What you do not see in your store statistics. Thoughts on the photo selection process.

You run a paid campaign using, let’s say, native ads, but the results are not satisfying? Viewers click the ad, but they do not complete the purchase? You probably blame the ad, the landing page, or targeting options. For many cases those are the reasons. But some users might be interested in buying the photo book but they resigned because they don’t have time or will to weed out bad photos.

Do you know how many potential clients you lost because the photo selection is just too long? We research online forums, we talk with our customers, we check the statistics. And well we don’t know too. In fact, no one knows that as those people are invisible in statistics. We only know that as an average 80% of projects are never finished but we don’t know how many were not even started.

So, we investigated more, asked more questions, read the publication, and started testing on ourselves. What we found out is:

Selecting photos takes longer than the creation itself

Imagine you were on 2 weeks holidays in Greece. How many pictures would you take? Our CEO made exactly 464 photos. The 30 pages book can include around 150 photos. So, he had to remove about 310 photos. It was not an easy task.

Removing the irrelevant photos – this is the first step. You don’t need photos of bills, bikes, cars and so on in your book. Sometimes you made them because you needed them, but you definitely don’t want to use them in your gorgeous photo book.

Duplications – in the time of mobiles, you can take as many photos as you wish. Which is great and bad at the same time. Because now you must choose one photo out of 3 identical photos. And if you are a photographer you can easily choose which photo has the best quality, but if you are not it might be hard to pick the best picture.

Similar photos – you have been in a beautiful city of Kavala and you made 50 photos from just this one city. And now you must choose up to 15 photos to cover 4 pages (after all this was just a part of the holiday). It is not easy to decide – we wrote about it in our article a few weeks ago. Deciding which pictures should be included in the book and which shouldn’t might be a complicated and thus unpleasant choice.

In the end, selection can take from half an hour to even a few hours! Not that many people have time and patience for this.

Selection in the creation phase

OK, you are in the editor with the selected photos. Now it will be super easy. Actually, yes and no.

The process is indeed much shorter than photo selection. But it is still not an easy-peasy job. You have chosen a super nice theme and sorted the photos by the creation date. But from the first day of your stay you chose 4 photos and in the beautiful theme there are only 3 slots. Again, decision to be made! Should you remove one photo, move it to another page or add another slot? Those are all easy actions, but the choice might not be that easy. And what if you have to make it on every page? And there is more – which photo should you choose on the spreadsheet? Which one should be used on the cover? Which out of those 4 pics from the beach should be put in the biggest slot? Creating a photo book is truly the art of choosing.

What most people want to achieve

We did extensive research about what most people expect from a photo book. And we observe that:

• Most people want their books to tell a story. From a wedding, a party, or holidays. The event really does not make a significant difference. Chronology is by far the most important factor affecting photo order.
• People like coherence – each spreadsheet should be a part of the story.
• People want nice framing but they use cropping only because they have to.

Same book with Smart Creation

So, when work on Smart Creation was finished, we took the same photos and made another round of tests. The result? Using different settings and themes each time, the photo book looked almost identical to the one the user would have created themselves. But it took 3 minutes on average to create it. And yes, in some cases we had to additionally spend a few minutes to replace one or two photos that we did not like that much. But besides that, we had a photo book ready in less than a couple of minutes. And without any hard choice to make.

Imagine your new campaign

Now imagine the same campaign we wrote about at the beginning. Only that this time the user uploads all the photos and sees the finished product immediately. Without hours spent on selection, without hundreds of small choices to consider. In fact, only one decision must be made – to buy or not to buy. Just think how much your conversion rate on paid campaigns could increase. And let us know when you are ready.