- Categorized renaming of your files- Imagine how great it would be to be able to find any of your 1000+ images quickly. Take for example, If we had a detail picture of your bouquet it could have taken it at any point during the day. This means your have to hunt through all the images until you find it. When we categorize your images, all your detail images (such as close ups of your bouquet) have a special code in the file name which makes it simple for you to find these images. You can even do a simple search in your computer to find just the detail files. This is going to save you so much time that this alone is worth the upgrade. We've used this naming convention for the last five years and have received praise from our previous clients for making finding images simple and easy.
Wedding Image Website (with online ordering) & White Glove File Handling-Free with $250 in online purchases!
Enhanced, individual correction, classification, and website
Our standard procedure for handling your files after your wedding is to go over your images and remove images obvious bad ones, do a few global corrections for color and density, and rename all the files. This simple file handling surpasses what most studios do for the files they handle. For many bridal couples, this is perfectly acceptable.
A very exciting option is for us to take this process to the next level. We will do three things for you, each making managing your wedding images a lot easier.
Here's a section of what our online ordering website looks like. Most of it is self explanatory. You can see the option in the top right corner to change the duration of the slide show. It can be from 1 to 5 seconds for each image. The prices are clearly marked. The blue link under each price that says "More Information" informs the buyer about discounts. For example, if they order four 4x6's the get the fifth one free. The prices to the right have a price for the first image, and then for 2 or more of the same image in the same size. Obviously, the more they order the more they save.
Above and below the prices are the buttons that say "Show Cart." When they press this button it takes them to a section that shows the buyer thumbnails copies of the images they have ordered, it clearly breaks down the sizes they ordered, and the price, and the discounts, and quantities they need to order to get other discounts. They can easily go back and add more or take off images from the order. Ordering is so simple.
At the bottom it says "Send a link to this image." When you press this it fires up your e-mail and creates a new e-mail message from your account with a link to this image. The recipient can go right to the image without having to sign in! The comment section is for the buyer to send us a message with the order. They could state "Please crop in a little tighter on the group of men."
- Enhanced color correction- We spend more time working with the files to make certain the color correction looks outstanding. Though we use very sophisticated programs and computers there still isn't a macro that can color correct all the files with a touch of a button. The auto correction features often do more damage than good. In order to do these corrections we need to spend between a half day to a full day in front of the computer doing the corrections by hand. Our standard color correction is better than what the majority of studios consider color correction. Our enhanced correction is even better! The thing to keep in mind is that we cannot be responsible for prints that our clients make because there are too many variables involved when making a print that we have no control over. With this in mind, if you select a fairly competent lab you should be able to make great prints. This option is optimal for people who want to make many prints from their files and don't want to play with color correction.
Here's a section of what our online ordering website looks like. Most of it is self explanatory. You can see the option in the top right corner to change the duration of the slide show. It can be from 1 to 5 seconds for each image. The prices are clearly marked. The blue link under each price that says "More Information" informs the buyer about discounts. For example, if they order four 4x6's the get the fifth one free. The prices to the right have a price for the first image, and then for 2 or more of the same image in the same size. Obviously, the more they order the more they save.
Above and below the prices are the buttons that say "Show Cart." When they press this button it takes them to a section that shows the buyer thumbnails copies of the images they have ordered, it clearly breaks down the sizes they ordered, and the price, and the discounts, and quantities they need to order to get other discounts. They can easily go back and add more or take off images from the order. Ordering is so simple.
At the bottom it says "Send a link to this image." When you press this it fires up your e-mail and creates a new e-mail message from your account with a link to this image. The recipient can go right to the image without having to sign in! The comment section is for the buyer to send us a message with the order. They could state "Please crop in a little tighter on the group of men."
- Website with online ordering- The nice thing about online ordering is that you don't have to be responsible for making prints for your friends and family . They order the prints directly from us, we print them and mail them out to them. You won't have to be involved in print production, collecting money, or mailing out pictures. This is a benefit when you realize how much legwork this involves. "Oh honey, there is a picture your photographer took of me and your aunt Dora, find it and make me a little 4x6 print." You hear that request once, and it's no big deal, you can find the picture and mail it to her. Get that request 45 times over the next six months and yes, you're annoyed! What you do is simply give them your website and let them find the picture and order it themselves. The categorization process discussed is a benefit because your website is broken down into separate categories . You can tell her which section to look in, or if you are super nice, you can find it, and send a link to her from within the website!
