Our new and improved blog has moved to blog.photobox.co.uk. All new posts will now appear at the new address rather than here. Come and take a look and see what you think!

Check it out now!

As promised I am updating you all on our proposed changes to pro galleries. We have started the planning work and now it’s time to get some feedback from existing gallery owners.

Uploading to your pro gallery

Firstly, I can see that some of you are frustrated that it is necessary to upload twice: once to the old site to sell images through pro-gallery and once again to the new site if you want to order prints. We could add a feature so that you could upload once to the new site (via FTP, in the browser or Picasa) and then import photos from the new site into a gallery album. If you would like to see this feature implemented please let me know. If there is enough support we will get it done ASAP.

New features planned

The new pro galleries are planned to have all of the features from the old service, but appearing in the style of the new site. We feel this will be a cleaner, less cluttered experience for your visitors and customers. Of course your own logos, graphics and contact details will still appear. And when launched all of your content will be migrated over.

These are some of the new features that we anticipate adding:

• Optional password protection for individual collections
• No limit on the number of products that can be offered
• Optional watermarking of medium sized (500 pixel) images
• The ability to set different products and prices for specific collections. Thus you could have a premium collection at higher prices or a collection of panoramic images with only relevant print sizes offered.
• Electronic download at a price you decide
• Search of gallery and optional inclusion of your collections and photos into the main site public search results (pro gallery images will be clearly identified to the visitor when viewing public photos)

And in a later release:

• Choice of page styles, for example, black background rather than white
• Choice of funds collection (the profit from your sales): as a credit to be used on main site or via automated payment into a nominated PayPal account
• Pre-made creations: the ability for you to make a completed photobook, calendar or any other creation product, allow visitors to view it and to buy it for a price you decide

Now over to you. Does the list above sound right to you? Are there any of these features that you feel are not necessary or not described the way you want them? Are there other features that would make galleries much more successful for you? I’m looking forward to receiving your feedback and ideas on what’s important to you.

One final point: we plan to launch a new PhotoBox blog within the next week. This will have two distinct areas: one for consumers and another for our pros. We feel that the issues raised are quite different between the two audiences. We will of course make you fully aware of the new address and redirect you from the old blog once this is available.

I always say this, but thanks again for the feedback. It’s a great thing to have you contributing to our future developments in such a direct way.

Regards
Graham

I would like to give you an update on some recent changes to the site and work in progress.

Performance and upload

We made quite a few changes over the last two weeks that have improved the performance of the site generally and some key pages including albums and “my photobox”. There are further changes that we can make to improve performance for customers with over 100 albums, and we will be looking at these in early June.

We have also fixed some issues this week with uploads freezing in Firefox.

Products

Postcards are now available again the site. They are improved over the old site version in that it is now possible to enter a lot more text and to have more control over text formatting.

Mugs with captions and templates are in the final stages of testing and will be available within the next few days.

Tableau

We have introduced “Tableau”: a new sharing method which allows you to design a photo blog page with photos laid out with a completely configurable layout (any scattering with different sizes and placements). It is an experimental service at the moment, but if popular then something we can build on for general sharing or pro gallery usage.

Take a look at a sample wedding Tableau we made to get a better idea:

http://publish.photobox.co.uk/Susan_and_tony/our_wedding_day.html

Other recent changes

For those of you who didn’t see recent postings, we have re-activated upload by FTP on ftp://ftp.photobox.com (note this is “.com” and NOT “.co.uk”). There is also now a new “advanced options” print user journey which re-introduces the controls you used to have: shrink to fit for all, and easy selection of different print sizes for all or part of the set of photos.

Image quality

I have seen several postings about the sharpness and colour of medium sized images. We have made no changes to this for several months. So the behaviour of the new site is exactly the same as the old site. I have personally investigated some of the images that people describe as differing in quality or colour and to be honest, I can’t see any colour differences. But the medium sized images are a bit soft. We have contacted the company that makes the upload software (Aurigma) asking for an ability to apply a sharpening rule when generating this image. They have suggested a different setting which we are currently testing and that will be released next week. It does improve the sharpness of the scaled image somewhat.

Other work in progress and Pro galleries

There are quite a few other changes in progress at the moment to provide new features and to address some of the points raised in this blog and feedback to customer services. I will give you an update next week on these.

We have also started the design work for the new pro galleries service, due later in the summer. We are starting 1:1 consultation with some pro gallery owners, and I will be able to provide you with more information on our plans next week.

As always, we really value your feedback and are working hard to make improvements based on what we see. I hope you all have a very good weekend.

