Brightroom

I posted my concern about Brightroom Photography on the Tough Mudder Facebook page. Fellow Mudders offered ideas on how to retrieve the whole gallery of photos for $ 49.99.
Note: Even though there’s a way to purchase your whole gallery, Brightroom deliberately makes it difficult to find, so that you will be tricked/​deceived into purchasing $ 49.99 for EACH photo, instead of the whole gallery. So not cool!
Read the Facebook conversation here:

Brightroom Inc. does road event photography and happened cover the Runner’s World Half Marathon event in 2012. The website is not user friendly and the pictures are hard to see and the offers are hard to understand. I didn’t mean to purchase anything from them but after the 6^th email from them about the event photos thought that maybe if I bought something it will stop the emails. I tried buying all my photos in digital form at a price which seemed reasonable, $ 25. I was wrong. The price of $ 25 was to email me a single photograph at medium resolution, and the image I got in the email wasn’t even mine. To get all 6 of my pictures it will cost me $ 47. So when I contacted Brightroom about the confusion in ordering, I was given two options. Walk away with $ 25 loss or pay up the additional $ 17 to get what I wanted in the first place. They were «so sorry for the confusion» and I am sorry I ever gave them my business. Never again.

Very expensive, poor photo quality and their website is not user friendly. Nuvision, which does the photos for the Spartan Races, has a much better service.

I just finished Tough Mudder NorCal 2012. I really wanted to get some good pictures, but after seeing the prices. I just can believe it. Six electronic pictures via e-​mail and the price is $ 299. Are these people just stupid or do they really believe we are stupid. Thank god, I took my cheap waterproof camera with me. Only cost me $ 60 and took around 120 photos. If I had used their services, my pictures would have cost $ 5,880. We need to send an e-​mail to TM to complain about it.

Last summer, my boyfriend ran his first half marathon. So I just «had» to order him Brightroom photos! I did think it was extremely pricey for almost $ 50 for 3 5x7prints with tax and shipping; however I ordered them. When they came, they were less than averages shots. Without cropping as I requested and on less than average quality paper. I emailed them SEVERAL times and each time they told me «your order will arrive by XX/​XXXX date.» And I would respond that I have the prints and they are terrible. Another email back «your prints will arrive by XX/​XXXX date» BEYOND frustrating! When I FINALLY did get a response (almost a full week later) it was they would refund me money for the prints only if I shipped them back. So I was expected to AGAIN pay for shipping for their less than mediocre product. At this point I gave up.
My complaints:
1 — TOO expensive.
2 — POOR quality shots and the paper used was cheep quality!
3 — TERRIBLE customer service.
I was totally turned off by the whole experience. And would SERIOUSLY have to reconsider using them again.
I would also like to note, I wrote in an event last year myself and all of my fellow participants had several shots, my bib had NONE. Maybe Brightroom just hates me.

Their website and photo selection interface needs a complete overhaul. Pictures look good, but it’s impossible to find my pictures if I can’t effectively do something as basic as browse through the pictures. This hurts their business because it inhibits their customers’ abilities to order anything.
I just ran the Tough Mudder Nor Cal last weekend and there are over 70,000 photos for that day of the event, so I understand it’s probably taxing on their systems. If they would just add a «go to» page # feature and have the pictures actually load, I would be happy to order some pictures. They need to hire a new webmaster, get some better servers, or completely overhaul their website.
(It should be 0 stars but the photographers had to climb that mountain too, so the 1 star is for their efforts.)

Road race and event photography!