Photographs of individual animals...

This message was posted in another thread in this site, but felt I would copy the text here to give you all a perspective of something that has perplexed me for a few years now:

As for photographs, this has been a kind of a thorn in my side for a few years now. I know everyone wants to be able to see the individual animals they are buying, and I do understand that. But many people don't realize what this means to someone whom is hatching out thousands of animals.

Suppose I were to take photographs of say 500 animals and post them up on a web page with a unique ID number. Someone says they want to buy ID number EGG024532. So Monday morning I go over to pack that person's box for shipment and find that that animal has regurged it's meal I gave it three days ago, or it didn't eat it's last meal, or I find a minor kink in it. What do I do then? I don't have the leeway to find a replacement because that person is expecting to get the animal in the photograph. I have my hands tied and have to postpone the shipment until I can contact that person about the problem. So instead of being able to send out the shipment with something that would certainly be just as nice, I have to keep them all (probably unpacking the rest of the order and putting them back on the rack), get the customer mad at me because they were really looking forward to the shipment when I promised it, and I have to care for and feed those animals an additional week.

A second consideration is the management of this situation. As I sell off animals, I can constantly moving the ones remaining around as some baskets in the racks have holes emptied by the sales, and I an compact them and keep them all in an orderly fashion. So these baby snakes will not stay at the same place very long. So Monday morning comes along, and I have 10 shipments going out, with 10 babies in each shipment. That means I will have to match up 100 ID numbers for animals that might be scattered over 4 racks holding 640 babies. Since I would be very hard pressed to be able to keep more than a couple of those ID numbers in my head as I searched for them, I would need to compare just about every deli cup I looked at to see if the ID number matched the list of animals going out the door that day. Realistically, I would have to start packing my Monday shipments beginning on Saturday to be able to get them all picked and ready to go. Obviously, this would be a tremendous increase in my workload.

Yes, I do know some people take photos of their babies and sell them this way, and it beats the heck out of me how they can do that.

Rich- I trust your judgement and don't think I'd ever ask you to do it for me, but do you still offer that service for the ten dollars per a picture as mentioned on serpenco.com? Just for the future info of anyone interested in buying.

I take individual pictures of some of my hatchlings. But these are snakes that have small clutches and I only have maybe a couple dozen of them. Not Cornsnakes, I will have a couple hundred Cornsnake hatchlings, there's no way I'm taking and posting 200 pictures. I don't have the time. And if I don't have the time I know Rich or any of the larger breeders don't. IMHO

While I do enjoy breeders that offer individual photos of all snakes they have for sale I understand that it just isnt feasible to do it on a large scale. I only produced 100 or so corns this year and I'd be hard pressed to photo 50 of them. (Which lets face it would probably mean more like 200 photos then going through the process of choosing which photo(s) you think best represents that particular corn)

As far as I'm concerned if your buying a corn from Rich you can't go wrong anyway.

If I'm acquiring an adult, I certainly *like* to see what I'm getting, but if I trust the source it doesn't really matter to me....

For example, I bought 4 snakes from Vinny (3 adults) sight unseen, and now that I have them I couldn't be any happier.

I also bought a "proven male albino sunglow" sight unseen that has so much white he doesn't really deserve the name, but that came from a source that I knew was questionable, and so I half expected such an outcome.

One snake I bought got here about 4 weeks ago (proven WC miami female) and was in bad health, and died yesterday. Having seen a picture couldn't have warned me of that....

I think it really boils down to setting expectations based on the source, not on any picture which could have been doctored up, or simply cropped in a way to hide a problem.

Now as far as babies are concerned.... Id really rather be able to see the parents, because that's going to provide at least as much clue as to how it will look as it matures than any picture taken when it's so young. While I will keep buying your corns with our without pictures, I wonder if it could be practical to at least provide "parent" pics? Hire some smart kid that loves to code to whip up a DB and it might actually be a fairly low overhead project to let customers buy a morph-X from mother-Y, or 50%-father-Z (since you let 2 males court each breeding female, as a rule.) And then, in the event that there was a DB glitch, or for any other reason you don't have a baby matching that spec you should be able to determine if there's any chance of one popping out as the season progresses, and at worst offer your customer a match in a few weeks or any other baby of morph-X (the order form could have checkboxes for, "I'll wait for this hatchling if possible" and "Any morph-X will do if my parent-selection turned out invalid" so that you can see right on the orderform what you need to do when you are packing shipments...

Just an idea - please don't feel obliged to provide individual pics of babys, adults, or parents. I don't think many people buying from SerpenCo are unaware of your stature in the trade, and therefore they should trust that the snake(s) they buy from you will be beautiful.

Since I'm jumping into this hobby as a real attempt to get out of the 9-5 jobs that are killing me, I will need to both: move a LOT of herps, as well as deal with the fact that I have ZERO reputation among folks that are well educated herp buyers. My assumption, is that the best medecine for this predicament is to go the whole 9 yards, and provide my customer as much eye candy as I can afford to keep on the web. I'll be planning to provide not only pics of parents, siblings, and snakes for sale or trade, but hopefully also some quality data about where the snake's bloodline is from, and anything else I can think of as a "value-added" type of service. Lord knows, if I thought I'd be doing that for the next 30 years though then I probably wouldn't have even come down this road - it is my hope that over time as I build a reputation for quality service and herps I can scale back, and eventually do away with the eye-candy aspects so I can focus on the two important things: the herps, and the real "value-add" type things I can provide my customers.

Rich, If people can't understand the circumstance, and if they are still mad after you explain it to them, consider the source.
The irritating thing is lack of communication on deals and then finding out that (sometimes there is an extrenuating circumstance, like a death in the familiy or something) someone is angry because something happened you have no control of.
But for the most part, I cannot imagine that you would try to photo babies due to their ontological changes into something influenced by the incredible amount of genes you are dealing with !!!
By the way, how do you like my signature ?? Glad to see the butter stripes are out Rich. I just figured that you and Don are having a tremendous impact on the hobby ( YOUR work is tremendous, I know more about it than Don's) so if I could attribute a little back to you guys I would.
Don has helped me in times of need . Recently I lost about 4 members of my family and was out of herps for awhile but getting back to it now. Gently, I will grow back into it having just purchased a computer for the first time recently.
Thanks Rich
ps I will have to figure out my signature, I see that I missed an "i" in with.