ExposureManager News & Tips

Coming soon: EM 2.0

One of my new year's resolutions is to do a much better job at keeping you informed with what we're working on here at EM. With that in mind, I am thrilled to announce the upcoming release of, what we call internally, EM 2.0 – the “new and improved” ExposureManager! It will a big upgrade for both you and your customer.

We started working on EM 2.0 nearly a year ago. Based on your feedback, we had a good idea where our weak spots were. One, clearly, was our utilitarian admin interface, and other was the lack of 21^st century looking templates for your customers. In other words: design and usability. Over the years we have hired several designers to help with that, but since they weren't able to assist with implementing we would often end up with unusable designs for the web. In this case, I decided to find a design and development firm that could assist. Luckily, we found one just a few miles from us. They were even in the same building where EM had its first office many years ago!

 The project description could be summarized as:

• completely redesign ExposureManager admin interface

• design new storefront template that can be easily customized

• design additional website pages so that a photographer can have their entire website with ExposureManager

That sounds pretty straightforward but when you realize how many completely different types of pages ExposureManager has, and different options, it quickly becomes overwhelming. We wanted to make sure we went through every page and made things as easy and intuitive as possible. So let's take a quick look at some of the upcoming changes:

In the admin interface:
A new dashboard: easily see the latest orders, your sales and access recent galleries:

 
Manage your photos easier, from within the management screen and drag & drop sorting:

 
Quickly manage all your pending orders:

In the storefront:
Super fast, maximized screen size browsing:

 

An even more streamlined cart with cropping:

 

Just redoing the design of course wasn't enough. In order to make it much faster to use, we completely redid our server architecture as well. Besides speed, this has some additional benefits like the ability to now provide an optimized experience for touch devices (phones and tables).

In addition to all that, if you are currently a long term subscriber (account older than April of 2011) then you will also get a bunch of new features such as gallery expiration, category management and early bird discounts.

 To summarize, here are some of the things you'll see in EM 2.0:

• full website capabilities (homepage, plus additional pages)

• the first of beautiful storefront templates

• easy customization of website / storefront

• cropping of photos in cart (optional of course!)

• a redesigned admin interface optimized for daily tasks

• better work flow for creating and managing galleries and photos

• integration with social media services (Facebook, Twitter, G+) for gallery promotion

• easy e-mailing of visitors of a gallery / category

• optimized shopping experience for iphone / ipad and other touch devices

• and much more!

   

When will this be available? Soon!
Naturally the first question I've received when I told people about this is 'when will this be available?' While I wish I had a hard release date, I don't have it yet. We aim to have a select group of people start beta testing it by February 1^st, and make it an optional upgrade soon after. We want to be fully up and running by the time WPPI comes around mid February. And since I postponed our honeymoon until this is done, I have plenty of incentive to get this done! 

Will prices go up? No!
I've also been asked if our subscription fees will go up. No, they won't :)

I am happy with my current setup, do I have to switch? No!
We know that you use ExposureManager for you business and that switching to a new system overnight when you are not prepared for it can be an unwelcome surprise. So we'll continue to support 'EM 1.0' for the foreseeable future and allow you switch over when the time is right for you.

Can I use the new storefront template with existing galleries? Yes!
When you upgrade to EM 2.0 you will have the option to use your current template or switch over to the new template. If you use the old templates, you will not be able to create additional pages or have a homepage however.

Can I help beta test? Maybe!
We can definitely use some additional help in testing. So we're looking for a small group of about 5 people to put it through its paces. If you are interested, drop me a line at donovan@exposuremanager.com. Ideally we get a diverse group of photographers (wedding, sports, etc.) because everybody uses EM in a different way. For the initial testing you'll get a new account, and for the second part we would convert your existing account over to it.

I hope this post gives you a better idea of what's coming down the pipeline. There's still a lot of work to be done, and we're all working very hard on getting it done. We're very excited about how these changes will help your business, and looking forward to releasing it to everybody soon. In the meantime, a big thank you from all of us for using ExposureManager for your business!

Donovan and the rest of the EM team

A preview shot of our new template

Hi everybody,

Part of EM 2.0 is a completely redesigned storefront and website template. This new template is much easier to customize with your preferred colors and background patterns. You can even choose a background image per gallery!

Besides looking great, we rewrote the entire underlying architecture. The result: superfast loading photos, and the template automatically resizes based on your customer's screen. No more guessing about image sizes, this way your photos will always display perfectly.

Much more details will be released over the coming days and weeks but we wanted to give you a quick taste of what's coming. Click on the image for a bigger version. Enjoy! - Donovan

(Re) Introducing the ExposureManager Team

As we’re about to release more details of the upcoming EM 2.0 release, I thought this would be a great time to re-introduce us all to you. It’s been nearly 8 years since Rhesa and I started development on ExposureManager. What was supposed to be a one week project has grown into a lifestyle! It’s been fantastic to see EM grow step by step, and we now support over 5,000 clients with their business. One of the best, and most satisfying, things is that many initial clients are still with us today! To all of you who joined in 2004 and 2005, thank you for proving to us that we could build a great photography company! It has been a pleasure to work with you!

