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Weekly Recap: Capture App v5, Faster Candy Culler & New Retail Themes 🍬📸

Weekly Recap: Capture App v5, Faster Candy Culler & New Retail Themes 🍬📸
Hey photo friends! 👋

This week’s update is a big one. The new Capture App v5 for iOS has officially landed with major performance improvements, a refreshed UI, and some helpful workflow upgrades.

On top of that, Candy Culler just got significantly faster, retail got a couple new themes, and several tools across the Dashboard have been refined.

Let’s jump in.

📱 Capture App v5 (iOS) — Major Upgrade

Capture App Version 5 brings a full UI refresh, major performance improvements, and several new quality-of-life tools for shooting events.

⚡ v5: Faster Uploads & Better Performance

A brand-new upload system significantly improves efficiency:

  • 📤 Uploads can be up to ~20–30% faster
  • 📦 Payload size reduced by ~25% thanks to image transfer improvements
  • 🔋 Lower CPU, battery, and memory usage during uploads
  • 📷 Much better memory usage with tethered cameras
  • 🧠 Improved overall memory performance across the app

These improvements should make long shooting sessions feel noticeably smoother.

🖼️ v5: New Image Gallery & Filters

The in-app gallery has been redesigned with better filtering and navigation:

  • Image name search
  • Uploaded / Unuploaded status
  • Roll filtering
  • Event filtering

Filters are easy to remove with a single tap, similar to the Dashboard experience.

🔁 v5: Duplicate Photo Warning

The Capture App can now warn you about duplicate images during a shoot:

  • Works only within the current session
  • Does not upload or save duplicate data
  • Can be disabled from the Resources page if desired

This works independently from the Dashboard’s Candy Culler duplicate detection, giving you duplicate awareness both during capture and afterward.

🧰 v5: New Event Overview Info

The event overview page now includes helpful connection details:

  • 📡 Carrier name
  • 📶 Cellular generation (if available)
  • 📶 Current Wi-Fi network

This can help troubleshoot upload issues while shooting events.

🎨 v5: Photo Booth Background Packs

Photo Booth now supports downloadable background packs:

  • 🎄 Christmas
  • 🎃 Halloween
  • More to come!

The default pack is now a downloadable set as well, which keeps the main app much smaller and makes OTA updates faster.

🔧 v5: Additional Capture App Improvements

🌍 International phone numbers supported in Positive ID (were already supported in Tap-A-Face)

🧍 Full vertical images now fit on iPhone screens

🔄 Update checks run automatically when refreshing events

📧 Tap-a-Face email validation now matches Check-In pages

🔄 Upload status updates immediately after each upload

📲 Tablets can now use portrait orientation throughout the app

✨ v5: Complete UI Refresh

Version 5 introduces a polished new interface:

  • Modern sheet-based UI
  • Improved dark mode styling
  • Larger login and event selection screens
  • Updated phone number input interface
  • New image details sheet
  • Cleaner image gallery layout

New popup styling!

Vertical orientation for iPad! Yay!

Overall, the app feels faster, cleaner, and more modern.

🧠 Candy Culler: Now 5× Faster

Candy Culler processing has been dramatically upgraded.

Up to 5× more images can now be processed at once, bringing it in line with Jersey Jotter throughput.

This means faster detection for:

  • Duplicates
  • Blurry photos
  • Exposure issues
  • Closed eyes
  • Other culling checks

🍬 Candy Improvements

Candy continues getting faster and smarter:

  • ⚡ Faster Candy responses
  • 🔎 Faster Candy Navigation results
  • 🧠 Improved event search for newly created events
  • 🎛️ Refreshed Mini Candy UI

Pro tip: Press CMD + A / CTRL + A to toggle Mini Candy.

🧾 Dashboard Improvements

Several useful refinements were made to the Dashboard:

  • 📊 Fixed Faces Report chart showing empty data
  • 🧾 QR Code generator downloads now export at 1024px
  • 📑 Scan card PDFs now sort duplicate participants exactly like the Capture App
  • 🎨 Offer editor popups for adding products and packages are now wider with product category tabs
  • 📊 Event order list diamond-press counts now include quantities correctly
  • 🧭 QR Creator and Image Tester now appear in Sidebar Find

🎨 New Retail Themes

Candy's Note: We hope you enjoy the pupper pics!

🍵 Matcha Theme – a clean green storefront (great for spring or St. Patrick’s Day)

🍠 Ube Theme – a bold purple theme

Bonus: Retail UI styling also received improvements for tabs, checkboxes, and order tracking.

📳 Haptics for Mobile Retail & Check-In

Mobile users will now feel subtle feedback interactions when using the site:

  • Tap feedback
  • Success feedback (add to cart, order placed)
  • Error feedback

This makes mobile ordering and check-in feel much more responsive, alive, and engaging!

🤳 Selfie Check-In Improvements

The Selfie Check-In site received improvements to the local face recognition model, making it more reliable and stable on more devices.

💰 QuicPics Adjustment

Good news for high-volume QuicPics users:

Selfie Check-Ins and PhotoRoster reference images no longer count as billable images.

