In cased you missed it, Gary was recently on Ask Dane talking about improving the client experience through Album Proofing.

Here’s the replay:

Make sure to check out askdane.com where Dane answers questions and hosts interviews covering a range of great, relevant topics to the photography industry.

Just added last week: client presentations now work on iPhone and Android!

Here’s a quick shot of an album on an iPhone that I snapped with my iPhone :)

In case you missed it, here’s the video of what we covered in the webcast on Friday:

Cheers!

As a part of our continuing effort to support our photographers, we’re going to host a live webcast this Friday October 1st at 11 AM PDT. We’ll first cover some of the basics of using AlbumExposure, and then open it up for live questions and discussion.

Join in at http://live.albumexposure.com

Leave us a comment below and let us know if there are any topics you would like us to cover.

See you there!

The HTML5 embed feature is a great way to show off your albums on your blog, website or anywhere else,  and because there’s no flash involved, it works on iPhone, iPad, and iPod!

We just launched a little update to the HTML5 embed codes to make them a little sleeker.  The bottom bar has been removed and the controls show up when you hover or tap on the images.  A little simpler, and more focus on your  images.  Here’s a sample embed from one of our good friends, Kevin Swan. Hope you like it!

Big announcement for our friends in Europe and the UK!

Our newest Send to Print partner is none other than FOLIO Albums! Folio offers some amazing wedding books, handmade right in the UK. These guys really do it right, we know you’ll be impressed. They’ve been able to overcome many of the challenges facing European photographers who want great albums, but can’t afford the issues with importing. Check them out today and tell Stewart we said hello!

Cheers!

While in the process of planning the future of AlbumExposure, we’ve decided that in order to move forward we’ve got to leave some things behind which are holding us back.  Mostly we think that’s flash.  In the last 30 days, visitors to our site had 24 different versions of the flash player installed.  It’s just not possible for us to keep up with all the different versions and quirks of each flash player release.  The most common fix to a problem with an AlbumExposure presentation is having the user upgrade their flash player and our customers deserve better.

Unfortunately at this time the only browser that doesn’t support the html5 features we need to replace flash is Internet Explorer.  IE 9 is going to have at least much better html5 support, but we don’t think we can sit around and wait until a release date is announced.  The good news is that only a small percentage of our users are using IE.

We’re confident that going this direction is going to make for a better, more reliable experience for you and your clients, and is going to open up opportunities for cool new features in the future that wouldn’t otherwise be possible (drag and drop uploads anyone?)

So, here’s what we’re going to do an how it will affect you and your clients:

The first phase will be the launch of our new site design this week, which is going to some of the newer CSS3 features.  If you visit our main site using IE or an older version of a browser that isn’t html5 compatible, you’re going to see a notification asking you to upgrade your browser.  The client presentations will be unchanged.

The next step will be converting all album presentations to html5.  Our plan is to leave a fallback to flash so that you won’t have to force your clients to upgrade their browsers, but the flash presentation will likely be limited to slideshow view.

The final phase of removing flash entirely probably won’t happen until IE 9 is released, but we think it’s important for us to take steps now to prepare.

We’d love to hear how you like the new design when it launches this week!

Cheers!

Today we’re proud to announce that we’ve added Shoot Dot Edit to our growing list of partners.  Shoot Dot Edit is a professional digital media post production service company and offers a variety of services, including album design.  We think they’re great people and they offer great value in their services.  We highly recommend them if you’re looking to simplify your process by outsourcing post production or album design.

Shoot Dot Edit is also now the first album design studio integrated with AlbumExposure:  when you order album design with Shoot Dot Edit, you’ll proof your album design through AlbumExposure before you send it to your client.  Then when you’re satisfied, Shoot Dot Edit can push the album right into your AlbumExposure account to proof with your client.  When comments arrive, you can choose to pass them right on to Shoot Dot Edit for revisions.

Very soon, these studio features will be available to all of our design studio customers, stay tuned!

To learn more about what Shoot Dot Edit can do for your business, check them out at http://shootdotedit.com

Cheers!

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!