Why ExpressDigital – One More Time

It’s a valid question. Why? With all of the options out there, why should ExpressDigital be the choice? I have said it time and time again; I would switch to something else if ED were to fail me and a better choice were to come along. I don’t feel that ED has ever let me down. I was madder than hell at them back in 2002 or 2003 and shut down Labtricity for 2 or 3 months, but I kept right on using Sports & Event and went back to Labtricity after some of my concerns were addressed.

So lets look at the second part of that comment, “a better choice were to come along”. What would constitute a better choice? For that to be answered we have to look at my actual reasons for sticking with them through the good (been all good for me for some years now) and the bad.

• Darkroom Web Edition. Back when this thing was Photoreflect Publisher 2.0 it was hardly worth a mention. It had few features aside from managing catalogs and orders for Photoreflect. That was it’s original intention, but for someone outside of the paid ED software it really didn’t even give you a glimpse into what the Pro versions had to offer. Web Edition changed all of that for me as well as for the thousands of people that use it every day. The two biggest additions to me were the ability to add borders and Photo Workshop. Free of charge doesn’t hurt either, and that’s the big point here. Free. What do the other services provide to help their customers be more productive in their workflow? Exposure Manager? Nothing. Shutterfly? Nothing. Smug Mug? Nothing. Printroom? Well, they at least try. I have heard some positive things about their new Pro Studio Manager software, but most comments end with something like “it still falls short of WE”. As a lab, looking to help a photographer just getting their start Web Edition has no rival. Period.
• Photoreflect.com. I may be nothing more than a casual user of the service but that doesn’t mean that the value is lost on me. You can find any number of places to post your images for sale. None of them offer a management tool like Web Edition, and none offer all of the same types of services that PR.com does. Randy’s list of unbeatables would be:

  1. Sell borders online. (with a border preview)
  2. Sell multi node print items. (with a border preview)
  3. Collect custom text for borders as part of sale.
  4. FREE uploads.
  5. UNLIMITED uploads.
  6. UNLIMITED time online.
  7. UNLIMITED catalogs.

  That’s right off the top of my head. Is the service perfect? No! Their latest upgrade to the service has taken much longer than anyone (including their own people) would have liked and things are still settling out. In a short while Photoreflect will be back to the same reliable service that it always had been, but with a bunch of new features.

• Darkroom Professional. This application right here is the biggest reason why I will stick with ExpressDigital. Much more so than Labtricity. Feature for feature, pound for pound there isn’t anything that even comes close. Period. This is where I (and this lab) make my money and I simply will not “settle” for anything less than what I have here. The photographer with Core, Professional or Assembly Edition can fulfill their print orders with this lab easily and this makes everyone happy in the end. For Private Network customers we offer packaging options to fit assorted school or sports needs and it is a very simple end to end solution for someone that doesn’t have the ability or the desire to print and package themselves. I’m not going to roll through all of the features, but you can see the chart on the main BB Color Labs website. There would need to be some type of catastrophic occurrence between myself and ED, as well as another product that did all of these things and more for me to even contemplate a switch. That’s right, I would hang in there through some mythical occurrence with ED. It’s not happening though. I have very good relationships with my contacts at ExpressDigital and see no “event” on the radar. The software has done nothing at all but improve over the years that I have been using it while other companies have done nothing to compete.
• PhotoCenter Home Viewer. You would have to know all that goes on in the lab to understand why we haven’t been as heavy handed as other labs to attract more business to this software that we have all of this money invested in. If you knew the inside story you would see that there is actually a method to the madness and that things are going pretty much as I had envisioned 3 years ago when we started this redirection of our business. Part of that vision was a seamless connection with the digital consumer. Now, we jumped on this software almost as soon as it was available even though we had no intention of actually using it for 12 months or so. In the end, this will be one of the largest segments of our business. You may notice that the name of this lab is BB Color Labs, with an “s’. That’s not a mistake. That’s a plural. Can’t give away any more of the plan than that right at this moment. In 2007 PhotoCenter will come front and center for us and nobody else even comes close overall. Here, for consumer software, there actually is quite a large field of options for the lab. Oddly, none of them integrate into our workflow software like PhotoCenter. Imagine that.
• Labtricity Server Edition. What can I say? It isn’t that we have tried others and chosen this one. We HAVE others but prefer this one. For this reason and that our plan involved other options in the beginning because it gave our customers a certain familiarity if you will with things that they had always expected from a traditional professional photo lab. Options that made ordering services other than print items easier and more straight forward than Darkroom. We aren’t a “pro” lab because we bought ExpressDigital software. We have serviced professional portrait, sports and wedding photographers for 44 years. We cannot and could not upend these people and ask them to do things in such a different way. Labtricity Server allows all of these other applications to work with this lab in a simple, straight forward manner that will be key to our future growth both as a lab and, well, in other ways.

I see some areas where Express could improve the software to make work flow more smoothly, both for the photographer and the lab. I don’t have any contacts with the actual developers of the software so I am relegated to sending my suggestions to their ideas email address and I can only hope that some will make their way in to future releases. There are any number of things that could be done to make the connection between Darkroom and Labtricity more complete. Areas such as shipping, drop shipping, color correction and more. In any event, the software says what it does, and does what it says. Not perfectly, but then again none of the other solutions that we have or have tried are perfect either. I’ve been all in for some years now, and I find it unlikely that anyone will come up with a “better” solution for me.

Technorati : Darkroom, Darkroom Web Edition, ExpressDigital, Labtricity, PhotoCenter, Photoreflect

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