Define “Templates”

Templates are pre-designed page layouts. They may help save you time, make up for a perceived lack of design skill, or give you inspiration.

Templates are not to be confused with Album Resources, which contain all the data necessary to design an album for a specific vendor. You can do without templates but not without album resources.

The two get confused occasionally so I thought I might clear it up ;-).

HTH - Danny

Cunning plan?

Assorted stress balls... Is this how The Boss judges who's working hardest at Team PJ? We hope not 'cos we hear Akshay pinched Vanessa's* (after rubbing the smiley face off his own).

Hey, we're ALL hard at work to put smiley faces on our clients. And thankfully our own haven't worn off!

Cheers, Danny

* Vanessa and Adam had another baby, William Daniel – all well, even #1, Benji ;-). Take care Vanessa.

PJ Remix web winners

Special PJ Dev Team Award for Enthusiastic Support: Queensberry - "Yay For Remix!"

Most Creative Use Of A Trademark: Kiss Wedding Albums – "Geez, Get A Room!"

Most Demanding Clients: Cypress Albums - thanks guys, sorry to keep you waiting: the resources ARE available now!

Most Enterprising User: Melissa Jill – "Templates now available for PJ Remix!"

Big thanks from Team PJ

"Projects, Clients, Events..."

As you know there are important differences between PJ Remix and the old software, Retro. We posted on this last year, but we have a lot more users now, so here's an updated introduction to one of Remix's basic concepts (for more info check out the web link below).

In Retro each job was in a separate PJF file and (as our support team can tell you) some of those files got very lost, or people ended up with multiple versions etc. Remix, on the other hand, keeps all of your work in a single database which the software can keep track of.

Remix uses certain words in a very specific way to describe that data. We work on Projects, which consist of four linked components: Clients, Events, Products and Exports:

We shoot an Event (eg a wedding) for our Clients (eg the bride and groom), who buy Products (eg albums).

Why do we use words like Event and Product instead of “wedding” and “album”? Because they’re more generic. Not all Events are weddings, and not all Products are albums.

Before you can create a new Product (let’s say an album) you need to take a few seconds to link it to both a Client and an Event. That way you'll be able to find it in the PJ database. You can view the database using the Project Browser (accessible from the Start window or the File menu). To illustrate, the following screen shot shows my copy of Remix after the FOCUS show in Birmingham UK recently – click on it to see it full size.



I have one of my Clients selected ("Focus Demo"), which is associated with a single event (Henry and Grace), which in turn has dozens of demo albums linked to it. There could be slide show "products" too, but as it happens there aren't any.

Your Products in turn have Exports or "Outputs". For example, the Outputs from an album design are the orders and image files that you export and either:

• Save to your hard disk, or
• Send to your album vendor and lab for manufacture.

After they have been created, these will appear in the right-hand "Outputs" column of the Project Browser.

Click here for an overview of Remix, including all the main windows and wizards, as well as the Project Browser.

HTH, Ian

Remixed album vendors

In alphabetical order, here are the album companies now directly supported in PJ Remix...

Asuka Book (unofficial)
*Cypress Albums
Finao
Glorious Books
Graphistudio
Kambara (unofficial)
*KISS Books
Leather Craftsmen
Photo Mounts
Queensberry
Seldex
Zookbinders
* Recently added or updated

And don't forget it's easy to design flush mount / magazine style / digital books from other suppliers using Remix DIY (see my previous post).

If you'd like to see your favourite Album Company get 'Remixed' tell them about us – demanding clients are great motivators! And we don't mind chasing them up either – tell us who to pursue on The Junction.

Cheers, Danny

Harder or smarter? Help!

Danny's on a mission to have us work harder not smarter - NO, smarter, not harder!

He asked me to identify the biggest issues in last month's support emails in order to focus the developers. There were hundreds of tickets, lots of hundreds. Not all were "issues" - many were auto replies and bounces, or just plain questions - but I needed to open most of them to see exactly what they were about.

Unfortunately I did such a good job he wants me to analyse your emails for every team meeting. Darn.

So I can work smarter, what I need is descriptive subject headings so I won't need to open each ticket - just look at the subject and tick the appropriate box. A general idea of the issue is all I need, eg registering PJ, export problems, installing, template issues. It would make my life a lot easier and I would be ever so grateful.

