We now properly detect and warn you when you are trying to upload photos or videos that are already uploaded. This is nice little feature. It means that when an upload fails or you need to restart it, you can just select everything again and we will sort out what remains to be uploaded.

Uploading was also made more robust. We detect a variety of errors and automatically retry. Overall, the uploading experience should be better.

Duplicate detection is implemented for the Flash (MyComputer) and Java uploader.

We also enhanced the slideshow music uploader for the Phanfare web organizer. It allows sorting and searching your current collection. Before, you needed to tediously scroll through the whole list to find stuff.

We now support music collections that are not on you main drive. This was a long-standing annoyance.

Aside from those features, we fixed a variety of other nits and bugs.

All this month, we are doubling that offer to 40%. Hence, if you refer a friend to Phanfare Premium, the friend gets a discount of $39.60 off their first year subscription of $99 and you get $39.60 in Phanfare credit.

If you refer a friend to Phanfare Pro, the friend gets $79.60 off their first year subscription of $199 and you get $79.60 in Phanfare credit.

There is no limit to how much credit you can earn.

The fine print: Your friend must sign-up for our free trial in September 2010. To give you the credit, your friend must enter your email or your special referral code at signup or payment.

If you are a Phanfare customer, you special referral code is shown here.

There are two separate ways to publish within your Phanfare account. The first way is our Website Hosting Model, under which each customer can set a custom URL and has a site at you.phanfare.com, where ‘you’ is chosen by you. When you click Publish after creating an album, your Phanfare site includes the album. You can email folks about that URL or you can use our email tools to notify people.

The second way to publish is to make an album available to Phanfare Friends, Family and Groups. You do this by clicking on the “friends and family” button in album options and choosing from checkboxes for friends, family and your various Phanfare groups.

If you make an album visible through the Phanfare social network then it appears at albums.phanfare.com/you. When friends go to that URL, they are asked to login. As an added wrinkle, your Phanfare connections are automatically notified nightly of all the new albums created by you and their other Phanfare connections.

The Phanfare social network is a vestige of when Phanfare was a freemium service, back in 2008. In that model, you would invite your friends to connect to you within Phanfare, they would get free accounts with 1GB of storage and be able to participate at some level.

When we first came out with the social network version of Phanfare in 2008, people told us that they wanted to make some albums available to everyone, not requiring them to login. And so we added that feature. If you click through the friends and family sharing button in album options, the choices you are presented with are “just me”, “everyone”, or some combination of friends family and groups. When you choose everyone, the album gets published without restriction to albums.phanfare.com/you.

What this basically comes down to is that we have two completely separate but equal ways of publishing content. We know this is complicated and tricky and so we simplified it months ago by removing the Phanfare friends and family sharing options for people who have no Phanfare friends and family. New customers already see a vastly simplified sharing model.

Without the friends and family stuff, an album in Phanfare is published to your Phanfare site, or not. Your site can have a password. Or not. That’s it. You can also control whether or not your site gets indexed by Google (that’s in Site Properties).

We also offer subsites, which fits neatly into the website hosting model. With subsites, you can create a URL like you.phanfare.com/soccer and specify that certain albums are included at that URL. You can set a password for that subsite or leave it open.

When Phanfare was freemium, having a way to connect with other free users in Phanfare made sense. But Freemium did not work for Phanfare and we have long since abandoned it as a business model.

We plan to completely remove the friends and family features in a future release. They have outlived their usefuless. We now offer transfer to flickr and facebook for those looking for social networking. Most of your friends and family probably have facebook accounts, and if not, it’s free to join.

And yet there are those who love the friends and family features because they offer a form of access control lists (ACLs). We believe that you can essentially recreate this control using subsites. You can create a subsite called you.phanfare.com/friends and publish albums into that only friends can see. You can create a separate subsite password. We know its not exactly the same thing – all the viewers to the site share a viewing password and you lose some reporting granularity – but it’s close.

