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New User Feedback and Questions

Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2019 11:20 am
by KYanicki
Hi Everyone,

Happy new year,

I have tested out the software in Demo mode for a few weeks and purchased the software over the weekend to try it live at a family event before going into a full on gig.

A few comments and maybe someone can help or guide me to either correct or update what is happening.

for this gig I was using an ipad air running wifibooth and an iphone Xr using Blue print for its rear facing camera.
I also have a Canon T6 with Wifi built in.

- Connecting using wifi is much slower compared to using the Iphone Hotspot. Takes a while to find the Iphone when on Wifi, even at home near the AC router.
- Connecting directly to the camera is also slow. Even when connected to wifi, I have yet to try using the Iphones HotSpot
- Not being able to zoom when using the Iphone camera is the only caveat so far.
- Anything we make a change to the settings, the Mirror live view resets to being turned off. This is frustrating. Yes I will most likely not make any changes mid gig, but, say I turn off or on the green screen or adjust the flash from off to auto, why should this setting reset itself?
- Why would a Canon T6 set to about 3mpx versus the iphone 12mpx, be so much slower to load the pictures?
- mid gig I turned off the setting for create separate folder for collage, however, in the main folder the collages were not there, so I am now going into the apps gallery and creating the collages (actually a nice feature that DSLRbooth does not have). So my question would be why do collages stop being saved if we ask for it not to be in a separate folder? that is not what the setting says.

Now I admit I have an older Ipad and it still did not crash once and even at 32gb, there is more than enough space to store the pics and then offload them to google drive for my clients. I could see an Ipad 10.5 or 11 being ideal for this as opposed to the bigger 12.9.

I will continue testing and see how the Dropbox or gif options slow down the app.
-Any change you could add upload to google drive instead of just Dropbox? I use google business and get unlimited size so why have to buy another app storage.

Thank you all.
kevin

Re: New User Feedback and Questions

Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2019 2:39 pm
by tim
Hi Kevin,
Thanks for all of your great feedback, and for purchasing Wifibooth!

Re wifi being slower than hotspot to connect: this is probably because you were using your home's wifi which is likely heavily-loaded. Although home wifi units are advertised as being super fast and all that, in reality they struggle when they hit even 15-20 devices. If you've got 3 phones, 2 ipads, a bunch of IoT things, a smart TV, a smart appliance or two, some smart hifi equipment -- you quickly get to your home wifi router being heavily loaded. In this scenario, discovery of new devices can take longer because your router isn't processing UPNP as quickly as it should. If you want to do a test, take your router and change its wifi hotspot name (SSID) to something brand new, so that no other devices can get on it. Then try connecting Wifibooth + camera to the new SSID. I'll bet it is quicker.
What people do: buy a dedicated mobile plug-style router that only the camera + ipad + printer have access to

Re not being able to zoom in BluePrint: that's on the list of things I want to build.

Re mirror live view changing: hmm, good feedback. What *should* be happening, is that this setting only changes when you change the camera. Ie. when you change from iPad camera front to back, or from iPad camera to BluePrint etc. The reason is that you want mirroring on if it is a forward-facing camera (ie. iPad front camera), but not if it is a rear-facing camera (ie. BluePrint or Canon T6i). Is that what you see happening? Is there a specific case where the auto setting is wrong for you? I'm definitely up for improving this.

Re BluePrint being much faster than your Canon T6: I control a LOT more of the code for the BluePrint camera -> transfer, so this is highly optimized. The Canon has a much slower processor (orders of magnitude slower) than your iPhone, and is nowhere near as optimized. This is just the reality of today's DSLRs (and if I may toot my own horn here, a well-written network-stack between wifibooth and blueprint!). If you go up to the Canon 80D level I find that level to be much faster than the 750D (T6i) level. But Canons get slow again when you go full-frame.

Re the save collages in separate album option: you are right, the name of the setting is not great. It basically means "save the collages to the camera roll or not, oh hey I mean in a separate album"

I use an iPad 12.9" for my events and I love it, especially if you have some older folks in the crowd who don't have great vision... but I could see the 11" being just as good. Never tried one live yet.

Dropbox/gif shouldn't slow things down. I worked hard to make that statement true :)

Re google drive, good point, i've added it to the list!

Re: New User Feedback and Questions

Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2019 3:01 pm
by KYanicki
Wow, thank you for the quick reply Tim.

I will setup my router with separate 2.4 and 5GHZ networks and test it out.
as for the dedicated router, I will look for one of those, Thank you

I understand what you mean about the live view changing if you make a change to the setting of the camera or change camera, But if i went into the app settings on the ipad and renamed the event or changed the save to camera roll setting, it would remove itself from being checked off.

If I could zoom on the Iphone I probably would totally not use the Canon, especially since most photobooth operators lower the resolution in order to print faster at 4*6, its almost pointless and overkill.

Lesson learned for the save collage option, but all is not lost, I am going through the Gallery and recreating the collage pics, Never seen that option in other softwares I have used, tedious but at least an option.

thanks for the google drive option.

