Photography Tips · Brussels

Group Headshots vs. Individual Sessions: Which Saves Your Company More?

By Dmytro Derkach · Brussels-based commercial photographer

A company updating headshots for an entire team faces a scheduling and budget decision before the photographer even arrives: book everyone in one long session, or spread individual sessions across several days.

The group session model

Booking an entire team for headshots in a single day, back to back at 10-15 minute intervals per person, is significantly more cost-efficient per head than scheduling separate sessions. A photographer charging a day rate or a bulk per-person rate for a group booking typically comes in well under what the same number of individual sessions would cost booked separately.

Where group sessions create friction

Coordinating an entire team’s calendar for a single day is harder than it sounds, particularly for companies with remote employees, client-facing staff who cannot all be pulled from meetings at once, or a team spread across multiple office locations. A missed slot in a tightly scheduled group day is harder to reschedule than a single missed individual appointment.

When individual sessions make more sense

New hires joining outside a scheduled group refresh, senior leadership needing a different treatment (more locations, more looks) than the standard employee headshot, or a small team where the coordination overhead of a group day outweighs the savings, are all reasonable cases for individual booking.

The real cost comparison

A group session for twenty people typically runs a flat day rate divided across the team, often landing well below individual per-person pricing. The same twenty headshots booked individually, at standard per-session rates, can cost two to three times more in total, purely from the added setup time each separate booking requires.

The practical recommendation

For any company updating more than five or six headshots at once, a group session almost always wins on cost. Individual sessions make sense specifically for exceptions: new hires, executives, or anyone who genuinely cannot fit into the scheduled group day.