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  • Embeddable Slideshows

    Will 11:39 pm on July 29, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: copyright, , embeddable slideshows, , , , , , viral

    We’ve just released a fantastic new feature called embeddable slideshows. In simple terms, an embeddable slideshow is a slideshow of photos, from an album on your Photoswarm photo website, which can be embedded into other locations on the internet (blogs, websites etc).

    These are great for promoting your photography or artwork and brilliant for generating interest in your site by allowing your content to “go viral” and (legally) spread all over the web.

    See one in action below:

    powered by photoswarm

    It automatically cycles through all of the photos stored within a particular album on your Photoswarm site and has controls to allow viewers to navigate backward and forward through the album manually.

    To embed a slideshow in a blog or website (sorry, Facebook doesn’t currently allow this) simply view the album on your Photoswarm photo website, copy the slideshow embed code (screenshot below) and then paste the code into your blog or website.

    Screen shot 2010-07-29 at 22.58.50

    In the bottom right hand corner of the embeddable slideshow there is small icon Screen shot 2010-07-29 at 22.31.34which, when clicked, displays the embed code required to embed the slideshow further. It also contains other sharing controls (Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon & Delicious) to allow people to spread the word about your work directly on those sites and a URL which links back to the original of the currently displayed image.

    The net result of all this is that with embeddable slideshows, when someone views an album on your site that they like, they can embed that album onto their site or blog thereby promoting it and also creating links back to your Photoswarm photo website. This effect can then be multiplied by a 3rd person (or 103rd person!) viewing the embeddable slideshow and deciding to embed it within another website or blog, creating even more buzz and traffic back to your photo website.

    But won’t people be stealing my images if they embed them in their site? Nope. Using embeddable slideshows doesn’t confer a copyright or give a commercial license to your images. The nature of the internet means that unless your photos are well watermarked people are probably going to steal them anyway so at least with an embeddable slideshow, every instance of your images point back to your Photoswarm photo website making the notion of orphan works irrelevant.

    If you want to restrict the use of embeddable slideshows we’ve built in privacy controls that allow you to turn slideshows off for particular albums. Simply login to your site and navigate to the “edit info” page for the album you would like to restrict.

    We’d love to know what you think about our latest slideshow feature…have you found a use for it? Stumbled across any of your albums that have been embedded in another website? Get in touch!

     

  • Huge Images Causing Issues

    aidan 9:18 am on July 13, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply

    As cameras get better and better, the images they create become larger and larger. We’re now at the point when a single snap can take up more than 20mb (in a few years people are going to read that and laugh).

    We’ve noticed in recent days that a few images have become so large that our compression system is struggling to deal with them. This is something we’re working on and hope to have resolved soon. We’ll keep you posted.

     

  • Image Rights Explained Visually

    Will 10:37 pm on May 20, 2010 | 2 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: image rights,

    Getty have just launched a site aimed at educating the masses about photo rights.

    They’ve done a great little video which easily explains image rights.

     

    • Nick Jones 1:00 pm on August 7, 2010 Permalink

      Awesome visual explanation – 100% effective

    • Jeff 12:31 am on August 29, 2010 Permalink

      Uh… and the various configurations of CC (Creative Commons)? Getty doesn’t like to talk about CC, I’m guessing.

  • Individual Album Password Protection

    Will 12:25 pm on May 16, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , privacy

    We’ve just expanded the privacy settings for individual albums so now, in addition to an album either being viewable by all or visible only to you, it’s now possible to attach a password to an individual album. You can then give that password out to specific people meaning only they will have access.

    You can access this setting by navigating to the “edit info” page for the album that you would like to add password protection to.

    Ho Chi Minh City

     

  • New Overdue Invoice Reminder System Released

    Will 6:03 pm on April 17, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , payments, , subscriptions

    We’ve been hard at work recently designing and implementing a system which sends out reminder emails when a payment is missed (usually due to a card being declined or out of it’s expiry date) and allows you to login to your photo website and enter new payment details to bring your account up to date. It’s been a very complex and long road to getting this released (over 2,500 lines of code!) but we’ve finally turned the corner and went live with it in the early hours of this morning.

