EOS Template compatibility w/ PM4.5.4

[Keith]

Anyone using EOS Template with PM on a Mac (running OS 10.5.6)? If so, I'd love to hear some user reports.

I am shooting events where potentially a few hundred images will be made available for participants/clients. Setting up an online point of sale system seems like a good way to go, just would like to make sure the combination of PM and EOS Template are 'the ticket' before pulling the trigger.

And more generally, just for generating online proofs, do many of you event shooters use PM, either with or without EOS Template? Any one PM-bundled html template better than the others for displaying larger numbers of images? (I'm fond of SimpleViewer for my galleries. Not much experience with the others.)

Thanks in advance for any replies.

Keith

[mervifwdc]

Hi,

I'm using 4.5 on Windows with Eos Templates. I use it for my on-line sales, and have looked at it for on-site stuff too. I've veered away from Eos Templates for on-site stuff through, but your milage may vary. I'm using browser based stations (well, 1 so far) for clients to browse the event and find the image number(s) they are interested in. Then I have 2 sales stations running Express Digital where they come to with a list of image numbers they want to buy, where we crop, sharpen, tidy, print and take the money.

I'm trying it like this so it's scaleable, If the browser idea works (so far, so good), it's easy to have 5 browser stations and no cost other than the hardware. (which is cheap as hell these days).

I've used EOS templates because it's nice the way you can build a sectioned web page with sections per court, or per match or whatever.  That's the way I build up the web pages (usually).   Here is one with 2 sections, but it will handle way more than that: http://www.eventphotoireland.com/monkstown/

For on-site, I want more than just 1 level of sections. I'd like to have day/court/gender for example. I'm now looking to use PM to injest, and to use the camera folder system to know the court number and gender, and the iptc date for the day. It then creates the directory structure to map to this and puts the images into each directory. I also rename the files by court number and gender so that in ExpressDigital (where I can search by file name) I can search by court number.

for the on-site web pages, I'm trying our arles from digitaldutch to create the site. It's fast, does very nice watermaking and reflects the directory structures in a navigation system for easy of finding your match. If there was a html template for PM that did this, I'd prefer it.

Merv.

[Keith]

Hey Merv,

Thanks for responding, and for the link. Very helpful.

Funny but I am venturing into the world of agility photography myself. You do good work! Your input helps with the decision to go ahead and give EOS Template a go.

We also plan to offer the option of making selections on-site, but will initially probably just run PM for that, with my wife or I helping with the navigation. But what you are doing makes a lot of sense. I'll check out Express Digital.

First trial is tomorrow, a small one, so we'll see how it goes. Just out of curiousity, what's the rough percentage of your clients who like to make selections on-site vs. online?

Thanks again for the response.

Keith

[mervifwdc]

Hi Keith,

I'd guess we do 80% or more of our sales on-site, printed and in their hands. I think if we did'nt have on-site printers, we'd still do a lot of sales, but people like the idea of paying their money and getting their product in their hands on the same day, within minutes even.  The web sales are not great, but it keeps us in their "community" and we often get requests for small digital images for their web sites or for ads in papers for stud work for their dogs - that would cover most of the web sales.

The agility is great to shoot, you know where the dog is going, and the sequence he's going to do it in. If he goes off course, stop shooting as they will not buy those shots anyway. It's a great sport for remote cameras, I usually use a remote on the tyre they jump through and stand elsewhere so that I can get 3 shots of the same dog on 3 different things from one place, usually from the end of the weaves. Lie down on the ground to get dogs eye view photos, owners dont do that, so your shots will look different, and they dont often realise why.

What we plan to do for this year is to find out the classes of the event, pre-load a set of directories onto the cards for the camera, and the Photog then picks what directory to shoot into. PM is smart enough to be able to manipulate the values in the directory name to be able to do a lot of the classifying for you, and put the appropriate values into the instruction iptc field, so simply regenerating the web page using EOS after injest is all you have to do.

And watch for those black labradors, they are like the black hole of light sucking creatures, to get them bright enough you'll have to blow out half your photo, but the owners will love you for it.

loads more dog photos at www.eventphotoireland.com

Merv.

[Keith]

Merv (if you're still following this thread),

Great weekend shooting -- even though the weather was horrible virtually the whole time. Made a fair number of sales. Took your advice about lying down a few times (on wet ground, no less) and that resulted in nice results on the weaves in particular.

I used PM to show various owners various shots and took orders for later delivery. I intend to post using EOS Templates this week. (I hope the set-up goes smoothly!)

I see what you are up to with the pre-sorted folder structure. For now I'm just shooting the board displaying the class and running order and rearranging into class folders just after ingest but your way makes a lot of sense.

Cheers.

Keith

[mervifwdc]

Good for you Keith!

Like I said, I love shooting the dogs. Include a link once you have it up and running.

I'm probably only a page or so ahead of you in the book, but If I can help out, let me know.

Merv.

[John OHara]

Keith,
Did you employee, EOS4YOU into your web site after your inquiry ? If you did, how is it working, if not what did you use ? JOhn

[Jim Poor]

Greetings from another agility photographer! The trouble I have with EOS is:

1.  You must generate the whole gallery at one time for sections and such to work.
-Currently, I shoot one class, hand off the card for sorting and uploading while I shoot the next.  This makes it impossible to generate the gallery all at once.

2.  If you generate separate galleries, say Standard and Jumpers for example, a client who has a dog in both cannot navigate from one gallery to another without loosing the contents of their cart.

Any way around these hang-ups that you know of?

I shoot large trials and end up with anywhere from 15-40K photos from a weekend.

Thanks
Jim