Phanfare groups are a different matter. They were intended to allow groups to collaborate and all contribute albums to a common group. But the reality is that 95% of Phanfare groups are controlled by one person and only one person publishes content to them. Hence, they too can be replaced with subsites.

When we remove the Phanfare friends and family features in a future release, we plan to make the Phanfare subsites feature available to all. We will also attempt to map your current Phanfare friends, family and groups to new subsites for you, and we will create contact lists of the members of these containers so you can continue to reach out to them when you add new content.

I wrote this longish post because I want you to understand how the system works today if you are a power user and to let you know where we are headed with it.

In design, less is definitely more, and if it requires a post this long to explain our sharing model, we know it has gotten away from us.

In the interim, we suggest that all customers stop using the Phanfare friends and family features. When you create an album, you just need to click Publish to make it available on your Phanfare site. Be sure to set a site password if you want to keep your site private.

Finally, you have always been able to get an isolated URL that shows a viewer only a single album with no links to any other content. That feature remains the same and its useful when sharing an album on a one-off basis with someone who should not see other content. Those links are not in your site namespace and don’t lead back to your site if the viewer manipulated the URL in their web browser.

You may ask why we hosted it on YouTube. YouTube is about finding an audience for your work. Phanfare is about hosting your photos and videos for your existing audience, often privately. But for those who want to see the video on Phanfare, here it is.

When we tweet an album on your behalf, we tweet the album name and a link through a Phanfare redirector (phanfare.com/t/shortname) so the viewer knows when clicking on a link that it really comes from Phanfare.

The tweeted links don’t include any authentication so if the album is published to a site that is password protected, then the viewer will need to know the password.

Over the last few years, we have added high quality merchandise to Phanfare: first prints, then photo books and cards and data DVDs. Recently we experimented with super low prices, fairly close to our cost, to see how it affected subscriptions to Phanfare. Those experiments confirmed my intuition that being the bargain basement provider is not consistent with our premium positioning or cost structure.

One of my goals for this year in these recessionary times is to make sure that we make money at everything we do. As a result, you are going to see some fairly dramatic prices increases on some items. For example, 4×6 prints will be going from 8 cents to 16 cents. An 8×8 book is increasing from $19.59 to $34.99.

I realize that for some of you, these price increases will come as a shock, and it will certainly reduce the overall volume of merchandise we sell. But I don’t think you will be disappointed with the quality of our merchandise, the customer service behind it, or our guarantee of your complete satisfaction.

As close Phanfare watchers know, we just lowered the price of Premium subscription from $54.95/year to $49.99/year. We did this in anticipation of introducing storage limits for new customers after approximately August 1st (existing customers grandfathered). Once the new accounts have a storage limit, the pricing will be rational. Our new Pro accounts will come with more storage and the option to buy additional storage.

We also used to offer two sets of merchandise prices, one to premium subscribers and one to free users. We used the merchandise discount as an enticement to join our premium program. We are no longer doing that. There will be one set of prices. Many of the people who buy merchandise are the friends and loved ones of the account holder and we don’t want to discriminate against them.

Free accounts (freemium) are not a big part of our future. We are right now offering all free users the ability to buy their first year of Premium at half off if they buy before August 1. Freemium users who buy Premium before August 1st also get an unlimited storage account, also going the way of the dodo bird on August 1.

Note that if if you sign up on our home page today, the offer is a 14 day unrestricted trial account, not a freemium account.

I hope you will still buy and enjoy our merchandise. It is expensive to produce integrated merchandise. Aside from the engineering involved, there are configurators, customer support and the management attention to finding high quality vendors. By buying our merchandise, you are supporting Phanfare and we appreciate it.

As always, we don’t hold your images hostage at Phanfare. You can download full size originals, even zip files of entire albums, and print at home or print through a third party. We sell photo merchandise as a convenience to our customers and for some incremental revenue, but it is not our main purpose. The main business of Phanfare is providing a subscription-based, archival, photo and video sharing service.

