Online Photo Filer

Our blog has a new home!

John — Thu, 14 May 2009 23:13:00 GMT

Our blog has moved to a new location. Please click here to see our latest posts and leave comments.

OPF 2.2.3 release Blog this Photo.

John — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 23:26:45 GMT

We’ve just released version 2.2.3 of the Online Photo Filer into the wild. The most obvious change is a new way to share your photos. You can now blog your photos to a suitably equipped blog*

User’s of Godaddy’s Quick Blogcast ( check your account you may have one free just waiting to be set up) can already quickly add OPF images quickly to their blog posts many of you use other blog applications or may just want to quickly post an image without logging into their Blogcast to do so.

Blogging your first picture.

This feature is only available when logged in from the filmstrip view and can be set in motion by clicking on “Blog Photo”

This takes you to our Add a blog screen where you will add your blog’s URL. E.g blog.onlinephotofiler.com and then the username and password you use to access the blog.

Quick Blogcast owners will have to setup and enable the “remote blogging” feature prior to it being able to accept posts from Online Photo Filer or indeed any other service. Setup details are located here.

Other services may require you to turn this feature on but in most cases all you will need to do is type in these few details. We’ll verify that we can use the information and all being well you are now on the Blog This Photo screen.

You can choose which blog to post to, which categories to place the post in plus you have a choice of three layouts to post in. That’s really it , fill out the details, click Blog This Photo and the go search

What If I have more than one blog?

Click on settings, blog settings, and then add blog.

What If I share a private Picture?

I suggest that you place any photograph you want to share in a Public gallery. You can post photos from galleries that you have marked as Private or Password Protected. However, when people click a Password Protected photo displayed on your blog, they’ll not be able to access it without knowing the password. If you made the gallery Private, no one apart from the OPF owner can click the image and view it; all other visitors instead see an error.

Additionally, if you blog a picture stored in Public gallery and later change the gallery to Private or Password Protect it, you must manually remove the image from your blog, since the blog software has no way of knowing that you’ve changed the gallery status.

Detailed instructions on how to set up and use the blog photo can be located here.

If there are any questions on this, or other feature, feel free to post to the blog or via the feedback button within your Online Photo Filer.

* Blog that supports Metaweblog.api with RSD Enabled. ( Quick Blogcast, Wordpress.com , Wordpress (installed) and many more.

OPF release 2.3.2

John — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 21:56:00 GMT

Greetings,

Many Online Photo Filer users have asked us for the ability to remove the "Powered By" banner from the bottom of the Online Photo Filer page. We’ve heard your requests and have just released an update to Online Photo Filer, allowing you to remove the banner.

To turn the "Powered By" banner off, log in to your account, click Settings, select Hide banner, and then click Save. The banner will vanish after you refresh the page. If you really miss the little guy, you can reverse the process by selecting Show banner on the Site Settings page. This process applies only to a paid account.

Free accounts now display banner advertisements when visitors view the Online Photo Filer. These ads can be removed by upgrading to the full version of the program, which also includes access to the photo montage feature and an extra 1.5GB of storage space over the free account.

I’m always interested in feedback regarding this, and any other, change to Online Photo Filer. So, please keep sending your feedback or posting to the blog with your opinions or changes you'd like us to consider.

John

OPF Shutterbug

OPF 2.3 release Flash. Ah ha it's a montage

John — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 20:51:00 GMT

Online Photo Filer 2.3 launched recently. We have added a montage feature to the paid version of Online Photo Filer. The montage is a dynamic sideshow that let’s you add images from all of your public and password protected galleries, and arrange the order, speed and transitions between images.

To get started, login and click on the Montage tab. Click “Create Montage” and add a title, Then select a gallery from the drop down menu. Once you see the images from that gallery, you can add all of them at once with a click, or manually drag them onto the gray area below the title.

You can then set the effect you would like to see when an image changes into another. Click on the left icon that looks like 3 little photos, select a transition, and then click ok. You can do that for every picture or if you prefer you can check “apply to photos” and have all of the selected items maintain the setting. You can also rearrange the order of your images by dragging them within this region. You can add music (our choices for the time being) and set the time each image appears in the montage using the speed drop down menu. Click save, then save and exit.