That means QuicPics events that use those workflows will be slightly cheaper overall.

📥 Easier Downloads on iPhone

On iOS Chrome: Press-and-hold image downloads now open the iOS Share menu, making it much easier to save images. (iOS Safari already supported this behavior.)

🌐 New QuicPics Landing Page

The Quic.Pics site now has a proper landing page instead of only a login screen in case end customers stumble across it somehow.

Hopefully this helps it seem more legit while still remaining relatively white-label for your photographers out there!

You can see it here: https://www.quic.pics

That’s the week!

Capture App v5 is a big upgrade, and combined with the faster Candy Culler and several Dashboard improvements, the entire workflow from capture → cull → sell just got smoother.

See you next week,

Candy 🍬

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QuicPics is an innovative photo booth alternative designed to enhance the photo-taking experience at events like proms. As a photographer, QuicPics allows you to offer a modern, fun, and interactive experience for prom attendees, while you get paid upfront for your services. It can be sold as a “mobile photo booth” service, as a manned portrait station akin to traditional photo booths, or as a service where you provide both! Thanks to our cloud, no matter how many photographers or photo stations you have, they’ll all talk to each other, meaning guests only have to provide their contact info once. 

This short guide will walk you through how to effectively use QuicPics for a prom night:

  1. First, Understanding QuicPics:
    QuicPics is quite different from NowCandid’s other programs, it texts image files directly to guests in addition to a link to their online gallery. With NowCandid’s other programs, only links to online galleries of images are delivered. QuicPics also charges the photographer for each image they take and upload to the cloud, making it the only NowCandid feature that charges the photographer in any way.
  2. QuicPics’ Advantage:
    QuicPics is a perfect alternative to traditional photo booths. It's a mobile, modern, interactive, and engaging way to capture memories at proms. With instant texting of images to attendees, QuicPics ensures a seamless experience for everyone involved.
  3. Create a Unique Photo Station:
    Make your photo station stand out by offering themed backdrops, fun props, and creative lighting. This will not only draw the prom-goers to your station but also encourage them to share their professional photos on social media, giving you free advertising and potentially attracting new clients.
  4. Pricing and Payment:
    As a photographer, it's essential to get paid upfront for your services. We recommend charging between $200 to $300 per photographer hour, possibly offering a discount if they are requesting a large number of photographers and/or hours. Alternatively, talk to the school or with involved parents about increasing the cost of prom tickets to pay for QuicPics services for the prom. Take payments using PayPal, Square, Venmo, via check, checkout on your own website, or whatever means are most convenient for you! Just ensure it looks professional to the school you’re dealing with.
  5. Planning your Workflow:
    To ensure a smooth process, have a tablet available for prom attendees to interact with the QuicPics platform. This will allow them to receive their photos via text message instantly thanks to the LTE connection of the tablets. We recommend using the Tap-A-Face workflow, which simplifies the process of collecting data and pairing it to their face, as well as being a fun addition to the prom already!
  6. Selling the Service:
    To promote your QuicPics services, create a compelling sales pitch that highlights the benefits of a mobile photo booth experience, the convenience of instant photo sharing, and the interactive nature of the platform. Showcase sample photos and emphasize the unique value QuicPics brings to a prom night.

QuicPics is a fun, interactive, and modern solution to traditional photo booths, making it an excellent addition to any prom night. By following these tips, hopefully you'll be able to provide a memorable experience for prom attendees while securing payment for your services. Happy snapping!

Proms: An Untapped Gold Mine
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Proms: An Untapped Gold Mine

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The top performing proms well exceeded $2 per image and $5 per guest by doing some combination of the following things:

          • First, they used NowCandid's Selfie Check-In workflow, which gathered the guest's parent's contact data! Marketing the prom images to them as well.

          • Second, they utilized photo stations (sometimes with backdrops and/or props!) with photographer attendants in addition to roaming photographers.

          • And third, they sent 4 or more photographers to ensure they photographed every guest multiple times, making the guest's online galleries (and the larger photo packages) more appealing!

At proms where all three of those conditions were successfully met, the average sales per image was $3 and the average sales per event guest was almost $9!

So, while proms might not be quite as profitable as they were once upon a time, they can still be a great way to make some extra profit in your off season, expand your business, keep your photographers paid and busy, and more!

And... stay tuned! Because a new feature we're calling Group-by-Face rolls out in the very near future! Helping to take your online galleries for social events to the next level! 🎉

Have any questions? Feel free to contact us! We love to chat. 😃

Stay profitable, photographers! 📸

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Graduation day is a momentous occasion, marking the culmination of years of hard work, dedication, and the occasional all-nighter (we're looking at you, college students). As a photographer, you have the unique opportunity to capture these once-in-a-lifetime moments, and we're here to help you make the most of it. From technical know-how to creative flair, we've got you covered with expert tips for optimal graduation photography. And with NowCandid's Grad Pics Now program at your side, you'll be snapping insta-worthy shots in no time. So, ready your camera and let's get started!

  1. Scout the Location:
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Let’s get in touch

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