    It’s designed to work as follows:

    1st Attempt: All our payments are taken on the 1st of the month. If you card fails on this first attempt we set it to be tried again in 3 days time on the 4th. No reminder email is sent out as for some inexplicable reason we’ve got a few accounts which won’t work on the 1st but always work on the 4th. It makes the whole process smoother.

    2nd Attempt: Any payments that failed on the 1st are attempted again on the 4th. If your card fails again, a reminder email is sent out letting you know it will be tried again in another 3 days time and also giving you a link where you can enter new card details.

    3rd Attempt: Any remaining outstanding payments are attempted again on the 7th. If these fail, another reminder is sent letting you know that things are getting a little dicey, that a 4th attempt will be made on the 10th and if things don’t go to plan then, your account will be suspended. The link to enter new card details is also included in this email.

    4th Attempt: EEEK! Where did it all go wrong? At this point if the payment fails again your account gets suspended. It’s not the end of the world but it’s close. An email is sent out letting you know your account is in automatic suspension. This email also lets you know that if you have a pro domain name, this may expire whilst your account is suspended and we may not be able to recover it.

    30 days after 1st Failed Payment: After a month, we send out an email letting you know that your account is now pending termination and if you still want your site, to get in touch with us urgently.

    60 days after 1st Failed Payment: After another month our system automatically terminates the account along with it’s subscription, outstanding invoices, photos and albums etc.

    We’ve tried to implement a system which is fair and gives users enough time (we love travelling in remote parts of the world just as much as anyone else!) to resolve any outstanding invoices however we would love some feedback on the above system.

    Do you feel it’s a fair way of dealing with outstanding accounts? Is there anything we could change for the better? Let us know!

    Reception

     

  • Railo Gotchas - Part III

    aidan 3:31 pm on February 27, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply

    I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. We love Railo, it’s the very foundation beneath our feet. Though, as we’ve said before, there are some things to watch out for. A known bug that’s come to bite us (just a little) is the whitespace management. When you get Railo to suppress whitespace in the server settings it takes quite an aggressive policy – for example, all additional newlines are removed from the output.
    In normal cases this is ok. Where it falls down is within html <textarea> elements (I can’t think of any other situations where it would be a problem but there may well be a few more). Within textareas you may well want users to be able to enter multiple linebreaks to be converted into <p> tags within the rendered html. Normally the solution would be to wrap textareas in <cfsetting suppresswhitespace=”false”> tags. Unfortunately, due to a (known) bug in Railo once suppresswhitespace is turned on there doesn’t seem to be any way of turning it off.
    When we get enough free time we’ll look into trying to fix the bug in the Railo source. For the moment we’ll have to live with it.

    I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. We love Railo, it’s the very foundation beneath our feet. Though, as we’ve said before, there are some things to watch out for. A known bug that’s come to bite us (just a little) is the whitespace management. When you get Railo to suppress whitespace in the server settings it takes quite an aggressive policy – for example, all additional newlines are removed from the output.

    In normal cases this is ok. Where it falls down is within html <textarea> elements (I can’t think of any other situations where it would be a problem but there may well be a few more). Within textareas you may well want users to be able to enter multiple linebreaks to be converted into <p> tags within the rendered html. Normally the solution would be to wrap textareas in <cfsetting suppresswhitespace=”false”> tags. Unfortunately, due to a (known) bug in Railo once suppresswhitespace is turned on there doesn’t seem to be any way of turning it off.

    When we get enough free time we’ll look into trying to fix the bug in the Railo source. For the moment we’ll have to live with it.

    D5WGQ8G3FQPY
     

  • New Photoswarm Homepage

    Will 3:53 pm on February 19, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Featured Sites, Photo of the Day,

    Recently we’ve been focusing on our Photoswarm homepage with the aim of making it clearer, explaining what we do better and narrowing in on our target audience of pro, semi pro and amateur photographers who want to showcase and sell their photos online.

