I have a group of friends and relatives I originally sent a link and a password to, to give them access to my group of albumns - it was that simple. No registration (which even most technically savy people hate these days anyway!), no fuss, no mess!

I don’t want to give my albumns acccess to ‘public’ to do this - thats not what I used to do at all either!!!

Please just fix this, renewal time is coming around,
and my family has just stopped using this site as ‘too hard’…and given they are varying degrees of technical savy thats not a good sign..!

Why not just alow people to choose how they give security to their content?? I know that social network registration is a way of marketing as well, but thats what adding comments, etc is there to force people to do.

That password facility was why I payed the dosh, and its why I (hopefully!) will upon renewal..!

People just want a way of being able to grant a group of users access to a group of content….

Why not just change your existing system slightly…
allow the administrators to create a user called ‘password1′, ‘password2′, etc (which can be granted rights just the same way as real users with the current system!) - and have a slightly different front-end link for those type users??

many thanks!
Mark

I’m a .NET developer and understand wanting to move to a WPF application (the framework the new desktop client is written in), but comparing it to the 1.X client is embarrassing. There is fuzziness on nearly all text, the images are slow to load, and most importantly from a usability aspect there are buttons all over the place, non-standard menus, etc.

Desktop client aside it appears that images that are web-linked are served up at a lower quality than in the past. The images on our blogs (which we will have to update all the links to) are not as sharp and vibrant as they once were.

We left Phanfare once due to the looming 2.0 changes and moved to SmugMug. I enjoyed the ability to highly customize the albums, etc, but it lacked the central, well-designed client application that Phanfare 1.x had.

Once you guys relented on some of the more ‘aggressive’ changes to 2.0 we moved back. Now I’m looking for another good home because while I can live with a work in progress, I don’t get the feeling you guys have the same goal as I do. A simple, clean, unobtrusive way for me to archive and link to my pictures.

I manage the website for a swim club and the members would like have a place to view photos. I would like to recommend Phanfare, but albums would need to be password protected. I don’t want to ask over 200 families to create Phanfare accounts or manage that many email addresses. Without this feature I would have to go with SmugMug or Zenfolio which I don’t want to do. Is there any way to still sign up for a 1.0 account until this feature returns or the pro account is available?

Thanks,

Marc

Thank god! I actually switched everything over to zenfolio, but after reading this, I am back in action. Your site is far more superior, and now with open albums, I am your customer once again.

Thanks!

Janet

For people using open URLs because they are easier to navigate for grandma, and are hoping for security through obscurity, our current setup is probably best.

For people who are hoping to get a large amount of traffic from anonymous people, not allowing google is not good.

In 1.0, we had it as a setting.

Stephen,
I hear you that it is easier for grandma to just type in a password. the integrated emailing of invites with isolated links should help a little bit. we are considering a pro version that might include passwords (and not include the social networking features). let us turn off 1.0 before we settle this. also, consider putting one of the screensavers on grandma’s computer.

Brian,
Teddy Roosevelt was right. And 2.0 was a good swipe at attempting to make phanfare a media play - and I think the more network-oriented features we created will be an important differentiation and barrier to entry for competitors in the long run. But phanfare is no media play right now and we are going to return to our normally scheduled programming of focusing on people who will pay to keep their photos and videos in the cloud and expect/want better service and more control.

we are considering creating a pro version of phanfare and it would cost more - helping us and giving us a separate revenue stream against which to evaluate more pro-like requests (not just businesses, but people who buy the pro version of products, like me!)

the basic answer to ‘how are you going to make money’ is the old fashioned way, by increasing revenue and cutting costs. we already have margin on every account sold. we just need to sell more accounts. and one good way of doing that is by delighting customers, versus pissing them off by removing features they liked. so lesson learned there.

Phanfare is a bit of a collective. We DO have the best tools on the planet, period. and we all have our photos and videos here. we will do the hard work of getting the company profitable so Phanfare does not go away. We have lots of dry powder and amazing people. It is fully possible.

I can’t help but ask, “What happened to Teddy Roosevelt?”

I was a fierce, angry critic of your elimination of public albums. So, let me say thank you for listening to your customers.