• Links pushed to facebook using the Phanfare Facebook app are fixed
• Flash uploader now reads captions properly
• Bug where Phanfare did not allow you to authenticate to multiple Phanfare sites simultaneously is fixed
• Video from the 3Gs iPhone now converts properly. Note that we still have the rotation issue if you take video vertically, although we do support manual rotation of the video for proper display on the web.

Let us know if you see any other problems.

But what I do believe is that it is not Phanfare’s role to provide the basic social networking infrastructure. That is best provided by facebook and hence, we have built conduits so that you can share your photos and videos on social networks, while securely archiving the originals at Phanfare.

At the same time, our customers, who tend to be photography enthusiasts, like having their own site. When you are sharing with an audience of people who may not all embrace social networking (grandma) or sharing with people who are not your friends (colleagues, etc), it is convenient to have your own site. Having your own site gives you a sense of ownership over your media. Rather than living as some node within some ecosystem, it is your real estate. And so we brought back the site hosting model that was originally our hallmark.

What we have given up on is trying to provide tools to social network within Phanfare. But that is more about how we approach integrating social networking concepts versus giving up on the genre. In fact, by integrating with facebook and flickr, Phanfare is much more social than it would be by itself. But I will say that Jeff’s headline is more catchy than: “Phanfare deprecates internal social networking infrastructure in favor of integrating with facebook and flickr.”

Our Phanfare facebook app is one of the most popular apps we have amongst our customers. Using the Phanfare facebook app, Phanfare customers can move an album of images (downsampled to facebook resolution) in one click. And once there, your facebook friends can comment on them and tag them.

I am pleased to announce that we have overhauled the Phanfare tools to support simple web hosting of your photos and videos at yourname.phanfare.com. This change will make it easier for you to use Phanfare and for your viewers to see your content. We are rolling out these changes on Thursday, June 25th, 2009. Your old Phanfare username is reserved for your use.

Phanfare’s social networking tools (adding friends, getting automatic content notifications when friends and family add content, Phanfare groups) are still in the system for those who want to use them.

Phanfare’s new sharing model is simple. Every album is either published or not to your Phanfare site. You can share URLs at an album or site level. If you have a site password set, your viewers will be asked for the password before being allowed to view.

We have created a new contact list to hold your commonly used email addresses. It will be populated with your Phanfare friends and family as well as people that were in your Phanfare address book prior to January 1, 2008.

You can also share your site and album URLs with Phanfare’s built-in email tools. The invitations to view your albums will not require viewers to sign-up to see your albums. When composing invitations to view your site, you can utilize addresses from your new Phanfare contact list.

All Phanfare tools are updated to support our new simple web hosting model. Be sure to download the latest version of your favorite tool on Thursday morning at http://www.phanfare.com/apps.aspx. The Mac and PC client automatically update themselves.

For Phanfare long-timers, you will rightly see these changes as bringing back the original Phanfare sharing model that was so adored by all of you for its simplicity and sense of ownership. Of course, it comes with all the new functionality that we have added in the time since, including an amazing iPhone and iPod touch app for managing your Phanfare site and plugins for popular tools like iPhoto, Picasa, Lightroom and Aperture. We have built conduits to move photos and videos to Facebook and Flickr. Phanfare continues to use Amazon S3 for storage, providing you the peace-of-mind that your content will be preserved for generations to come.

I am also happy to announce that we are lowering the price of Phanfare Premium to $49.99/year for all our customers, effective at your next renewal.

Again, all these changes are schedule to be released this Thursday.

We offer a full range of photographic print sizes, printed on matte or glossy paper. There is a shopping cart built right into the app so you can checkout on the phone. Of, you can start the order on the phone and finish it on the web.

Phanfare is the first company to offer prints-by-mail from the iPhone. You are not limited to buying prints of photos taken from the iPhone. Since Phanfare Photon syncs all your photos to your phone, can buy prints of any image you like. We use the fullsize image to make the print.

Phanfare premium customers enjoy better pricing. For Premium customers, 4×6 prints are $.08. You can see our full price list here..

