We’ve already shared our enthousiasm about the iPad. We can now tell you that Viewbook is in the process of creating a native iOS portfolio app for the iPad and iPhone that syncs with your Viewbook Albums.

A couple of key requirements we’ve formulated are:

• The option to store Albums locally so you can view them offline, without an internet connection.
• A nice visual overview with big thumbs of all your locally stored Albums.
• The option to set a default portfolio that opens as soon as you launch the app, so you can directly show your work without first looking up which album you want to show.
• The option to easily email a link to the online version of your album/portfolio.

Do you already use your iPad or iPhone to show your work? What are your experiences? Do you have other ideas that would make it ideal for you?

Let us know in the comments.

About a month ago we’ve moved our applications to bigger servers. Starting with our upload servers followed by the services that deliver your websites.

We use a monitoring tool called Pingdom that monitors our servers 24 hours a day. It checks if all runs well, when not I get a sms message, which actually can be in the middle of the night. Pingdom also creates insightful graphics about the response time of our users websites.

You can see (in the figure above) that the load time peaked at 600ms to 1000ms at the end of June and beginning of July. We believe the load time should not be more that 500ms (half a second). So we decided to speedup the websites by moving to faster servers. We run all our servers in the Amazon AWS cloud and benefit from the standards that are created by the big Amazon.com. We moved to 7.5GB 4 core instances and the load time went down to around 360ms, which is pretty fast!

We are very excited to announce the opening of the Viewbook PhotoStory 2010 competition. Today the submissions opened and we welcome all serious photographers around the world to submit their most compelling narratives. To unleash true narrative strength in a series of photographic works. Every photographer may submit one photo story per category. The jury prize winners will be exhibited in Amsterdam, published in GUP Magazine and win a lifetime Viewbook Pro account as well as a custom designed book supported by Blurb and many other prizes. In addition to the competition we introduce the Watchers Network, a network of photography enthusiasts who follow the Viewbook PhotoStory competition closely and may offer critiques and insight on competition entries. 

Submit your best series at www.viewbookphotostory.com
The submissions deadline is October 1st.

Enjoy this years contest and be sure to connect with us and each other on the Viewbook PhotoStory Twitter and Facebook pages.

We are excited to announce that it is now possible to sell your images, either printed or as a digital file, directly from your Viewbook site or individual Albums. To make this possible, we teamed up with Fotomoto, a great service that ‘works like an invisible team of sales people, professional printers, packaging and shipping services, accountants, and customer support squads’, as Fotomoto says themselves. Together we can now offer you the simplest and most beautiful way to present and sell your images and prints online.

Sounds good. How do I activate this?
To make your images available to buy, simply create an account at Fotomoto and add the given ID-code to your Image Manager. Then enable the sparkling new shopping basket button in those albums of which you want the images to be sellable. See complete instructions here.

Once installed, visitors can click the basket symbol in your album. The image is added to the shopping basket, and further details (print size, paper, etc.) can be specified from the Fotomoto widget, reachable from the right corner of your site. Orders are processed right on your website and you will receive an email with the order information and be prompted to upload the high-resolution image. You only have to upload the high-resolution file once a sale is made. Fotomoto then takes care of the payment, printing and shipping.

Print options
Fotomoto offers premium quality C-Print using high-end Noritsu and Chromira printers on professional Kodak Endura photo papers so that you always receive the longest lasting and highest quality photographic prints available.

Order processing and payments
Fotomoto prints, packages, and ships the order direct to the customer. Your profits, which is the sales price minus the cost of the product and Fotomoto’s 15% service charge, are deposited directly into your Fotomoto account. Though you can request your money at any time, Fotomoto regularly pays you every time your balance hits $200, via mailed check or PayPal.

It’s the quality and simplicity of Fotomoto’s service that makes them our partner of choice. But on top of this it’s extra nice to see we share visions: “We just think it makes more sense to bring the technology to the place your art is, not the other way around. Isn’t that simple?” Affirmative.

