Proofing Gallery and Print Order Management

We have been extremely busy in the last several weeks working on a brand-new addition to the Weddx application -- Proofing Gallery and Print Order Management. We are proud to announce the release today!

There are plenty of proofing gallery application readily available in the market. It might even come with your website as a built-in feature. However, they all suffer some common problems:

• They are slow, hard to navigate, and too flashy. The goal of a proofing gallery, as its name indicates, is to show your clients proofs. Clients want to be able to navigate through all the pictures quickly and easily. Imaging you upload a thousand-picture wedding gallery, each page of the gallery only shows 10 thumbnails (a pretty average number, some only show 5!), the clients must click 100 times just to navigate through all the pages, not to mention the click on each picture. If you are showing off your portfolio, sure, this is not a problem, you may have just 50 pictures to go through. But for any proofing galleries, navigation and ease of use become a much more important factor in your presentation.
• There is no print credit/coupon management. Most wedding photographers offer some type of print product as part of their packages, either through print credit or a print package. Your clients will then need to place an order based on precisely the predetermined terms like size, quantity, etc. If they want to use partial credits for an engagement session, you have to manually track such usage.
• There is no central print order management. This is especially true for those "shopping carts" that come with your website. The typical workflow is your client place the order, and you receive an email notification. You then arrange payments, process pictures, and have them shipped. But at a given time, do you have any idea what status is for each order? Does your client know? When the number of print order increases, this problem becomes more serious exponentially.
• There is no configurability. Sure you can add the print size and price you offer, but what about different options? For example, the paper texture, the color of the frame border, etc. You wind up adding multiple products rather than one product with different options. What about shipping options and their price? What about sales tax?
• They are expensive. Many cost $100+ per month. Some come with very limited pictures or storage. For example, if your average wedding is 500 pictures, a 10,000 picture limit can only accommodate 20 weddings. And some even take a big cut out of your order.

It's always been Weddx's strategy to focus on the business side of the wedding photography, proofing gallery is no exception. Some of the key features include:

• Directly integrated into business management. When you create a new job, Gallery is simply another tab. Here, you can create galleries for the job, as well as manage print credits. A new module tab is also added to the top navigation, allowing you to centrally manage all existing galleries and print orders.
• Light-weight, quick loading, and easy to navigate. Our gallery is not flash-based, and does not load all the pictures even the clients do no wish to click. We generate thumbnails for your uploaded images and only loads thumbnails. The entire gallery of 1,000 pictures can be loaded in just several seconds! There are no paging at all. All pictures are immediately available for your clients to jump from the first to the last without any delay.
• The built-in ordering system allows you to configure pretty much everything -- product (Print, Canvas, Frames, etc), size and options, shipping methods and fees, and sales tax.
• Centrally manage all print orders and their status. Once an order is placed, it automatically shows up in your Weddx interface. Your clients have the option to pay for your order using the same methods you configured in ClientAccess. This can be check, phone, PayPal, or Google Checkout. You can update the order status and your client can view the same status on the ordering confirmation page. All financial data is automatically inserted into your business management for that job. You have a single interface to view all your pending orders and completed orders.
• Use print credit as a "debit card". You can create a single print credit code that your clients can use for all the galleries in that wedding. For example, if you have three galleries for a job, an engagement session, a bridal session, and the actual wedding. And your print credit is created for $200. Your client can apply that code to the engagement session for a $50 order, leaving a $150 balance of the code. Then the client can claim another $50 for the bridal session, and use the rest of the $100 on the wedding gallery. You simply create the code and set the amount, your clients determine how they spend it like a "debit card" concept.
• Directly integrated into ClientAccess. When you enable galleries in ClientAccess, your client can see all the available galleries right from ClientAccess.
• You will have a public gallery page that you can link to from your website. This is the page where visitors to your website can click and see all the available galleries from you. You can determine which galleries to be displayed, which one is locked by a password or not, as well as a password hint if you wish.
• No disk storage limit, no bandwidth/transfer limit. We don't do that, period. We believe you should not worry about things like am I running out of disk quota or how's my bandwidth/transfer this month? We do, however, have one single catch -- all the galleries will be expired one year after the wedding date. (The average expiration date we surveyed is 3 to 6 months.)
• Low cost. For all the features above plus much more, the cost is extremely affordable. At this time, as long as you have a Weddx business management subscription, proofing gallery is completely free of charge to you!

Try it out, let us know! As always, we are open to your suggestions and comments.