    To this end we’re very happy today to announce the launch of our new design which can be found at http://www.photoswarm.com.

    We’ve included a sliding content bar which details our core features, a featured photo websites area which promotes some of the incredible photo websites on Photoswarm and a testimonials / news area which will relay press news stories, our latest blog posts and some of the kind words that our users have emailed us with.

    We’re constantly on the look out for amazing photos too which we can feature on our Twitter page as part of our photo of the day series and stunning photo websites which we can add to our featured photo websites area so if you’ve got a Photoswarm site (if you haven’t, what are you waiting for!), get uploading and if your work is stunning, we’ll make sure it gets noticed.

    Photoswarm Photo Websites

     

  • Happy Valentines' Day - New Sweetheart Themes

    Will 3:15 pm on February 14, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ,

    We’re a little romantic at Photoswarm so we’ve just added two special new Valentines’ Day background themes for our photo websites so you can wear your heart on your sleeve.

    If you’ve got loads of photos to share but don’t have one of our fast, beautiful, showcase photo websites yet then you can create one here. It’s easy, free and takes less than a minute.

    Red Hearts

    Blazing Red Heart Theme

    Sweet Hearts

    Sweetheart Theme

     

  • New Background Themes

    Will 11:32 am on February 10, 2010 | 1 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , ,

    We’ve just added a couple of new background themes to enable you to customise your photo showcase websites a little more. These new themes can be accessed from within the “site settings” page of your admin area.

    We’re working on adding many more of these themes and also the ability to upload your own backgrounds.

    Floral:

    Floral

    Space Invader:

    space

     

  • Apple Releases Aperture 3 - 200+ New Features

    Will 10:44 pm on February 9, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Aperture, , Review

    Apple today announced a new version of their pro photo editing and management software Aperture 3. It’s been a long time coming with almost 2 years to the day since the last version was released however it looks to be worth the wait with over 200 new features including Faces, Places and Brushes. Aperture 3 introduces new tools to refine your photos including Brushes for painting image adjustments onto parts of your photo, and Adjustment Presets for applying professional photo effects with just one click. Stunning new slideshows let you share your work by weaving together photos, audio, text and HD video.

    Aperture 3 allows you to organise large photo libraries using Projects and the new Faces and Places. Faces uses face detection and recognition to find and organise your photos by the people in them. You can view faces across your entire photo library or view just the faces that appear in selected projects. In a new view that speeds up the organisation process, Aperture 3 displays faces that have been detected but haven’t yet been named.

    Aperture 3 Screenshot 1

    Places lets you explore your photos based on where they were taken, and like in iPhoto, Places automatically reverse geocodes GPS data into user-friendly locations. In Aperture 3, you can assign locations by dragging-and-dropping photos onto a map or by using location information from GPS enabled cameras, tracking devices or your iPhone photos.

    The new Brushes feature allows you to add professional touches to your photos by simply painting effects onto the image. Aperture 3 includes 15 Quick Brushes that perform the most popular tasks like Dodge, Burn, Polarise and Blur, without the complexity of layers or masks. Brushes can automatically detect edges in your images to let you apply or remove effects exactly where you want them. Aperture 3 includes dozens of Adjustment Presets that apply a specific style or look to the entire image with just a click. You can create your own custom presets or explore the techniques of other photographers by importing theirs.

    Aperture 3 Screenshot 2

    Probably most importantly Aperture 3 now runs as a 64-bit application on Mac OS X Snow Leopard on Macs with Intel Core 2 Duo processors meaning that it can take advantage of larger memory capacities (up to 16 terabytes).

    Aperture 3 supports camera RAW, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, PNG, PDF, PSD2, .ARW, .CR2, .CRW, .MOS, .NEF, .RAF, .RAW, .SRW, .TIF, .OLY, .FFF, .3FR, and .DNG1 files.

    Aperture 3 costs $199 (£169), while existing Aperture users can upgrade for $99 (£79).

    A downloadable 30-day trial version is available from http://www.apple.com/uk/aperture/trial and more information can be found at http://www.apple.com/uk/aperture.

     

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