blog.gallerama.com

Assigning default photo titles, per gallery

A fresh set of updates now provides quick control over your photo titles! While previously all photos were assigned Untitled as the default title, you now have the option to set it, per gallery. Initially, photos will be assigned the file name (without the file extension) as the title, but you can easily override that for each gallery by providing the Default Photo Title. To do this, go to My Galleries, and click on the Settings button for the chosen gallery.

Sorting gallery photos by filename

Additionally, you now have a quick way to sort your galleries based on the file names. This is generally convenient if you preserve the camera assigned file name sequene, or if naming your photos sequentially is a part of your workflow. This option is available in the Photos tab on the My Galleries screen.



Special thanks to Michelle Zassenhaus for the suggestions here. Y’all should follow suit.

Layout enhancements

We’re continuing to make our gallery layouts faster, prettier and more search engine friendly. The latest beneficiary of that effort is our default layout which we think you’ll agree meets our goal in every way. Here’s an example: http://glr.me/g/636

If you follow Gallerama on Twitter, you likely noticed a few recent post or two regarding some new releases. Here are the specifics:

- Short URLs (ex: http://glr.me/g/1670) are now used by the Share (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) utilities. Gallery covers or selected photos will be displayed by capable social network sites.
- Gallery and Image page titles have been optimized such that the title is up front, followed by the artist’s name. This has SEO benefits, as well as helping with bookmarking, etc.
- Custom fonts on public Profile and All Galleries pages now use Cufon instead of sIFR. The result is much faster load times and better cross-browser support. In addition, minor visual enhancements have been made to both of these pages. (We’re working on converting remaining sIFR implementations to Cufon as well.)
- Sign Up form is now snappier and snazzier, with the help of new Ajax validation.
- Loading (and editing) of photos on the My Galleries screen is now much faster and includes a few visual enhancement. Most notably, the info box displayed as you move your mouse over the thumbnails now displays a larger preview.
- The Brick Wall layout now uses the fade effect for display of photo caption.
- A few other visual enhancements are scattered about.

Enjoy!

The PhotoPlus Expo 2009 once again delivered in every way, surpassing prior events with more exhibitors and seminars. Once again, Gallerama was there and this year, we had the pleasure of hearing Harry Benson’s keynote and checking out a few of the seminars including Joe McNally’s Lighting on Location. Have a quick look below and read on for more information.

New Gear From the Market Leaders

As usual, hugely represented and right at the entrance to the Expo are Nikon and Canon, the leaders in the DSLR market and always attracting enormous attention from visitors. Both companies recently made big additions to their camera lineups with Nikon announcing the Nikon D3s and Canon delivering their 1D Mark IV, as well as the all new Canon 7D. Nikon also attracted a lot of buzz at the Expo by showcasing their Nikon COOLPIX S1000pj camera, the world’s first compact camera with a built-in projector. We’ve been expecting this one and will look for this category of products to continue to evolve and expand.

Online Photo Management and Digital Printing: Competition Heats Up.

In much greater number than in prior years, the PhotoPlus Expo featured companies in the web-based photo storage and gallery space, including SmugMug, LiveBooks, Zenfolio and PhotoShelter. Joining SimplyCanvas (our pick for superb quality canvas prints) were Canvas On Demand and MPIX which recently started offering gallery wraps.

But our favorite part of the event was easily Harry Benson’s keynote address.

Keynote by Harry Benson

If you think you don’t know Harry Benson or his work, think again. Harry has photographed Winston Churchill, every U.S. president since Eisenhower, extensively traveled with and covered The Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson and many other musicians, endless actors and historic events. In fact, looking at his portfolio you’ll begin to wonder if there was anything that happened over the last 5 decades that he missed. Check out some of his covers.

“I don’t know what I would have done if I had to work for a living”. — Harry Benson

Hearing him speak so passionately about his work and experiences with the people whose lives he captured was inspiring and edifying. Harry’s wit and humble voice made his speech hugely entertaining. If you have an opportunity to hear him speak you should definitely take it. In the meantime, check out his online portfolio or some of his books (a new addition is coming this month).

