If you haven’t been to the Photojunction website or blog lately, you won’t recognise them.

What’s going on? Well, the old PJ site had to go, for several reasons.

• Danny was embarrassed by it (me too).

• PJ has changed so fast that a lot of the support info was out of date.

• There’s a bit of misinformation out there (I’ll get to that).

• And it’s high time we came out of the closet…

So here’s the story:

In case you don’t know, Photojunction is a Queensberry project. It dates back ten years to when we first realised that any album supplier without a software solution was history (we were right: some of them already are).

But as we developed the software we realised it would turn into an expensive overhead unless we did something creative … so what we tried to do was persuade other album manufacturers to work with us in developing a great solution that would work for everyone. In our mind, an industry partnership.

We set up a separate company (Photojunction Ltd). We built a Chinese wall between it and Queensberry and insisted that Photojunction staff didn’t promote Queensberry in any way. We offered all vendors the same power and functionality as us. We built more than two dozen sets of “Album Resources” … to support Queensberry’s competitors!

And it worked. Sort of.

Today our users number well into five figures (highest in our category) and at least half of them use the software to design albums other than Queensberry.

But with few exceptions most album companies never bought in … and it takes two to tango. By and large the vendors were simply too suspicious to work closely with us. Fair enough, I guess…

These days the deal with Photojunction is strictly between you and us. “For photographers. By Queensberry” as the new website says. And anyone can use it, no charge.

Now for the misinformation:

Does that mean Photojunction locks you into Queensberry? Absolutely not.

Does it mean we’d like you to sell Queensberry albums? Of course!

But if you never spend a dollar with us it’s still free. A taste of what Queensberry can do.

What else? To streamline things around here we’re taking down that Chinese Wall so we can build a better, unified Queensberry/Photojunction support team. The PJ blog and forum have already been moved to the Queensberry site (you can still subscribe separately) and the separate Photojunction phone numbers will disappear soon. The payoff will be improved service for you.

So there you go. We’re out of the closet.

We’re Photojunction. Welcome to Queensberry!

Cheers, Stephen

PS For our reconfigured support resources, forums, blog etc, head off to the new website.

If you’d like to read more about our story, it’s here.

For more about why we’re f.r.e.e. click here.

To comment on any of the issues I’ve raised, please have your say below, or click here (you’ll need to login to post).

Hi All

A quick update about the upcoming release…. (hit play)

If you can’t be bothered watching the movie just remember we live by our new saying… ”If we’re going to bug you it had better be for a good reason!”

Cheers, Danny

Well, we made Photojunction free … now what?

After yesterday’s new final we’re finalising the development schedule for the next few months.

It’s always been our goal to make Photojunction the software of choice for wedding and portrait photographers, and we really appreciate the support we get from the thousands of photographers who use it.

But we do also recognise that there are four areas where people struggle, or where we can see strong opportunities for improvement.

1, While most people fly through the set up procedure, some people struggle. Maybe it doesn’t work as they expect, and therefore the task looks a little overwhelming. Our goal is to make getting started really easy and straight forward.

2, Some people think of Photojunction as a tool for matted albums, and although it does a brilliant job of laying out digital albums we recognise that there are some cool things we could do to make it both more obvious and even more powerful.

3, Once the album is complete, some people get overwhelmed with “what next?” – how to export, how to order, how to FTP their files. This area will get an overhaul in the next few months to make it very simple and straight forward.

4, We anxiously want to retire Photojunction Retro but realise there is still functionality that Remix doesn’t have, eg the portrait and proof sheet modules.

So our question is, what next?

If you use other portrait sales software such as Pro Select what do you love about it? We want to bring this functionality forward from Retro … but only if it’s world class.

Are there things not on the list above that you think are more urgent?

If you prefer other template software, what is it that you think we could do better?

Again, thanks so much for your support so far. Tell your friends we’ve started a discussion here on Facebook about how to make Photojunction even better. We hope you’ll contribute, we’d love your opinion.

Cheers, Stephen