We had begun the process of transitioning to SmugMug. But, my wife and I will now remaing paying customers of Phanfare.

I hope that the move to restore public albums presages a different customer-facing posture for Phanfare moving forward — that when making or contemplating changes to Phanfare that fundamentally alter the manner in which users interact with its services, you reach out to customers BEFORE deciding to embark on that change.

Your mention above of polling customers re: the pro pack hints at just that sort of change.

Let me ask this — in your response to my original, angry posts about the death of Phanfare 1.0, you wrote that the business “was losing money and not growing fast enough”. Now that you’ve restored the public album functionality, what are your plans to address this problem? Is it that you hope a large percentage of the 125,000 people who were exposed to Phanfare by being forced to create accounts will now become paying customers? Is it changing the pricing structure to get fees from “low storage” users, with a graduated fee schedule for “moderate” and “high” storage users? A mix of the two? Something else?

Those of us who pay for your service want it to succeed — if for no other reason than we’ve invested time and energy in developing online photo albums that can be shared with loved ones, and we’d prefer not to have to duplicate our efforts by transitioning to another provider.

So, let me also offer this — I think that many of us who pay for your service — because we find it valuable and easy to use — would pay more for it if such were necessary to secure Phanfare’s financial viability.

Currently, we pay $54.95/yr for your service (unlimited storage). That’s what — $4.58/month? I pay more than 3 times that monthly for Netflix, and I don’t get nearly as much enjoyment out of Netflix as I do out of Phanfare.

Also, you write in one of your blog posts of no mainstream business cracking “…the code of creating a mainstream service that preserves fullsize original media for the consumer and is free for all to use.”

I think the assumption you make about the service needing to be “…free for all to use” doesn’t apply to YOUR customer base. Those of us who put albums up are a special, niche customer base — We’re not teenage FLICKR customers throwing some random, small number of cell-phone photos up on the web for the hell of it.

We’re families who are using Phanfare as an alternative to the age-old practice of pasting photos into large album binders to be shared with family members during holidays and other gatherings. Or we’re professionals seeking a home for galleries that can easily be perused by potential customers. We’re interested in something robust, easy to use, easy to access, but more permanent, too — and not necessarily free. I think we’re willing to pay for permance and ease of access for our viewers — and I think we’d be willing to pay more. Just something to consider….

You said, “But you do get more control and the viewer gets more convenience if privileges to locked down albums are based on registered users accounts. For one thing, if you track multiple phanfare users, you can see all the albums with just one password, a password which you can reset if you forget it, since it is associated with your account.”

I totally agree and that’s why I’m not clamoring for passwords. But I am clamoring for the flattening of connections because of both the

(1) benefits of the registration (like you said, a lot more convenience: just one password rather than a dozen different site passwords–not to mention per-album passwords).

and

(2) the current system’s limitation. There is no way to share an album with just one or just a handful of people from within the Phanfare network. Yes, you could email isolated album invites but this requires the invitee to keep track of the email messages which contain their album invitation links. Or perhaps they could bookmark them in their browser. Either way, it’s not very convenient. If registered user A has shared ANY albums with registered user B, then B should see ALL of the albums that A has shared with him just by logging in with his one password. This is why you have had so many confused users who were trying to use Groups as a way of sharing albums with a specific subset of their connections (remember things like “Jack’s college friends”?). The strict, uncustomizable, Friends & Family model has led to this. When one wants to share some albums (not necessarily related, or otherwise not suitable for a Group) with just a few people, the registration system is no better than the password system–the one that you know is clunky and inconvenient. Keeping track of passwords or keeping track of email invites… it’s like six in one hand, half a dozen in the other.

As for offering simple password protected albums, we may bring this back. But you do get more control and the viewer gets more convenience if privileges to locked down albums are based on registered users accounts. For one thing, if you track multiple phanfare users, you can see all the albums with just one password, a password which you can reset if you forget it, since it is associated with your account.

In terms of a refund, Phanfare offers pro-rated refunds and we will be happy to provide you one. We have only had 2 chargebacks since we started business in 2004. We don’t charge people money who are unhappy.

Explain your need for password protected albums. Maybe there is a workaround that we can suggest.