blog.gallerama.com

Our friends at Adorama did an objective report of the new breed of full frame DSLRs. Check it out at: http://www.adorama.com/catalog.tpl?op=academy_new&article=012609

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.

Major News! Gallerama members can now order prints of their photos stored on Gallerama.com directly through AdoramaPix. If you are not familiar with AdoramaPix, it is the professional print lab of one of New York City’s oldest and most trusted photography stores – Adorama Camera. Many of us here at Gallerama have used their print lab for years and have always been thrilled with the quality of both their service and the results. (Oh, and most of our photo gear is bought there as well.) Offering a great selection of print products at affordable prices, AdoramaPix was our first choice when selecting a print lab for Gallerama and we’re excited to be joining forces. Once you check out their large variety of sizes, paper types, and other print products, as well as their super easy to use and streamlined interface we’re sure you’ll agree.

Please visit AdoramaPix.com to learn more about all their print sizes and prices and to find out about some of the fantastic features of their setup flow, including manual per-photo crop adjustment and access to their color profiles for each paper type.

Shipping or Local Pickup

If you’re in New York and don’t like waiting for the mailman, why not swing by the store and pick up your prints as soon as they’re ready? AdoramaPix offers local pickup which means that you get your photos sooner and don’t have to pay for shipping. In addition to being able to track your order via the AdoramaPix website, you will also receive an email notification as soon as your prints become available for pickup. And if you’re opted to have them personally delivered, you’ll be notified as soon as they’re on the way.

While AdoramaPix presently only ships to United States, support for international shipping is on the way and slated for early next year.

Extending the Print Option to Your Visitors

Each Gallerama member can by default order prints only of their own photos, but they have the option to extend this to all of their visitors as well. By turning on this option on either the My Galleries or My Photos screen, you are enabling all of your visitors to order prints of your photos as well. Keep in mind that any of your galleries can be password protected, so you can enable printing yet expose that to only those to whom you’ll provide the password you select for a particular gallery. And enabling or disabling either of these settings takes no time so you can get creative with how you’d like to manage your print and security settings and when.

A few exciting updates have been made to the Gallerama application. We’ve increased upload limits from 100Mbs to 200Mbs (per upload), allowing you to upload more photos at once. Again, we encourage uploading zipped files containing multiple photos since that also helps speed things up.

In addition, we’ve also improved the My Photos section to allow in-place editing of photo titles and descriptions. We find that this allows much faster and more intuitive editing of photo information. Just click on the current title or description to go into edit more. Click “Save” (or just hit ENTER for the photo Title) and your update is instantly stored.

Other improvements:

• Rotating photos is now faster and more easily accessible.
• Comments can now be posted without leaving the gallery or photo page.
• Emailing gallery and photo links has been optimized and received a face-lift.
• Changing your email address and password is also simplified and optimized.
• Loading time for all Gallerama pages and member galleries has been improved.
• Loading of galleries using Brick Wall layout has been greatly improved.

Enjoy, and stay tuned for further updates.

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.

That’s right, another new gallery layout is now available to all Gallerama members. Featuring our new, large thumbnail size the Grid layout aims to deliver a more structured and modern look to your galleries, with the focus being on the presentation of the gallery as a uniform photo collection.

Once again, our Zoom feature is used to display the enlarged photo version which is automatically displayed in the largest available size which will fit in the user’s browser window. (Resizing the window will correctly adjust the image size.)

Displaying captions below the photos in the gallery view is entirely up to you, as is the number of photos you choose to display per page. When specifying this number please keep in mind that the first grid “cell” is reserved for the gallery name. To display all photos on the single (first) page, just enter a high number!

So, check it out and let us know how you like it.

One of Gallerama’s goals from its inception was to offer not only a cutting-edge photo management and storage solution, but also a great way to showcase photos as well as photographers. We believe we’ve made a big step in that direction by revamping Gallerama’s photographer profile pages, making them a vital component of each member’s online photo presence – a complete photo site in itself. The new profile sites offer quick access to photographer’s most popular and most recent galleries, as well as a link to all available galleries, organized by group.

And there’s more to come. Many elements of the new profile page will soon be customizable, including colors, fonts and the background texture!

If you are a Gallerama member, you benefit from this update instantly and at no extra cost. If you haven’t joined Gallerama yet, what are you waiting for? Join Gallerama today – its free!

As you may or may not know, Gallerama automatically generates a number of versions for each of the photos you upload. (Your original photo file is kept in its original state and is not accessible by anyone but you.) The web-optimized, lower resolution versions are used for display thoroughout the Gallerama application, in Gallerama layout templates, slideshows, etc. In some cases having a consistent (square, cropped) size allows for a clearer and more attractive presentation while in others maintaining the actual aspect ratio is preferred (always for larger versions). Also, some layouts benefit from a fixed photo height, for example the Gallerama.com homepage. While the topic of file versions is briefly described on Gallerama’s site (in the help section), we felt it was time to make things clear. So, below is a list of all web-optimized photo versions created and used by Gallerama:

• Mini Square Thumbnail: 40×40 pixels (cropped)
• Small Square Thumbnail: 90×90 pixels (cropped)
• Standard Thumbnail: 140 pixels wide or tall (larger dimension is used as the limit)
• Fixed Height Thumbnail: 140 pixels tall
• Fixed Height Web Version: 400 pixels tall
• Standard Web Version: 740 pixel wide or tall (larger dimension is used as the limit)

We’re happy to announce that we’ve just added two more standard versions which we feel provide a better gallery viewing experience, and allow for greater flexibility with future gallery template designs.

• Large Squre Thumbnail: 150×150 pixels (cropped)
• Extra Large Web Version: 650 pixels tall

Keep in mind that our Zoom and Slideshow features automatically display the largest possible photo version which fits into the viewer’s browser window, making sure that no part of the image is cut-off during viewing.

PDN PhotoPlus Conference & Expo, the premier photography and imaging event took place at Jakob K. Javits Convention Center in New York last weekend. Once again, members of the Gallerama team were in attendance speaking with photography professionals and enthusiasts about their photo archiving and management needs, and about how Gallerama can help solve them. Additionally, we’ve continued to explore potential partnerships with other providers with the goal of expanding the Gallerama offering to include services such as printing, online sales, etc. Stay tuned for updates on these.

But since we’ve got a real passion for photography and technology ourselves, we couldn’t help but explore the new offerings from the many great exhibitors featured at the show. Some of the highlights included Nikon’s first full-frame DSLR: the Nikon D3, as well as its close sibling, the Nikon D300. As usual, Canon’s presence was dominant with a broad array of fantastic products. Adobe, highlighting its industry standard Photoshop CS3 as well as its new Lightroom software provided many very useful tutorials making its booth a hot ticket at all times.

Information on the next year’s Expo is already posted on the PDN PhotoPlus website. Be sure to check it out.