If you joined during that time, you probably remember that at that time it was just Rhesa and me (Donovan). There’s a good chance that we emailed back and forth! However, if you joined after that time period, you may not know exactly who everybody is at EM. It’s about time that changes! So, without further ado, let me introduce our, very geographically spread out, team! 

Because everybody is so spread out, we never actually all met in person until my recent wedding in November. Here’s a snapshot from the brunch the day after.

From left to right: Jack, Donovan, Stephanie, Rhesa, Travis
Not shown here because he only joined EM a month ago: Dave

Rhesa: our server and database expert (co-founder)
Furthest away from our home base in Los Angeles, is Rhesa. Though we met when we both lived in The Netherlands, Rhesa now owns a farm in Hungary. When he is not busy optimizing our servers, writing backend code or chasing bugs, he tends to his many animals with his wife and two small daughters Lotte and Tessa (5 and 2). He was also my best man at my wedding!

Stephanie: master task juggler
Steph joined EM in March of 2008. Although technically on a part-time basis, she couldn’t resist working with such a fun group and turned full time after just 2 days! She keeps the trains running on time for us by taking care of all legal and accounting matters, as well as many other things. An Idaho native that lives in LA, Steph loves all things horses and has a great teenage daughter Tori. There used to be a time when we could bribe Tori to stuff checks with candy but sadly, those days are over!

Jack: our resident photographer and in charge of making you happy
Jack also has been with ExposureManager since March of 2008 (it was a busy month!). Since Jack is in charge of customer support, I am sure most of you have chatted with him. One of the great things about Jack is how unflappable and patient he is. No mean feat considering he has to work with two developers every day! He lives with his wife in southern New Hampshire and has been involved in photography since an early age. As time permits he shoots local events, sports and weddings as well as scenic photography wherever he goes. Jack enjoys photography, computers, travel, reading and spending the summer on Madison, New Hampshire’s Silver Lake.

Travis: people pleaser
Travis joined the shipping department of ExposureManager in 2009. He was fantastic in managing our daily lab operations so when we moved the printing over to our lab partner, Travis moved over to customer support in 2010. He currently resides in Michigan with his black lab, Abbey. Like myself, he has a passion for golf.

Dave: pixel wizard
Ok ok, you can say it. One of the big EM deficiencies has been our outdated look and our lack of beautiful templates. Although we spent most of 2011 working with a great design firm, when we started the implementation it was clear that we needed additional help to build the front end of the admin interface as well as additional templates. After a world wide search, Dave came out on top. We’re thrilled to have him on board! Dave does live the furthest away you can be from Los Angeles and still be in North America: St. John's New Foundland! He has a three year old daughter named Leia, who is named after Princess Leia from Star Wars. If he can work that kind of magic we can't wait until you see what he will come up with next.

Donovan: developer and co-founder
Where Rhesa works on the server end of EM, most of my work is on the front end itself. I am always looking at our data to see what we can tweak to increase your sales, and making the purchase experience as easy as possible for your customers. When I get some free time, I love playing golf. Other hobbies include flying and motorcycling. Although I was born in New Zealand and grew up in The Netherlands, Los Angeles has been my home since June of 2000. I live in Long Beach with my beautiful wife Allison and our new black lab pup named Hogan.

How we work together:
Since everybody works remotely, communication is key. Although we tried many different ‘collaboration’ tools, in the end we settled on using Skype for group chats. We have a ‘Support bubble’ and a ‘Development bubble’. It’s super easy to keep track on multiple devices that way, and keeps a nice log. That’s helpful since we’re all in different time zones!

Openings:
It’s a great team and it’s been great to work with all of them. If you want to join our team, we’re always looking for a great front end developers, and perl hackers. Just send your resume to me: donovan@exposuremanager.com.

A big thank you to all our EM clients. We’re gearing up for an amazing year, and I cannot wait to show you what we have in store for you! A teaser image will be posted next!

Introducing our new editing partner: PWD Labs

We're all familiar with the 'plight' of the modern photographer: after shooting a great wedding or event, you're stuck in Lightroom for days (or worse) sorting through photos and editing them. Time that could be spent shooting or just enjoying life. Wouldn't it be great if you could find a company that handles your editing, just like you let EM handle your online sales?

