Community @ The Turning Gate

Dear Matthew and Rod,

Thank you for replying. Rob, your overview is excellent and clarified a lot of things on my mind. Matthew, I think you live in a different planet to me.

I bought TTG on the basis of recommendations from luminaries such as Victoria Bampton. I have a son who designs – amongst other things – websites but who is up to his eyeballs in various projects, lives away, and really does not have the time to sort me out, although bless him, he tries.

He and I had long and animated discussions about how I would like my galleries, with me advocating (from a very theoretical standpoint) how advantageous it would be to be able to manage my galleries directly from Lightroom using your program. He was, I am sorry to say, very dismissive. I have had to subsequently ring him up, apologise and agree with his professional assessment.

Why? well. after a few days away working I cleared my desk and sat down to get to grips with TTG, having previously bought publisher, galleries and auto index.

At this stage, I should probably step back and explain my provenance. This may make my subsequent comments more or less palatable. In my career as a surgeon I have invented devices, patented them and acted as an adviser to several multinational companies that produce medical devices. From the earliest days, one of my main themes has been ergonomics.

Sadly, your product not very easy to use. For instance, I spent a couple of hours trying to fathom setting up a gallery, dipping to and fro between the programs and the documentation. Nowhere did it clearly tell me that I'd then had to create a template and save that. Nowhere was there an obvious button.  I did 'some tinkering ' but of course lost all the stuff I had done.

Do not console yourself with the thought that I am an idiot and simply did not see it. I am an idiot. The fact that i am spending the time to try and communicate proves it. But the process is deeply flawed and this is but one of many criticisms that I could make, having spent a day trying to get somewhere. Your advice that all you need to make the program work is time, some tinkering about and reading the instructions is inappropriate in this day and age, ignoring the fact that the need for 'tinkering' simply shows it does not work out of the box and that the program is probably the preserve of those who can write code. To make light of the amount of effort needed to make this program work has probably produced a lot of dissatisfied customers over the years.

Some years ago, while working in a very dysfunctional organisation, I coined the term kludges. Often there is a simple and effective solution to a problem but it is either too expensive, requires reorganisation or seems just too difficult. So, instead of implementing the obvious solution a workaround is implemented. At later stages a couple of more workarounds are introduced on the back of the first kludge, such that getting from A to B now involves going to C D and E, and so on. Kind of what happened with Photoshop, such that they went back to the drawing board to produce Lightroom (now getting bigger and more complex every day).

An example of a TTG Kludge: In my search for information I read the section explaining what was new and came across your workaround for previewing a gallery on different devices. Boy, I have seldom seen less elegant workaround. What the end user wants is to be able to click a button that shows the display in the different formats. With dozens of workarounds like this, the documentation becomes so complex as to be unusable.

Can I suggest that you find somebody who uses Lightroom, sit them down in a room and ask them to use your programs. Don't teach them, just let them start using the program and see how far they get. Then let them try the documentation to answer their questions. Watch them get lost or become trapped in redundant hyperlinks (or even navigate to pages that don't exist). Absolutely resist the temptation to show them how it is done. Instead, take notes and work out what you need to tell them, when you need to tell them and then write it down. Repeat until cooked. Expect pain.

Rod Barbee's site does a much clearer job of explaining things but is outdated and not an instruction manual.

In summary, I am in two minds. I can put in the hours needed to set up TTG or I can establish a workflow that exports my images from LR in a format that suits whichever gallery I use. I offer these comments constructively. I think that you need to start by re-doing the documentation. With so many apps out there these days, the defining factor is often the documentation.

Steve