To make the process easier, you can use addresses out of your iPhone contacts and the credit card you have on file with Phanfare, if you have previously given us one either for a merchandise order or for premium membership.

Let us know in the comments what you think of the new printing features.

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.

New photos you take on your iPhone are integrated directly into your collection. With this new version your iPhone is transformed into a managed wireless digital camera. Your whole collection appears on the camera and new content is automatically uploaded to your account in the background.

This new version of the Phanfare iPhone app is available for the iPod Touch as well. While the touch lacks a camera, you can still view your photo and video collection via the app.

For many shooters, the iPhone is only one of the many devices they use in their photographic life. Phanfare brings all the content together, viewable from the web and on the iPhone. We also support TV viewing via our media server software combined with the PS III and Xbox 360. We would love to be in TVs directly (if you manufacturer TVs, contact us – we would be happy to provide API keys).

Since then, I have had the 3G network turned on and I am happy to report that the battery life is much better.

At the same time, as I waited nearly 3 hours for my phone to back itself up while tethered to my Thinkpad on friday, I could not help but think that this was a painful transition for a new product with high consumer volume. Updating firmware on my electronic equipment is like breathing to me, but for most people, this would be considered a major hassle.

Nevertheless, the iPhone 3G with the 2.1 firmware is awesome and Phanfare runs great on it. Now if Apple could just give me a universal search feature on the phone…

Phanfare records the GPS coordinates of any photo with GPS information in the EXIF header. The process is fully automatic and compatible with cameras that support geotagging of images (such as the iPhone) and with the Eye-Fi Wi-fi enabled SD memory cards that geotag images automatically.

We automatically geotag any photos sent from the iPhone with the Phanfare iPhone app. On the web, you can click on “View Map” when viewing photos to see the location on a Google Map. On the iPhone within Safari click on the little globe in the upper right hand corner of the image.

We plan to do other things with the geodata over time. Here is the fine print on the new geotagging feature:

• Showing location is enabled for new albums but not existing albums. This is for privacy reasons. You can turn on geotagging support for older albums on an album by album basis.
• You can turn off showing map location on a per album basis. Click on album options within the web client.
• You can control whether new albums are created with geo tagging support enabled within settings
• We have been recording the GPS info from iPhoto images for at least a month so if you have older iPhone photos, they are geotagged. You just need to enable showing the info for the album.
• You can view the location of a photo on an iPhone as well.
• You can’t set the coordinates of a photo from within Phanfare. The photo has to have been tagged outside of Phanfare.

We released a few other features yesterday as well:

• A new table of contents design that handles large accounts much better and pages in albums. This design is turned off by default for existing users so you will need to enable it manually in settings
• You can now post a comment or send a message to the author when viewing photos and videos on your iPhone
• We fixed the Phanfare facebook app to work properly with the new facebook. You can even move the Phanfare widget from your Boxes page to your main profile page.

There are also numerous small bug fixes in this release. Let us know how you like it.

• You can now add friends and family from the app
• You can accept connection requests from the app
• Your Phanfare newsfeed, telling you about photos and videos in your circle, is now available from the app.
• You can signup for Phanfare from the app; not important to existing users but great for new users.

As always, you can view your own photos, create albums, set security on new albums and caption your photos. Videos don’t play within the app, although they do play if you browse to your account using Safari on the iPhone.

This release also addresses stability problems in the previous version. The app was dying suddenly when it hit memory limits on the phone. We don’t have complete control over memory usage but we did trim down the footprint a bit. The phone seems to provide less memory to applications after the phone has been running for a period of time. Restarting the phone alleviates the issue.

Apple has publicly said that some of these issues will be addressed in future firmware releases for the iPhone. In the interim, we now show a message if memory is running low to warn you that you will need to serialize your photo taking (we normally overlap more operations to reduce latency).

We will continue to optimize the memory foot print of the Phanfare app to improve its performance and decrease the likelihood it gets killed by the operating system for memory usage. We are also hoping that the underlying iPhone libraries become leaner and faster over time to improve performance.

