Blog

Viewbook PhotoStory 2010 submissions are open now!

By Alrik | July 9th, 2010 | No Comments

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.

Sell prints of your work with Viewbook + Fotomoto

By Rien | July 8th, 2010 | 18 Comments


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.

Simplified Webpage Editing

By Rien | July 6th, 2010 | 16 Comments

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.

Faster uploading and high quality resizing

By Alrik | July 3rd, 2010 | 4 Comments


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!

Our old upload system received your uploads, resized your images, and stored them in the cloud. Your upload was ready after this process finished. With the new system your upload is ready as soon as your image is uploaded to our servers. Resizing and storing happens in the background. This dramatically increases the experienced speed, and you can start organizing your images much earlier. Our challenge is to make sure the first images you see (thumbnails, previews) are ready (resized and stored) when you close the ‘upload’ window. Larger images will follow a couple of seconds later. In this case you will see a ’progress’ image in place.

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!