Meet Pace, and the end of guessing your turnaround times

Here's a confession. For most of my career, the turnaround time I gave couples was a guess dressed up as a promise. Six to eight weeks, I'd say, with the confidence of someone who had absolutely not measured it. Some galleries flew by. Others quietly ballooned, and I'd find myself editing at midnight, apologising in my head to a couple who hadn't even chased me yet.

The problem was simple: I had no idea how long my own work actually took. I knew a wedding felt like a lot of culling and a mountain of editing, but I couldn't have told you my real speed if you'd offered me a lens for it. So I built a small tool to find out, and it turned out to be one of the most quietly useful things I've made. It's called Pace, it's free, and it's live on the site now.

What it actually does

Pace is a calm stopwatch for the two phases nobody got into photography for: culling and editing. You start the clock when you sit down, pause it when you stop, and tell it where you got to. From that, it works out the things I could never see before.

• Your true seconds-per-image, measured, not guessed.
• A live estimate of how much time is left on a gallery.
• Whether this sitting was faster or slower than your average so far on this wedding.
• Sneak peeks timed separately from the main gallery, because they run at a completely different pace.

There's a small nerdy detail I'm oddly proud of. You always tell it a running total (I'm up to 1500), never a per-sitting count, so the maths can never double-count your work. And it shows your speed to three decimal places, which looks fussy until you realise culling runs at a couple of seconds an image, and that's exactly where the useful differences hide.

You can't protect your evenings from a number you've never looked at.

Why measure the boring part at all?

This is the bit that matters to me, because on the surface it sounds like productivity-bro territory: track everything, optimise, squeeze more in. That is the opposite of what this is for. I don't measure my pace so I can cram in another wedding. I measure it so I can stop lying to myself about my time.

When you know your real pace, a turnaround date stops being a hopeful guess and becomes a promise you can actually keep. The low-grade anxiety of not knowing whether you're behind just lifts. And once you can see how many hours a gallery truly costs you, you can price and book in a way that protects your life, rather than discovering the hard way in August that you said yes too many times.

That's the honest reason it exists. Not to make you faster for its own sake, but to swap a nagging, invisible worry for a calm, visible number.

New: float it over Lightroom

The bit I'm most pleased with lately: you can pop Pace out into a tiny window that floats on top of everything else. So while you're actually culling away in Lightroom, the timer sits quietly in the corner of your screen. Pause it, resume it, and type in where you're up to without ever tabbing away from your catalogue, and it keeps telling you your pace as you go. It leans on a newer browser feature, so you'll want Chrome or Edge to float it; everywhere else the full tool still works in the tab exactly as normal.

Free now, and where it goes next

The version you can use today is completely free and runs entirely on your own device. No account, nothing leaves your browser. You'll find it in the Tools section, alongside the Focus Timer and Backup Buddy.

Down the line there's an obvious paid tier for the things that need a login: syncing the same live clock across your phone and laptop, learning your pace across every wedding you shoot, and turning that into a delivery date you can genuinely commit to. But the free tool isn't a teaser. It's the thing I actually use, and it's yours.

If you try it, I'd love to know how your real pace compares to what you thought it was. Mine was slower than I'd have admitted out loud, and honestly, knowing that has made me kinder to myself about it. That's the whole point of The Co Lab: less guessing, less friction, and a bit more of your life back.