Regards
Graham

View of Canary Wharf from the Millbank Tower

When not blogging for PhotoBox, one of a handful of other gigs I juggle is my role as Food & Drink Editor for Londonist. The position is a brilliant opportunity for me to sample some of the best that London’s eclectic dining scene has to offer and often provides me with interesting photo-ops too. For example, a recent event had me schmoozing in the Altitudes Studio on the 29th floor of the Millbank Tower round sunset. Situated near the Thames in Pimlico, the views from atop the Millbank were absolutely stunning – the best I’ve seen in town except for maybe those from the London Eye.

I took several shots of the skyline with most not turning out so well (I think that last glass of ’schmoozing’ might have gone to my head). However, I did manage to get one halfway decent shot looking out toward Canary Wharf with a bit of rainbow thrown in for good measure. Nice one.

Chris

About time for an update, and I thought I’d drill down a bit into the stuff we’re doing to develop and improve the service the way our customers would like. I’m glad to say we’ve had no shortage of takers so far, prepared to help us with problem resolution and the prototyping of new features we’re developing.

Inevitably, new site or old, we get problems from time to time caused by either stuff we do (new site releases), or stuff the market does to us (like new operating system or browser versions getting released). It’s impossible for us to test every possible combination that’s out there; our test team do a thorough job, but after that we inevitably rely on customer feedback to flag remaining problems, which we pick up through a daily analysis of the many contacts we get.

Often we’ll then go into a more detail with you direct, to try to find out more about the problem. We’ll use surveys, one-to-one emails or phone calls, and our own logs and diagnostic tools to get more data. Thanks, if you’re contributed recently, as we’ve gone about finding and fixing stuff that’s been hard to track down. This kind of work is by its nature ongoing, but we’re making great progress fixing problems, and making our site easier to use.

So the key point. It’s our intention to continue to increase our interaction with you, using your feedback directly to shape the future of the service, and to continue to drive up service quality. If we contact you directly, I hope you’ll help. If you’re already helping, I’m certain you’ll see the benefits of your input very quickly.

Talking of which, you’ll hopefully have seen significant improvements to print ordering on the site, and the performance of key pages. It’s definitely an example of stuff we didn’t get right first time, but live customers have greatly contributed to both these upgrades, giving us great confidence that everyone will see them as positive change. Graham, our CTO, has personally been involved in some of the calls. I’ll leave you to judge whether we got it right.

Next up, you should expect further developments in respect of site performance, and product coverage in the next week or so. We’ll keep you posted, of course.

Finally, a bit of shameless marketing. We launched our new range of personalised hardcover books this week. Please take a look – I love them, and I hope you do too. The quality of the finished product from our new manufacturing process is amazing.

As ever, keep the feedback coming.

Mark

Not the usual kind of post, but since it’s been a big ask from you since we moved house, I thought I’d just flag this up. For those not familiar with FTP, it’s simply an alternate method by which you can send your image files into us.

We’ve tested the service thoroughly, and we think it’s working fine. Sorry again for the delay.

So FTP is now back as an option on our upload page, and the direct URL is ftp://ftp.photobox.com. Just login with your usual PhotoBox email address and password, and please let us know if you get any problems.

Have a great weekend.

Mark

Falls to me to post the latest on the new site, and other stuff going on here. I hope you found the previous posts by Graham informative.

We’ve spent a great deal of time over the last week or so talking to our customers about the new site, via surveys, email, phone conversations and doing some prototype testing of new features with some of you. Thanks again if you’ve contributed. It’s been a good experience throughout, getting to the heart of what people really miss about the old site, and now that the new site’s a bit more familiar to customers, what’s working well.

Problems really comes down to the fact that we’re not yet fully optimised for the frequent, ‘heavy’ user of our services, particularly professional and commercial customers. We’re seeing a good response however from customers who wish to make a relatively simple order - 100 6×4s, for example, or a Photobook. Indeed our new book manufacturing facilities are running pretty busy already!

I’m confident however we’ll continue to improve for all our customers. As previously posted, we’ll go live with a much improved high-volume print order screen very soon, which will reintroduce the features on the old site. FTP will go back up in the next few days. Performance on some of our key pages will also greatly improve, as promised, in the next couple of weeks or so – development of the required tuning is already well-advanced.

Back to the theme of getting feedback from you. Apart from this blog, we’ll be increasing the amount of co-development & testing we do directly with customers. Just recently some of you have worked with us on a new ‘prints user journey’ and it’s been invaluable for us. We aim to continue with this kind of approach to ensure our customers remain at the centre of our thinking. Post your views on this via this blog, and let us know if you’d like to participate in the future.

