We are power users of Phanfare and tend to assume that all of you are too. But there are ten great features that many folks don’t realize we have.

1. Versioning of images. When you edit an image, we keep the original around so you can always revert to it in the future if you don’t like your changes.
2. Recovery from computer crashes. If you download Phanfare on a new computer and login, your whole world appears and you can access your original fullsize images. It is not empty like iPhoto, Picasa, and other client-side organizers that are tabula rasa when you first install them on a new computer.
3. High quality video archive. We store two versions of every video uploaded, one at web streaming bandwidth, the other at DVD quality, so when the internet gets faster, we can upgrade the viewer experience. And we use Flash 8, unlike most sites that are still stuck on the lower-quality Flash 7.
4. A really slick Mac version. Most folks are PC users so they have never tried the Mac version. The mac version is visually more attractive than the PC version. And with Phanfare, if you ever switch to the Mac, your whole collection travels with you.
5. A way to fix under-exposed images. Our auto-level tool works very well and you can select whole groups of photos and apply all at once.
6. Video in your slide shows. Our slide shows include videos. As we transition from a still image to a video we lower the music so that your viewers can hear the soundtrack of the video, then we raise the volume back up as we transition to the first still image.
7. Secure RSS feeds. Even if you password protect your site, you can use RSS because we put a really long random string in the RSS feed URL. If you change your site password, we change the RSS URL, flushing out all the folks who previously had access.
8. Isolated invitations. If you password protect your site, you can send an invitation out to a person that contains a link to just one album and hides the rest of your table of contents. This feature is great if you want to invite a co-worker to see photos from work without passing the person your entire personal collection.
9. One step album creation. If you drag a folder of images and video onto the “Create new album in 20xx” label in Phanfare, it creates the album, imports the images and automatically updates your website.
10. Mutual trust linking of Phanfare sites. Through the Phanfare Phriends program you can list your close friends’ albums on your site. A person who knows your password can click through to a Phriend without entering their password, and vice versa. But they go no further. For example, you could trust your brother so that folks who can see his albums can also see yours, and folks who can see your albums can also see his.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 8th, 2006 at 1:27 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.