Calendar & Availability

Spatiko builds your booking calendar so that every time slot an agent sees is a slot you can actually shoot. It combines the hours you work, the time each job takes, the drive between properties, and your connected calendar — so a booking never lands where you can’t be. This page is the overview; the rest of this section covers each piece in depth. The smart scheduling page shows the same engine in action — a sample week with drive times, twilight windows, and calendar sync.

What decides which slots are offered

When a client picks a time on an order form — or when you book internally — Spatiko checks a candidate time against everything that matters and only offers it if it genuinely fits:

• Your working hours for that day, in your timezone.
• Whether the whole job fits before you’d run out of daylight or hours — the services selected (and the property size) set the session length.
• Your minimum lead time, so nothing gets booked too last-minute.
• Existing shoots already on your calendar, plus anyone mid-checkout holding a slot.
• Busy times on your connected Google calendars — the calendar your shoots are written to plus any other calendars you’ve chosen to check for conflicts, so a side gig on a second calendar blocks you too (see syncing Google Calendar).
• Travel time to and from the property around other jobs that day, plus your setup and teardown buffer.
• For twilight work, the daylight window for that property and date.

The guarantee: a slot shown as available is a slot that’s really bookable. The same checks that draw the calendar run again at the moment of booking, so you don’t get double-booked by a race.

The pieces you control

• Setting your availability — your working days and hours, how far ahead bookings must be, and the buffer around each shoot.
• Travel time and travel fees — your home base, how far you’ll travel, and what you charge for distance.
• Syncing Google Calendar — the single most important setup step, so your real life blocks bookings and your shoots land on the calendar you already check.
• Managing shoots on your calendar — rescheduling, multiple sessions on one order, reassigning, and the reminders that go out automatically.

Twilight and golden-hour scheduling

Twilight shoots are only offered at the right time of day. When the property location is known, Spatiko works out the actual sunset and dusk window for that address and date — so twilight availability naturally shifts earlier in winter and later in summer, without you managing it. If a package mixes regular and twilight work, Spatiko schedules the daytime services first so the twilight shots land right at golden hour and wrap before dark. You set a service as twilight in your catalog; the calendar handles the timing.

Availability is per photographer

Every setting on this page belongs to a person, not the whole business. On your own, “My Availability” is your business’s availability. On a team, each photographer has their own hours, home base, travel settings, buffer, and connected calendar, and Spatiko composes all of them to decide who can be booked when. See managing shoots for how team shoots appear side by side on the calendar.

Go deeper

• Setting your availability — your working days and hours, minimum lead time, and the buffer around each shoot.
• Travel time & travel fees — your home base, how far you’ll travel, and what you charge for distance.
• Syncing Google Calendar — two-way sync so real-life commitments block bookings and shoots land on the calendar you already check.
• Managing shoots on your calendar — reschedule, split a job into multiple sessions, reassign a photographer, and the reminders that go out automatically.
• Assigning shoots to your team — how Spatiko decides which photographer can cover a booking, session by session.