We’re adding some great new options to the Viewbook image galleries. Here’s what’s coming:

Password protect your presentations
Protect your presentation with a password, so only people who received the password can view your presentation. Great for client presentations and stuff you like to keep private.

Google Analytics for individual presentations
You can add Google Analytics to see visitor statistics for each individual presentation.

Public Share function, so everybody can share your presentation
You can share your presentation from within the Image Manager, as we wrote in a previous post Share Viewbook Everywhere. We made it also possible that viewers of your presentation can share it to a wide range of websites and via e-mail. So they can help you promote your work. You can disable the share function when you don’t need it.

Transparent toolbar
We added a new setting for a transparent toolbar option that picks up the same color as the background of your image gallery (see picture above).

Embedded mini-view, now with toolbar options
When the size of the embedded Viewbook is smaller than 400 pixels all elements automatically scale down; the thumbnails, the logo and the toolbar. We now added extra toolbar options (see the picture above) to the embedded galleries, so people can: play/pause your slideshow, enable a fullscreen view, download the current image or share the gallery (Facebook/Blogger e.o.).

The new options are available within two weeks.

This is just a short message to inform you, in the midst of the summer holidays (I just came back from a short holiday at the west-coast of Italy), about recent things we’re working on at Viewbook.

This August we’re going to release another great overhaul of Viewbook. Based on your feedback and new insights we will release new features, better help pages and a completely new improved product website. Some of the new features include: cropping and positioning of images (finally!), new embed configuration options, more font options and the possibility to backup your presentation images into a .zip file. There’s lots of new stuff coming!

We’re also working on a Viewbook ‘Experts’ network to enrich communication with our users in many countries. We already have some great people supporting us in Belguim, France, England and The United States. We’ll post a message as soon as we’re requesting for new participants.

If you have any ideas or wishes that would make Viewbook a better tool for you, let us know by posting your ideas in the Viewbook forums here.

For now, enjoy the summer, and we’ll keep you posted.

With 100,000 objects dating from ancient times to the present, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is the largest art museum in the western United States. For one of their current exhibitions LACMA uses Viewbook to show a selection of art works from Los Angelenos/Chicano Painters. You can visit the the LACMA page here.

Today we pushed some Image Manager optimizations online, together with a new Share feature. You can now share your Viewbook galleries almost everywhere. With just a few clicks you can embed your gallery in Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress and 20 other platforms I did not even know the existence of. It’s quite amazing how fast you have your gallery posted in your Blogger web site.

The new Share feature can also automatically bookmark your Viewbook gallery to Del.icio.us, StumbleOpon, Twitter and 30 others.

Just click the ‘Share’ button on top of your presentation to get started. Happy sharing!

The public Viewbook presentations were not available in the weekend of 14/15 March, because of network problems. You can read more at our System Status forum here.