We’ve Moved!

Our new and improved blog has moved to blog.photobox.co.uk. All new posts will now appear at the new address rather than here. Come and take a look and see what you think!

Check it out now!

 

Pro gallery v2.0 planning: your feedback requested

As promised I am updating you all on our proposed changes to pro galleries. We have started the planning work and now it’s time to get some feedback from existing gallery owners.

Uploading to your pro gallery

Firstly, I can see that some of you are frustrated that it is necessary to upload twice: once to the old site to sell images through pro-gallery and once again to the new site if you want to order prints. We could add a feature so that you could upload once to the new site (via FTP, in the browser or Picasa) and then import photos from the new site into a gallery album. If you would like to see this feature implemented please let me know. If there is enough support we will get it done ASAP.

New features planned

The new pro galleries are planned to have all of the features from the old service, but appearing in the style of the new site. We feel this will be a cleaner, less cluttered experience for your visitors and customers. Of course your own logos, graphics and contact details will still appear. And when launched all of your content will be migrated over.

These are some of the new features that we anticipate adding:

• Optional password protection for individual collections
• No limit on the number of products that can be offered
• Optional watermarking of medium sized (500 pixel) images
• The ability to set different products and prices for specific collections. Thus you could have a premium collection at higher prices or a collection of panoramic images with only relevant print sizes offered.
• Electronic download at a price you decide
• Search of gallery and optional inclusion of your collections and photos into the main site public search results (pro gallery images will be clearly identified to the visitor when viewing public photos)

And in a later release:

• Choice of page styles, for example, black background rather than white
• Choice of funds collection (the profit from your sales): as a credit to be used on main site or via automated payment into a nominated PayPal account
• Pre-made creations: the ability for you to make a completed photobook, calendar or any other creation product, allow visitors to view it and to buy it for a price you decide

Now over to you. Does the list above sound right to you? Are there any of these features that you feel are not necessary or not described the way you want them? Are there other features that would make galleries much more successful for you? I’m looking forward to receiving your feedback and ideas on what’s important to you.

One final point: we plan to launch a new PhotoBox blog within the next week. This will have two distinct areas: one for consumers and another for our pros. We feel that the issues raised are quite different between the two audiences. We will of course make you fully aware of the new address and redirect you from the old blog once this is available.

I always say this, but thanks again for the feedback. It’s a great thing to have you contributing to our future developments in such a direct way.

Regards
Graham

PhotoBox technology update: end of May

I would like to give you an update on some recent changes to the site and work in progress.

Performance and upload

We made quite a few changes over the last two weeks that have improved the performance of the site generally and some key pages including albums and “my photobox”. There are further changes that we can make to improve performance for customers with over 100 albums, and we will be looking at these in early June.

We have also fixed some issues this week with uploads freezing in Firefox.

Products

Postcards are now available again the site. They are improved over the old site version in that it is now possible to enter a lot more text and to have more control over text formatting.

Mugs with captions and templates are in the final stages of testing and will be available within the next few days.

Tableau

We have introduced “Tableau”: a new sharing method which allows you to design a photo blog page with photos laid out with a completely configurable layout (any scattering with different sizes and placements). It is an experimental service at the moment, but if popular then something we can build on for general sharing or pro gallery usage.

Take a look at a sample wedding Tableau we made to get a better idea:

http://publish.photobox.co.uk/Susan_and_tony/our_wedding_day.html

Other recent changes

For those of you who didn’t see recent postings, we have re-activated upload by FTP on ftp://ftp.photobox.com (note this is “.com” and NOT “.co.uk”). There is also now a new “advanced options” print user journey which re-introduces the controls you used to have: shrink to fit for all, and easy selection of different print sizes for all or part of the set of photos.

Image quality

I have seen several postings about the sharpness and colour of medium sized images. We have made no changes to this for several months. So the behaviour of the new site is exactly the same as the old site. I have personally investigated some of the images that people describe as differing in quality or colour and to be honest, I can’t see any colour differences. But the medium sized images are a bit soft. We have contacted the company that makes the upload software (Aurigma) asking for an ability to apply a sharpening rule when generating this image. They have suggested a different setting which we are currently testing and that will be released next week. It does improve the sharpness of the scaled image somewhat.

Other work in progress and Pro galleries

There are quite a few other changes in progress at the moment to provide new features and to address some of the points raised in this blog and feedback to customer services. I will give you an update next week on these.

We have also started the design work for the new pro galleries service, due later in the summer. We are starting 1:1 consultation with some pro gallery owners, and I will be able to provide you with more information on our plans next week.

As always, we really value your feedback and are working hard to make improvements based on what we see. I hope you all have a very good weekend.

