Views from Phanfare CEO and Co-founder Andrew Erlichson
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Link Major overhaul to our web client

We have made some improvements to the Phanfare service. The big news is that we have significantly reduced the gap between the web client of Phanfare and the downloadable clients for managing your account. This will allow you to most everything you need to do from the web (viewing has always been on the web).

New web client features:

  • Music upload/import from itunes. From the album option menu you can upload an mp3 or import from itunes using a java applet. Only thing missing is music preview.

  • Style picker. If you click on “change style”, you will see the full list of album styles.

  • Reorder sections. If an album has multiple sections, you can change the order of the sections.

  • Move images. If you select images and click on “extras” you will see the option to move images to another album. (This is a cut and paste, not copy and paste.)
  • Image detail. From image detail, you can view and edit captions. Plus, clicking on info includes a link to get external links for individual photos and videos.
  • Clicking “preview slideshow” will play the slideshow and leave you on the album page when it is over.
  • From any album, you can click on “show all albums” to see a view of all of your albums.
  • Drag and drop. You can drag and drop images directly onto the java uploader, including from iphoto and picasa.

Other than image edits and transforms, the web interface has almost all of the management functionality that the desktop applications have.

Other features in this release:

  • Friend Finder. There is now a place on your Phanfare home page that shows you connections of your connections that you might want to connect with. From the “see more” link you will also have the opportunity to search your email address book for contacts that are already on Phanfare.
  • Inviting friends/family to a group. There is now a link that allows you to choose existing friends/family to invite to a group without having to re-enter their email addresses.
  • Visitors by day. This report now shows you the names of the visitors who came on each day.
  • Slideshow changes. Added the names to appear under the buttons in the slideshow controls. Fixed a bug where videos were playing only in smallest rendition in many instances.
  • New privacy setting. If you don’t want visitors to your shared albums or even friends of friends to be able to ask you to connect, you can choose to only allow connection requests from people who know your email address.

If you have a favorite feature that is missing from Phanfare today, please post it in the comments.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 10:47 am and is filed under Digital photography, General, YUI. 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.

Viewing 12 Comments

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    Love the new updates!!! Especially the 'People you may know..." feature.
    Great work. It just keeps getting better and better :-)
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    • v
    I still miss all the Phanfare 1.0 features that were taken away.

    -I (and my friends) want RSS feeds back so they don't have to get email every time I add new albums. If this isn't happening soon then I suggest changing the title on the email that gets sent out because the title makes it seem like spam.
    -I also want the other album layout back with all thumbnails in a grid. I don't like how the current layout crops my images in the thumbnails.
    • ^
    • v
    we are planning on adding back RSS feeds. it will be an RSS feed of all the albums created by family and friends with whom you are connected.
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    • v
    I really want to see the Family/Friends sharing model to be flattened to a generic "connection" model with fine-grain unilateral hidden access control lists to easily share with all "College friends", "Immediate Family", "Extended Family" or whatever other arbitrary categories the user wishes to use. The user would also be able to give or prevent access to an album on a per-viewer basis. The categories would just be a way of streamlining the process of choosing who may view an album.

    I just got updated to 2.0 and am immediately frustrated by the constraint of only two pre-defined categories without any fine-grain control on a per-album basis.

    Additionally, in order to mesh with the Phanfare Facebook app, one should be able to choose on a per-album basis which albums to share with Facebook. Facebook could be its own "connection" which would stand as a placeholder for all of one's Facebook friends. Obviously you wouldn't be able to choose through the Phanfare app which Facebook friends can see one's content, but this way it would be easy to decide which albums would show up on Facebook and which wouldn't.
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    • v
    if you want to show certain albums to your facebook friends, create a phanfare group, let's say called facebook, and then tag those albums into the facebook group. only publish facebook group albums on your facebook profile. this gives you per-album control.
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    • v
    Regarding Facebook: Ah very clever, Andrew. Ok. That sounds good.

    How about the flattening of the connections? A while back you asked for feedback offering two different options and the one I described above (which is a restatement of one of option #1) was overwhelmingly popular. (See this thread: http://forum.phanfare.com/showthread.php?t=1708 ) At the time I had the impression that it was just a matter of time before Phanfare would do that (but that it would take some time and we might lose the pretty TOC).

    Is that still the case, or is that up in the air now? Is that something you'll be asking about in the upcoming survey?
    • ^
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    We are going to make the social networking features more optional and we hope that this will reduce the interest in us pulling apart the friends/family thing. in particular, we will enable open public albums and will bring back the ability to share via email with people without requiring the viewer to be registered. Hence, you can use the social networking features of phanfare with closer friends and family.

    So, in short, we back burnered the flattening of friends/family but if there continues to be a strong interest, we will do it.
    • ^
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    WOW! THIS IS GREAT NEWS, Andrew!

    THANKS SO MUCH - I LOVE not having to exit Phanfare over the social networking features which I don't care for at all.

    Will you also allow the use of customized URLs as before?
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    • v
    That's wonderful!!! Do I understand this correctly, if my friends go to www.myname.phanfare.com, they'll be able to see my albums again without having to register? Whohoo.
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    I wish to start a site for my club. We are a motorcycle club and would like to post pictures of various events we have thruout the year. We would like anyone and everyone to be able to view these pictures as we do not want to restrict anyone. We feel this is a great advantage for us as far a public relations go. With anyone and everyone being able to see the various events it will increase membership into the club. As I understand now, this will not be possible. If it is possible please let me know so I can sign my club up and get started immediatly.
    • ^
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    It would be great if the people I invite to view my albums could invite others (obviously letting me authorise)... this would allow relatives to invite other relatives to see photos, and same with friends. This would also help Phanfare grow much quicker!

    A question - if the people I invite decide to sign up for membership for, say, 1 year, do I still get a free year membership?
    • ^
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    Tony: as of today, you can mark all your albums as public and all will be able to see the, no registration required.

    Jolene: we have been thinking about how to allow pass-along of secure links. we will get to this.

    Saki: for a 1.0 phanfare user that upgraded to 2.0, username.phanfare.com will redirect to albums.phanfare.com/username. For a 2.0 user, your albums appear at http://albums.phanfare.com/username where username is chosen by you.

    Sorry for the slow response. I was away for the Memorial day weekend.
 

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