Calendar Syncing

Get SmartBooked Jobs & Block Out Time for Personal & Work Commitments

SmartBook will not assign jobs during events synced to your calendar. This feature works with your Working Hours to provide accurate, real-time availability.

Why Sync Your Calendar?

• Required for SmartBooked jobs – Without it, you will only be able to claim jobs from the Job Map or email offers which are rare.
• Keeping it up to date will immediately block time for existing personal or work commitments.
• Prevents double bookings and last-minute scheduling conflicts.
• Your bookings will sync directly to your calendar, creating an event with links, booking details, the shoot address, and all relevant information—making it easy to stay organised.

How to Sync

• Go to My Calendar
• Connect your iCloud, Google, Office, Exchange or Outlook Calendar
• Ensure personal events are marked Busy/Unavailable (default “Available” events will not block time).

Calendar Sync Best Practices

• Always check your My Calendar page to confirm that SmartBook is detecting your time off correctly.
• Manually set all-day events as Busy/Unavailable when adding them to your calendar.
• Review your availability regularly to ensure you’re only booked when you want to be.

SmartBook Buffers

Note: Every event in your synced calendar gets a 30-minute buffer before and after to prevent back-to-back scheduling conflicts.

• A SmartShoot job cannot start immediately after a calendar event - there must be a 30-minute gap.
• Likewise, a SmartShoot job cannot end immediately before a calendar event - there must also be a 30-minute gap.

Examples

• If you block 1 PM – 2 PM on your synced calendar, you will not be available until 2:30 PM.
• If you have a shoot from 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM, SmartBook will not schedule you again until 1 PM.
• If you have a calendar event at 3 PM, SmartBook will not schedule a 1-hour shoot at 2 PM, because the job would end at 3 PM without the required 30-minute gap. Instead, the latest time a 1-hour shoot could be scheduled before that event is 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM.

Calendar All Day Events

If you’re using All Day events to block out time for vacations, public holidays, or personal days, it’s important to manually set them as Busy/Unavailable.

All calendar platforms like Google, Outlook, and Apple Calendar automatically mark All Day events as Free/Available by default. This means that even though you’ve added an event, SmartBook will still see you as available for job assignments unless you update the setting.

To avoid receiving shoot bookings during these All Day events, you must edit the event and manually set yourself as Busy/Unavailable.

 

How to Change All-Day Events to Busy/Unavailable

Google Calendar

• After creating an event, click on it and change the Free status to Busy (next to the briefcase icon).

Outlook Calendar

• While creating or editing the event, locate the Show As dropdown and change it from Free to Busy.

Apple Calendar

• In the New Event dialog, click the Availability option and switch it from Available to Busy.

Watch out for this button: