Setting Your Availability

Your availability is what tells Spatiko when agents can book you. Get it right once and the order form only ever offers times you can actually shoot.

You’ll find these settings under Settings → My Availability (or, for a teammate, under Settings → Team → their name → Availability).

Weekly hours

Set a start and end time for each day of the week, and switch off the days you don’t work. Times use your own timezone and clock preference. These are your default working hours — the outer boundary within which any shoot can be booked.

Minimum lead time

Set how far ahead a booking has to be. A lead time of a few hours (or a day) stops an agent from booking you for a slot that’s minutes away, giving you room to prepare and get on the road.

Buffer before and after each shoot

Add padding around every shoot for parking, setup, and teardown. Spatiko reserves this time on both sides of each booking, so agents can’t book you back-to-back with no breathing room — the buffer that keeps you from arriving flustered or running late to the next job.

Buffer is separate from travel: Spatiko also reserves estimated drive time between shoots. The buffer is your on-site cushion; travel time is the trip in between.

Accepting orders

Each photographer has an Accepting orders / Not accepting orders switch. Flip it off and you’re removed from new bookings entirely — handy when you’re fully booked, on a break, or pausing intake without changing your hours.

Blocking time off

Spatiko doesn’t have a separate “vacation” tool — and it doesn’t need one. You block time three ways:

• Switch a day off in your weekly hours for a recurring day you never work.
• Mark it busy on your connected Google Calendar for one-off time off — a doctor’s appointment, a personal trip, another job. Busy calendar events automatically remove those times from booking, and that works on any calendar you’ve chosen to check for conflicts — a personal or shared calendar counts, not just the one your shoots are written to (see syncing Google Calendar).
• Turn off “Accepting orders” to pause everything at once.

Important: working hours alone don’t know about your personal commitments. Without a connected Google Calendar, Spatiko has no way to see that Tuesday afternoon is taken — it will happily offer it. Connecting your calendar is the step that makes “block time off” work.

If you don’t set anything

If you never configure hours, Spatiko falls back to standard weekday business hours (Monday–Friday, roughly 9 to 5) so your booking page still works. It’s worth setting your real hours anyway — most photographers don’t work a flat 9–5, and your calendar should match your life.

Changes apply right away

Availability isn’t frozen at booking time. When you change your hours, buffer, or lead time, Spatiko recomputes what’s bookable immediately — including around existing orders. Widen your buffer and tighter slots disappear; open a new day and it becomes bookable at once.

On a team

Every team member has their own availability, lead time, and buffers. Spatiko looks at each person’s settings independently when deciding who can take a booking, so one photographer’s day off never blocks another’s calendar.

Go deeper

• Calendar & availability — the full picture of what decides which slots a client is offered.
• Syncing Google Calendar — the connection that lets personal commitments block bookings.
• Travel time & travel fees — set the home base and the drive time reserved around each shoot.
• Managing shoots on your calendar — reschedule, split, and reassign the bookings your hours let through.
• Inviting and managing team members — add a photographer who then sets their own hours and buffers.