Finally, an update from our customer service department. Stuart and the team have worked much overtime fielding the initial wave of questions and problems as customers changed over. Thanks for your patience if an answer’s taken longer than normal. I’m glad to say service levels are returning to normal, but if you could call outside of our peak 9am to noon period it would be appreciated.

More soon
Mark

I wanted to give you all some further feedback on the most common issues being raised, and our progress in making improvements.

Firstly, a number of small fixes have been made in response to your requests and feedback.

Album changes

Photo names are now displayed in albums above each thumbnail. These are visible when you are viewing the medium and large sized thumbnails. Hopefully that will make your photo selection easier.

We have also turned off the marquee-select feature which we got very negative feedback about. Customers were having the problem that if they clicked outside of a checkbox it would de-select any photos they had previously ticked. Now fixed.

Picasa

We had to do quite a lot of chasing with our friends at Picasa, but this is now working ok. You can now use Picasa to upload to us as an alternative to the in-browser method or our desktop uploader.

Blurry thumbnails and shared albums

I reported last time that a number of you were seeing blurry thumbnails. This was due to the images from our old site being smaller than the new site and image stretching was making them look strange. We had several hundred million photos to regenerate and that process is now completed.

We have also now migrated all of the PhotoBox members who shared albums and so there should not be any further problems in seeing the albums you were expecting. If you still have a problem please contact customer services for some further investigation.

Pro galleries

I have seen some concerns in the blog comments about pro galleries. To re-state what my colleagues have previously posted, we are still running the original pro gallery service and this will continue to run until the updated version is ready. Pro gallery owners are still able to create new albums/collections, upload photos, set products and prices and modify all gallery settings.

Yesterday we put in place a change so that any sales generated on pro gallery are automatically transferred over to the new site, to be used as credit for purchases. Or alternatively you can request payment exactly as before.

And the big changes yet to come…

I would like to confirm that due to strong feedback the old FTP upload method will be reinstated by the end of May. To be honest we thought that with in-browser uploads (Active-X and Java, the same method that Facebook uses) and with a desktop uploader and with Picasa, FTP was no longer required. But clearly it is a popular feature so it will be brought back.

We are working on an improved print ordering journey that addresses many of the comments received so far. We have had agreement from some of the customers posting on this blog to review the new feature and give their feedback. That will happen towards the end of next week. Depending on the level of adjustment required we hope to have this live during the week after.

Clearly performance is still an issue and be assured we feel your pain! We are working as fast as we can to rewrite some parts of the website that are causing the biggest performance bottlenecks. I wrote quite a bit about the history behind this and the U-turn we are making in my last posting. You will see significant improvements by the end of May with further improvements during June.

A few words about production and customer services

I have seen some postings here about order problems (items delayed or not delivered). There is no reason why orders from the new site should be any slower than orders from the old site. Since the launch of our new site we have dispatched over 95% of our orders on-time and we expect to get this back up to our target of 98% in the next few days. Mark can give you a further update on service levels in his next posting.

During this time of changeover to a new site, we are seeing higher levels of calls and support emails than normal, and that means that there is a slower response than we would like. But we have increased the size of the customer services team and response times are returning to normal.

Once again, I would like to thank you all for taking the time to give us feedback. I realise that in most cases you give us this feedback because you share a sense of ownership of the service and care about what direction it takes. We are working hard to get past any problems raised and show you the real benefits of our new platform over the next few months.

I wish you all a very pleasant weekend.

Regards
Graham

Hope your holiday weekend went well – it sure made a change to see the sun down here in the south.

I have decided to make a post to address some of the issues highlighted on this blog. As you are all aware we have launched a new version of our website to mixed responses. First the history: our old site was in operation for nearly 8 years. At the beginning of 2007 we started to build a replacement site. We wanted it to be a new platform to offer great new features and products to our customers for the next 5 years and beyond, and to make it easy for all users: pro and novice.

That site started to appear for some UK users during April and is now active for all of you.

To date we have received feedback from a number of different groups: a group of UK members who we migrated during April, survey response from UK members migrated over the past week and feedback from members migrated in France and Germany over the past few months. Generally the feedback has been positive, with only 16% of UK respondents preferring the old site. We have also seen record levels of ordering activity.

But clearly, based on your feedback below, many of you on this blog feel unhappy about some aspects of the new site. I am confident that we are already on the way to addressing many of these points.

The challenge now is to set some priorities, and make changes to the new site where necessary in order to respond to your feedback, and to improve the service further. Whilst we have an ambitious plan going forward, the plan for immediate improvements in the next month or so is pretty clear, so I thought I’d let you know what’s coming up.

