Changelog

What's new in the AG Guide.

    • Added Usage covers every tool on this site. The Usage page now shows, day by day, the other tools hosted at rbmarketingautomation.com beside the AG Guide: how many people opened the Deal Proposal generator, the TM Promo Template guide, the Careers search, Getting Top Results and the PO docs, how many presentation decks were downloaded, and each run of the Asana automations (the Buyer Bidder Map, the Getting Top Results handout, TM templates, intake tasks, creative drafts and banners) with the name of the person who asked for it.
    • Changed A new look for the whole tool. Every page has been redesigned: the type is now Inter (the same face the guide pages print in), the fields are soft filled boxes that light up when you click into them, the buttons and cards have rounded corners and gentle shadows, and the top bar and the Output panel are frosted glass that the page scrolls under. On the Generate page the photo order is a two-way switch (Auto by equipment category / Custom order), Auto-brighten is a toggle, empty photo boxes are dark instead of red, and the Output panel stays pinned at the top of the right-hand column while Save progress scrolls beneath it. Nothing about how the tool works has changed: every field, button and shortcut is where it was and does what it did.
    • Added Stack two photos in any row. The ▤ button now sits on the line between any two photos, in rows of two, three or four. Click it and those two photos go one above the other in a single column as wide as both were; the other photos in the row stand beside the pair at the row's full height. In a row of two the pair still takes the whole page width. Drag the line inside the pair to give one photo more height, the lines beside it to make the pair wider or narrower, and click ▥ on the line inside the pair to put them side by side again. A row of four can hold two pairs. Saved with checkpoints and Finalize; prints exactly as shown. (Erica, 2026-09-09.)
    • Added Stack two photos on top of each other. A row that holds two photos now has a ▤ button at its right edge. Click it and the two photos sit one above the other instead of side by side, each across the whole width of the page, which suits two long, low machines such as a harrow and an auger. The row grows to make room (about two hero rows' worth) and the rows below give way; drag the line between the two photos to give one more height than the other, or the line under the row to change the pair's share of the page. Click ▥ to put them side by side again, or Reset box sizes. The stack is saved with checkpoints and Finalize, the page prints exactly as shown, and the star still works on the pair. Asked for by Erica.
    • Changed Territory Manager library brought up to date. Doug Sinclair, Brett Radford and Tyler Doepker have left Ritchie Bros. and are no longer in the library, so they do not come up in the TM search. Carson Welke's and Brandon Basler's phone numbers were confirmed by Venice. A page saved with one of the departed TMs still restores with the name and details it was saved with; pick the new TM for that territory before you generate. The creative team's headshots for everyone else are exactly as they were.
    • Fixed A restored headshot copy no longer sticks to a TM. When a checkpoint was restored for a Territory Manager who had no photo in the library at the time, the page kept the checkpoint's own copy as if you had chosen it, so the library photo, once added, never printed for that page. The copy now prints only until the library has a photo; a headshot you chose yourself over a picked TM is still kept, as before.
    • Fixed "Later" on the new-version bar means later. The bar used to come back about every minute and a half after Later, and a tab that went quiet afterwards could still reload itself onto the version you had waved off. Later now keeps the bar away for five minutes, and a version you said Later to never reloads the tab on its own; it only shows the bar again.
    • Changed A headshot added on the page keeps its framing. A Territory Manager headshot saved from the page used to be cut to a square before it went into the library, which could clip the crown or chin before the print crop ran, and framed it differently from the creative team's set. It is now stored whole, the way the creative team's headshots were loaded, and the page's face-aware crop frames it at print time. Nothing already in the library changes.
    • Added Move a photo inside its box. Beside each photo's zoom pill there are now four arrows (◀ ▲ ▼ ▶) and a ⌖. Each arrow moves the crop a step that way, so a machine that sits off to one side, or a tall photo whose interesting part is low, can be framed by hand: press ▶ to show more of the photo's right side, ▲ to show more of its top, and so on. The thumbnail moves as you click and the page prints exactly as shown. A greyed arrow means there is no room that way: a photo the shape of its box fills it at 100%, so zoom in with + and the sideways arrows come alive; a tall photo in a wide box can be moved up and down without any zoom. The ⌖ lights up while a photo is moved and puts it back where the tool had it. Moving works on Auto too (the automatic zoom stays, only the position changes), it is saved with checkpoints and Finalize, and it comes back on restore. Asked for by Erica.