 If you are like me, you are probably a little skeptical about editing services. Can they really match my artistic taste as well as deliver images as good as my own editing? At a recent tradeshow, we were exhibiting next to PWD Labs. Their owner, Jerry, and I started talking and I expressed my concerns. He addressed them one by one and told me about all the great services that are available through PWD. For example, they can assign you an editing person who is trained on your specific style and taste. You'll have an instant 'mini-me'! After seeing the results on an event I shot a few weeks ago, I have to admit, I am a believer! And I am not the only one. Fellow EM-er Jim Graham says about PWD:

 "PWD has been a very welcome addition to my business, and their customer service has been wonderful."

Because of those reasons, I am very excited to announce the new partnership between PWD Labs and ExposureManager. You'll be able to send your raw files to PWD, they will edit your photos and, when the photos are ready, publish them, without additional fees, to ExposureManager. Just remember, the better your photos look online, the more sales you receive!

So go ahead, and give them a trial run. Use coupon code 'EXPMANAGER' to receive 25% off your first order (offer valid till 12/31/2011). Visit them today at http://www.pwdlabs.com/ .

New feature: easy online invoicing with upsell functionality

Ever needed an easier way to invoice a client for a sitting fee, a deposit or anything else? With the introduction of EM Invoice, now you can! Based on the feedback of many photographers during our recent WPPI Roadshow tour, we've added an easy to use invoice module to ExposureManager. All you need to do is enter your client's name, email, an optional message and the items you'd like to invoice for. You can setup which items are taxable, and the EM Invoice module will do the rest. 

A really cool option is the upsell functionality. There's no better time for a client to purchase additional products than when they are already on your site paying an invoice. So you can add 'upsell' items to your invoice. For example, if you've shot an engagement session, you can offer an engagement album right there. And if you added an album to the invoice already, you can even have that album replaced by a larger album!

After you create your invoice, you can choose to have our system email your client, or you can email them yourself with the URL that we provide you. The invoice page will have the look and feel to match your page, and of course has no ExposureManager branding.

Here's how items in an invoice look like:

The EM Invoice module is available to account levels today at no extra cost. If you have a Premium account and use your own PayPal account, there is NO COMMISSION at all on our end. For all other setups, here is the commission structure:

- Event account: 10% (includes credit card processing or PayPal fees
- Premium account: 5% (includes credit card processing or PayPal fees)
- Premium account with your own PayPal account: 0% (PayPal fees may still apply)

The commission is taken out of your sales balance when an invoice is paid. There is no fee for creating an invoice and you can create as many as you need.

Based on the number of requests we've had for this feature recently, we trust that you'll find this very useful. If you have feedback on how we can make EM Invoice even better for you, please let us know!

Donovan

Lightroom plugin now available

The long-awaited plugin for Lightroom is now out of beta and available for immediate download. Lightroom developer extraordinaire Jeffrey Friedl worked with us to make this a reality and we are very thankful for his efforts.

You can download the Lightroom plugin from his website.

The plugin works with Lightroom 2 and Lightroom 3.

Thanks again Jeffrey!

We made at cost ordering a whole lot easier!

It's just a few more weeks before most schools are back in session. Like you, we are eagerly waiting for fall season to get underway and start seeing all the orders come streaming in!

We have seen that many of you place at cost orders through EM to fulfill orders taken on paper during photo days (or other events). We just made fulfilling those orders a whole lot easier for you. There are two big changes:

1) You can now store your billing (and optionally shipping) info in your account. That means that when you go the cart to place an order, that information will be pre-filled for you. You can even set a preferred shipping method. This setting screen for this is accessible through 'Account -> Quick order settings'.

2) We know that often you want to order the same packages that you offer in your regular price sheet but of course with at cost pricing. While there were some workarounds for that in the past, we've made that a LOT easier. Now, when you switch to at cost mode, you get to use your own price sheet but with at cost pricing! That means that not only packages work, but also group packages. Of course you can still switch to the complete EM price list as well if you prefer. There's nothing you need to do to enable this setting. Just switch to at cost mode and your price sheet will be automatically converted for you.

As always, if you have questions or comments about this functionality, please let us know on our Facebook page! Thanks to everyone who has offered suggestions to make at cost ordering easier. 

Donovan

Creating 'assistant' accounts - we need your feedback

Hi everybody,

We've received a lot of requests for creating 'assistant' accounts. In other words, allowing an assistant or a 2nd shooter to upload photos into a gallery. We already offer additional FTP accounts that allow uploading into your account, but we realize this is not sufficient. Because adding 'assistant' accounts is quite a big system change, we'd like to get your feedback and make sure we get it right. Below is a list of account types we're thinking of adding. Please let us know if there's is something missing from this list.

- Owner / Admin
Has access to everything

- Assistant
Access to everything gallery related, everything reporting related but not access to payment settings (subscription and pay out)

- Gallery limited
Access to specific galleries (or categories), can access upload / process / delete in that specific gallery. No access to reporting / refunds etc.