We often wonder if a photographer with such a rich portfolio would have a favorite photo, and were pleased to hear that does. Taken in Paris, in 1964 it is the shot of The Beatles titled Pillow Fight. Check it out on artnet.

Joe McNally’s Lighting on Location

If Joe McNally is teaching a class in your area, you should go. Simple as that. Regardless of the subject. Joe’s vast knowledge and experience, coupled with his captivating agenda and occasionally very funny delivery are sure to impress and satisfy photographers of all skill levels. As we’ve been on a Lighting kick, we very much looked forward to his Lighting on Location class, which coincidentally will be back in New York City later this month as a part of Kelby Training Live and we look forward to attending in the expanded format.

Next year’s PhotoPlus Expo is taking place at Javitz Center on October 29-30, 2010. Visit www.photoplusexpo.com for further info. See you there.

You may have noticed a hick-up or two in the past during the transfer of photos to our printing partner, Adorama. Well, not only have we resolved these problems, but we’ve made the transfer much, much faster.

Go ahead and give it a try!

That’s right. Gallerama is now on Twitter. Follow us to get faster updates and other goodies.

http://www.twitter.com/gallerama

As promised, we’ve added a new, simpler and faster way to upload your photos to Gallerama. The new method supports simpler browsing of image and zip files, multi-file selecting and makes upload file-size limits virtually a non-isssue for PRO members as they now only apply to the size of each file rather than a single upload. To clarify, the size limit for a single file remains 200MBs, but you can select as many files as you’d like that are under that limit and they’ll be processed in sequence! For Gallerama members of the Standard kind, if Unlimited storage was not reason enough to upgrade to a Pro membership, then this certainly must be it.

And just in case you liked our old (now referred to as “Basic”) Uploader or if you don’t have Flash installed, its still available. Just follow the link in the sub-header and its back.

For those of you who are techies, the new tool is using the great new open source tool called: SWFUpload, which supports extensive customization and configuring both of which we’ve taken serious advantage of. In fact, our dev team likes SWFUpload so much that we’d be happy to contribute to the project.

Oh, and when you log into “My Gallerama”, you’ll notice a few other improvements and niceties. We’ve enhanced the speed and experience of various operations such as moving photos and galleries around, creating archives (there was a bug with opening generated zip files on Macs – now resolved!).

Enjoy!

Our print partner AdoramaPix just announced their awesome new application for creating high-quality hardcover photo books. Unlike most other print labs, their app is web-based so there is nothing to install. And with your photos stored on Gallerama, you can make your photo books anytime and from anywhere.

Visit http://www.adoramapix.com/photobooks.aspx for complete info and pricing. (Btw, prices start at just $19.99 for a 26 page 8×5.5 book!)

We’re happy to report that we’ve made a number of key enhancements to Gallerama aimed at simplifying and streamlining the management of your photos, galleries and gallery groups. The improvements are not only functional but also visual. In fact, we feel that the interface enhancements do as much to help usability as do the performance enhancements.

To give these updates a try just log into Gallerama and create, edit, assign, re-assign your photos, galleries and gallery groups. And let us know what you think!

We’d like to wish all Gallerama members and visitors a Happy New 2009!

As we reflect on 2008, we’re thrilled with the updates we’ve rolled out, such as our partnership with AdoramaPix for offering our members professional quality prints. We’ve made various tweaks to our site to make management of your photos simpler and more intuitive. We’ve also extended our presentation options making your galleries and profile pages more elegant and unique. And we’ve seen our member base continue to grow!

We expect 2009 to be even more successful. As we continue to enhance our feature set, we look forward to hearing from as well. Let us know what you like or dislike, and what features you’d like to see on Gallerama.

We have spend the last couple of months enhancing and optimizing various components of Gallerama, in particular the upload flow, all gallery templates and our SlideShow. While some of the updates are can only be seen as under-the-hood performance improvements, many visual embellishments have been scattered about as well.

For our tech savvy readers…
Gallerama is now using the brilliant jQuery JavaScript library. We’ve been impressed by John Resig’s amazing library for quite some time and were itching to bring it into Gallerama space. With this new set of updates our own libraries were re-written to rely on and extend jQuery and maximize its potential. Big thanks goes out to the jQuery team.