Following a recent poor experience with a business (now sorted) it’s very refreshing to find a business who know how to treat a customer.

A good friend recently took a great photo that was used on his Facebook page, he commented it looked similar in composition to some of the Old Master type paintings, and I produced a few printed copies for him.

In a few quiet moments I thought I’d use Photoshop to produce a painting type effect for him but I couldn’t get it to look just right, so it was off to Google for a Mac painting App.

I found a trial version of PhotoArtista - Oil from JixiPix, after trying it out, it was an instant buy at a very reasonable price (£13.01UKP), I printed out my result on matte paper and gave it to my friend.

The very next day a marketing email arrived from JixiPix offering a ’Summer Sale’ with 35% discount off all their products!

An email explaining I’d bought a product from them less than 24 hours earlier was sent......to my surprise the very next morning there was a refund email for £4.30 from JixiPix...........now that’s how to treat a customer!

One of the websites I built and maintain hosts a foreign language booklet in PDF format for children that can be read online or downloaded. The booklet usually runs to around 60 or so pages and around 8 - 10 megabytes in size, making it easy to download for anyone on a reasonable connection.

Back in June 2021, I was sent the latest copy, however it was over 100 megabytes! I tried several ways to compress it and reduce the size but. the best I could get it down to was 96 megabytes. Since then I’ve gone back to it several times and tried various methods to find out why it was so big and to reduce it to a manageable download for those on a slower internet connection but I failed miserably!

Just browsing Facebook groups today, I saw an item mentioning Affinity Photo from Serif could open PDF files, my old copy of Photoshop could open PDF files and I had tried it on this booklet previously, so I gave it a go in Affinity.

It opened (slowly due to the size!) and the open dialog gave me some options to change, I selected export file and there were some further options that looked as if it might help with the size, checking the file size after export gave me a 56 megabyte file!

So I opened that 56 meg file and applied the same settings again along with a few further options and exported the file - I got an 8 meg file that showed an acceptable quality loss from the original 100 meg file!

So after messing with this file for nearly a year, I found a program I’ve had on my Mac for several years could solve the problem for me........ Who knew?

A year ago I saw a FaceBook ad for Picfair, they were a photo agency offering 2 levels of ‘membership’ to sell my stock photographs, a free option where they took a percentage or an annual paid option with no commission, there was a ‘free’ trial and I signed up for the annual package with a new user discount.

One year on and checking my bank account, they have taken another annual payment without any email notification beforehand. I only have a hundred or so photos with them, and I had made a conscious decision that with just one sale (£6) within 12 months I would continue my subscription when it came up for renewal (their Facebook page has one subscriber with 18,000 views and not one sale!).

Well, one year on and not one sale! I’ve been a professional ‘tog for over 40 years, I’ve had thousands of photo’s published in various national, regional and local newspapers, monthly magazines, house magazines, advertising campaigns....the list goes on, so I’d decided not to renew my annual subscription and revert to a commission subscription which was mentioned when I signed up.

Now, virtually every company I’ve ever dealt with either professionally or personally with a subscription service, either monthly or annually, send me a courtesy email in advance before taking money from my account reminding me, and offering to cancel my subscription if I wanted - BUT NOT PICFAIR! They do however manage to send out marketing tips and other helpful suggestion emails!

Checking the Picfair website, there is a 7 day money back guarantee for new subscribers and a clause saying it does not apply to renewals - definitely not very ethical business practice in my opinion.

I’ve asked for a refund, we’ll see what happens and I’ll post back here with the result!

UPDATE:

After several emails, a full refund has been approved, Thank you Picfair.

A few further thoughts on this...

As previously mentioned, I’m grateful to Picfair for the full refund, however, following the refund email, a few thoughts occurred to me.

After the initial shock of suddenly finding out nearly £70 had been taken from my bank account I had not been made aware of beforehand (OK they mentioned a year ago it was a rolling subscription, but that was a 12 months ago!), I thought a simple email explaining I didn’t want a renewal would put a refund in place.

As a retired person, money is tight and I keep a very watchful (daily!) check on my account, even more so these days with inflation currently at 9%, to suddenly find £70 disappear brings on minor panic.

A policy of a rolling subscription WITHOUT notification beforehand seems very poor business practice to me, my SIM card supplier sends me an email notification 1 week prior to renewal for an account that’s just £5 per month.

When questioned and a refund requested along with a cancellation of the account, to then be quoted T&C’s on the website seems very poor judgement in public relations. In this day and age of social media - a single complaint post can go viral in seconds and ruin a companies reputation that could take months, or years to recover from.

One quote mentioned to me many years ago when I was in business, still rings true today - a satisfied customer (client) will tell a few people, an unsatisfied customer (client) will tell EVERYONE!

I remember when we got our first NLE system in 1994 called Media100, it came with 2 17” CRT monitors, it made editing easier to be able to have so much screen space, as time went by and we upgraded computers, monitors and edit systems, I ended up using FCPX on 2 24” LCD monitors.

When I had problems with my ageing MacPro desktop, I was able to buy a 2020 iMac to run my new edit system DaVinci Resolve, my MacPro was consigned to a GP role, emails, web browsing etc. Eventually after tracing the fault to one of 4 sticks of RAM, I wanted to use it as a second ‘edit’ machine with FCPX for simple Facebook and website videos and looked to replace a faulty 27” monitor I now had on the system.

Browsing Facebook Marketplace (as you do!) I spotted an IIyama GB2888UHSU 28” 4K gaming monitor (3840x2160) for £160 which interested me, a young lad had gone to Uni and was raising funds by selling the monitor. A few weeks later it was still on Marketplace and the price had dropped to £120, I made a cheeky offer of £100 and they accepted!

Back home and hooked up it was a delight to use and edit with and looked good beside my 27” iMac, as I’m now retired with little or no income, this monitor would see me out....or so I thought!

Barely 5 months after I bought it, I was editing some photos for Facebook and it suddenly died - it was like a fuse blowing, OK the first thing to do was check and replace the mains lead, still nothing, I had found this monitor liked having an input to work so I changed the HDMI cable, then tried a DP cable - still nothing. Assuming it might be a heat related shutdown I left the monitor for around 3 hours and tried again - Still nothing, it was totally dead.

The annoying thing for me is I still have monitors in the garage that are 15 years old or more that still work fine, I even have an original first generation working 14” LCD that I use as a tele-prompt screen.

To replace the IIyama is going to cost over £350, well outside the cost I can afford these days, so I only have the memory of using such a high quality monitor for a short period of time and now it’s back to using a 1920x1080 HDMI TV monitor!

After all the problems last week getting Air Display to work on one particular MacPro desktop, I got the chance to use it last Sunday. Connecting everything to the WiFi and using my new Mac Mini, I bought up the Keynote I’d prepared, I opened Air Display on the iPad (an old v2), the Air Display host on the Mac Mini asked to connect to the iPad and within a second or two, my ‘second screen’ was showing on the iPad.

Switching Keynote into Present mode, the projector display showed up on the iPad and the speaker could see the slides as I advanced them in time to his script which he’d sent to me earlier. There was virtually no lag and the display quality was very high, even video clips played on the iPad again with virtually no lag, overall for £12.99 I was very impressed.....if it had only worked on the older MacPro desktop, but the plus side is I‘ve now got a (fairly) new Mac mini (just don’t tell the missus!)