Eleva CRM for Photographers

Wedding and event photographers and video makers who want a CRM built around how a shoot actually works: one client, one date, a handful of payments, and a stack of files, not a generic sales pipeline.

Yes. Eleva CRM for Photographers is a free CRM that runs inside your own WordPress admin. It keeps your clients, bookings, payments, files and calendar in one place, with no monthly fee and no feature locked behind an upgrade.

Eleva CRM for Photographers is a business manager for your photography work. You can track customers (with more than one contact per booking), your catalog of services and prices, every booking with its date, locations and files, deposits and balances with automatic Paid, Partial or Unpaid status, a monthly calendar, and an inventory of your memory cards. Client details stay encrypted in your own database.

No. Eleva CRM for Photographers is free, with no monthly fee and no feature paywall inside the app. An optional paid add-on, Eleva CRM Pro, exists for studios that want a team (collaborators), a Kanban board, analytics, quotes with VAT and PDF, and automatic scheduled backups to Google Drive, but nothing in the free plugin nags you to upgrade.

No. The plugin uses only native WordPress meta boxes and registers all custom post types itself. No third-party field plugin is required or used.

Yes. The plugin is completely standalone and has no dependency on WooCommerce or any other plugin.

The Vault is a dedicated encryption layer for the personal details tied to your clients and bookings: names, email addresses, phone numbers, home addresses, nationality, tax ID, Instagram handles, and each booking's event address. Every one of those is encrypted with AES-256 before it is written to the database. You set a Vault master password, independent of your WordPress login, and pair it with a TOTP authenticator app (Google Authenticator, Authy, or similar); unlocking needs both, unless you turn on fingerprint unlock on a device (see below). The password itself is never stored: it is stretched through PBKDF2 with 600,000 iterations, and the resulting key lives only in a temporary, authenticated session cookie (AES-256-GCM), never in the database. The Vault locks itself again after 15 minutes of inactivity, and on every WordPress login or logout, so a shared computer is never left open. The Vault is optional. The first time you open the CRM it asks whether you want it. If you choose "Not now", you can turn it on later from Settings, and everything you have already entered is encrypted at that moment. Without the Vault the same data is stored as plain text in your database, and encrypted backups are not available. Besides the personal details above, the Vault protects the titles of your clients, bookings and quotes, your notes, the notes inside a booking, the notes of your backup locations, the notes and the password of your deliveries, the titles, prices and notes of your service catalog, and the documents attached to a booking (the file and its name). With Eleva CRM Pro it also protects collaborators, suppliers, products, expense notes and quote notes. Dates, prices, payments, statistics and the titles of tasks and expenses sit outside the Vault and stay readable, and so do the title and the addresses of a booking you send to Google Calendar (Google has to read them).

Yes, on browsers that support it (tested on Safari and Chrome on macOS). Open Settings, then Vault, then "Unlock with fingerprint", enter your password and code once, and your device asks you to confirm. From then on the lock screen opens the Vault with a touch. Your password and code always keep working, and you still need them if you lose the device or use another browser. Good to know: it uses the check your device already has, so a fingerprint, face or device PIN, and anyone who can unlock the device can open the Vault from it. If you save passkeys in iCloud or Google, whoever controls that account can also use the passkey on other devices. It works only on the address where you turned it on, so if your site address changes, turn it on again. Resetting the Vault or recovering it with your phrase or code removes the fingerprints; changing the password keeps them. Under the hood the Vault key stays encrypted on your server and opens only with a secret that your device produces, so the server never opens it on its own, and the fingerprints are never part of a backup.

The plugin gives you two separate fallbacks, both set up ahead of time from the Settings page. If you still know your password but lost your authenticator app, the one-time recovery code gets you back in. If you forgot your password itself, only the recovery phrase can reset it without losing your encrypted data. Set up both, since they cover different problems. Losing your password, your authenticator, and both recovery credentials together means the data cannot be recovered by anyone, including us. That is what makes the encryption real.

Yes. It needs PHP 7.4 or higher and WordPress 6.0 or higher, both standard on modern shared hosting.

Entirely in your own WordPress database. The plugin makes no external HTTP requests and sends no data to any external server, ours or anyone else's. You own and control your data completely.

No. The plugin only loads on its own admin screen inside WP Admin; it adds nothing to your public-facing site, so visitor-facing performance is unaffected.

Yes, any time, from the Settings page: download a complete encrypted backup of every customer, booking, service, and file. It is your data in a portable archive, not locked to the plugin. A standalone command-line tool that ships with the plugin opens the archive on any computer and gives you your data as readable files. You can also bring a backup back into the plugin: see How do I restore a backup?

Yes. From Settings, download a single encrypted archive of your entire CRM: customers, bookings, services, memory cards, and every attached file. Nothing leaves your server: the archive is built locally and saved to your own computer. That archive is encrypted with a key protected by your Vault password before it is ever written. Nobody, including us, can open it without that password or your recovery code, and there is no back door: lose your password, recovery code, and recovery phrase together, and the archive is unrecoverable. Its protection rests on your Vault password: the minimum is 8 characters, but a longer, less guessable password is safer, so choose a strong one and keep the file private. This backs up your CRM data, not your whole WordPress site. Themes, other plugins, and unrelated content are not included. Automatic, scheduled backups that push this same archive to your own Google Drive are an Eleva CRM Pro feature. The free plugin's backup is always manual: on demand, whenever you choose to download one.

In Settings, find the Backups section and its box Restore from a backup. Choose a backup made on this site, a backup saved on Google Drive (with Eleva CRM Pro), or upload the .zip file you downloaded. Eleva CRM then compares it with what is already on your site and shows what is new, what is already there and what is different. By default it only adds what is missing and leaves everything you have alone. For each difference you choose whether to keep your version, use the one from the backup, or add the backup one as a separate copy. Before anything is written, a safety copy of your current data is saved, and you can undo the restore until you choose to keep the result. Replace everything is also there: it removes your current data and puts the backup in its place, exactly as it was on the day of the backup. It cannot be undone with a button, so you confirm it by typing a word. To go back, restore the safety copy.

A backup made by this site opens without a password while the Vault is unlocked. Any other backup, from another site or from a Vault you have since reset, opens only with the Vault password, the recovery code or the recovery phrase that were valid on the day the backup was made: if you changed your password since, use the old one. Without one of them nobody can open it, not even us. After several wrong tries the attempts pause for a while. On a new site, turn the Vault on first: the personal details you restore are then protected with that site's own key. If the site has no Vault you can still restore after confirming, and the details are kept as plain text until you turn the Vault on.

The connection with Google Calendar (connect it again in Settings; events already on your calendar stay as they are), the license key, and in Eleva CRM Pro the look of your quote PDFs and your signature (set them up again). With Eleva CRM Pro active, quotes with their PDF, expenses, suppliers, collaborators, products and tasks come back too. Without Pro, the Pro data in a backup is listed as left out, and nothing is lost from the backup file.