Photo organizers: quote the flat fee so every sorting hour gets paid. Free, no signup. All defaults are editable starting points, not market rates.
The consult is real work. The diagnosis visit, the pickup, and the delivery drop are not free extras.
Quoting a photo project by photo count alone is how the hours get away from you. A box of prints and a hard drive of digital photos are different jobs, and this calculator prices both. Start with your target hourly rate, the margin you want to keep, and the smallest fee you will take. Then describe the project: how many digital photos need sorting, how many prints need scanning, how fast you sort per hundred photos, and what share are duplicates you have to cull. The presets load editable starting points for the four most common jobs: digital cleanup, scan and organize, print sorting, and photobook projects. Then fill in the leaks card: the consultation and diagnosis minutes, the pickup and delivery trips with miles, and anything you pass through at cost like USB drives or albums.
The results show a line-item breakdown of sorting, culling, scanning, layout, consult, and drive time, your true cost, and the flat fee you should quote. Compare it to the fee you would have quoted to see the dollars you were leaving on the table. It runs entirely on your phone with no signup, and your numbers never leave the device.
Example only, not typical pricing. A digital cleanup of 2,500 photos at 45 sorting minutes per hundred, 20 percent duplicates, with a 90 minute consult and two 30 minute drive trips: the tool totals 1,725 minutes, or 28.75 billable hours. At a 50 dollar per hour bar with 20 percent margin the true cost lands near 1,464 dollars and the recommended flat fee is 1,775 dollars. A 500 dollar photo-count quote would land near 16 dollars an hour and 964 dollars below true cost.
It depends on duplicates, tagging, and how scattered the collection is. At 45 sorting minutes per 100 photos plus 15 cull minutes per 100 with a 20 percent duplicate rate, 1,000 photos take roughly 12 hours of hands-on time, before consultation and drive time.
Per-photo pricing is easy to quote but hides your slowest hours. Use per-photo tiers as the customer-facing quote and this calculator behind it to make sure the fee covers sorting, culling, scanning, metadata, the consult, and the drive.
Scanning services price prints near 50 to 99 cents each, which sets customer expectations. If you scan prints yourself, enter your real minutes per print here instead of matching the service price, because your bench time is the cost.
A diagnosis visit costs you 90 minutes plus drive time. Either charge a visit fee or bake it into the project fee. Giving it away for free is only free for the client.
Price the book separately from the organizing. Real organizers report 8 to 12 hours of layout work for a typical 400 photo book, plus the cost of the book itself. Enter layout hours and pass the book cost through at no markup, or add your markup in the pass-through line.