EU print lab any time soon?

Kurgen

I'm not holding my breath for this, as a search on the forums dragged up a few threads that asked the same question, and are now several years old, and still no EU based print labs. Is this ever going to become a reality? Right now, if a client orders 10 basic 4"x6" prints, costing £1.35, they get charged £5.13 for shipping! Naturally, no-one is buying a single thing, not with those prices. I've only joined SM in the last two months, but the primary reason for doing so; print sales, is never going to happen the way it is now. Please tell me I haven't just wasted a years subscription and weeks of setting-up?

Allen

http://news.smugmug.com/2012/03/23/welcome-loxley-colour/

RobLoud

Kurgen wrote: »

I'm not holding my breath for this, as a search on the forums dragged up a few threads that asked the same question, and are now several years old, and still no EU based print labs. Is this ever going to become a reality? Right now, if a client orders 10 basic 4"x6" prints, costing £1.35, they get charged £5.13 for shipping! Naturally, no-one is buying a single thing, not with those prices. I've only joined SM in the last two months, but the primary reason for doing so; print sales, is never going to happen the way it is now. Please tell me I haven't just wasted a years subscription and weeks of setting-up?

As far as I am aware, but I may be corrected by someone else. You can select Loxley Colour from the drop down menu when you creat a price list in account settings as long as you have a Portfolio or Business account otherwise I think you are limited to EZ Prints with with basic accounts.

Robin

denisegoldberg

RobLoud wrote: »

As far as I am aware, but I may be corrected by someone else. You can select Loxley Colour from the drop down menu when you creat a price list in account settings as long as you have a Portfolio or Business account otherwise I think you are limited to EZ Prints with with basic accounts.

You're correct - that is shown on the help page at http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93270:

Our non-commerce plans all print photos through EZ Prints.

Hopefully someone from SmugMug will comment here.

--- Denise

Kurgen

Hmmm... I guess I'm stuffed then, unless a "Power" account is covered?

[EDIT] Just checked, and no, my account type does not include selection of print lab. Wow. What a complete waste of time and money. The next level of account is almost three times the cost of the current one. I didn't realise at the time, that not having a selection of lab meant I could only use one that is physically thousands of miles away, on a different continent. Not happy.

zacHer0

Hi Kurgen,

That is correct, Loxley is only available to Portfolio and Business members at this time. You can add your votes and comments on our suggestion forum, regarding adding Loxley at the Basic/Power account levels here.

In your first post you mentioned that your primary reason to use SmugMug was print sales. At the Power account level you cannot sell prints for a profit - you can only sell prints at the base/default prices. I'm not sure if you were aware of this. You can upgrade your account by going into the Account Settings > Me > Subscription page, then click the Change Plan button (the upgrade fee is prorated).

If you have any questions feel free to email us at the help desk http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/emails/new.

Kurgen

Hi Zac, yeah, It probably didn't register with me at the time that I would have no control over the prices, as I was (have to admit this...) kinda bowled-over by the site builder itself and the fact that I'd be in control of my site for the first time since I'd signed-up with a publishing company a few years before. Still doesn't make me any happier that I can voice my opinion on it in the thread you linked to, mainly because I don't feel very confident that anything will change, given the timescale since people first started asking for this facility (with no luck), but I'll check it out anyway, before jumping ship.

Andy

I don' t get it. You want a close lab. You want pro features. You live in Scotland where the SM Lab is. Just think of your alternatives! You'd have to code your own website. Build in your own e-commerce. Interface with Loxley Roes software. And so much more. Simply can't understand about your surprise that this might cost $90 more a year than then plan you are on now. Put things into proper perspective

RobLoud

I agree with Andy. The power account costs around £5.15 per month and the Portfolio account around £12.90 (depending on exchange rate), which for an additional £7.75 per month would give you the ability to use Loxley Colour and add your own % markup to your prints.
That is the main reason that I went with the Portfolio account, as it allowed me to make a small amount of profit on any prints that I sold. I only do it as a hobby, so my margins are quite low.


The Portfolio account only allows you to set one price list for all of the different types of prints available which would cover all of your galleries. If you want to have different prices for different galleries and/or clients you would need to upgrade to the Business account which is twice the cost of the Portfolio account.

Robin

Kurgen

OK... hint taken guys, account upgraded as required. I'm now on the Portfolio account, and having nightmares with watermarks not showing on the actual gallery images, but it's showing on their thumbnails... :-/

zacHer0

Kurgen wrote: »

OK... hint taken guys, account upgraded as required. I'm now on the Portfolio account, and having nightmares with watermarks not showing on the actual gallery images, but it's showing on their thumbnails... :-/

Got a link to the gallery? If you don't want to post it publicly you can email us at help@smugmug.com

Kurgen

Sure Zac, here it is. Another problem with this particular gallery (panoramas) is that some of the thumbnails have a super-sized watermark.

http://www.ivors.photos/Scenery/Panoramas/

This is a good example of the problem with WMs not showing on either the full size image or its thumbnail, but the main gallery pic (the square one) does. ???

http://www.ivors.photos/Motorsport/Knockhill-Racing-Circuit/2013-season

RobLoud

Kurgen wrote: »

OK... hint taken guys, account upgraded as required. I'm now on the Portfolio account, and having nightmares with watermarks not showing on the actual gallery images, but it's showing on their thumbnails... :-/

Hi Kurgen, I am sure you will not be disappointed with your upgrade. I have had a look at your site and you have some great shots on there. However I noticed that you have all of your galleries are set to show the original image, and this will allow visitors to your site to grab the original image without any need to purchase it. I would advise you change all of your gallery setting to show X2, X3 maximum. This will not affect any purchase of your prints as they are automatically taken from your original image..

