ALAFOTO

Phanfare

By Alafoto September-1-2010

Phanfare

Phanfare is an excellent quality service for sharing your photos and videos online. It offers an astounding array of features and loads of different ways to integrate the service with software and devices you might already own. Unlimited storage for all your content comes as standard and its really easy to create your own great looking website made up…

Costs:

Premium membership: $49.99 per year
Pro membership: $99.99 per year
Optional RAW format storage for $24.99 / 10 GB

Features:

Great looking photo sharing website with loads of features
Share your photos and videos online with your family and friends
Create your own photo and video website in minutes
Web drop box so family and friends can leave photos for you
Unlimited storage for all your photos and videos
Order custom hardback, high quality books of your photos
Allow your visitors to order prints of your photos
High quality, fullscreen video on the web
Create great looking photo and video slideshows
Phanfare screensaver automatically shows your photos
Customized URL for your website
Password protect your whole website
Sync photos and videos directly with your iPhone
Integration with Flickr and Facebook
Web based management or downloadable desktop organizer
Plugins for Apple Aperture, Apple iPhoto, Google’s Picasa and Adobe Lightroom
Export your photos directly to Phanfare
Customize your website more fully with a Pro membership
Support for Eye-Fi™ wireless SD memory cards
Wireless digital photo frames that support Phanfare will automatically update
One hour email support
Free trial available

Phanfare is an excellent quality service for sharing your photos and videos online. It offers an astounding array of features and loads of different ways to integrate the service with software and devices you might already own. Unlimited storage for all your content comes as standard and its really easy to create your own great looking website made up of your best photos and videos. We think this is a truly excellent service at a very reasonable price.

Before you even sign up, Phanfare lets you see some examples of the kind of sites it is possible to create with the service. These look great and once you get some photos uploaded you will soon realise it is incredibly simple to create something equally good, if not better, looking. Sites seem to load very quickly and even the best quality high definition video streamed very well. As well as creating your main web site with its own customized URL you can create multimedia Flash based slideshows and share them with your visitors. This is also really simple to do and there are some nicely structured wizards to lead you through the process.

Before we go on we should mention how easy it is to get some photos uploaded to Phanfare. This is because, as well as having a variety of intuitive web based uploader tools, Phanfare also integrates with all of the popular desktop photography software. Plug-ins are available for iPhoto, Picassa and Adobe Lightroom amongst others which let you simply upload your photos from within the application. Support is also provided for Eye-Fi™ wireless SD cards which can be used to upload photos directly from your camera to the web site. While we are on the subject of integration, another great feature that we haven’t seen elsewhere is the ability to link in supported digital photo frames to your Phanfare account. This means that the photo frame in your living room can be displaying all the most recent photos uploaded to your Phanfare account.

As well as providing a wealth of sharing, creative and integration features Phanfare also allows you to purchase high quality gifts and prints from their online store. There is even an online designer so that you can design your own hardback photo album containing all your favourite photos and printed on high quality paper. The prices for these aren’t the cheapest around, but the products are very good quality. A neat extra is that visitors to your albums can also order prints of any photos they like the look of. Of course, you are always in complete control of who can do what do your photos by means of the tight security controls, so there is no need to worry about unwanted visitors stealing your snaps.

In case you hadn’t realised by now, we think Phanfare is an excellent service and membership is very reasonably priced. Some of the best features, such as wireless SD card support and digital photo frame integration, are only worthwhile if you already have, or are planning to buy, the associated hardware. However, you will still find a whole host of useful and fun features to play with. Also, considering it is easily possible to pay the same membership fee for a service not even half as good as this we think Phanfare offers excellent value for money. A free trial is available so that you can see all you are missing out on!