The websites feature:
- Files named by category- As stated above, all the detail pictures have a unique file name, as do the romantics. In all we have over 15 different catagoriees to segment down your wedding into small, logical collections of images you can quickly search through. The website is broken down into different sections based on these file names. Thus all the romantic images are found together . If your wedding has 95 romantic images, on the first page of your website you'll see one of the options is to go into the romantic image section, and you will also see that there are 95 images in this section.
- Slideshow-You can hit the slideshow button and make a slideshow of the images from the website. They will display one after the other. It's not set to music but if you would like you can hum your first dance to add impact! You can also change the pace of the slide show from between one to five seconds. Thus you can savor each image, or fly through them.
- Color, black and white, sepia options- You can order the images in either color, black and white or sepia for the same price.
- Retouching- We do go through the images and fix them up a little before we send them into the lab. This often makes a good image a little better. We spend more time on the images that are 5x7 and larger.
- Professional Color Lab- As a consumer, you often only get access to consumer based labs. The professional labs we use have higher standards when it comes to maintaining chemistry. They also use professional papers that are designed for portraits. These are different than the papers that the one hour labs and mail order labs use. These papers are often higher in saturation and contrast and don’t provide the optimum results for portraits.
- Paypal-You will not need to have a Paypal account to order prints online. However, Paypal does handle the credit card transactions. This means we accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and of course Paypal credit.
- Free Shipping - On orders $75 or greater
- Discounts- For multiple prints, or if any individual order exceeds $150.
- No password, anti spam policy- Your website isn't linked from LifetimeImages.com . It's a completely separate website. We give you the link, and you are free to pass it along to whoever you want. Because we put them up and take them down so quickly, these websites aren't found by search engines. Thus we don't password protect them because unless you have the link, you won't find the website. We own these websites outright. The important point is that your friends and family are free to check out your wedding pictures ANONOMOUSLY. Most wedding photography studios use commercially hosted websites. In order to view images on these websites a person often has to supply personal information such as their name and e-mail address. Many people just won't bother and thus they won't see your wedding images. The ones who do make the extra effort get rewarded by having spam e-mail messages sent to them encouraging them to order before the website expires. Worse yet, some of the larger commercially hosted websites may be selling the names and e-mail addresses they collect ( in the thousands) to the larger spam organizations. Thus, the simple gesture of looking at wedding photos can result in more spam messages about Rogaine and Viagra for your friends and family. We respect not only your rights to privacy and anonymity, but that of your friends and family.
Your website is up for 60 days!
When you select this option your website will be active for 60 days. At the end of this sixty day period, if your account is paid in full you will receive your high resolution images and your website will be taken down. You will not be offered your high resolution images and your website simultaneously. We landed on 60 days because we found that the excitement about your wedding dies fairly quickly after the day is over. If we keep the website up for longer periods of time, people will put off ordering and more or less forget about it.
How the payment & photo credit works
If you work the system right, you can get this option for free. When you sign up for this option you are committing that the total of online orders will be $250 or greater over the 60 day period. The point is, we count every online sale we get from your wedding toward this $250 minimum. We've found that often people will order over $75 to make the minimums for free shipping. Thus it often only takes a handful of orders to reach this $250 minimum. You can of course help by forwarding the links of certain images to your friends and family to piqué their interest. After all , nobody will go through the images as closely as you will. When you send the link, it comes from your e-mail and we don't get any record of your message, thus it's totally private! If you're low key about it, and send out a number of messages to different people chances are they will order the pictures themselves. The prices are very reasonable.
So, the question remains, what if you don't hit the $250 minimum after 60 days? You get two options. The first is that we can keep the website up for another 30 days and if you notify the people who plan to order that the site is coming down soon, this often will do the trick. The other option is that the balance will be put on your bill. Though this sounds like a bad thing, it really isn't. For some strange reason you will get a lot of frames for your wedding as gifts. These lovely frames, as with other displays around your home will be seen for years. If it's 5x7 or larger you would probably want us to make these prints. We'll do a nice job retouching the images and the prints will be made at a custom color lab. It will be a much nicer print than what you'll get at the Wal-Mart 1 hour lab. Thus, take your remaining credits and make nice display prints for yourself, your parents and key members of your bridal party. Perhaps you may want to make a nice 11x14 print from one of your favorite romantics? The bottom line is that a fewer, larger prints are more meaningful than a handful of small collection of 4x6 prints.