    • Fixed A restored checkpoint is work in progress. The self-updating tab counted a restored checkpoint with no photos (a text-only draft, a sale whose photos are still to come) as nothing in progress, so the next release could reload the tab and clear the restored form. A restore, a Generate or Finalize still running, a checkpoint save or restore under way, and listing text on the page now all count: such a tab shows the orange bar with the Reload button instead of reloading on its own.
    • Added One photo across the top. A page can now have fewer photo boxes than its template, so a sale can lead with a single photo across the whole width. Under each photo, at the right of the Size row, a ⊟ button removes that box: the other photos in its row take the room, the removed box's photo moves to the next box, and the photo at the end of the page, if there is no box left for it, is held under the grid with its name rather than deleted. A ⊞ at the right edge of a row that is short of a box puts one back, and "Reset box sizes" restores the whole template; the held photo returns with the box. A lone box across the top prints 7.5 in wide and takes half the photo area by default, and the star still works on it: one starred photo leads the page and the row grows by the same amount as the featured pair. Empty boxes carry the ⊟ too, the arrangement is saved with checkpoints and Finalize, and the page prints exactly as shown. Asked for by Erica, for sales that want one hero photo at the top.
    • Added Resize the photo boxes. Every photo box on the Generate page can now be made larger or smaller, and the others give way. Drag the handle in a photo's bottom-right corner in any direction: sideways makes it wider and the others in its row narrower, up or down makes its row taller or shorter, diagonally does both at once. Or drag the line between two photos or between two rows to move just that pair, or press Size − / + under a photo to step it, with the box's printed size in inches shown between the buttons. The page keeps its shape: the photo area is fixed by the press, so a box grows only by taking room from the others in its row and from the other rows, and no box can shrink past the point where its name no longer fits or its photo drops under 40 points. The framing preview follows each new shape, the page prints exactly as arranged, the arrangement is saved with checkpoints and Finalize, and "Reset box sizes" puts the template back. Empty boxes have the grip and the size readout too, so a page can be laid out before its photos are in. Asked for by Erica and Anna, who wanted to play with photo sizes before generating.
    • Changed The page keeps itself up to date. A tab left open across a release used to keep running the old version until someone reloaded it, which made new fixes look missing. Now a tab with nothing in progress reloads itself onto the new version within a minute of a release, or as soon as you come back to it. A tab with photos or typed text on it keeps them and shows an orange bar at the top instead, with a Reload button, so nothing is lost. Every release also gets its own web addresses for the page's files, so no cache can hand back an old copy.
    • Changed The How To page is about the AG Guide alone. It used to describe the whole Creative Automation suite the AG Guide once belonged to. It now walks through this tool only, from signing in to the Asana hand-off, and includes a short narrated video of the new box resizing.
    • Changed AG Guide photos ship as sRGB again. The designers' finished guide pages carry ICC-tagged sRGB photos and the print shop separates them, so the tool's photos now do the same, with the sRGB profile attached. Yesterday's press-CMYK separation had been measured against a single "Press" export rather than the finished pages; side by side on the new site the sRGB photos came through better on the John Deere and the MacDon. The automatic levels lift is unchanged, and a printer who asks for pre-separated photos can still get the SWOP CMYK output by configuration.
    • Fixed Generate says when a photo prints at a manual 100%. Pressing − on a photo that is on Auto sets it to 100% by hand, which also turns automatic framing off for that photo, and the orange readout was easy to miss. The list under Generate now names each photo printed at a manual 100% and how to return it to Auto (click the percentage on its box).
    • Changed Territory Manager photos come from the creative team's colour-corrected set. The TM library held the raw June headshots, which carry a pink cast on the skin, and the tool had been correcting them on the way to the page. The library now holds the retouched headshot from each of the creative team's TM blocks for the Fall 2026 guide, framed the way the designers framed it, for all 24 Territory Managers (five of them new to the tool: Brett Radford, Doug Sinclair, Glen Motycka, Shane Sexauer, Tyler Doepker). The automatic skin correction is off, since the photos now arrive corrected. A saved build picks up its TM's new photo on its next Generate. Doug Sinclair, Shane Sexauer and Tyler Doepker have no phone number in the library yet; type it on the page until the creative team confirms it.
    • Fixed Photo captions print the plus-minus sign. A caption written as "+-" or "+/-" (a bin's "+- 4000 bu", for example) printed those characters as typed, while the same spelling in the pasted listing already printed as the single stacked ±. Captions now do the same, whether the name came from the photo's file name or was edited on the page, and the on-screen label matches the print.