Regards
Graham

The view from the 29th floor of Millbank Tower

View of Canary Wharf from the Millbank Tower

When not blogging for PhotoBox, one of a handful of other gigs I juggle is my role as Food & Drink Editor for Londonist. The position is a brilliant opportunity for me to sample some of the best that London’s eclectic dining scene has to offer and often provides me with interesting photo-ops too. For example, a recent event had me schmoozing in the Altitudes Studio on the 29th floor of the Millbank Tower round sunset. Situated near the Thames in Pimlico, the views from atop the Millbank were absolutely stunning – the best I’ve seen in town except for maybe those from the London Eye.

I took several shots of the skyline with most not turning out so well (I think that last glass of ‘schmoozing’ might have gone to my head). However, I did manage to get one halfway decent shot looking out toward Canary Wharf with a bit of rainbow thrown in for good measure. Nice one.

Chris

Working With You

About time for an update, and I thought I’d drill down a bit into the stuff we’re doing to develop and improve the service the way our customers would like. I’m glad to say we’ve had no shortage of takers so far, prepared to help us with problem resolution and the prototyping of new features we’re developing.

Inevitably, new site or old, we get problems from time to time caused by either stuff we do (new site releases), or stuff the market does to us (like new operating system or browser versions getting released). It’s impossible for us to test every possible combination that’s out there; our test team do a thorough job, but after that we inevitably rely on customer feedback to flag remaining problems, which we pick up through a daily analysis of the many contacts we get.

Often we’ll then go into a more detail with you direct, to try to find out more about the problem. We’ll use surveys, one-to-one emails or phone calls, and our own logs and diagnostic tools to get more data. Thanks, if you’re contributed recently, as we’ve gone about finding and fixing stuff that’s been hard to track down. This kind of work is by its nature ongoing, but we’re making great progress fixing problems, and making our site easier to use.

So the key point. It’s our intention to continue to increase our interaction with you, using your feedback directly to shape the future of the service, and to continue to drive up service quality. If we contact you directly, I hope you’ll help. If you’re already helping, I’m certain you’ll see the benefits of your input very quickly.

Talking of which, you’ll hopefully have seen significant improvements to print ordering on the site, and the performance of key pages. It’s definitely an example of stuff we didn’t get right first time, but live customers have greatly contributed to both these upgrades, giving us great confidence that everyone will see them as positive change. Graham, our CTO, has personally been involved in some of the calls. I’ll leave you to judge whether we got it right.

Next up, you should expect further developments in respect of site performance, and product coverage in the next week or so. We’ll keep you posted, of course.

Finally, a bit of shameless marketing. We launched our new range of personalised hardcover books this week. Please take a look – I love them, and I hope you do too. The quality of the finished product from our new manufacturing process is amazing.

As ever, keep the feedback coming.

Mark

FTP back online

Not the usual kind of post, but since it’s been a big ask from you since we moved house, I thought I’d just flag this up. For those not familiar with FTP, it’s simply an alternate method by which you can send your image files into us.

We’ve tested the service thoroughly, and we think it’s working fine. Sorry again for the delay.

So FTP is now back as an option on our upload page, and the direct URL is ftp://ftp.photobox.com. Just login with your usual PhotoBox email address and password, and please let us know if you get any problems.

Have a great weekend.

Mark

Latest Feedback

Falls to me to post the latest on the new site, and other stuff going on here. I hope you found the previous posts by Graham informative.

We’ve spent a great deal of time over the last week or so talking to our customers about the new site, via surveys, email, phone conversations and doing some prototype testing of new features with some of you. Thanks again if you’ve contributed. It’s been a good experience throughout, getting to the heart of what people really miss about the old site, and now that the new site’s a bit more familiar to customers, what’s working well.

Problems really comes down to the fact that we’re not yet fully optimised for the frequent, ‘heavy’ user of our services, particularly professional and commercial customers. We’re seeing a good response however from customers who wish to make a relatively simple order – 100 6x4s, for example, or a Photobook. Indeed our new book manufacturing facilities are running pretty busy already!

I’m confident however we’ll continue to improve for all our customers. As previously posted, we’ll go live with a much improved high-volume print order screen very soon, which will reintroduce the features on the old site. FTP will go back up in the next few days. Performance on some of our key pages will also greatly improve, as promised, in the next couple of weeks or so – development of the required tuning is already well-advanced.

Back to the theme of getting feedback from you. Apart from this blog, we’ll be increasing the amount of co-development & testing we do directly with customers. Just recently some of you have worked with us on a new ‘prints user journey’ and it’s been invaluable for us. We aim to continue with this kind of approach to ensure our customers remain at the centre of our thinking. Post your views on this via this blog, and let us know if you’d like to participate in the future.

Finally, an update from our customer service department. Stuart and the team have worked much overtime fielding the initial wave of questions and problems as customers changed over. Thanks for your patience if an answer’s taken longer than normal. I’m glad to say service levels are returning to normal, but if you could call outside of our peak 9am to noon period it would be appreciated.

More soon
Mark