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New Technical Support and Upgrade Policy

Following on from my recent discussion about pricing changes, I've been conducting a thorough review of many aspects of how I run the Pixaria Gallery project. As of July 1st, I will be changing the technical support and upgrade policy for Pixaria Gallery in a way that I believe will enable me to provide a better support service that strikes a more realistic balance between the needs of Pixaria's many users and my availablility as a freelance software developer.

From July 1st, the Pixaria upgrade and support policy will be to provide free technical support and upgrades for one year from the date of purchase of a Pixaria Gallery license.

After the free upgrade and support period ends, it will be possible to purchase a technical support and upgrade maintenance licence that will extend the coverage period by an additional year. If you decide you don't wish to purchase an extension, your existing licence will (of course) continue to be valid and you can continue to use your software as you wish.

Should you need to, you will be able to purchase a support and upgrade licence extension for $99 (US) at any time you choose.

I hope that by making this change in policy, I will be able to offer an even better service that enables Pixaria to continue to grow with the support of its users!

Existing users please note!

1. Users who purchased over a year ago from July 1st will need to purchase a licence extension in order to continue to obtain technical support.
2. All existing users of Pixaria 2.0 or above will be entitled to free upgrades up to but not including version 3.0 which will be out later this year.
3. Pixaria users who purchased the software during 2010 will be entitled to a free upgrade to version 3.0 later this year and then one year's upgrades from the date of purchase.

Addendum

I've been contacted by a few users who have asked to know if it will be possible to buy an upgrade extension that does not include technical support. The answer to this is no because I don't think it's fair to ask people to pay for updates and then not provide support the end user if they need assistance or something goes wrong.

Aperture 3 - The Ars Technica Review

For any fan of technology and science, Ars Technica is a must visit website and their software reviews are legendary. In true style, Dave Girard tackles Apple's recent release of Aperture 3 with an in-depth review that probes the software in glorious detail from the perspective of someone who really knows his stuff.

I won't spoil the review by telling you Dave's conclusions but it's looking like a must have upgrade from my perspective..! Read the complete review here.

Pixaria 2.8.5 Released

I'm pleased to report that Pixaria Gallery version 2.8.5 is now available for all registered users of Pixaria 2. This is a major new release which includes a lot of new features and improvements that have been requested by users over the last few months.

Probably the biggest change is the inclusion of new tools that make it possible to create groups of products that can be linked to galleries. In this way Pixaria now offers a much greater level of control over how administrators sell and price image products for different galleries.

Still on the theme of e-commerce capabilities, the admin area now includes significantly improved sales management tools which have been completely re-designed to make them easier to use. A frequent request from users has been to have an additional status setting for sales between 'paid' and 'complete' that will make it easier to manage transactions where physical products have not yet been shipped. I'm happy to say that this new status option is now included alongside a new sales filter tool to make finding sales by customer name and status quick and easy.

Other enhancements to the admin area include improved image download reporting tools, CSV export of lightbox contents and image download reports, an improved Pixie (plug-in) manager, options for random avatar images on galleries and easier to use transaction admin tools.

Away from the admin area, there are a number of other big changes in version 2.8.5 including a new batch download feature available from users' lightboxes. This makes it easy for users to download images in one convenient zip file rather than having to manually download images one at a time. Note that this feature requires PHP 5 and the Zlib library which shouldn't be a problem if you're using a decent hosting company.

For users with larger libraries of images, this update also features performance enhancements in the front-end that will dramatically speed up page load times while simultaneously reducing load on the server where Pixaria is installed. The graph below shows the page load time for a Pixaria homepage with a library containing 180,000 images and 4,000 libraries. The difference in page load times when using version 2.8.4 and the new version 2.8.5 is dramatic - 2.8.5 clocks in at only two seconds compared to 15 seconds with the older version of Pixaria.

As usual there are plenty of minor bugs fixes and improvements in this update and I'm pleased to report that, there is now a Russian translation included. My thanks go to Konstantin Filimonov for the translation.

Finally, big thanks again go to Matthias Zehnder who has contributed a large number of bug fixes and improvements to the geo-coding, mapping and blogging tools (among others) in this update.

To get this update, please drop me an e-mail at upgrade@pixaria.com and I'll send the new version to you. As always, please take a moment to check out the release notes and change log before upgrading as these contain full details of all the modifications in this version.

