more pics - more profit?

[J.S.]

Just ignore phase 1 of this cunning plan, but how about:
Phase 2 = put pictures of painted miniatures on the store page??

This thought came to my mind yesterday, while browsing through several webstores of miniature manufacturers. Before I realized it, I had several packs of polish 10th mechanized infantry and some of those nice Gebirgsjäger (Gorgon studios) in my shopping basket. Do I really need those? Well most obviously not, but the figures were too tempting.  
It's a noble deed of Leon not to tempt us to strain our wallets more than necessary, but seriously.. at the end of the day pendraken is a business. And as long most ranges look like this on the website, I guess no one is too eager to buy some more packs than initially planed:

At the end of the day most wargamers are grown up kids, who want new shiny toys or at least look at them and make grand plans what to purchase next.

Just my 2 cents on this..what does the rest of the forum say? Maybe I'm completly wrong and there's no noticeable difference in sales between ranges with/without pics in the store  

[petercooman]

+ 1 to this!

ALthough most of the time, when i'm looking at something without a picture, i type for example:"pendraken 88" in goole images, and most of the time you get shown some nice results.

I mis-ordered 2 opel blitz trucks in the wrong version though, maybe a pic could have prevented that. But in the end, the version i got was equally nice and useable

[Techno]

What Leon needs are some volunteers to help coordinate something like this.
It would be a damn big project ! ....There would be a hell of a lot of sorting out to do it properly.
But the idea is very sound.
Cheers - Phil.

[Luddite]

I think Leon's well aware of the issue, and it does remain an issue.

I'm the sort fo the chap likes to see what i'm buying. 

I definately reckon that Pendraken sales will be depressed for lack of online images.  Presumably there are sales stats that back this up.

However, as i understand it this is a MAMMOTH task, hence the continued proliferation of 'shadow images'.

[petercooman]

Well, seeing most of the stuff i got for christmass is still not assembled, i don't mind taking pictures if needs be. All of it is ww2 though. Off course if we all send in pictures, they won't look very uniform.

But every item has a review entry. Can we post pics in that or only text? Otherwise we could help the guys out by posting our pics on that 

[Leon]

First up, let me make one thing clear.  No one is more annoyed by the lack of pictures than me!  It's a constant bugbear which we get emails about all the time, and it means that I have to do more work trying to find pics on the Forum, or online, to reply to queries.  So why haven't we fixed it?  Basically, it comes down to not having the time.  Everyone drastically underestimates the amount of time it takes to get a photo up onto a website:

If we take a batch of 20 codes, each one having 1 or 2 poses.  Casting them up is going to take 1 hour, and then another 1 hour to glue them to sticks and blackwash them.  Leave them to dry for a bit, and then onto the photo-ing, which requires 3-4 shots of each to allow for focussing issues.  This is another hour.  With the pics in hand, we can go to the computer, where we need to edit each pic, crop it, and collate the different poses into a single 'code' image.  Resizing and then uploading them to the website takes this part of the job to near enough 2 hours.  So, that's 5 hours work for 20 codes.

We've currently got about 3000 codes which require images, equating to 750 hours of work needed!    Even if we somehow managed to squeeze 10 hours a week for this, it would still take 18 months to get all the images up on the website.  We don't have 10 hours a week though unfortunately, some weeks we'd be lucky to grab 1-2 hours.  The fact that I've not photo'd the releases from Nov / Dec shows how little time we have spare each week.

So, can other people help out?

Yes, and we are working with a couple of people who are helping us with this.  The stumbling block comes down to how the images are presented and keeping them all in a similar style.  If the pics are going to be bare, the figures need to be blackwashed and then photo'd in a similar style to the new ACW range for example ([url]http://www.pendraken.co.uk/19th-Century-c15/NEW-American-Civil-War-NEW-sc281/)  For painted pics, the paint job needs to be good first off, and then the individual code needs to be completely in view, with nothing else getting in the way.  I know some folk will say that anything is better than nothing, but we'd rather get it right first time, so we don't have to go back and spend more time editing new images in.

