More Viewing station stuff

[ChrisPurves]

So - I know this viewing station stuff has been done a lot but it still seems to be something that so many of us need guidance on.
I've been doing some horse and dog agility shows and am using two laptops sharing files with Nikon view. Hoo what a clumsy system, but I need to grow into better systems as sales increase. I did a show two weeks ago and came away with four more shows because of my professional setup.
So here goes with the possibities I am thinking about.

1) - Install Breezebrowser on my existing setup and run with that for this year.
2) - Buy something to be a server and two more laptops for viewing stations.
Software options, Breeze browser and 5 Minute photo . Any one know about this software or are using it?
3) - bite the bullet and spend the money to get Claude Ferron's system.

We are a small bunch. About half the time my daugher and I shoot, my wife and my daughter's boyfriend do the viewing stations, run cards, sell, etc. The other half is just Cheryl and I. We are new this year to these shows so it is still all part of the uphill learning curve travels.

Do any of you long time guys remember back to your startups to offer some comforting words or advice. I'm really excited about all this but even more confused. We all know about the amount of money that needs to be invested. The good thing right now is we can work around the full time jobs so most of the money right now goes into the equipment fund.

Cheers
Chris

[Chris_Lax]

Chris,
when you say your going to use Breezebrowser, do you mean on each viewing station or to generate web pages to be viewed on viewstations over a network?

[ChrisPurves]

Hi:- I was going to use it on each viewing station to look at the shared folders on the main computer. Right now I only have two laptops so that looks like the easiest way to do it.
No real security concerns as someone is always with the computers.

Chris

[Will_Mass]

Hi Chris,

**Disclaimer** The following comments are only my opinions, based on personal experience. Your mileage may vary.

First, I would recommend not using laptops. Not for security reasons, but for clumsy customer reasons. It only takes one knocked over beverage to turn your viewing station into a doorstop (it was a beer in our case and she didn't even offer us one). Plus, used low end desktop machines can be had for less than one half the cost of a laptop. Use your savings to buy a backup machine.

Second, Breeze Browser will do the job I'm sure. We've tried several browsers and have found ACDSee 3.1 to be the best solution for our needs. Yep, the really old version of ACDSee. It's small quick and efficient. No frills. It just does it's job and it's easy for the customers to navigate. You can probably find it on E Bay for very little.

Hope this helps, Bill

[Robert_Smith]

Chris , What Will Mass has said will save you big time, at the moment I am buying Dell desktop P111 800
slimline machines at $45.00 on Ebay. Each includes 250MB ram, and 20Gb HDs more than enough for viewing stations.At the moment I use the Kiosk mode in EI so that I can lock down the public to one main folder and its sub folders.(I am not sure you can do this in ACDsee)and Jalbum web page generator
which is free, They have an add on named EOS which adds a shopping cart.


Robert

[Mike_Ehrmann]

I had an event and I tried to use BreezeBrowser on each viewing station. If the amount of pictures don't change BreezeBrowser works great. As the day went on we kept adding more pictures to the folder. Each time you add more, you need to hit F5 to refresh BreezeBrowser. Eventually it was taking 10-15 minutes to refresh and rebuild all the thumbs. Customers were frustrated having to wait.

I have found if you use BreezeBrowser to make HTML pages and just use IE to view the pages it has worked out best for my application.

Mike

[Norm_Cabana]

I think a lot of how you do things depends upon how you manage your photos and your subject matter. For example, in soccer some people do a gross level sort and then let people find their photos. This method works well with viewing stations that look to find the photos on a server. We do a much more extensive sorting, because our subjects are numbered, so that the customer has no need to search though a large number of photos. Because we show the customer only their photos we've found that viewing stations that are complete low cost desktop computers work better than having 4 or more computers looking at the same server at the same time. We simply do a quick drag and drop to a predefined directory on the viewing station and the photos show up almost instantly. We use ACDSee 5.0 on the viewing stations and that combination works flawlessly for us. If you cannot sort the photos down to individual customers then our method may not work for you.