate.

To help clients judge how much their project will cost, we estimate that we can process about 35-40 pictures an hour -- no restoration work beyond red-eye removal and occasional repair to a torn picture -- just capture, crop, borders and transitions. At five seconds display time per picture, a 10 minute montage will require about 120 pictures -- 3 to 3.5 hours. We estimate another hour for adding titles and music, plus 30 minutes for review of the finished montage with the client. Roughly 5 hours for a 10 minute finished piece.

Jack

I bought 3d-album about a year ago or so to do a photo montage as I wanted something more than the crop/pan/zoom thing. This program has phenomenal capabilities but the UI is horrible! Somebody needs to redo this program to make it work great. It has an export to DV AVI, screensaver, .exe program file, or even a game of naming the photos the right name, or a walkthrough 3d world where you control where you go and what pictures you look at by using the arrow keys. Like I said, it is a great program... w/ a horrible UI. I bought the commercial license so I can sell what I make. I don't put it to sound, but I do plug the pictures into the template that I want and do all the editing with sound in Vegas.
www.3d-album.com

j razz

I agree with JohnnyRoy. The per picture price of $2 has served us well for many years. The "sitcker shock" aspect is important. Plus, it's easy for them to "tell there friends" how much it cost.

We always give the customer a CD with the final, edited pictures. But we do not include it in the package. It's just a little extra they'll remember us by.

Scanning pictures...not unless we're going to do some serious track motion. I use a Canon R-350 Video Visualizer (a presentation camera) to load the shots directly with VidCap as a single frame. It auto white balances/auto focus, and it's WYSIWYG. Not specs, dust or junk to clean up. I can do hundreds of pictures in an hour. Then, I bring them all into Photoshop, a quick crop, use an "Action" to automatically set the levels and save, and you're done. If a repair is necessary, I'll do it while in PS.

Also, In addition to a DVD...I always include a VHS. Sometimes people get to where they are to make a presentation and lack a compatible DVD player. More than once have I been told that this saved the day!

I've found that you can pick up a little extra cash by doing this type of project, but you've gotta streamline the process, while maintaining the quality.

Charge? Going rate? You guys are now charging for photo montages?? Hmmm.... Maybe that's why my business isn't doing so well.

I never thought of using something like the Canon RE-350. I looked it up and they are not prohibitively expensive. What kind of quality and resolution do you get working this way? Are there any other tricks like this for speeding up the scanning process?