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This is the blog for professional photographers, and those who aspire to be. Our aim is to help professional photographers build long-term, sustainable careers.
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Things have a habit of creeping up on you, as our friends at Seldex have reminded us by sending an email to their clients reminding them that come July they won't be able to use Photojunction's cover design and Send Order functions. (We announced as much here back in February.) We've counted Seldex as friends for years – in fact they sold Queensberry albums in Australia back in the day! - so this is a rather sad time, the culmination of a process that started to unfold a couple of years ago when we realised that most suppliers weren't going to support PJ as a universal album design tool, which was our original goal. Since then we have been trying, and failing, to reach agreement with Seldex and a couple of other suppliers (who to be fair did buy into our original goal) that would make it commercially sensible for Queensberry to continue allowing them to use our intellectual property in Photojunction. The features in question are of no use to the vast majority of non-Queensberry PJ users – photographers who use the software pretty much entirely to design digital albums and press books and create their layout files for printing. They are, however, as we see it, a key part of Queensberry's competitive advantage. Here are two posts on The Junction that will help explain the thinking behind this. The first is a survey we did in January to see what users do with Photojunction, which functions they value and which suppliers they use etc. There were a lot of surprises! The second explains the decisions we took as a consequence, which included turning off the functions that Seldex has been using. Seldex users, like everyone else, will still be able to use Photojunction to design their albums. No change there. As I said at the time, "…the vast majority of people use PJ primarily to design and export page layouts. Rest assured that we’ll still be supporting all page types (matted, digital etc) and you’ll be able to export your page layouts for uploading and printing as now." The vast majority of users will notice no change, and rest assured we are still committed to making Photojunction the most productive, creative, intuitive page design program out there for ALL professional photographers. Please contact support if you have any concerns or questions. Cheers, Ian
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Stephen Baugh
on
June 8, 2011, 7:23 am
said:
Hi everyone.  I think the bottom line is that we are completely focused on improving your experience using Photojunction. Over the next few months we will be open sourcing the creation of supplier resources for companies other than Queensberry and introducing exciting new and simpler, but powerful features for our own clients. We can't continue to innovate if every time we do that we give away that innovation to our competitors without return, which is what we were effectively doing under our previous arrangements, which, as Ian says, only made sense in terms of our original goal of getting suppliers to support PJ as a universal album design tool. We're focused on developing and improving Photojunctions core functionality used by all users and leaving the order processing and behind the scenes production systems to individual suppliers.If the photographer wants a completely integrated work flow, I'd suggest using Queensberry but Seldex and others are developing their own workflows. Sorry if this causes inconvenience. All the best Stephen Baugh CEO Queensberry and Photojunction
 
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