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With our new feature,  ‘Publish images to Flickr & Facebook’, sharing your images in these social contexts has become very easy. You can do it in just three clicks. But which of your images do you share on Facebook or Flickr and which do you not? And when do you or don’t you?

“I think, therefore I am”, is a famous quote from Descartes, which nowadays can probably be translated to  “I share, therefore I am.“ While on- and offline participation in social communities can take many different forms, the fact of the matter is that we all invest in social interaction. Sharing thoughts, ideas and work with people simply opens up new opportunities.

However on the one side, there’s the desire to be independent and autonomous as an artist, on the other side the necessity to share. It’s a challenge to find a balance within this paradox.

Brandon Schulman, in our first podcast, says the following:

“I don’t love mixing work and personal stuff, which is definitely an issue on Facebook. A blog is great for me. I see it as another way for people to get to know me without knowing me. I see all these things as a way for people to take a little bite, if somebody wants you they are going to get you, it’s important not to force things upon people.”

I’d like this post to be a start of a discussion about whether or not to share works on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and other social media. And if yes; in what manner? Got ideas or insights that you like to share? Please post it in the comments!

Thinking about creating a physical portfolio? I just received a copy of ‘Designing effective compelling and memorable portfolios of creative work’. A nicely-designed, high-quality magazine-like book by Flaunt. The book is brimful with case studies of great portfolio’s, interviews with professionals like Michael Bierut, Carin Goldberg, Stefan Sagmeister, Petrula Vrontikis, Adrian Shaughnessy, and others. They share the most common mistakes people make in their portfolios, and offer their best advice. Surveys answer common concerns like how many pieces should be included in the portfolio, how should first contact be made with potential interviewers, and how should the work be presented in an interview.

Focused on graphic design it should also be interesting for photographers and other creative professions that require a portfolio. The book is available as .pdf too on the Flaunt website.

To give all of you new Viewbook website creators a flying start we made an illustrated tutorial. In 13 steps it guides you trough the basic steps of website creation and shows you the basic principals of Viewbook. You’ll find the tutorial here.

You can do more with your images than you think. Keeping them on your hard-drive or e-mail them once in a while is not the best way to promote yourself and your work. Here’s what Viewbook can do for you and your images.

1. A central place to store your images
Viewbook gives you a central place to organize and store your images. You can access your image library wherever there’s an internet connection. After uploading them to your account you have a secure online backup of your original images.

2. Leave a professional impression
Viewbook makes it possible for you to show your work quickly and professionally. It simply makes a good impression when you use a professional tool like Viewbook. The Viewbook galleries look clean and load quickly. They automatically adjusts to different screen sizes and have full screen view. If you want to protect your presentations you can add a password so only people with a valid login can see your work.

3. Make work selections quickly
Once you uploaded your images into Viewbook you can organize them into different presentations (albums) and portfolio pages. This way you can create work selections very easily, and showcase only the works you think are important.

4. Special gallery formats for different kinds of usage
Showing images from a photography shoot is not the same thing as showing web design proposals. That’s why Viewbook created flexible gallery settings to enable or disable only the options you need. Show website and design proposals at their original size, enable thumbnail options for photo albums, or hide all options for a clean embedded gallery.

5. Share your work on Facebook and many other sites
Create a gallery with your best work and add it to your Facebook profile or any other website. When you enable the public share function visitors of your gallery can share your work even further.

6. Keep your portfolio up to date in minutes
Viewbook created a simple but powerful online portfolio page. Not a complete portfolio website, but a functional page optimized to show your work. You can create as many pages as you need for different portfolios or projects and you can connect your portfolio to your own domain name.

7. It’s simple, quick and it works
It always feels good when an application does what it needs to do. Viewbook is focused on simplicity and ease of use. After registration you can have you gallery or portfolio up in several minutes.

Any ideas for new features? Let us know by adding a comment or visit our support forum.

With Viewbook it’s possible to create multiple web pages. Web pages are portfolio or project pages that bundle your presentations, to make them available to the public.

The new web page style settings allow you to adjust the page to your specific needs. You can choose the image size (small, wide and large), background color, hide or add a custom logo, and more. We’ve added a brand new tutorial to our support section; Create and Customize Portfolio Pages to get you going and which shows you all the available options.

If you want to try all of this you can upgrade to the Standard or Pro account and try it one month for free. Login to your account and go to the ‘account’ tab and choose ‘upgrades’.

To show you what you can do with those style settings see the examples below.

wide images, white background, default font | open example

wide images, black background, no-logo | open example

large images, dark blue background, Serif font | open example