For an how-to to add Fotomoto to Viewbook, see the Fotomoto support page on Viewbook. For more information and FAQs on Fotomoto, see http://www.fotomoto.com/home/tour and http://www.fotomoto.com/home/support

In our ongoing strive for simplicity, we’ve updated the page editing interface, making it easier and more intuitive to design your Pages and Websites. Just ‘click and edit’, that’s the idea.

So what changed exactly?
We’ve simplified the toolbar, thereby reducing the number of tabs from 7 to 4.
The ‘Text’ tab now contains a subsection of the different text elements on your Page (base text, title, menu). The ‘Layout’ tab is removed and is now part of the ‘Page’ tab. You’ll notice this clear arrangement works more logical.

New toolbar

Old toolbar

Click and edit
A second major change are the new frames around each Page element (see above screenshot). These frames clearly indicate all the different elements on your Page, and show you which element you are editing. But more importantly: when you click an element, it automatically switches to the right tab, with all the settings you can change for this element. Handy.

New text editor
There’s a new text editor too, with buttons to make text bold, italic or underlined, and to create a link. We still use Textile, as it’s faster and cleaner than rich text editors.

New thumbnail sizes
We’ve also added two more thumbnail sizes: a ‘medium square’ and a ’small’ one.

We hope you like it! And feedback is greatly appreciated.

Uploading to Viewbook got a whole lot faster. Not only do we use bigger servers for more capacity, we completely refactored the resizing and storage software and the main principle behind the upload process. This sounds a bit technical, but if you’d like to know what exactly happens with your images, read on!

Image quality
Image quality is important to us. We want to offer you the best resizing, compression and color. That’s why we hardly compress your images. We apply 95% quality JPG compression, so they will look sharp and bright. With all new software, there’s always a period of tuning. If you experience anything that could be improved, let us know. We hope you like the speed!

We’re very happy to announce that we’ve won the prestigious Professional Photographer Hot One 2010 Award. These awards represent photography’s best new products for professional application, as chosen by a panel of professional photographers. The Viewbook Pro Website Account swept past its competitors in the online album design and hosting category.

For the past 11 years, the Hot One Awards have provided Professional Photographer magazine’s readership with a resource of the newest, most innovative products. The panel of 52 judges – independent, practicing professional photographers selected for their expertise and knowledge – know what to look for in professional products. Their selection was based on overall quality, innovation, design, performance, and value for the price.

Viewbook.com stands out from the many static template website solutions available today because of its sophisticated design, flexibility and complete feature set. Look for the special Hot One Awards article, detailing the Viewbook.com Pro Account and the other winning products, in the February 2010 issue of Professional Photographer and online at www.ppmag.com/hotones_10

The social news release to spread the word is on http://pitch.pe/51397

We just launched our first issue of Photostory Weekly. Every second week we pick one submission from the Viewbook Photostory archive and provide it with background. We are starting off with Francesco Giusti’s story SAPE, and with good reason. His portrait story about the elegant Congelese ‘Sapeurs’ earned the first prize in the Viewbook Photostory 2009 Awards. Then, just a few months later, the series won a World Press Photo Award. Now it will be exposed to the world with the traveling World Press Photo Exhibition. We asked photographer and writer Miranda Gavin to share her view on the SAPE series and talk with Francesco about how it all came together. Enjoy, and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below. If you like to keep involved be sure to subscribe to the e-mail version!

www.photostoryweekly.com

We’ve just released a major new version of the Viewbook album and slideshow functionality. With many new features we can say we offer one of the most advanced flash albums available. But this release brings more; a completely new and very easy to use album editor. You can now style and configure your albums and see the changes instantly; 100% what you see is what you get!

The new album design is more refined and intuitive with enhanced text options, more configurability for thumbnails and navigation. For very large displays we added a HD viewing mode; full size viewing without quality loss! The new album also integrates seamlessly with the Viewbook Pages; a new editor lets you customize the albums inside your pages directly. Read more information and FAQ’s here.  Login and check it out! Any feedback? Let us know in the comments!