Sharing albums
From Doc
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There are four options for sharing from your Phanfare account.
Sharing public albums
We recently released the ability to designate all or any of your albums to be open, public albums available to anyone who navigates to your home Phanfare URL (albums.phanfare.com/vanity URL or number). If you were previously a Phanfare 1.0 customer, your site URL will automatically redirect to the new URL.
To create a new public album, select "Everyone (open to the public)" under "Who can see this album?" during the album creation process. To set any of your existing albums to be public, go to the album sharing page (http://www.phanfare.com/album/sharing.aspx) off your Phanfare home page.
Here's an example of a public album: http://albums.phanfare.com/open
Sharing with friends and family
Phanfare also offers you the ability to designate your albums as viewable to only family, friends and/or a specific group. This method does require that you invite your friends and family to register with Phanfare to view your albums. The benefit of this option is that you will get visitor reports specifying exactly who visited what albums. If connected to several people with content, you will be able to navigate to their site directly from your Phanfare home page at www.phanfare.com just by clicking their name in your friends & family box. When they post new albums, you will get a message on your news feed with the link to the new album. When you create a new album your friends and family are automatically notified via an email with a direct link to the album (optional - read more about content notifications below). It's a great way to stay in touch with the people you share with most.
Once you have albums designated as shared with friends and family, you need to invite people to connect with you as a friend or family member so they can view your shared albums. To do this:
- Go to your Phanfare home page (http://www.phanfare.com).
- Click on the tab for friend, family, or groups and click the link under the tab to add someone.
- Enter the first name, last name, and email address of the people you want to invite. Designate them as friend or family.
- If you need to invite more than 6 people, click the "invite more people" option under the box. Each time you click it, another row is added to the invite table. So if you need to invite three more people, click it three times. Then, use the scroll bar to scroll down to enter the information.
- You can import contacts from an existing address book by clicking the "Import email addresses" link above the area where you enter names. You can currently import addresses from AOL, Live, Hotmail, Msn or Yahoo! account. You can also import your Outlook or Mac address book or import any .csv file. Most address books (including gmail) let you export them as a .csv file.
- Once you have the list of people you want to invite, you can add a personal message to the invite if you want.
- When done, select the blue invite button at bottom and Phanfare will send out your invitations to connect.
When a friend or family member receives the invitation, it will instruct them that they need to click the button in the email to register for a free account to see your albums if they are not already a Phanfare customer. They click the button or link and go to a page where they set their password. This is the password they will use, along with their email address, to view your albums in the future. Once they set the password, there is a link under "messages" to click to view your albums.
After they are connected to you, any subsequent new album notifications or messages you send them will contain direct links to your albums that they can follow without being prompted to login (the login is automatic as long as they are coming from a registered email address). Upon connecting with a Phanfare customer for the first time, we also send each person a welcome email that reiterates that they have a free Phanfare account and can now view your albums. Other than that welcome mail, we do not send any other email to registered viewers without content of their own. The only other email they would get is if you choose to send them a new album notification or use the "share album" email invite tools.
Once connected to you, you can choose when you create a new album if you want your friends and family to automatically receive an email notification of the new album. These notifications go out once a day (overnight) and contain a direct link to the new content. These notifications only go out currently when you create a new albums. Adding images to an existing album will not trigger an email notification.
If you do not want the content notifications to go out to specific people (or anyone) on your friends and family list, then you should click the "adjust notifications" link next to the box where you choose who to share the album with when you create the album. Unselect anyone you don't want to get a new album notification. You can also turn automatic content notification off completely if you choose under Settings-->manage privacy settings (uncheck top box on right side of page).
If you want to customize the text, subject, and/or picture in a notification of a new album or new pictures, you may want to unselect all under adjust notifications when you create the album and use the "share album" functionality to customize a message to the people you choose about the new album or pictures. The message will go out instantly.
In addition, each family or friend that accepts an invitation to connect now has their own Phanfare Home Page at http://www.phanfare.com. If they go there (and login if prompted), they can see all the people they are connected to, manage their privacy & email notification settings, and create their own Phanfare albums to share back with you for free (up to 1GB in storage).
External Link to One Album
If you want to share an album with someone without being permanently connected to them, but you don't want the album to be completely public, you can use our external link feature to get a URL for any album, copy it and then share it outside of Phanfare. Recipients can go directly to the URL to see just that album without being connected to you in the Phanfare system. They will only see the one album unless already logged in and connected to you as friend or family. The "share album" function also creates an external link. Read more on how to send an external link.
Sharing with a group
Related article: How to create a group and invite others to view the group's shared albums.
Using your Phanfare home page (http://www.phanfare.com), you can create groups and invite others to join and view the albums. Groups are intended to be a specific set of people outside of your family and friends who you only want to be able to see a certain album or set of albums, such as a baseball team, dance troupe, etc. If you share albums with group members, they will not be able to see any albums other than those shared with the group. Groups are not intended to be a subset of your friends or family list. If your mission is to share an album with a subset of your friends or family, you should use the external links feature explained below and email the link out to that subset directly.
Those invited will receive an email invitation to view the group's albums. If they click the link in the invite, they will be taken to the registration page to set up their password. Once they have confirmed their email address, they should go to the group's shared page.
If you are the creator of the group, you will have the option of whether to allow other group members to add their albums to the group's shared album page. If this option is on, this means any group member can go to an existing album they have uploaded to Phanfare and go into its album properties and designate it to be shared with the group. The album will then be added to the group's shared album page. Keep in mind that although someone has added their own album to the group. The album remains their album and is on their account (not the group creator's).
Groups have their own distinct URLs, which are formatted as albums.phanfare.com/groups/xxxx. As such, if you invite someone to a group that you have also invited to connect as a friend or family member, they will only see the group's shared albums when visiting the group's page. There will be no links to albums you may have also shared with them as family and/or friends. To view these albums, they can visit their Phanfare Homepage and click on your name in their friend and family list or follow the links in the email content notifications they receive.
There is no way to automatically take someone who is a friend or family member and add them to a group without inviting them again. This is because a group is designed to be something completely separate. Depending on how it is set up, there may be several people a person does not know in the group who are uploading content to it and your friend or family member must confirm that they do want to be listed as a group member and receive the emails when someone in a group creates a new album. If you are using a group the way it was intended - for a soccer team for example- this should make sense. If trying to subset your friends and family into smaller groups, it does not suit your needs as well. That is why we recommend using external links for this purpose if possible.
If you don't know all the email addresses for who might join your group but still want registration-based security, you should set your group to be an open group by checking the radio button in the group management screen that says: "Anyone can join the group without being invited." That will allow those who go to your group URL to register, confirm their address, and then immediately be able to view the group content without awaiting approval from you.