Pixellated thumbnail images

This was caused by the process of moving over to the new site, which uses larger images (so your smaller images looked “fuzzy” when displayed in a larger space). We had several hundred million photos to convert but that process should be completed by Thursday this week. Please be assured that the original, full-res image has not been changed in any way by the move to the new site.

Album sharing

Again, there’s been problems caused by some people being still on the old site. Everyone with shared albums will be fully migrated by the end of the week, at which point all albums shared with you will be there for you to view again.

Large-quantity photo orders

It’s clear this and performance have been your main concerns. You should therefore know that we plan to go live with an improved way of ordering prints in the next 2 weeks. This will reintroduce the features you have expressed concern about, specifically, the ability to tick one, many or all images in the basket, then rotate, resize, delete or shrink-to-fit all of them in one click. We’ll also be introducing larger thumbnails during the ordering process so that cropping effects are easier to see.

Performance

Originally we designed the new site to be very “active” and to work much more like a desktop application supporting features like drag-n-drop and content updating without having to load a new page. Unfortunately some browsers support this type of site better than others and we know that the performance is unacceptable for some of the people posting below. We are doing a bit of a U-turn on this based on recent feedback.

You should expect a progressive improvement in performance of the new site starting with a major step at the end of this month. Our old site was causing us a few headaches towards the end, but it was fast so we set ourselves a hard standard to live up to. It may take us a little while to get back to normal, but I’m positive we’ll get to the performance you want soon.

Postcards

Finally, we’ll be steadily bringing in great new products and bringing back some old ones, the first of which being postcards later this month. Apologies for the delay, but I hope you’ll like the new version, which will have all the old features, plus more.

There’s much more to come of course, but I hope you’ve found this post useful. Either Mark or I will update again soon. Anybody out there who knows us will already be certain we’re completely focussed on making the new site as successful as the old one. We’re equally certain we’ll get there!

I appreciate that is has been a frustrating time but please be assured that we do agonise over every piece of negative feedback, and will do our absolute best to create the new PhotoBox that you all want. And we do very much appreciate your feedback. You are telling us what our priorities are for the period ahead.

Graham

Without any exaggeration, yesterday was one of our biggest days ever at PhotoBox. Launching a new site is no mean feat, so I’m pleased to say it went very smoothly.

So far, about 30,000 of you have tried the new site, and though we’ve got a few issues to work through, services such as photo uploads, sharing and product ordering have been as popular as ever.

I do confess to feeling a bit sentimental however. I clearly remember the first orders going across the old site 8 years ago. I even printed all the photos then! It seems a bit strange to be moving on but nothing lasts forever, and everyone here is really fired up about the new products & services we’ll be able to roll out, as we fully move into our new home.

Back to those issues then - firstly thanks for all your feedback. Our customer service team have been pretty busy helping some of you through the new site, and we’ve been taking careful note of your comments and suggestions via phone, blog and email. Please keep them coming – we’re not perfect but we want to keep improving our service, and your feedback is what drives us.

It’s not possible for me to speak here on every point raised, but I wanted to comment on a couple of popular points:

Pros, Semi-pros, and other photo-junkies

You win the prize for the most vocal contribution so far. Not all good feedback, but where we’re not getting it right we’ll fix it. Specifically, we get your points on the flexibility and speed of ordering when you’ve got hundreds of photos to print on a tight timescale. FTP upload will be back shortly, and some missing products will be re-introduced, or superseded by better versions soon.

You should also know also that we’re fully committed to Pro gallery. Watch this space for a new improved version, which will be fully integrated into the new site later this summer. Meanwhile it’s business as usual for existing gallery owners via links from your new ‘My PhotoBox’ page.

Finally, I want to make it clear our core commitment to serious photographers remains: High-quality printing, fast turnaround and sharp pricing. You’re where we started; we don’t intend to leave you behind now!

Site performance

There’s a lot going on right now to improve performance over the next few weeks. Please bear with us – we’ve got some of the best software engineers in the business on this project, but moving millions of members and hundreds of millions of images takes a while, and a bit of horsepower. I’m confident you’ll see improvements as we tune the service, but it’ll take a few weeks to get it right.

I promise we’ll take all your other comments into account. In particular, look out for great new slideshow and sharing features appearing soon.

Please carry on posting your views here – I’ll be responding to the more common themes as they arise. I’ll also give you a further update on how the changeover’s going next week.

Have a great bank-holiday weekend!

Mark Chapman
Managing Director