Hopefully someone can get you sorted with your WM issue to give you a bit more protection of your images.

You may need to have a separate WM for your panoramas..... Have you tried adding more left & right transparency to it so that it does not need to stretch so much?


Robin

Kurgen

Hi Robin, thanks for the feedback. I've limited the max size to 2x, but had already decided (before uploading any images) to keep the maximum actual resolution of any I upload to within a 1024 x 1024 limit box. I considered this to be ample enough for potential buyers to evaluate the images, without being so big as to be a usable freebie, like you said. The exception to this rule would be the panoramas, where I've had to keep the vertical resolution within normal screen constraints, but at the cost of increased horizontal resolution. I'll go through them and fix this soon. I've followed your advice regarding the horizontal space in the panorama WMs, and it's worked a treat, thanks for that.

I noticed that I had to go into each gallery's settings/security & privacy dialog and set it to "apply watermark" & "watermark all in this gallery" to get the WMs to show properly? Last night I had gone in through : organize site (select gallery)/select all/edit/watermarks, but this didn't seem to do the same thing? It's kinda confusing to be honest. I wish there was some kind of global "watermark all my non-thumbnail and tile images please!" function. Having to go through each and every individual gallery is a slog, especially when you've already done it, only to discover you goofed somewhere.

Thanks for the help, I'm slowly but surely getting there!

Ivor.

Kurgen

Oh crap... I've just realised I've goofed, monumentally. As I said in that last post, all the images I've uploaded (other than the panoramas) have a maximum horizontal and vertical resolution of 1024 pixels. I did this to prevent people just nicking the hi-rez ones, but it's just dawned on me that these are the images the print house(s) will be relying on should someone order anything. Obviously a 1024x763 image isn't going to produce a very usable A3 print, to say the least. This is how my old website ran, and if anyone ordered anything, I provided the printers with a high-rez version as and when required.

Arggghhh!!! Am I going to have to rebuild all my galleries, again, or is there any way to bulk-overwrite what's already there using the same filenames but full-rez versions? I know the default upload setting is to skip dupes, but... please let there be an alternative.

*sigh*

zacHer0

Check out the minimum resolution requirements for various print sizes - http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93359-resolution-for-printing

You might be interested in Proof delay which allows you to replace images after they are ordered and before they are submitted to the print lab. As long as the image is large enough to order (chart above) the customer can place the order and you can later replace it with a larger size. http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/84523-proof-delay

Watermarks will only be applied if the original image is at least 801px on the long side.

Re-uploading and skip duplicates will be the best way to go I believe...

Kurgen

Re-uploading and skip duplicates will be the best way to go I believe...

Trouble is, the way my image archive is setup here at home is to have one folder for each event with hi-rez photos in the main folder, and a sub-folder with the low-rez versions, but both the low-rez and high-rez images share the same name, so to upload all the high-rez ones would require me re-naming them all. Not that this in itself is a problem with the availability of bulk-renaming programs, but it would mean I'd have tens of thousands of extra files and folders kicking around, and I'd have to re-upload the entire site, with files that are considerably bigger than the current ones, e.g. one low-rez file at 400KB could easily be 10+MB at full rez. This, times 3000+ files would be excruciating.

The Proof Delay idea is looking mighty promising right now.

Speaking of which, and I'm dreading the (likely) reply, but is there a global "Proof Delay" setting, or is it per-gallery again?

denisegoldberg

Kurgen wrote: »

The Proof Delay idea is looking mighty promising right now.

Keep in mind that proof delay will only be useful if the low-res images you uploaded are large enough to support the size that your viewer wants to order. Make sure your low-res images match the minimums for the print sizes as shown on the page that Zac referenced in his last post.

--- Denise

Kurgen

Ah, so the print size selection (for the client) won't work even if I intended to supply the print house with the appropriate size? Hmmm... So proof delay is really only intended for re-touching/re-cropping rather than re-sizing?

denisegoldberg

Kurgen wrote: »

Ah, so the print size selection (for the client) won't work even if I intended to supply the print house with the appropriate size? Hmmm... So proof delay is really only intended for re-touching/re-cropping rather than re-sizing?

It's meant for both but you will need to upload a photo large enough to support the sizes you want to have available to your viewers when you do the initial upload.

I've always uploaded full size photos to my site - but I have a fast internet connection.

--- Denise

RobLoud

Kurgen wrote: »

Ah, so the print size selection (for the client) won't work even if I intended to supply the print house with the appropriate size? Hmmm... So proof delay is really only intended for re-touching/re-cropping rather than re-sizing?

Yes, thats correct. Your customer will only be able see available print sizes that the original image is suitable to be printed at. That is why you need your full rez original images if you want to offer larger prints and formats that Loxley offer.

I'm afraid that I can not help with how you are going to be able to repopulate your galleries with the original images with out it being a fair bit of work.

Robin

Kurgen

I fear that is the case Robin. Not tonight though, my eyes are starting to bleed with resetting all the watermarks. One gallery at a time then...