Client proofing for photographers can be a disappointing process. When we first realized how big of a challenge it is for many photographers, we started looking at various solutions and ways to handle the process.
As expected, there were quite a few solutions out there already, ranging from cheap to expensive, hosted or self-hosted, well-designed to pretty horrible. But we quickly realized that there is not a single one which truly met all of our requirements. For us, a client proofing solution needed the following characteristics:
- It needed to be (very) easy to use.
- It needed to have an intuitive interface – not only for photographers, but especially for the photographers’ clients. („Easier than email“ is the goal to meet.)
- It needed to be fast.
- It should better be great at only one thing (client proofing) and leave other functionality to other solutions.
- It needed to be self-hosted, as many photographers want full control on where to upload their images to.
As we both had been working with WordPress for a very long time, building custom themes and plugins for our clients, it was only logical to create our own solution around WordPress.
We built picu to make the lives of photographers as easy as possible. It is designed from the ground up to be as reliable, fast and intuitive as possible. To get as much feedback from photographers as we could, we released picu as a „public beta“ for almost a full year, before finally launching version 1.0 a couple of days ago.
Quite a long time for a public beta, you might think? Maybe, but the real world feedback we got from various photographers form different fields, was invaluable and helped us to make the right decisions and correct some of the mistakes we made in the beginning.
We think it is fair to say, that we met most of our initial goals. There is still a lot of room for improvement though (ain’t there always?), especially in terms of performance with huge amounts of images. So this is one of the areas we are working on right now. And of course there is a big backlog of ideas and additional functionalities, that didn’t make it into version one and will be introduced either in future versions or as separate premium add-ons.
Speaking of add-ons: Our online store also went live last week and we already released our first two add-ons: Brand & Customize let’s you customize the appearance of your collections. Import enables you to import images directly from your web server.
If you have any ideas, improvements or other feedback, please don’t hesitate to get in contact with us. We build picu for you and would love to hear from you!