Adding my $.02 worth...
Hey! A bandwagon, let me jump on!
The ability to work off of thumbnails is something I have used for 18 months with another lab, but they have had reliability problems over the last 2 weeks and killed my sales stream, so I am looking for a new lab.
I can't emphasize how important the ability to upload thumbnails is for event work. I wouldn't have a problem with 100+ images, but my biggest running race last year resulted in 2000 images. This was a 20-mile race where we were set up in 3 places along the course to get pictures of nearly 700 runners. Post processing and uploading full res JPG images from the D2H/D100 cameras we used would have consumed days and many gigs of space.
I read the entire thread first before posting. I appreciate the concerns about customer service and such. Here is how I look at it:
1) When there are problems with the prints, the customer calls me, not the lab. I pay for the reprints, even if it was their mistake. Call is silly, but we are in a customer service business here and I want the customer to be 100% happy AND be their friend after the transaction. I am getting cross sales business here for other types of work and am not going to screw around arguing about the fact they cropped the image too tight themselves.
2) I check my e-mail for orders frequently, but there are times when I am traveling and (heaven forbid) take a vacation. During those times, the print request sits for a day or two, or I have someone do the necessary post processing for me while I am gone. The idea someone had about sending an e-mail to the customer stating that the order will be processed as soon as the prints are received from the photographer is fine. All of the branding on my own website and the ordering site points back to my contact information, not the lab and if there are delays, the customer rings my bell, not yours.
3) If you don't get a print request in 7 days, cancel the order and tell the photographer to get their @(*#()%# together. Dock the tardy photographer the cost of the print or a flat fee as a penalty. It will only take a few of those situations to weed out the problem childs and keep the rest of us honest.
1) When there are problems with the prints, the customer calls me, not the lab. I pay for the reprints, even if it was their mistake. Call is silly, but we are in a customer service business here and I want the customer to be 100% happy AND be their friend after the transaction. . . . All of the branding on my own website and the ordering site points back to my contact information, not the lab and if there are delays, the customer rings my bell, not yours.
I think that SM would say that the customer will typically call them, not the photog, and since SM is handling the transaction, technically, they are SM's customer.
3) If you don't get a print request in 7 days, cancel the order and tell the photographer to get their @(*#()%# together. Dock the tardy photographer the cost of the print or a flat fee as a penalty. It will only take a few of those situations to weed out the problem childs and keep the rest of us honest.
Actually, I like this idea. I do think the photog needs to be held very accountable in this kind of situation. That said, I am betting that SM would say that ultimately the buyer is SM's customer and a rogue photog giving SM a black eye isn't a situation that SM is keen on bringing upon themselves.
If that's the case, then I really think that SM needs to make sure that the photog, and not SM, is visually at the fore of the transaction by changing the default branding for pro accounts that have sales enabled to something photog-centric, and not SM-centric, even at the expense of being more generic. If SM is going to allow the pros the customization they do, they need to realize that the photog is spending the $$$ to be front and center, and SM needs to take a back seat.
And frankly, if the photog wants to make some money off of this little endeavor, they need to step up to the bat and take a little responsibillity.
another advantage...
this is great guys!
needless to say another advantage would be in control of cropping from 4:6 to 5:7 and 8:10 formats. I hope, if implemented, the notification would also include the dimentions of the prints being ordered.
Great job, as always SM crew!
A question for Pro's
For those of you that take 300+ photo's at events...
Do you really have to tweak each photo? What would you do if the bride/groom wanted a copy of all 300 photos? Would you open each and tweak it?
What I do for weddings is slideshow all unprocessed photos on my computer and throw out the bad ones (out of focus, motion blur, bad crop, etc.)
I then pick a dozen that are wall hangers and do some creative editting (soft focus, BW convert, etc.)
I upload all of the photos making sure the tweaked ones are the first ones in the gallery. Set the price and turn the client loose. I let the client know that if they want any work done on the others to let me know. I also limit the size they can purchase on the untweaked photos to 8x10 and let them know that if they want bigger to let me know. That allows me to tweak the bigger pictures for best quality.
For those of you that take 300+ photo's at events...Do you really have to tweak each photo?
I shoot live dance. That means a wide variance in lighting between adjacent shots as the dancers move (rapidly) in and out of pools of light on stage. So I'm often shooting ISO 800 or even 1600, and often So I shoot RAW, but adjacent pictures can require quite different fixups in terms of exposure adjustment, color correction and.
Prints at 4x6 may be OK, but anything larger really requires:
- (batchable) noise-reduction (heavy chrominance, very light luminance)
- manual luminance noise reduction on areas of skin and other non-edge parts of image
- manual adjustment of exposure, shadow/highlight
- manual color correction
- manual fixups on faces, like targetted sharpening of eyes but not still-noisy hair
I'm happy spending 10 minutes doing this if I know I've already got revenue for it. Otherwise forget it.
I also limit the size they can purchase on the untweaked photos to 8x10 and let them know that if they want bigger to let me know. That allows me to tweak the bigger pictures for best quality.
This would definitely lose sales. The initial impulse buy is the by far more likely than a later followup to an email.
It seems to me that the real issue is that Smugmug is purposefully not offering a completely whitebox service. As a photographer, I want the customer to credit their experience (good or bad) to me, not to the service provider I happen to be using.
I would never expect my service provider to receive customer complaints, re-color-correct files, reprint, reship .... that's my problem and my expense.