That's it. Here’s hoping that you got a new camera this Christmas so you can fill up your galleries and montages even faster.

John

Mark my word, err… images.

John — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 20:16:00 GMT

After all, you have an image to protect.

One of the great things about the WWW is that people get to see the results of your creativity, work, and skill. This is excellent if you make furniture, restore cars, or sell any tangible item or service online. But, it’s not so convenient when the item for sale is often directly reproducible with a screen capture, right click save, or a myriad of devious, though readily circumvented, techniques. I’d like to qualify this line from the help files linked to below.

“NOTE: The securest and safest method of protecting valuable digital images is to refrain from sending them through the Internet or posting them online.”

That does make it rather hard to showcase your work doesn’t it? It’s almost worth putting Photoshop back in the box, dusting off your developing reels, and breaking out the developer Roxanne. But wait! You don’t need to put on your red light as Photoshop and similar image editors can get us out of this, err…fix.

We’ve updated two articles that speak to this concern, within the help system for our Online Photo Filer program. The information is generally applicable for image content no matter where it ends up.

http://help.godaddy.com/article.php?article_id=2246&topic_id=337

http://help.godaddy.com/article.php?article_id=2269&topic_id=337

A change in the way comments are handled on our blog.

John — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 03:16:00 GMT

Greetings,

We’ve upgraded the commenting procedure within the blogging application we use (GoDaddy.com ’s Quick Blogcast) to more effectively counter comment spam.

The first time we receive a comment from an email address unknown to Quick Blogcast, we issue an email asking the sender to confirm their address before passing the comment along. Once the email address has been confirmed, the comment will display to the owner.

This is not a retroactive measure, so if you’ve already posted to any of our blogs with your mail address, please be on the lookout for this confirmation.

Aspect ratio and the effect it has on your prints

John — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 17:37:00 GMT

Oh, my time does flash by! There's been another release to Online Photo filer, which has added more seasonal templates and expanded the choice of destinations for the photo badge to link to.

On to today's question, which deals with the charming issue of “when our prints arrive, what will they look like?”

Many new technologies are compromised by a need to keep one foot in the past. For example, the 35mm camera format hearkens back to William Dickson at Edison labs taking Eastman Kodak's 70mm film, cutting it in half and joining them together to provide a continuous strip. The improved version of which was 24 to 36mm or a ratio of 1.5:1, which is where the 6 x 4 standard print derives its size. The aspect ratio of most digital cameras is typically closer to 1.33:1, which is a squarer image and when it lives on a screen not too bad a choice. When you print an entire image to one of the traditional sizes, there's going to be some information cropped from the picture to maintain the ratio of width to length, which we currently do from the center of the image. The bigger the image you are trying to print, the more information you lose on each edge.

There are three ways to guarantee your image you receive is the same as you see on the screen, give or take a pixel. (There's some real world math that doesn't care about hyperbolic statements, but it's really, really close.)

Crop your pictures in advance of placing them in the photo store.
Check your camera to see if it has a setting to shoot at a 3:2 ratio which is an easier version of number one if you have that option available to you.
Order a digital aspect print which prints the entire shot in the same manner it's shown on the screen.

With the first option you get to pick what to print and have the benefit that the standard size pictures that are created will fit your existing frames and match your expectations. To crop an image, start from your thumbnail view and then click on “edit photo”. When the picture appears, change Tabs to “Crop” and then pick the size and orientation of the image you would like to print. You can now select exactly what's kept and then hit crop, if you like the results, save. If not, reset and try again.

With the third option, we provide a print that shows all of the information by using the amazing trick of...using larger paper. Your image is preserved and the only downside is that standard frames may not accommodate them. Hence the naming convention you see in the store under Digital aspect prints 4 x D, which is basically as close to 4 x 6 as we can make it without losing information.