    • Added Feature two photos. Star up to two photos on the Generate page and they print large in the top row: about a quarter taller than the usual top row, so the featured pair stands well over twice the height of the photos in the rows below, which give up a little height. It works on any template whose top row holds two photos: 8, 9 or 10 photos on one page, and every two-page template. Starred photos lead the page on screen and in print, in both automatic and custom order, and the choice is saved with the checkpoint. Asked for by a sale that wanted its two biggest pieces to stand out.
    • Changed The AG Guide has its own site. It now lives at rbmarketingautomation.com/agguide with the same logins and every saved build, checkpoint and Territory Manager profile. The AG Guide tab on this site is replaced by a link there. The tool has grown and is used differently from Image Search, so shipping it on its own means AG Guide updates no longer take Image Search offline for the minute each release restarts this app.
    • Fixed AG Guide photos now match the designers' pages. Photos are separated to press CMYK with the same SWOP characterisation the creative team's InDesign export uses, and every photo gets the levels lift the designers apply by hand (dull skies to white, mid-tones up, never past white). Side by side with a designer's PDF the equipment colours and brightness now line up; the earlier sRGB output looked darker and more saturated on screen. "Auto-brighten" remains the switch for the automatic tone, and a manual brightness still overrides it.
    • Fixed Generate and Finalize no longer re-upload photos the server already has. A sale's photos are 30 MB or more, and that upload on every Generate was the step that failed on an office connection. Photos restored from a saved build, or saved in a checkpoint, now go back to the server as references, so a re-render sends a few kilobytes. A progress bar under the status line shows the upload as it goes ("Uploading 12 of 31 MB"), a dropped connection is named as such with how far it got, and the upload is retried once by itself.
    • Fixed Territory Manager headshots lose their pink cast. The headshot files in the TM library carry a magenta tint on the skin that nobody retouches on the way to the page. The tool now measures the face and neutralises that cast on skin-coloured pixels only, so backdrops, shirts and hair print as shot and a portrait that already reads natural is left alone. A retouched headshot in the library still gives the best result.
    • Added Live framing preview in the AG Guide photo boxes. Each photo box is now the shape of the printed image (with a one-line printed name) and shows the crop the page will get. The zoom pill applies in real time: press + or − and the thumbnail changes with it, so you can see how much zoom a photo needs before generating; a manual percentage prints exactly as shown. On Auto, a small readout beside the pill shows the factor the automatic framing expects to print at (for example "124%"), worked out from a reduced copy of the photo as soon as it is added, so it can differ from the final page by a hair.
    • Changed Tighter automatic framing and a fuller page. Auto framing now zooms up to 35% toward the equipment (was 18%), still stopping short of cutting any machine, and the one-page photo grid and details block sit where the approved template puts them (the grid is 29pt taller and the empty band above the trim is gone). Both address the white space around equipment raised in the Weyburn comparison.
    • Added "A newer version is live" bar. A tab left open across a release now shows a bar with a Reload button as soon as it notices a newer build, instead of quietly running yesterday's version. It never reloads on its own.
    • Changed Find saved work says what it covers. With the search box empty it now states how many saved pages are searchable and how many were saved by teammates, so it is clear the search spans the whole team's work, not just your own.
    • Added Sale number on the AG Guide Asana task. A Sale number box now sits in the Asana push section. On Finalize it is appended to the task name, for example "2026-03-31 John and Annette Mattson Assiniboia, SK (Sale 123456)", and printed as the first line of the task's Asana fields, so a sale can be found in Asana by its number. It saves with checkpoints and comes back on restore. It is not printed on the page.
    • Fixed AG Guide saved-work search covers every page and says where the hits are. Four things made search look like it only covered the open page. The people on the page (seller contacts and additional consignors) were not searchable; they are now. A date typed naturally, such as September 3, 2026, found nothing because of the comma; it now matches. One sale with many checkpoints could fill the whole results list and hide the other pages; results now show the newest three per page so every matching sale is listed. And when the matches were in other pages, the checkpoint list under the Build box said only "No checkpoints match the search", which read as if search had failed; it now says how many matches there are and that they are listed under Find saved work above.
    • Improved AG Guide saved-work search now matches the sale's town. Searching for a sale by its location, for example Weyburn or Assiniboia, found nothing; only the sale name, checkpoint name, dates, and teammate were searched. The town now matches too, for existing saves as well as new ones, and search results show it beside the auction date so it is clear why a result matched.
