Looking for an alternative to Photocrati

I resolved my issues with Photocrati, and I’ve decided to stay with them for a while. Thanks anyhow.

Please let me know how you got the folks at Photocrati to listen. I purchased the Theme about a week ago, and have spent most of the holidays trying to get it to look right (padding, spacing, etc). Most of the issues they blame on WP plug-ins or different browsers, which work fine with the other themes I have used.
Thanks!

Hi,

This is Erick from Photocrati. @mcgregorlink – A few thoughts here. I want to start by emphasizing that we do listen in the forum, even if we don’t always give you the response you want.

In your case, I see you had posted once about an IE8 issue in our forum, and we responded same day and helped you resolve it by adjusting browser settings. I think we also mentioned that we’re already working to address a few other bugs that affect a small percentage of users with IE in case you experience those.

BROWSERS/PLUGINS? I think you are disappointed that we suggested it was a browser issue, and you asked why we often reference browser/operating/hosting/plugin issues. As you noted in your post, the issues you are having don’t occur for other members, even when viewing their sites in the same browser. As you ask: “why is it working for them and not for me?” This is exactly the issue. Our theme functionality works for the vast majority of users, across all browsers and hosts. We have a small percentage of people who have bugs USUALLY because they are using some hosting configurations or operating system or browsers or plugins, etc, that others are not. Something about our theme AND the specifics of your situation are not agreeing.

Although these problems stem from particular browsers or plugins or other components, we DO still consider it important to fix major bugs like this. If an IE8 bug is affecting a lot of users, we’ll introduce a fix more quickly. If it’s affecting a small number of users, we’ll still introduce fix, but it will take a bit longer since it’s lower on the list of priorities compared to other factors.

OTHER THEMES DON’T HAVE THESE ISSUES? You also mentioned that other themes don’t have these issues. That’s in large part because other themes don’t offer the level of functionality we do. Very few themes offer either the kind of built in gallery management functionality that we do, or a more extensive customization panel, much less both. The more complexity we add to our theme, the more space they’re is for those kind of compatibility issues.

WHAT WE’RE WORKING ON. Finally, when you think about how quickly we might introduce a fix for your issue, please keep in mind that you are one of 5000 people using our theme and giving us feedback. For any person having the kind of issue you are having, there are 20 or 30 asking us for ecommerce or image border controls or albums or sidebar widgets or advanced header fonts or new gallery displays or other new features or small fixes. Version 4.0, to be released in mid-January will have dozens of new features that come from listening to other customers. FYI – among those will be fixes for a few bugs affecting how galleries display in IE7 for a small number of viewers.

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So we want to hear from you, we want to solve your problems, and we definitely incorporate feedback into our development plans. You can rest assured that comments made and issues raised in our member forum are taken seriously.

Best wishes to you,

Erick

In my experience, the problems I had with the Photocrati folks were all caused by communication failures… the sort of communication problems one gets with email. The product itself seems very stable and a solid basis for building upon.

I sincerely believe that the folks at Photocrati are improving their theme, and I’m hoping to be able to use many of these improvements with my blog at lenscraft.com …

Ron

I purchased the photocrati theme; under the impression that it integrated with other plug ins, but emember disabled its shopping cart features. Instead of helping me find a solution, I got no real response from support. All I want to be able to do was sell my photos, but have the various galleries accesible only to specific log ins. I didn’t want to use WP’s built in Word Press password protection because then each page of their photos would require a password (IE – Ceremony, First Dance, Cake Cutting photos for a wedding or Cocktail Hour, Keynote, Panel Discussions for a corporate event.) eMember seemed the way to do this, but when it was activated, Photocrati’s ecommerce features stopped working. Emember folks said to check code on the theme, which turned up about a dozen coding errors, mostly related to footers, which various sources told me was the problem. I pointed this out to photocrati, got NO response. The only response I ever got was when I said “I think I need a refund if you can’t help me find a solution” to which they said “Sure, go this link”. So while they guise the theme as being for professional photographers, it’s really for shutterbugs who want to sell generic photos or have “look at me” galleries. I was very disappointed, not so much in the lack of protection on the theme, but in the lack of support I got. Still looking for a solution to sell my prints, and am willing to pay for a theme, but for the cost, Photocrati’s theme should have been bullet proof. I’ve used less expensive and even free themes that were error free when validated.

Oh my Rippleeffect!! As a programmer, not affiliated in any way whatsoever with Photocrati, I MUST respond to your post. You are combining two very complex pieces of code, that are created by two totally separate firms. And you expect every piece of code to operate flawlessly when you throw them both together. Even Microsoft, who owns and controls everything in their own product line has problems integrating things 100%.. I ask you, give both vendors a break! You now see one drawback of open source, free (or almost free) code. I am afraid it is up to you to integrate two unique pieces of software to work together. I hope you agree that it is unreasonable to expect Photocrati to make sure their software works with every single plugin out there, isn’t it? Otherwise, fork out $10,000.00 for a non-open source software, and if it doesn’t work — you have total cause for anger and frustration.