- Upload only
Would upload into a temporary area, where photos would be approved by assistant or higher. 

Anything not on that list that you think there should be? Let us know by commenting here or on our Facebook page.

Thanks!

Donovan

New Premium Feature: Use your own PayPal account to process payments

We're thrilled to announce the availability of processing payments through your own PayPal account. If you have a Premium account, it only takes a few minutes to setup. Just login to your EM account and go to 'Sell my photos → PayPal setup'. After you enter your PayPal Verified Business account, you will be redirected to PayPal to authorize EM processing payments on your behalf.

Once setup, all orders (pro lab, self fulfillment and download) will go through your PayPal account. That means you'll have instant access to your funds! If your client does not have a PayPal account, they can still check out and pay through PayPal using their credit card. You will also still be able to handle order management through EM. So if you need to refund an order, just do it how you are used to.

On a daily basis, EM will charge your credit card for commission and applicable print costs. Please make sure your credit card is up to date! Please note that EM's commission is unchanged at 10%. That means any fees PayPal charge you will be on top of that, and will come out of the payment processed by PayPal.

One very important notice: using your own PayPal account changes the point of sale for tax purposes. That means you will be responsible for handling sales tax. You can setup sales tax (for all types of products) under the self fulfillment area in the price sheet area. For more information on this, please see the knowledge base.

On a side note: if you don't want to use your own account, but still like to offer your clients PayPal, we've got you covered! Since the beginning of June, we have offered PayPal as a method of payment to all customers. They can now choose to use a credit card or PayPal during checkout. This method has been a huge success and we've seen a nice bump in overall sales since we've added. We're always looking for ways to increase your sales and this one seems to be a hit!

 

What happened yesterday with our hosting, and what we’re doing to ensure it never happens again.

First I want to thank all of you who wrote in with encouraging words, moral support, and most importantly, your understanding. We know that you’ve trusted EM with your business, and we take that trust very seriously. That’s why it is all the more frustrating when outages like these happen.

As you may have seen from news coverage, our hosting provider, Amazon, suffered a major outage yesterday morning in a way that, according to Amazon themselves, could not happen. In fact, that ‘impossibility’ was a huge factor in making our decision to switch to Amazon; their multi ‘availability zones’ within one region was supposed to prevent an outage such as yesterday’s event.

Without getting too technical, it means Amazon has multiple physical locations relatively close together to maximize network speed yet be completely independent. By having different physical locations, it would rule out any downtime due to power, fire or other disaster issues.

This is what Amazon says themselves:

"Each availability zone runs on its own physically distinct, independent infrastructure, and is engineered to be highly reliable. Common points of failures like generators and cooling equipment are not shared across Availability Zones. Additionally, they are physically separate, such that even extremely uncommon disasters such as fires, tornados or flooding would only affect a single Availability Zone."

And elsewhere:

“When a developer chooses to run an application in multiple Availability Zones, the application should keep performing smoothly as the instances in the second zone are unaffected by events occurring in the first.”

We designed our systems with that in mind. That means we have databases (and servers) running in different Availability Zones, so that when one zone goes down, we can switch easily to another one. In addition to that, we of course run constant backups of the database in case the attached storage drives (EBS volumes) fail. This protects against a server dying as well as storage failure. It should even protect against an entire data center going offline as the back-ups are stored outside of them.

Today, in simple terms, the storage went offline in all 4 data centers. As to how that happened, I am as curious as you and await Amazon’s “post-mortem report” on this. Still, in our disaster plan this should not have mattered. To manage our hosting at Amazon, we use another company called RightScale. This allows us to easily launch copies of our servers across multiple regions. We decided to simply launch new servers in California, and host the site from there until the issues were resolved in Virginia.

And this is where we ran into a roadblock. As it turns out, the method of database backups only works for a specific region! That meant we could not start up a new server in California, and were stuck waiting until we could launch a new server in Virginia. The moment we could, at 12:30 p.m. PST, we launched the new server and started copying the data from our backups. Because hundreds of companies were doing the same thing and at the same time, that process was definitely slower than normal but by 2:00 p.m. PST, EM’s service was completely restored.

While EM, and many of the other affected companies, adhered to Amazon’s best practices, it is clear that it is not good enough. Believe me when I say that we fully shared your frustration. Every system will have its outages now and then, but to be completely held captive for many hours is not acceptable. What happened yesterday was not supposed to happen, but it did and now we need to deal with that reality.

We therefore are working on setting up additional servers in Amazon’s California data center. This would make cases like today no longer affect us. We know we had some other issues the last two weeks as well, and we’re tackling those at the same time.

Like you, we depend on EM being up, 24/7/365. We will continue to work hard on making that as close as a reality as possible. Thank you again for your understanding, and your continued support of EM.

Donovan Janus
Chief Executive Officer
ExposureManager.com