Howdy Friends,

Hope this finds you well as you’re busy preparing for the upcoming summer shooting season!  Many of you have asked for more education on AlbumExposure’s features, so we’ve created a new Tutorials section for you on our website.  We want you to get the most value out of your AE account and this is a perfect way to learn about things that will improve your album proofing and sales, starting with this summer’s events.  You’ll find videos for both Photographers and Design Studios, covering an array of features and functions, such as setting up preferences & branding, creating new albums, managing communications, promoting your work, managing multiple designers, as well as general workflow tips.  If there’s a topic you’d like to learn more about, and don’t see it, simply click on “Request a Video” to let us know what subject you’d like us to cover.

Start watching: http://albumexposure.com/tutorials

We’re here to help make your life easier and keep your album workflow smooth, so please don’t hesitate to send us an email at support@albumexposure.com if you need anything or have any questions.

Cheers!

The AlbumExposure Team

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!

Check out the Ultimate Photographer’s Source Book, a great resource that’s full of tips, tricks, discounts and freebies for taking your photography business to the next level.

If you order by Sunday January 23rd, you’ll also save $40 off of the retail price!

Spoiler alert: we’re in there ;)

One of the most exciting things that we announced at WPPI this year was integration with PhotoJunction.  We couldn’t be more excited to be partnering with Danny and the rest of the PhotoJunction team.  Check out the video below, it’s pretty slick.

We just added two screencasts to the homepage of albumexposure, and they’re pretty slick. The first demonstrates the functions and features of albumexposure to better communicate the value to people who are just checking it out.

The second walks through customizing albumexposure to match your branding via logo, background color, and masking your url.

Hope you like them!

This week we launched the auto resize feature, eliminating the need for you to choose an album size or to resize any of your existing images before uploading them to albumexposure.

Here’s how it works: albumexposure resizes the images for you to be no wider than 1000px and no taller than 600px, detects the dimensions of the image after resizing, and automatically fills in the size for you.

Of course if your images are already in those sizes, uploading and processing will be faster, so you can still resize if you would like. (A photoshop action or droplet makes this a snap.)

We hope you enjoy the new feature!

In the next couple weeks we’re going to be working hard on improving albumexpoure performance and reliability.

Here is an album link so you can try it out yourself (the password is test). It’s set to default to book view so you can flip the pages, but you can always switch it to slideshow view by clicking the middle button on the bottom right. The song that plays while in slideshow view is “Thinking of You” by Molly Jenson and it is one of the songs that available to use royalty-free by all users. Enjoy!

Our friend, Jessica Claire invented this really cool bag for photographers called the ShootSac. If you haven’t seen these yet … then you’re missing out on a great way to carry your gear and do it in style. We’re all about doing things in a way that’s consistent with your brand experience so we thought we’d share this tip with you … because after all you are your brand. In fact, we love the ShootSac so much we’re going to be giving some away later this year to AlbumExposure users.

We know that many of you will want to use the features of AlbumExposure as a component of your website. Frankly, we agree! Your brides should be reminded of your brand every time they interact with you. In theory, we could install the software on your own domain. Practically, this doesn’t work because the system requires an advanced architecture that would be too expensive for you to maintain.

But have no fear! It is actually very easy to have your cake and eat it too! By a technique known as masking you can have AlbumExposure working on your domain in a matter of minutes. If you don’t understand the article ask your website guy or contact us and we would be happy to help walk you through the process.