John
OPF shutterbug

Out and about with On line Photo filer Mobile galleries / posting

John — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 01:47:00 GMT

Greetings,

Have you ever visited your mobile gallery from your cell phone? No? Good, since until recently most mobile devices that aren't on their way to being called “smart” would have been unable to display an invisible pink unicorn let alone a photograph of one that you had within your gallery. Try it today however. Go on - I'll wait for you to move to a place where your phone's reception is better. You will see that your gallery is now mobile.

Not all mobile browsers possess a browser that can handle the password secured galleries so some devices will show only public pictures. A few devices, such as the iPhone, will display the normal website and anyone with a two line led display on a phone that you carry around in a briefcase will really need to upgrade to take advantage of this.

We have also added additional links for sharing. Click under any image on the “permanent links” for the code snippets to link to the solo image, the gallery page the image is on and to embed it within your website plus you get to pick the size of image you wish to submit up front.

We have some more exciting features on the way but please keep sending your feedback or posting to the blog with any changes you'd like us to consider

John

OPF shutterbug

That's a Nice Slideshow! Where are the pictures?

Mike — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 21:53:00 GMT

Hello, this is Mike again, development lead for Online Photo Filer team.

Today I want to talk about Bitmaps (images that normally end in .bmp), and some of their current limitations in our product. There are two parts of the Online Photo Filer that do not accept bitmaps: the flash slideshow and the photo store.

For the photo store, our photo development partner does not support bitmap images. Likewise, Flash components also have trouble displaying bitmap images. In order for these to features to work properly, they need Jpeg images (normally ending in .jpg or .jpeg).

Converting a bitmap to a Jpeg should be a feature avaialable in any photo editing program. If you are running Windows, you can just use Paint. Open your bitmap in Paint, choose File/Save As... and save the image as a Jpeg format. Then you can upload the Jpeg version to your Online Photo Filer site and it will show properly in the
slideshow and also allow you to develop it through the photo store.

I am pleased to say that we are working on a feature to allow you to convert your original uploaded bitmaps to Jpeg format after they have been uploaded. This will make it a lot easier in the future to handle this directly from within your Online Photo Filer account.

Mike

Welcome from the Online Photo Filer team!

Mike — Wed, 16 May 2007 16:17:00 GMT

My name is Mike and I am the lead developer here at GoDaddy.com (R) for the Online Photo Filer product. I have worked on many products here at GoDaddy.com (R) since I started in 2003, including Express Email Marketing (R), Traffic Blazer (R), Website Tonight (R), Quick Blog, Quick Podcast, and Online Photo Filer.

It has been a joy to help design and build our entry into the online photo management world. One of my goals when starting this project was to build something that my family could use to set up and view photo albums with ease. We have put together a lot of nice features in our initial releases including the ability for our customers and their visitors to develop photos and have them delivered to their door.

As we go into the future we have many great plans for our product. We will be continually offering more photo products for purchase as well as additional editing and sharing features. I encourage all our customers to provide us feedback on how we can make Online Photo Filer easier to use, or what features would help you manage and enjoy your photos the most.

Mike

Online Photo Filer Blog Comment Rules

OPF Team — Mon, 14 May 2007 23:12:00 GMT

This is a moderated blog to discuss Online Photo Filer (R), its features, development, uses and online photo albums in general. If you have comments on a feature you would like us to provide, how to improve an existing feature or just want to let us know how you’re using the program we’re looking forward to chatting with you.

Support issues

This forum is only for Online Photo Filer (R). We're unable to answer support requests or billing inquiries about other GoDaddy.com (R) products (so please do not send any account information within your comments). If you require immediate assistance with Online Photo Filer (R), contact us via one of the methods listed in our support link contained within the sidebar.

Moderation

All comments that are on topic and constructive will be posted. Normally comments and trackbacks will appear within 5 days of being posted, but please allow us more time for inquiries that require additional research. If we require further information about a comment prior to approval, we'll contact you -- provided you have submitted a valid email address.

Content

We don't allow obscene, racist, sexually explicit, inflammatory, or derogatory language, and may either edit the comment prior to posting, or refuse to post the comment entirely. Commercial advertising, links to sites irrelevant to the topic will be removed from comments/trackbacks prior to posting.