• Video is now synchronized to the iPhone over the air and will play offline in airplane mode.
• Properly supports the new Phanfare Site features, including sending sharing invites to Phanfare sites and publishing an album to your Phanfare site.
• Supports changing album properties under iPhone OS 3.0.
• Fixed the bug that prevented associating with a facebook account from Photon.
• Better support for album sections. You can see and edit album section descriptions.
• Support for shooting and uploading video from iPhone 3G S phones. Note that we are still not converting iPhone video properly on the service but are working to address that.
• Supports assigning albums to Subsites for Pro users.
• Follows the convention of other Phanfare apps (Mac,PC and Web) in showing an album as private (ghostbusters icon) if the album is not published to your Phanfare site.
• Deprecates the Phanfare social networking features. New albums are created with friend & family visibility turned off. Friends and Family features are off the main tab bar and appear in the “more” area.
• Numerous small bug fixes. For example, deleting the last image in album does not crash the app.

You will also notice that our extensions the camera view are gone. They were touch-anywhere-to-shoot, image-stabilization-assist and self-timer. These features were disallowed by Apple when they released the 3.0 version of the iPhone OS. The good news is that we believe that we can put these features back in using a future version of the iPhone OS.

Our data shows that more than 90% of photos taken using Photon don’t use the camera within the app. Most people prefer to take photos and videos using the built-in camera app on the phone, saving them to the roll. Then they import the photos and videos to Phanfare Photon.

The built-in camera still has a much shorter shot-to-shot time than the camera within Photon. This is due to limitations of the iPhone SDK. We recommend that all users shoot with the built-in camera. We would pull our camera control out but we are leaving it in since we believe we will be able to provide the camera extensions in a future release. Let us know how you feel about having it in.

How it works

Launch Phanfare Photon on the iPhone, navigate to any album in your whole collection, then click on the send-to-facebook button. You will be able to choose which photos are sent. Phanfare then creates a new album on facebook and transfer the images, server to server, so no bandwidth is used from your iPhone. Once the images are at facebook you can tag them and your friends can comment on them.

Why it matters

You can already send photos to facebook from your iPhone using the facebook iPhone app, but facebook is not archival. They throw away more than 90% of the data from your photos when they downsample and compress your images. Phanfare retains the whole image, and any edits you make.

Phanfare is intended to hold your entire photo and video collection. I don’t know about you, but I have a lot more friends on facebook than I have on Phanfare, and while I love to share a small subset of my photos with my wider facebook network, only my closer friends and family have access to my whole photo and video collection on Phanfare.

Phanfare also lets me hide the photos and videos that I don’t want to share, but I want to keep, such as slightly redundant photos from an event or a photo that might not capture our family in the best light.

But there is no doubt that facebook is where your friends are. With 150MM people and growing, you are far more likely to find any given friend on facebook than Phanfare.

But didn’t Phanfare already support publishing to facebook?

Yes, we did, but the older integration places external links automatically on your facebook newsfeed that link back to Phanfare. This works well for some, and we continue to support it, but your facebook friends can’t comment or tag photos on Phanfare from facebook, and the whole album is visible to your facebook friends.

The new integration allows you to be more selective with what you show on facebook, and it puts the photos fully into the facebook ecosystem where they can be tagged and your friends can comment. The new integration requires you to manually choose which photos you want to push over to facebook. While less automated, this allows you to be more selective.

You can use the old and new facebook integration. Personally, I created a Phanfare group called “facebook” and any album I want to make fully accessilbe on facebook, I make visible to the “facebook” group on Phanfare. There are no members of that group. It’s just a placeholder so I an decide what to publish.

And I also use our new facebook integration from the iPhone and the web. I will choose just a few photos from a recent Phanfare album and push them over to facebook.

But wait, there’s more

This release of Phanfare Photon also includes a bunch of other features such as re-ordering of images using wiggle mode, and the ability to pinch and zoom images. You can read the release notes for the full story.

Tell us in the comments about your experience with the Phanfare-to-facebook transfer on the iPhone and let us know any other conduits you want us to build. We don’t hold your photos and videos hostage at Phanfare. We want you to be able to view them wherever, whenever and on whatever device you please.