| Quality of Sharing Features: |
|
| Range/Quality of Prints and Gifts: |
|
| Other Features: |
|
| Ease of Use / Navigation: |
|
| Ease of Joining / Registration: |
|
| Customer Support: |
|
| Value for Money: |
|
| Overall Star Rating: |
|
I've been using Phanfare for 5 years and have a love / hate relationship with it.... Mostly I love it.
The good:
- Fantastic looking albums. No advertisements appear to the user or viewers
- Ability to create a personalized URL and sub-sites (i.e. xxx.com/family-photos or xxx.com/travel-photos) as well as providing a direct link to an isolated album
- OK editing tools online; Excellent desktop editor (download from Phanfare) that makes building an album and tweaking pictures (brightness, contrast, sharpen, crop, etc.) a breeze
- Ability to make very nice slideshows with multiple sections and music tracks (using tracks provided by Phanfare or by accessing MP3 files you own)
- Speed of uploads is quite good; Allows hi-res / very large images
The not so good:
- No ability to organize your overall website with anything other than Chronological grouping, i.e., groups albums by year as in 2011, 2010, 2009, etc. Within the albums from a specific year your choice is to store the albums oldest first or newest first, not alphabetical or any other user specified way. The only way to have a grouping of your choosing, e.g., "Family photos", or "Travel photos" is to create sub-sites (see above comment) but your viewers cannot see all of your sub-sites in any one place. What that means is if you create a lot of albums and give access to your website to a family member or a friend, they'll have to read through all of your albums in chronological order to find the one they want vs being able to go to "Travel" for pictures from your trip to France 5 years ago or "Family" to see pictures from a grandchild's birthday party. Within each sub-site the organization is again grouped by year. This is a big drawback if you create a lot of albums and will most likely be the reason I leave Phanfare; I have been asking Phanfare to provide user-defined organization for the last 5 years.
- Does not allow importing of RAW format unless you purchase RAW storage blocks for $24.99 per 10GB per year on top of your subscription rate
- Online help tools are not good and customer service help is terrible.
My recommendation is "Yes" try it if you don't care about personalizing how your albums are organized / displayed on your website because all the other features are great.
My recommendation is "no" don't try it if you have a lot of albums and you want to organize by anything other than date/year
In summary, I would recommend Phanfare to a friend.
|