    • Fixed The customer's phone number prints beside the customer's name. A phone number pasted in the sale text without a label used to land under the Territory Manager's name in the footer, while the seller block printed the customer's name with no number. A bare phone or email in the sale text now belongs to the customer and prints in the seller contact block, directly under their name. A line that mentions the Territory Manager, or carries a ritchiebros.com address, still routes to the TM block.
    • Added Manual zoom on every AG Guide photo. Each photo box now has a small − Auto + control. It starts on Auto, the automatic framing the tool has always done. Press + to bring the equipment closer (up to 200%), press − to pull back out, and the percentage shows exactly what you have chosen; 100% is the widest view the box can show. Click the percentage to hand the photo back to Auto. Your setting prints exactly as chosen, is saved with checkpoints, and comes back on restore. If a zoom pushes a photo past what it can give at print sharpness, the tool says so when you generate.
    • Fixed A file of exactly the stated size limit now uploads. Photo and file uploads were refusing a file that sat exactly on the limit, so a 10.0 MB photo was turned away on a screen that said 10 MB was allowed. The limit is now inclusive everywhere: exactly at the limit goes through, over it is still refused. This came in with a security update to the upload handling.
    • Fixed Equipment keeps its real color in the AG Guide press PDF. Photos were being converted for print inside the tool, and that conversion visibly shifted the machines: John Deere green went darker and sharper, yellow picked up a green cast, orange lightened, and tire black turned olive. Turning off "Auto-brighten dark photos" made no difference, because the shift was not coming from brightness. Photos now keep their original colours all the way into the PDF, and the conversion for the press happens at the print shop with their own press setup instead of inside the tool, which is both truer and how print shops normally work. The tool's usual preparation still applies: automatic framing, the optional brightness help, and print sizing. Type and brand color are unchanged: black text still prints on the black plate alone and the brand orange still hits its specified build. Guide PDFs are also about a third of their previous size.
    • Fixed AG Guide saved-work search now finds the actual sale across every build. Search by sale name, auction date, checkpoint name, save date, or teammate and matching checkpoints appear immediately with a result count. Selecting a result opens and focuses its build without restoring over the page currently being edited. Existing checkpoints are included, not only saves made after this fix.
    • Fixed Finalizing an AG Guide sale again updates the same Asana task even when the build was never saved first. The in-place update only worked for sales whose build had been saved before the first Finalize. A sale finalized straight from the form had no build for its task to be linked to, saving a checkpoint afterwards could not repair that, and so the next Finalize created a second task. Finalize now saves the sale as a build on its own (it appears in the build list with a "Finalized: ..." checkpoint under Save progress), links the Asana task to it, and switches the button to "Update Asana task". After a reload, open the sale's build from the list first and the same button updates its task.
    • New Upload the hero image right in the AG Guide builder. Answering Yes to "Do you have a Hero Image ready to upload?" now opens an upload box instead of only recording the answer. The image is attached to the Asana task for whoever builds the auction web page, and it is never printed on the guide page. It saves with your checkpoints like every other input, so a rollback brings it back, and finalizing again replaces it with the current one. Switching the answer to No clears the file, so the task never carries a hero image the sale says it does not have.
    • Fixed Finalizing an AG Guide sale again updates the same Asana task. A second Finalize used to create a second task, leaving the first one holding out-of-date notes and the old press PDF. It now rewrites the task the sale already produced: the notes are brought up to date, the press PDF and photos are replaced with the current ones, and a comment on the task lists what changed so everyone following it still gets notified. The subtasks the crew is already working are left alone, and files anyone attached by hand are never removed.
    • Improved Clearer AG Guide form labels and examples. "Seller" is now "Sale Name", and the greyed-out examples in Location, Directions to Yard, Equipment viewing, GPS and Legal land description have been replaced with the format each field expects, so nobody has to guess whether a sample town or a real one is wanted.
    • New A second Territory Manager, an extra phone number, and the hero-image question. The Territory Manager section can now hold a second TM, each seller contact can carry a Phone (additional), and the Asana push section asks whether a hero image is ready to upload. All three save with your checkpoints and ride into the Asana task.
    • Fixed No more duplicate TM boxes. The Asana push section no longer repeats Territory Manager 1 and 2; the page's own Territory Manager section is the single place TM details are entered, and that is what is pushed to Asana.