Exciting Features Coming Soon

It's coming up to one month since the last update to Pixaria and in that time I've been hard at work on some long requested and exciting new features which will be making their debut in the next update!

My main focus in this release has been on improving the sales and e-commerce features and functions and the big news is going to be the introduction of product groups that will make it possible to assign selections of products to different galleries. This will make it much easier to offer different prices and product types for different galleries and will be a big bonus to event photographers.

As part of this work, I've also taken the opportunity to revamp the sales admin interface with new 'quick filter' for finding sales by status and client name and improved sorting or sales lists by date, number of items and client name. I've also overhauled the transaction detail views to bring them more into line with the rest of the Pixaria admin user interface and make them clearer and simpler to use.

Other new developments include copyright and title information options for PDF contact sheets, configurable batch downloads from customer lightboxes, new and improved download reporting tools with Excel/CSV export and configurable gallery announcement messages.

All this will be arriving in the next update which I hope to be able to make available within the next week.

Pixaria Pricing Changes

With the next update to Pixaria not too far off, I wanted to take the opportunity to give advance warning that the price of Pixaria Gallery will soon be increasing $249 (US). No one likes random price rises so I thought it would be only fair to explain the reasons for the change...

As many of you will know Pixaria is a project I work on in my spare time and with a recent increase in sales, I've begun to find that my enjoyment and engagement in the project is suffering as a consequence of spending too much time working on Pixaria and dealing with customer support and not enough time away from my computer relaxing. As might be expected, I tend to only hear from customers when things go wrong rather than when everything's working correctly and this can become quite depressing when there's no team of engineers to share the burden with.

After discussing this with my family and other Pixaria users, I've realised that what was once something I enjoyed doing was becoming a highly stressful chore and that I've become something of a slave to my own creation.

This has happened to me once before during my time working on Pixaria and the solution I found to reducing my support burden at the time was a price increase. This had the effect of reducing the volume of sales to a more manageable level and ensuring that I was able to offer what I consider to be an appropriate level of support to those customers willing to invest in my software.

This last price increase was over three years ago in February 2007 and in the intervening time, the capabilities of the software have expanded beyond all recognition so I feel that now is the right time to do this again both for my own sanity and to reflect the thousands of hours of work I've devoted to this project.

The only way I can realistically keep going with Pixaria Gallery is if I both enjoy doing it and receive ongoing income from new sales. I'm not getting rich from this venture so this isn't an attempt to gouge my loyal customers but rather a measure to ensure that I'm able to keep working on the project with my sanity intact.

If anyone has any thoughts on this, please do let me know and don't forget, if you enjoy using Pixaria, drop me a line to tell me - it's really appreciated..!

Lightbox Batch Downloads

Continuing the series of articles discussing my plans for upcoming releases of Pixaria, another new feature I will be introducing shortly will be batch downloads from lightboxes. This is an important digital asset management feature for picture researchers looking to quickly download comps or full size images from their lightbox for offline viewing.

The main reason I've held off from offering this feature in the past is due to difficulties reliably generating zip files on a web server but with a new PHP 5 based software library, I am now able to do this safely and offer this feature for the first time.

The batch download function will be configurable via the admin area (in Download Settings) and will make it possible for users to select from all available image sizes and file formats for the images in their lightbox prior to downloading the zip file. Administrators will also be able to define text to be included in a 'read me' file that will be included with the downloaded zip archive.

As with all free downloads from Pixaria, details of the images in each batch download are logged and with the introduction of this new feature, I've taken the opportunity to improve the download log viewing tools in the admin area. The re-design makes it easier to browse downloads by date and by user and adds the ability to generate CSV reports that can be viewed in spreadsheet software such as Microsoft Excel.

Product Groups Coming Soon

One of the most requested features for Pixaria Gallery in the last year has been to have better control over which products are linked to images. In particular, it's a frequent request to be able to pick the products that are linked to images on a gallery by gallery basis.

The good news is that as part of many up and coming improvements to the e-commerce capabilities of Pixaria in the coming months, I will soon be introducing an update which supports product groups which can be linked to galleries. In this way it will be possible, for example, to have different products on a wedding photo gallery than are available on a gallery of general stock images.

The new product group control panel will make its debut very soon and will make all this possible with no modifications to the front end templates. Watch this space for details of the release coming in the near future!