new user first impressions

[darkroomdevil]

Hi,

We store all of our images on drives that are local to one computer (main lightroom computer), and then share those drives over our network to 4 other computers. Currently we use BreezeBrowser, Lightroom and Photoshop for images and Studio Plus's Spectra for the business client session tracking side of things - not that it really matters but to give a feel as to where we are at. Our current system works great and it is easy to find images when a client reorders - not easy sometimes to find images for internal use - like picking through past sessions to choose an image to use in an ad.

It makes sense for us to look at a DAM system if it can be easily accessed and managed by users on any of our five computers, if we can rename / renumber and be used to move/archive images. The main point here is that it must be easy, we have a range of workers here that would be using the system from the techie to the not! techie - it has to be easy!

So I downloaded the single user Photo Supreme to my laptop at home to test (with of course the idea of using the networked version at the studio if I liked it), and then did the first thing that we would normally do in our studio workflow - rename / renumber the images from a session. We copy the images from our flash cards to a folder for the clients session, then we renumber (sorting by date/time) using the format of a 6 digit job number that we get from our studio management software, the underscore character and then a 3 or 4 digit number. So 203182_001, 203182_002, etc. Within the renumbering routine there was no information on how to do this, seems pretty basic to me in terms of a need - BreezeBrowser and Lightroom both can do this easily. I did discover how to do this by searching this forum, but I am just saying out loud that my first impression of Photo Supreme is that it is made for the techie photographer. I will continue to trial the software as the competition for a networked DAM is slim to say the least, but just wanted to stress out loud how important ease of use to us, and I think for for Photo Supreme to be as successful as I think it can be in the market.

Thanks for listening
Roger

[Hert]

Thank you for your input. I am aware that the rename dialog is still not at the "user friendly level" that I too want it to be. Your message confirms again that it needs to be addressed.

[darkroomdevil]

Thank you for your input. I am aware that the rename dialog is still not at the "user friendly level" that I too want it to be. Your message confirms again that it needs to be addressed.

Thanks and good to hear. It is really good to know that my first impression of the program being techie and never getting 'easy' is probably wrong. For me ease of use is as important as function, it reflects that the developer is well rounded, is much more likely to succeed and is worth investing the purchase and the time learning the software with new workflows. Thank you for replying so candidly.

[Maczero]

Hi, piggy backing on this thread, I think that another thing that would help is either a more complete set of help manuals available on line or more and more detailed video tutorials. I agree with the impression that you need to know how PSU works at a more technical level before you can use it properly.

[Hert]

I agree.
And at the same time the community can also produce videos of how they use certain areas of the software. That's ever more practical than when we produce a video of how we *think* you could use the software. In our videos we focus on features of the software and try to accent how you *could* use it in different ways, but real life users of the software can produce videos of real life usage of the software and that is a lot more helpful than whatever we produce. Look at how active the Lightroom community is in producing videos of real world usage. Our users could do the same, even if it's just about small areas that would be very helpful for everyone. Even if it's without voice over.