    • Improved AG Guide pages now match the printed guide exactly. Pages are built at the guide's real trim size (8.25 × 10.75 in with an eighth-inch bleed and printer trim marks), with the specified margins, and the whole page is set in the guide's Inter typeface at the faces and sizes from the design team's guide. The page size is locked so it can never drift again.
    • Improved Seller and secondary name share one line. The page header now prints the seller and the secondary advertised name together, separated by a middle dot, matching the approved design. The Hurricane banner question is now a fixed choice (Farm Auction Fees, Site Fees, or N/A) instead of a typed answer.
    • New Shared builds and recall search in AG Guide. Saved builds are now shared with the whole team — anyone can open a build, restore a checkpoint, and save onto it, with each checkpoint showing who saved it (deleting stays with the creator). A new search box filters builds and checkpoints by name, date, or teammate.
    • New Asana stays in sync with sale-detail changes. Once a sale is finalized to Asana, later edits to its key details (date, directions, collected dollars, and more) post a change notice on that Asana task the moment the updated work is saved as a checkpoint, so the crew following the task always hears about updates.
    • Fixed Saved AG Guide builds no longer vanish quietly. The tool used to make room for new saves by silently deleting the oldest saved builds; a guide season has more sales than the old limit allowed. The limits are now far higher, and if one is ever reached the save message says exactly what was removed.
    • Fixed AG Guide print polish after review. Long names, titles, and contact lines in the page footer now shorten cleanly with a visible ellipsis and a warning, instead of wrapping over the line below; every footer detail that had to be shortened is called out. And when the seller and secondary name are too long to share one line, the secondary name prints on its own smaller line so it can never drop off the page.
    • Added New access level: Image Search + AG Guide. Accounts can now be scoped to Image Search plus the AG Guide builder. These accounts land directly on the AG Guide and see just the pages they can use. Administrators pick the level from the Admin page, both when approving a new email and on any existing account.
    • Changed Clearer sign-in help. If you try to log in or resend the verification email before your account actually exists, the login page now says so and takes you straight to the Sign up tab with your email prefilled, instead of reporting an email was sent when there was nothing to send. It also tells you when your email is already verified, so a wrong password sends you to password reset rather than a pointless resend.
    • Added Usage feed. A live view of who used which feature and when — grouped by day, all times US Pacific, refreshed every 30 seconds. Find it next to How To in the top nav.
    • Added Account access levels. Accounts can now be scoped to specific features (for example, Image Search only). Administrators manage the approved user list and each account's access from the new Admin page.
    • Added AG Guide: auto-fill from the sale write-up. Paste the write-up from the Word doc or Wrike and one click fills the auction fields — date, auction type, location, seller, directions, viewing, GPS, legal land — while bulleted equipment lines become the printed Equipment Highlights.
    • Improved AG Guide: portrait-ready headshots. Territory Manager headshots are cropped face-aware, so the head sits correctly in the portrait slot whatever the source photo's framing.
    • Fixed Auto-fill keeps both consignors instead of dropping the second, and the login page now says what actually went wrong instead of failing without an explanation.
    • Added AG Guide: save progress & rollback. Save a named checkpoint at any point in a build and restore any earlier one if something goes wrong. Checkpoints are stored on the server, so they survive a reload and follow you to any device.
    • Improved Print-true color. Guide PDFs now encode photos for the press (CMYK), so the printed page matches what you approved on screen. Superseded August 31, 2026: that in-tool conversion turned out to shift equipment colours, so photos now keep their original colours and the print shop handles the press conversion.
    • Added AG Guide: printed photo captions. Every photo prints with a caption — two lines with automatic height, on by default.
    • Improved AG Guide: Territory Manager library. Saved TMs are searchable by name and fill the whole contact block in one click — and the existing TM roster was imported, so most TMs are already there.
    • Fixed AG Guide layout tidiness. Undocumented photo codes no longer leak into the printed page, and long directions stay inside their box.
    • Added AG Guide: photo ordering + bulk add. Add photos in bulk and let them sort into standard equipment order, or switch to custom order and drag to arrange.
    • Added AG Guide. A new Generate tab that builds the press-ready Ag Auction Guide page: pick a template, add photos (dark ones brighten automatically and everything sorts to standard SOP order), fill in the auction details, add the Territory Manager and consignors, then generate a print-ready PDF with a live, zoomable preview.
    • Fixed Email casing. Login, signup, and forgot-password now lowercase the email so capitalization can't lock you out.
    • Added Auth, end-to-end. Invite-only signup via PocketBase, email-verification gate, self-serve password reset, and verification emails wired through the deploy.