We would love your feedback on the Phanfare iPhone app. We have a whole list of things we want to do with it, but we don’t see it with fresh eyes as some of you will.

Please comment on this post if you want to discuss the direction of the app.

• See your published albums from within the app. This embeds a web view that will show you your own published content and published content from friends, family and groups. The web view does not show your private content, except that if you take photos on the phone, we do link to a private web view of that album for your convenience.
• Import from existing camera albums, limited to 640×480 resolution, which is what the Apple-approved interfaces give us today. We are hoping Apple addresses this in a future release.
• Faster image capture. We shaved 7 seconds off the shot to shot time.
• Power management features: You can set the app to only upload when on WiFi, greatly increasing your battery life.

This is the view you see after the photo is taken. If you caption it and use it, it is sent in the background to your account. You can change which album it is uploaded to, or add a new album.

Here we are composing a new image while another image uploads in the background.

This is the web view of your albums, embedded within the app. You can get to the photos of your friends and family as well.

We need feedback on the app! Let us know what you think and what you want it to do. We have our own agenda but we want to hear your ideas.

You don’t need a 3G iPhone to use the Phanfare app. Update any original iPhone to Apple’s 2.0 phone software and you are on your way.

Once you start using your iPhone to take photos and automatically upload in the background, you won’t go back.

When users upload photos and videos, we first move them to our own servers. In the background, we send the data to S3. If Amazon S3 goes down, we can buffer data for up to two days before we notice. By buffering, we remove the real time requirements of Amazon S3 being up for our users to upload data. We can’t buffer indefinitely, but we are betting than an Amazon S3 outage longer than 2 days is very rare. We always believed short outages would occur. In fact this, is is not the first one.

For serving photos and videos, we act as our own content distribution network (CDN) and cache the hot data. That means that users can view most recent photos and videos, including what was recently uploaded.

All this caching and buffering is done outside of Amazon. We don’t use Amazon’s compute cloud (EC2) for that. We have considered moving more of our system to Amazon Web Services. It is unfortunate that EC2 was built to require S3 to be up in order for to it run. New instances are loaded from S3. So an S3 outage is correlated with an EC2 outage.

Photo and video sharing services that did not plan for S3 outages were completely down yesterday. We estimate that most of the cost savings for our business comes from outsourcing the storage. While we could save some additional money by using EC2, it is not as dramatic as the S3 savings. Hence, we will have to carefully consider before we put all our eggs in that basket.

We arrived at 7am at the Menlo Park Mall in Edison, NJ. The experience did not disappoint. We got there at 7am to find more than 100 people already waiting outside the store.

Most people were waiting for the Apple store versus the ATT store next door. The ATT manager came out and berated the crowd that both his store and the Apple store had the same product. Yeah right. No way we were going to the ATT store when we could go the super-cool Apple store. The Apple employees were handing out Smart Water. The ATT folks were scrambling to find paper cups to hand out tap water.

By 10am somebody had cut in line in front of us. We reported the person to the Mall Police and after a minor confrontation where nobody raised their voice and no force was used, the geek left the line.

Once inside Mecca, we were quickly attended to by a shiny Apple employee wielding a PocketPC based portable Point of Sale device. Oh the irony! It was just around 11am that we got to the point of trying to provision our phones. At that moment, the west coast started selling phones, bringing ATT and Apple’s servers to their knees. It would be another HOUR before we got working phones, all the while waiting for the Pocket PC devices to take our orders.

The final step is to activate via iTunes, something you are supposed to be able to do instore. No dice. iTunes store servers were hopelessly unresponsive. We gave up and went to lunch, devices in hand. Once back at the office we tried repeatedly until the phones activated. Ahhhh.

These photos were taken with the Phanfare app running on a first generation iPhone. And one last thing, the ATT store did run out inventory around 11am as expected.

About 100 people ahead of us at 7am

The first lucky customers to get the phones.

Eureka!

The team gets their phones..slowly.

No joy activating the phone in the store via iTunes. We needed to finish the process back at the office.