Also, we're reluctant to just start sending loads of figures to people on the promise of painted pics of them at the end, as we've been burnt by a few people in the past, who've just wandered off with the figures, or popped them on the side where they've never resurfaced unfortunately.

Could we pay someone to do it?

Not really, not with those levels of work required, as we don't have the budget to pay ourselves most of the time, let alone painting/photo staff!  


Sales-wise, I've got no idea whether having pics boosts sales of those ranges, and it's a hard one to judge.  I'd expect pics to help, but I know other traders have seen next to no difference when they've added images to their websites.  Most of our Ancients ranges have images, but sales on those ranges are generally slow?  Is that because we need wider ranges then?  Where does it balance out?

I will make everyone a promise though, that we'll have more images up on the website this year.  A lot of these will be blackwashed figure pics, but I will be pestering the Forum for some WWII vehicle images further down the line.  I might also make a small note on the Painting Comp whereby Pendraken may use the images on the website!

[Duke Speedy of Leighton]

Random idea, have a 'Not photographed yet' category this year, with a stipulation that all entries must Not already be in the catalog, but any entries will automatically be posted! Just need a note saying painted by... 

[fred.]

I've chatted with Leon about this before, and I know his preference is to have consistent photos of each figure - i.e. bare metal, black washed on a white background. And while this is a great goal - as Leon says above this is a mammoth effort.

I do think there has to be an interim goal - which in my opinion would be get as many photos up as possible. One area that is currently odd is that new ranges often get photos of greens in the newsletter (which is great) but then don't get photos on the website. Even the photos of the greens are way better than no photo.

Then there are photos by us fans - I have taken loads of the WWII vehicles I have bought, and of various fantasy creatures - mainly because I found it hard to know what was what.

I do like Lemmy's idea for the painting comp.

Leon, if you do get a fair few requests through for photos, just think how many people can't be bothered to ask? Also all the time you spend chasing down photos could be used better. Once you have chased down a photo, get it linked on the sales website, then anyone looking can see it. Also the more photos up on the sales site, the less requests you will get, which will save you time. I know there are lots of photos out there, but it is a real effort to search through the different places to try to find them.

If a photo of each code is too much work, then how about a sampling of each range - its generally enough to let people know what they look like?

I think photos generally help - I was looking for tree creatures before christmas and on the two sites I looked at I ended up getting a second pack because the figures looked great.

But every item has a review entry. Can we post pics in that or only text? Otherwise we could help the guys out by posting our pics on that  

I've tried this but couldn't work out how to get it to work.

[petercooman]

A little idea, anyone ever looked at the essex site? 15mm chaps?

They have an easy way for their photos. You push the item you want and get a pop up with another page that just contains pictures. Many times these are the entire range. (so fpr example a page with germans for WW2) THey just have the pics in the order that the codes folllow on the site.

It's not the most good looking solution, but it might be easier to obtain as a temporary solution.

[nikharwood]

But every item has a review entry. Can we post pics in that or only text? Otherwise we could help the guys out by posting our pics on that 

I did that once - here: http://www.pendraken.co.uk/FPW2-p3634/

Could easily do a few more...

[Techno]

Could we have a thread....with 'sub threads' in the photos section JUST for photos and captions....
By that I mean absolutely no comments....Simply pictures stating which codes are displayed ?

Hmmm...Not sure that that's a goer....But I'll throw it into the pot.
Cheers - Phil

[nikharwood]

I've tried this but couldn't work out how to get it to work.

Easy...when you click in the "leave a comment" box, there's a little pic icon...click that & you're away  

[fred.]

Works today. When I tried some months ago I just got a comment of 13.jpg which wasn't too helpful.

[petercooman]

I just tried it too, and it doesn't want my pic   

[Leon]

If people add nice pics to those comment boxes on the website, I should be able to pull them out and use them in the images as well.