As a photographer I’m always on the lookout for applications that will make my life easier. Sometimes it’s applications that help me make lighting diagrams, sometimes it’s an application that helps with new and fresh posing, and sometimes it’s an application that helps with the business end of photography. Zosh is one of the latter. Zosh takes one of the most tedious tasks in photography and simplifies it. Of course I’m talking about paperwork. Zosh takes the most popular style of documents (PDF, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, JPG, GIF, PNG, and BMP) and allows you to fill information on the fly and email a copy of that document to anyone you choose. This is great for photographers! Now fill in Model releases, wedding contracts, property releases, etc. on the go!

Functionality

Setting up your account with Zosh is as simple as any setup for an online account. You have to provide an email account that you wish to be associated with the app. If you have multiple email accounts, choose your email account carefully because this is the email account that you have to use to load documents into your Zosh document dashboard. To load a document you simply email the file from your specified email address to mydocs@zosh.com. Within two to three minutes, that document is available for you to view and use from your idevice. You will receive a confirmation email from Zosh letting you know that it is available for use.

Once you have a document in your Zosh dashboard, filling it out is easy. Simply click on the document to open it on your screen. On the top right of the screen you will see an insert button. When you tap on it, you get four choices; insert signature, insert text, insert date, and insert image. Chose whichever you would like to insert. Once you have created the content to add to the document and click “ok” the content will be added right in the middle of your document. Tap once on the content that you added and you will be presented with a number of options to place that content in your document. You will have the option to move, resize, rotate, and delete. The biggest advantage of this application to me is the ability to add signatures to your documents right on your idevice. When I sit with a wedding client we fill out the wedding contract right on the screen, tap insert signature and the client signs with their finger right there. It’s quick, easy and effective.
Once you have your document filled out, getting a copy to your client and to yourself is as easy as tapping “Transmit” at the bottom of the screen. You can then add as many recipients as you would like the document to go to. You can email it to yourself for printing at a later time.
 

Things I would like to see

This app is designed for the iPhone and iPod touch (when you have wifi service), there isn’t currently a native iPad app yet. This means that to use it on my iPad (which I do a lot) I have to use the up scaling option which makes the resolution less than ideal. According to the Zosh website there is a native iPad version in the works. Until then the up scaled version will have to do. The other thing that I would like to see is the option to store documents on your device. In its current form, your documents are stored in the “cloud” and not on your device locally. This means that if you don’t have 3g or wifi service you cannot access your documents. This isn’t a problem on my iPhone usually however I bought a wifi only iPad so from time to time I don’t have a connection to be able to access the forms when working with clients. I would like to see the ability to keep documents locally on the device and email them later when I’m connected to the internet.
 

Conclusion

Overall, this application is a winner. It simplifies my life when dealing with clients, models, and art directors; and anything that does that is a winner in my book. At $2.99 it’s well worth the money. If they get the iPad version out, and add local document storing this will be a perfect app.
You can get Zosh here from the Zosh

 

 

Yes it can be awkward signing with your finger so get a stylus!

If you're going to be a doing a lot of these, you might want to make an investment in a iPhone stylus to make it easier for your clients to sign. I got one of these and I LOVE IT! Makes it so much easier to sign!