Customer Service - A Positive Experience

I know that everyone has had their own experience with customer service, but I wanted to let you know about something that happened to me recently. I have always been into photography, but I never did much with the pictures that I took. Occasionally I would print one or email one to somebody, but that all changed back in December.

I decided it was time to start doing something with my pictures, so I bit the bullet and purchased Apple Aperture to work with the photos a little. After loading the application and then importing all my photo's I realized that many were duplicated. Not just many but THOUSANDS!! I have no idea how this happened but sure enough, I was out of disk space!! I purchased an external drive and copied my library to the new drive. That freed up the drive on my laptop. But then how do I get all the dups deleted on the external drive?

Well, I Goggled and found a program called dupeGuru - Picture Edition from Hardcoded Software. It was relatively inexpensive and there was no physical way, probably in my lifetime, that I would be able to go through 56,000 photo's looking for dups. So I purchased this app and now I was on my way... Right? Well not exactly, because of the volume of photos, I was pushing the limit on what could be scanned. I started the scan and three days later it through up its arms and Quit!

I contacted support via email, and within a matter of minutes, I received an email from Virgil Dupree. He provided me some instruction on possible causes to make the program stop. So I tried it again and four days later it quit again, once again contacting Virgil and asking for help. Again immediatly I receved a response to my inquiry with a couple of other things to try. I started the scan again and about two days into it, my machine was accidentally turned off...... Operator Error!! So trying what I thought would be my last time. I started the program and off it went. Three days later it died in the scan! Wow, what could I do to get these files removed? Email back to Virgil.

Virgil, immediatly responded back that he had written a new version that would speed up the scan. I tried and again it failed. To be honest, at this point I was ready to give up with the software, but because Virgil was so responsive, and helpful I continued to try again. Well this time, after only two days it quit. Again I email Virgil, and I could tell that he was out of suggestions.

He told me to try again and send the logs, which I did. About a day later he sent me another version to try. Two days later it quit. I think at this point Virgil was ready to give up, as I would have, if he did not have a suggestion. But low and behold after only 24 hours, my photo library is down to 23,ooo photo's without dups!! Yeah!!

Long winded way to say, there are still people out there, who are willing to and want to help. I have had some very bad experiences over the last few months: AT&T, Direct TV, Delta Airlines to name a few. They will do what ever they can to avoid taking your call. Have you tried to navigate some of the Voice Response Systems? I think most are designed to get you to hang up before you get someone on the phone. But I must say that Virgil's demeanor and desire to fix the problem gave me the confidence to keep trying.

Thanks Virgil, I appreciate all your help!! Keep up the Great work. And for all the rest of you, if you need an application to scan for duplicate files, check out dupeGuru!!