We've now made it possible to upload to your PhotoDeck account image files in the major RAW formats (DNG, CR2, CR3, CRW, NEF, NRW, ARW, ...)!
While this is mostly meant for commercial client proofing and delivery scenarios, RAW files can also be sold. You'll find a new pricing profile template in your admin space for that purpose.
Following our recent design and themes update, we've been hard at work expanding PhotoDeck's capabilities to make our members' life easier, and better support their business.
Until now, clients could request quotations for images and video clips from PhotoDeck websites. With this update, PhotoDeck members can themselves create and send new quotations, including for custom services (i.e. things not necessarily related to images), directly from their admin space.
For example, this makes it exceedingly easy to:
The new Create a quotation button can be found under My Business / Orders / Quotations.
We've built the ability to add Team Members to PhotoDeck accounts, so that a member can delegate access to his admin space to different people with different credentials -- and different user rights.
This is a big one. PhotoDeck is used not only by independent photographers but also by teams and organizations, and this feature opens up new possibilities to them.
This options requires a BUSINESS account. It is free of charge during the BETA period, until the end of September. Please contact support to get it!
We've also added the possibility to create additional websites under a single PhotoDeck STANDARD or BUSINESS account, sharing the same storage and all features, at a much lower price than a new account.
Many members have distinct specialities, and using different websites helps maintain a focused branding!
This will also come in handy for those who want to try something different without compromising their main website, while keeping the extended feature set they're used to and limiting costs.
The additional website add-on can be found under your subscription management page. Note that we are unfortunately not able to consolidate several existing accounts into a single one and this can only be used for new websites.
We're very excited to finally launch the design update we've been working on since last summer! It focuses on perfecting the polish and overall clean and modern look of PhotoDeck websites (those small details that can make a large difference), and realigning with some current trends.
Shortcut: How to benefit from this upgrade
Here are the main improvements available today as a free upgrade to all members:
We've improved the consistency of the typography for headings and sub-headings across the top of pages, sub-gallery titles, custom text, etc... The updated themes make it easy to select a font and a color for all headings at once, and get more readable and visually pleasing pages.
Similarly, we've introduced a standardized size progression for the fonts used across your website, based on the Golden Ratio. When you change the main font size, all others will scale in a way that maintain those pleasing proportions.
We've also worked on the spacing between lines of text, also resulting in a cleaner, more modern look. The updated themes allow for fine-tuning of this spacing.
The same line spacing used in typography now also serves as a basis for the spacing between paragraphs and elements on a page.
The objective is to create a vertical pattern that follows as regular a rhythm as possible, making it possible for the viewer's brain to more easily process and understand a page, again resulting in a more harmonious effect.
All themes (except #7, with its already-collapsible menu) now feature a new layout for tablets, one that relies on the "Hamburger navigation" (named after the Menu icon) normally found on smartphones.
Designers sometimes use a Hamburger navigation layout even on desktop designs for a super-minimalist look. If that's up your alley, PhotoDeck themes now also let you apply that Hamburger navigation on all devices.
Due to popular request, the size of buttons can now easily be changed in the themes' settings. But we've gone the extra mile and added more options that allow for completely new styles.
It wouldn't make sense to list all what we've worked on, but you might also notice improvements for example in thumbnail mouse-over effects, icons' colors, automatically computed text colors, styling of form fields...
Part of these improvements will automatically appear next time you change a setting that affects all pages on your website, even if you don't update your theme to its new version. From line spacing changes down to the rendering of some icons, many small improvements will automatically make their way to your website.
But this upgrade will only take its full sense for members who update their themes, both mobile and desktop, to their latest version.
The first reason is that updating your themes will bring you access to customization settings related to the changes, either to benefit fully from them, or, you know, if there's something you don't like.
The second reason is that all layouts / themes have been pretty much rewritten from scratch. We've kept the main layout concept for each of them, so you probably won't notice dramatic changes, but again, many little things have been polished, modernized, squared-up... or in a few cases, fixed.
So, take a backup of your designs just in case, upgrade now, and let us know what you think!
We're not quite done yet. We still have a few little design-related things up our sleeves that didn't fit into this update (subtle animations anyone?), so do send us your feedback and stay tuned for more!
Until now, orders not delivered through PhotoDeck (like prints prepared by yourself) could only be marked in the admin space as DELIVERED. This also triggered a notification email to the customer.
It caused confusion in some cases, when the photographer marked orders as DELIVERED before the customers actually received them.
So we've added a new intermediate "SHIPPED" state, which allows our members to both:
better communicate with their customers,
and better manage their own orders and their status.
Until an order is marked as DELIVERED, it can now be marked as SHIPPED, with an optional message to the customer, ideal for example to add a shipping tracking number!
Orders fulfilled by WHCC via our integration are automatically marked as SHIPPED.
And like before, orders can also still be marked as DELIVERED, but the message to the customer is now optional.
Note: the new SHIPPED state is naturally optional. For some orders (e.g. services), it is preferable to mark directly as DELIVERED.
We're happy to announce the completion of a major behind-the-scenes project:
We've updated the code behind PhotoDeck to base it on a new version of the software framework we use, Ruby on Rails. (A software framework is the coding language and associated tools used by developers.)
That's over 10.000 lines of code that have been manually edited, rewritten or added, in hundreds of different files.
The upgrade was brought to the live PhotoDeck platform last week -- without any service interruption.
In the short term, probably not much. Some performance improvements, although since our platform already enjoyed an average response time of less than 15ms, that's barely noticeable.
But PhotoDeck isn't about the short term, never has been (that's the benefit of not having external investors or bankers to please).
Keeping up with the evolution of software frameworks is tedious, and has to be done often, but it means that, down the line, we can leverage new features, new technologies, better security.
It's like like always shooting in a brand new shiny photo studio with the latest tools.
More generally, constantly keeping our code fresh, clean and consistent is what allows us to stay flexible, consider big changes and keep improving for years to come.
We want our software to be like a nice Lego house, where it's easy to move a window and some walls, and build a new room in the same way as if it had been there from day one.
The common alternative is to stick with old stuff and keep adding new stuff on top of it. Like for a sand castle, at some point one can't touch any part without risking huge damage, and the whole thing slowly crumbles, ultimately leading to restarting from scratch, or dying.
We love our Lego.
