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Assigning Shoots to Your Team

How photographer assignment works — per-session assignment, eligibility by services and coverage area, and auto-assign for client bookings.

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Every session on an order — not the order as a whole — has its own assigned photographer. That means a multi-session shoot, like a daytime session plus a separate twilight session, can go to two different team members if that’s what makes sense for your schedule.

Assignment is per session

Reassigning who’s shooting is a calendar action. If you need to move a session to a different photographer, add a session, or split a shoot into multiple sessions, see managing shoots for the mechanics.

Reassigning a session: the picker shows who's currently assigned, with the option to remove the assignment entirely.

Changing who’s assigned normally requires order management permission. A narrower reschedule-only permission lets someone move a session’s time, but it does not let them reassign the photographer — see roles and permissions for the full breakdown of what each permission level allows.

Who’s eligible to be assigned

When you open the assignment picker, Spatiko only offers team members who are active, available for new work, and fully set up — meaning they have a linked account, a saved location, and at least one working day on their availability schedule.

From there, two separate filters narrow the list further:

  • Service capability. If a member hasn’t had any specific services or packages configured for them, they’re treated as able to shoot everything. Once a member has at least one capability configured, they’re limited to exactly the services and packages they’ve been given.
  • Coverage radius. Members are generally offered based on whether the shoot address falls within their coverage area. When you’re creating or editing an order yourself, you can still manually assign someone outside their usual coverage as an override. On a client’s self-service booking page, only members within their coverage radius are offered at all.

These two filters are independent — a member’s service capability doesn’t affect their coverage eligibility, and vice versa. Eligible members are listed closest-first, based on estimated distance to the shoot address.

The picker lists eligible members closest-first with their travel fee. A member outside their coverage radius sinks below a divider with a reason instead of a fee — still selectable here as a manual override, unlike a client's self-service booking page, which wouldn't offer them at all.

Auto-assign

Each team member has an auto-assign flag. It’s on automatically for the first team member created on a new business (typically the owner), and off by default for everyone invited after that.

Auto-assign matters when a client books through your public booking page and Spatiko needs to suggest a photographer without a human picking one. In that case, active members with auto-assign on are offered first; if more than one has it on, the member who’s been with your business longest is prioritized. This is a simple ordering used for online-booking suggestions — it isn’t a load-balancing or scheduling engine, and it doesn’t come into play when you assign a photographer yourself.

Assignment and pay

Reassigning a session’s photographer automatically updates the order’s payout to match the new assignee’s configured rate. See photographer payouts for how those rates and payouts work.

Each member's payout is configured per service (or per tier, for tiered services) on their Team Capabilities card — this is the rate a session's payout switches to when you reassign it.

For an overview of team member setup in general, see team and roles.