A little while ago we announced that we were teaming up with some local artists to bring you some fresh new royalty-free songs for your album slideshows! You voted on your favorites, and today we’re happy to announce that we’ve added four new songs from two of those artists: Barrett Johnson and The Ultimate Bearhug. The Ultimate Bearhug just released their album last week, and you can now download it free on their website.

You can find the new music in your account under ‘Songs,’ where you can preview each, and also purchase them for your own personal collection if you enjoy the artist.  To play them in an album slideshow, just select the song from the royalty free list when creating your album.

We think you’ll love the new tunes!

Cheers!

Jared for the AlbumExposure Team

We’ve got a little Valentine for you :)

We sometimes get requests to pull the original album files from customers because they don’t have access to them for one reason or another, so we decided to make it accessible and easy for everyone!  There’s now a link in the album menu to download a zip of the original files for any album.  We hope if you’re ever in a jam it’ll help you out :)

Cheers!

Jared for the AlbumExposure Team.

If you didn’t already hear, last week we launched some two big updates to AlbumExposure.  First we made some much needed updates to the UI and re-arranged a few things. We tucked a few items that used to be in the main albums list into the album screen that we felt didn’t need to be as prominent.

We also added album stats so that you can see when the client last viewed the album, as well as when and how many times they viewed it.  If you share the album, you can also track  how many times it’s viewed publicly.

We’ve got lots more coming, and hope you love the new features!

Cheers!

Jared for the AlbumExposure Team

Just over a year ago we posted a blog article about why we were ditching flash and with that went support for book view in Internet Explorer. Today I’m happy to announce that AlbumExposure now supports book view in Internet Explorer 9.  If your client is using IE 8 or less, they’ll simply be redirected to slideshow view when book view is your default.  Clients using IE 8 or less are still able to review albums and post comments, just only in slideshow view.

If you’re using IE 9 on the backend, things might still look a little off due to IE 9′s lack of support for css3 and html5 video, but should work regardless.  We of course still recommend Firefox or Chrome for using the backend of AlbumExposure on Windows, but IE 9 should work if you prefer it.

Cheers!

Jared

A short while ago we changed numbering in client presentations to indicate pages rather than spreads because so many of you asked for it.  Once we did, enough of you requested that we change it back that we decided to add the option to do either, with the default to spreads.

This change will take effect on Monday, August 8 at 10 AM PST.  If you have any albums out to clients that you would like to stay presented as pages, make sure you login and indicate that before then.

You’ll find the new option under preferences in your account:

Here’s how the presentation looks with the each option:

We hope that the change lets you communicate to your clients consistently in your presentations, no matter if you prefer to work with spreads or pages.

Cheers!

After you’ve created your album, make sure you take advantage of the features we’ve built into AlbumExposure to promote yourself and sell more books!

The public link under “share” is a great page to encourage your client to share their album with friends and family.  It’s a great opportunity to get your work in front of more people.  You could also send that link to parents or extended family for the opportunity to sell an additional book to them. We’ve heard of lots of creative ways people are using the public page!

Last week we added a couple little items to make sharing your albums on AlbumExposure even easier.  When you click to share  an album, you’ll see two new share buttons that you can click to quickly tweet or post on facebook about your album.

We also added buttons to the public page so that people who come to view your album can share it on twitter and facebook as well and do some of that promoting for you.

Now go show off your albums!

Cheers!

Since more and more of you are uploading high resolution images now that you can allow the client to zoom in on them and for Send to Print, we just launched a little update that’s going to speed up the processing of those high res images.

In my own semi-scientific test, my full res images processed 287% faster!  Hope you notice things being a little speedier too!

Cheers!

For those of you who were at WPPI this year, we showed off a few new features that we’re excited about, and that you requested on our feedback page.  Here’s a sneak peek of what’s going to launch next week:

	Comment Conversations We’ve revised the client interface to create an interactive conversation on each spread. Comments will be posted in a chat style format that’s familiar and intuitive to clients.  As previously discussed, everything is now in HTML to improve reliability and promote a consistent client experience.
	New Comment View We’ve redesigned how you’ll view comments when you log in to albumexposure.  You, as the photographer or album designer, can now reply to client comments inside albumexposure and those comments will be displayed to the client the next time they log in.  Click on a spread to see the entire conversation history for that image.
	Fullscreen Zoom Screen sizes vary and sometimes the client wants to get a closer look at the images that will be included in their album.  That’s why we added a feature where a client can click at anytime to get a full screen display of any image.  We of course take every precaution to make sure the client can’t download your images.

We hope you love the new additions! Feel free to post any comments or questions below.

Cheers!

The AlbumExposure Team

Many of you have already made your life easier by sending albums directly to print with our partners KISS Books and Laguna Albums. Today we’re stoked to add Leather Craftsmen to this growing list. Once an album is approved in AE, we’ll verify your files to Leather Craftsmen’s specifications and send it right over…that’s it! If you haven’t checked them out yet, now is a great time to do so (http://leathercraftsmen.com).

Cheers!

We’ve been quiet for a little while, and that’s because we’ve been working on some big features, one of which we’re proud to announce today. We’ve taken our first step towards complete compatibility with devices that don’t support flash, specifically the iPad.

Client Presentations

First, when a client logs in to view an album, if they’re using an iPad, they’ll automatically be shown the iPad compatible version of the client presentation.

HTML5 Embed Codes

Second, there’s now a new embed code you’ll find when you click ‘share’ that’s html5 powered rather than flash.  If you use this code rather than the flash  one, visitors to your site or blog who don’t have flash will be able to view the embedded album.  If you already have albums embedded and you want this functionality, you’ll need to switch those to the html5 embed code.

Here’s the same album as our previous post on embedding albums, but with the new html5 code:

Public Pages

Last, if you’ve enabled sharing on your album, the public page for that album is now also iPad friendly.

Can’t wait to show you what we’re working on next!