Re: New User Feedback and Questions

Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2019 3:17 pm
by aluminumwelder
make sure the ipad battery is near 100% as well as a low battery decreases speed I'd get the 12.9 2nd gen if I were you about $550 used, better value and easier for guests to use.

Re: New User Feedback and Questions

Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2019 3:20 pm
by KYanicki
Thanks, I will look into those. I am in Canada so prices are a little steeper but i will check out the used market.

Would anyone know why we do not see the collages in the wifibooth gallery and only in the photos of the ipad? How could we reprint or resend the collage without recreating it?

Thanks
make sure the ipad battery is near 100% as well as a low battery decreases speed I'd get the 12.9 2nd gen if I were you about $550 used, better value and easier for guests to use.

Re: New User Feedback and Questions

Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2019 3:26 pm
by aluminumwelder
the gallery is used to make collages, so it would not make sense to have collages in the gallery.
people are not that bright they would place the collage into another collage opening which would look ridiculous.

Re: New User Feedback and Questions

Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2019 3:44 pm
by tim
AluminumWelder is right about why collages don't appear in the gallery.
May I ask why you are recreating the collages? Did something not work?

Re your router, please avoid 5ghz. Your camera will likely not connect to it, and 5ghz is very sensitive (to walls, obstacles). Just rename your 2.4ghz SSID to something else and try with no other devices on it.

It sounds like you've found a bug with regards to the live-view mirroring automatically changing, i'll go hunt that down and squash it. Thanks!

Re: New User Feedback and Questions

Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2019 5:14 pm
by KYanicki
In my Case I am recreating the collages yes, because I had that option turned off at one point so I cannot share the full collage pictures. I have recreated then all and will not uncheck that in future.

To me the gallery should show the collages and the plain pictures be available in the photos of the iPad.
My logic is the following, if and when a client wants to either reprint or resend a collage, they don’t want to recreate it. They want the collage.
If ever the client tells me they only want one pic of the three or so, then I tell him I can go into the photos and send him one, at the end of the night.

Thanks for looking into it
Kevin

Re: New User Feedback and Questions

Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2019 5:32 pm
by tim
Hi Kevin
If the collage was emailed or texted, it appears in a list in the sharing center and can be resent. You can get to the sharing center from settings -> top bar -> second icon on left

Re: New User Feedback and Questions

Posted: Fri Apr 26, 2019 2:25 pm
by KYanicki
HI Tim,

Been a few months since we last spoke. A few follow-up comments and feedback

1)Thank you so much for the update to allow Google Drive uploads, works amazing. Would it be possible to have an option to put all pics and collages in same folder or separate folder like we do on the Ipad itself?

2)Regarding the Live view changing, I believe it is in fact due to camera changes, as in, If I go out of the blueprint app on the Iphone Xr, it will change on the Ipad...as you explained this is as planned.

3)In looking at the sharing center for previous Collages sent, This only allows you to "resend" whatever collages have been sent to the same phone number. so since I had sent myself 10 tests, I pressed resend and i got all ten again...The reason I had been asking about only seeing the collage in the Gallery was due to the fact that there may be 3 or 4 people in a group photo and they each want to send the collage to themselves. So having the option to just click on the collage and type in an email or SMS number would allow this to occur. The Share Center does not fix this..

4) Would there be an easier way to choose colors in the software, such as being able to enter a color code or having boxes to click on? At the moment if I wanted the same color to be used for a border and a wordmark i must use the slider and try to get the same color code which is almost impossible. I tried to get a fluorescent green and in the wordmark I got color ACF32E, could not duplicate this in the border color selection.

5)Is there a way to make a template of an even, sort of a default event that would have my logo and other settings that I wish to use and then just copy that to a new event and rename it? If ever this picks up and I need more than one Ipad, this could get quite time consuming to setup.

6)You may have answered this in another post but would you have a suggestion as to a site or app to obtain green screen backgrounds?

I truly appreciate the hands on assistance you provide and hopefully the questions do not appear as complaints.
Thank you in advance
Kevin

Re: New User Feedback and Questions

Posted: Wed May 01, 2019 10:48 am
by tim
Hiya,
Thanks for the feedback! Don't worry these don't look like complaints :)

Re Google Drive / uploads separating out collages & photos, good idea i'll add it to the list.

Re Share center / emailing a collage to multiple people. The Share Center is designed to be used by the iPad owner (photographer), and is specifically designed to solve problems around internet connectivity and setup issues (wrong email account password, wrong twilio information, etc) that stop outgoing messages from being sent. If you want to send collages to multiple people then the way to do that is in the email field itself when sending the collage: you can enter multiple email addresses in the field. You do this by separating addresses with spaces, or commas (or even semi-colons).

Re picking colors, good feedback, added to the list.

Re templates - we are thinking hard about how to do this right (it is complex). In the meantime did you know that you can duplicate an event to use its settings in a new event? On the event picker screen, slide the row of the event over, and hit the duplicate button that's underneath.

Re green screen backgrounds - I don't have any great recommendations at the moment.

Re: New User Feedback and Questions

Posted: Wed May 22, 2019 2:51 pm
by tim
Update: in the next update after 4.9.2, you're able to touch the hex code to enter the color code directly.