Similarly, I expect the service provider to let me dig my own grave if I want. It's up to me to set an expectation with the customer, *before* they purchase, one that I can meet. For me that means something like "prints will take 1 week to process before they ship". This must be made clear to the customer before they hit purchase, but I haven't found that to be a problem at all.
I love smugmug's interface and look&feel, but so far, this one reason is why I'm using exposureManager.com, which allows me to take orders against thumbnails, and then upload the hi-res files after orders come in.
A large event for me looks like 3000-5000 images in consecutive 2 evenings of dance performances with 120 dancers, 8 choreographers, lots of friends&family in attendance. There is NO WAY I could prepare all the potentially-sellable images for printing ahead of time. Thumbnails are the only way.
Customer service issues come to me, not exposureManager, because their name doesn't show up *anywhere* that the customer can see on my website or in emails -- it's only my name and contact info. (The only place is on the credit card statement where it just says "Photo Products" with exposureManager's phone number. I would have to set up my own merchant banking account and use an online payment gateway to avoid this last part.)
It seems to me that Smugmug's fears of a customer service nightmare might be a little misplaced.
At any rate, the reason I am in this forum at all is because I am still searching for a good way to present a large shoot to a customer who has already paid who is going to select a final set, and send me the "lightbox" with their selections that we can use to communicate back and forth. ExposureManager can't do this, and I'm hoping smugmug can. Maybe I'll be forced to use two different service providers.
At any rate, the reason I am in this forum at all is because I am still searching for a good way to present a large shoot to a customer who has already paid who is going to select a final set, and send me the "lightbox" with their selections that we can use to communicate back and forth. ExposureManager can't do this, and I'm hoping smugmug can. Maybe I'll be forced to use two different service providers.
Keith
Hi Keith many thanks for posting, and telling us like it is
If I can be of any service to you, please holler for me!
Comments
Hey! A bandwagon, let me jump on!
The ability to work off of thumbnails is something I have used for 18 months with another lab, but they have had reliability problems over the last 2 weeks and killed my sales stream, so I am looking for a new lab.
I can't emphasize how important the ability to upload thumbnails is for event work. I wouldn't have a problem with 100+ images, but my biggest running race last year resulted in 2000 images. This was a 20-mile race where we were set up in 3 places along the course to get pictures of nearly 700 runners. Post processing and uploading full res JPG images from the D2H/D100 cameras we used would have consumed days and many gigs of space.
I read the entire thread first before posting. I appreciate the concerns about customer service and such. Here is how I look at it:
1) When there are problems with the prints, the customer calls me, not the lab. I pay for the reprints, even if it was their mistake. Call is silly, but we are in a customer service business here and I want the customer to be 100% happy AND be their friend after the transaction. I am getting cross sales business here for other types of work and am not going to screw around arguing about the fact they cropped the image too tight themselves.
2) I check my e-mail for orders frequently, but there are times when I am traveling and (heaven forbid) take a vacation. During those times, the print request sits for a day or two, or I have someone do the necessary post processing for me while I am gone. The idea someone had about sending an e-mail to the customer stating that the order will be processed as soon as the prints are received from the photographer is fine. All of the branding on my own website and the ordering site points back to my contact information, not the lab and if there are delays, the customer rings my bell, not yours.
3) If you don't get a print request in 7 days, cancel the order and tell the photographer to get their @(*#()%# together. Dock the tardy photographer the cost of the print or a flat fee as a penalty. It will only take a few of those situations to weed out the problem childs and keep the rest of us honest.
I hope this helped put some gas on the fire
-Mike
Fairfield Photography
Actually, I like this idea. I do think the photog needs to be held very accountable in this kind of situation. That said, I am betting that SM would say that ultimately the buyer is SM's customer and a rogue photog giving SM a black eye isn't a situation that SM is keen on bringing upon themselves.
If that's the case, then I really think that SM needs to make sure that the photog, and not SM, is visually at the fore of the transaction by changing the default branding for pro accounts that have sales enabled to something photog-centric, and not SM-centric, even at the expense of being more generic. If SM is going to allow the pros the customization they do, they need to realize that the photog is spending the $$$ to be front and center, and SM needs to take a back seat.
And frankly, if the photog wants to make some money off of this little endeavor, they need to step up to the bat and take a little responsibillity.
BenV
And the verdict around the smugmug offices was... ?
BenV
this is great guys!
needless to say another advantage would be in control of cropping from 4:6 to 5:7 and 8:10 formats. I hope, if implemented, the notification would also include the dimentions of the prints being ordered.
Great job, as always SM crew!
For those of you that take 300+ photo's at events...
Do you really have to tweak each photo? What would you do if the bride/groom wanted a copy of all 300 photos? Would you open each and tweak it?
What I do for weddings is slideshow all unprocessed photos on my computer and throw out the bad ones (out of focus, motion blur, bad crop, etc.)
I then pick a dozen that are wall hangers and do some creative editting (soft focus, BW convert, etc.)
I upload all of the photos making sure the tweaked ones are the first ones in the gallery. Set the price and turn the client loose. I let the client know that if they want any work done on the others to let me know. I also limit the size they can purchase on the untweaked photos to 8x10 and let them know that if they want bigger to let me know. That allows me to tweak the bigger pictures for best quality.
Hi Keith
If I can be of any service to you, please holler for me!
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