Oh, one final thing - Can you give every new question a new ticket? If you're hitting Reply, just change the subject and remove the ticket number if you're raising a different issue.

Thanks! Christine

PS Don't worry - we will still respond to your email - this is just to speed up analysis :-)

On the up and up

Hi All

At the end of our fiscal year and a round of trade shows it's a good time to reflect on progress.

This year with the release of Remix we've seen the most successful sales at trade shows for both clients and vendors, but we're ambitious folk with big plans. So with another year's data and maybe a little wiser for the experience we'll reset the sights and carry on.

I encourage you to do the same. We're big on stats at PJ HQ, we want to know our clients and what they're like.

A few questions you might want to consider while pondering the business stuff:

Where did my clients come from (bridal fairs, print advertising, client referral, web, venue referral)?
What package is selling the best? Should I shift a price point?
Am I profitable (enough)? Have my operating costs changed?
What % of my turnover is from albums? Reprints? Other categories?

Developing a list of questions and answering them every quarter will help give you a sense of perspective...

Cheers
Danny

Technicolor Mats

Hi All

If you're using an album company that offers different mat colors in the same album...

We don't have the functionality yet, so in the mean time, right click on the layout and 'add note', then specify what color you'd like on that particular layout.

It's just a short term work around, but it will work for now.

Cheers
Danny

1.09 Released and Rocking

Hi All

We've released 1.09, upgrade. We've made some ground with your favourite ( or not so favourite ) issues.

A few highlights...

1. Import - Export has been worked on even more and the developers practically begged me to post a 'howto' - so thats the a separate post.

2. Quicktime Movie, we think it's awesome but so does someone else. Forum Post

3. Templates - quicker and more robust.

Anyway thanks for the feedback from our survey (results coming soon).

Take care for now,
Danny (and the Developers)

Projects are go

As of 1.09 you can Import and Export Projects to your heart's content.

A few steps, straight from the horse's mouth (or a Developer's: sorry that wasn't a joke towards you Akshay!)

1. Right click on Client in the Project Browser and select Export Project. This will bring up a window...



It might be a good idea to Duplicate the Client before exporting, because the original Client will be deleted from the Browser after export.

Selecting Export opens another window. If necessary choose where you want to save the exported project by Browsing, and whether you want to include the original high-res files.



3. Click Export.This will create a .project folder in the location you selected, along with a project.pjr file, the proxies and the originals if you chose to include them.

4. Copy this folder to the Destination Computer (DC).

5. On the DC, run PJ Remix and select File > Import Project > Choose File. Once you're done the project will be up and running on the destination computer.



HTH
Danny (on behalf of Akshay)

Ready for final??

Sorry this is a bit long... You’ll recall that in mid-February we surveyed PJ users asking how close Remix was to final release. We had a lot of responses, and some of you went to a lot of trouble over your replies – thank you.

So, how did we go? And what progress have we made since then? We asked, “How likely is it that you would recommend Photojunction to friends or colleagues?”

40% of regular users gave us a score of 9/10 or 10/10. For pre-release beta software we felt that was pretty good. Click here to read some of the compliments we got.

But still, a quarter of people were negative to a greater or lesser extent - not good enough to go final. The main concern was crashes. There were also clear problems with templates. A few people were concerned about “portability issues” (eg how to shift work from one computer/staff member to another, or to a design service). And as expected there were other specific bugs, lots of feature requests, instances where people were confused by Remix's behaviour, or the differences between Remix and Retro. And of course a few people who simply think Remix should be a different program. That’s cool too (fortunately there are different programs!)

The Dev Team listened hard. One of their first responses was to develop a piece of code that kept a log of what happened if a crash occurred (very helpful when one of the main challenges is replicating problems). And over five or so weeks they’ve released three more updates, including over a hundred more bug fixes, and we have more to clear before we go final.

But we feel we’re very close now. Crashes seem very rare, albeit just as frustrating when they do happen. So we have invited people who identified themselves as “regular users” last time to repeat the survey.

If you HAVEN'T been contacted but would like to participate, please click this link. We'd love to get this show on the road. Tell us what you think!

Cheers, Ian