Fotomoto

New Print Product: High Quality Wall Peels

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:33:38 -0800

Wall Peels, Wall Murals, Sticky Prints, Self-adhesive Posters… these are all different names for the same product, a new product that we just started offering to our community.

Wall Peels have been around for a while, and we have wanted to add that to our product offerings from early days. But after testing a good number of print labs, we realized the quality of this product was not good enough for our community. The material most of the labs use for Wall Peels is a fabric that absorbs ink, which makes colors look dull - especially darker colors. So we decided to wait, and test more labs.

A few months ago we finally found a great lab offering Wall Peels using a very good quality vinyl material. We tested several photos, and they all came out with vivid colors. Happy to have found the right product, we started integrating and adding this to our offerings. Today we are happy to announce that we have added Wall Peels to our print product offerings!

There is virtually no limit to the Wall Peel print size. Wall Peels are printed on 40”-wide roles of vinyl, and they can be applied to the wall right next to each other (just like wallpaper), so orders can be as big as almost any wall size. Applying Wall Peels is very easy and needs no special equipment or expertise, almost anyone can do it in a few minutes. We also offer something that most Wall Peel labs don’t have: we can offer Wall Peels as small as 8” x 8”. And all of that comes at a very affordable price.

To enable this product in your store, simply log in to your Fotomoto account, go to Store, select the Collection you want, and turn on Wall Peels.

Behance Enhanced by Fotomoto

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 10:12:00 -0800

Behance is the latest company that has integrated Fotomoto into their platform and has made it available to its photographers and artists.

Behance’s core product is the Behance Network, the leading online platform to showcase and discover creative work. Creative professionals, from across industries, use Behance to create multi-media portfolios that showcase their work within the Network, as well as dozens of other partner sites and industry-specific, curated online galleries. Partners include LinkedIn, Art Directors Club, AIGA, TED, and others.

In addition to the Network, Behance offers Prosite. Leveraging the cutting-edge technology that supports the Behance Network platform, ProSite is a revolutionary new way to build, host, and manage your personal portfolio website. Tailored to the needs of the modern creative professional, ProSite allows users to create a fully customizable website, without touching a line of code. And, it seamlessly syncs your portfolio with the Behance Network for maximum efficiency and exposure.

With Fotomoto’s seamless integration in Behance Network’s platform, Behance Network and Prosite members now have the ability to sell prints of their portfolio content using Fotomoto. You can receive promotional pricing on the Prosite offering if you mention Fotomoto in the signup form.

Step-by-step instruction on adding Fotomoto to Behance accounts is here.

Cards & eCards Improvements

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 11:15:00 -0800

This week we have made a couple improvement to our Cards and eCards services. For both products, you can now customize the credit and copyright text. To do this, simply go to your Store > Collections, click on Card’s or eCard’s Settings, and customize the credit message.

Also, we used to have our full logo in color on the back of the cards. Some members mentioned that this makes it look like their cards are from Fotomoto, and they were right. So we have changed the logo to a smaller, black & white stamp-looking graphic.

Improved eCard & Social Share

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 19:27:32 -0800

There have been some changes in Google’s social life: Google Buzz is out, and Google Plus is in. While we were updating our Share feature to apply these changes, we thought we should improve the eCard service as well, cleaning up our eCard UI has been long overdue.

In our server update this week, we have combined the eCard and Sharing into one button and one window, simplified the eCard UI, and replaced Google Buzz with Google Plus.

Social sharing can now be turned on / off in the Dashboard under the eCard section.

Rolling Stone (and Facebook)

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 15:54:00 -0800

If you like music - any type of music - there is a good chance that you are a fan of Rolling Stone Magazine. They have been publishing since the late 60s, and just looking at those covers can make you emotional. It’s almost imposible not to want to hang some of those covers - old or new - in your room, or your office. And now we are happy to announce that they are using Fotomoto to offer authentic reprints of their covers, both on their website, and on their facebook fan page!

Very soon, you will be able to offer Fotomoto’s service to your fans on facebook too!

Fotomoto Product Updates

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 16:51:31 -0800

We have been quiet here in our blog, but we have been busy working on a lot of improvements:

We have completely redesigned and combined our Image and Products page and improved the way we handle product offerings and pricing. The new page, Store, is simpler, cleaner, and more streamlined.
We changed the layout of the product pricing table in the Dashboard, organizing the product pricing section into tabs based on size groupings so it’s easier to manage.
We have added a new way to manage images: Albums. Albums are basically what you expect an album to be: a set (or subset) of the images. This was an important feature for some of our future features, including the most-requested service, a Facebook integration app (we’ll have more on this soon!).
We’ve simplified the customer interface for Cards by removing the ‘fit’ option from our Widget. Images now fill the Card, and buyers can drag the image to achieve the desired crop if necessary.
We added the ability for sellers to adjust the cropping of any image in the Dashboard > Orders page, so that you have the final say on what your image cropping looks like.
To make ordering products even easier, we’ve simplified the shipping options so your customers can choose shipping options based on combinations of Standard and Express in Tube or Flat.
And last but not least, we have been able to negotiate better shipping prices! Our shipping prices are 5%-20% lower for most of the products and sizes. Right on time for the shopping season.

As always, we welcome your feedback and comments in our Community. We will be rolling out several new updates and products during the next couple of weeks, stay tuned.

Printless in Europe - No More!

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 13:01:00 -0700

Good news: we finally have our European print lab partner up and running!

Some history: based on the feedback from our European community, we first talked about expanding our print lab network to Europe back in early 2010, and now it’s 2011! We were lucky in finding good print lab partners here in the US, and we naively thought adding labs in Europe would be just as easy. Since then our members have been asking for this repeatedly: first with excitement, then with patience, and recently with frustration; and they are right to be frustrated - we got frustrated too. The problem is the right combination of quality, technology, and automation seems to be rare when it comes to print labs in Europe. While we were able to find good quality print labs, most of them didn’t have an API for automation. And the very few that did were mostly offering “snappy-fishy” print quality which is not suitable for our community.

After almost 2 years of “research and development”, we are happy that we finally found a great lab that offers (German) quality prints: WhiteWall. You may know them for the wide range of print products that they offer and their award-winning print quality. We have been quietly using them for a few weeks to make sure everything works before we announce it, and now we are excited to finally and officially say that we have a print lab partner in Europe! At this point we are only using WhiteWall for Premium Print orders, but soon we will be offering EU fulfillment for most of our products.

Changes in Non-USD Accounting

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 11:15:00 -0700

Fotomoto has been offering it’s services to both US-based and international members. International members using non-USD currencies may have noticed that we added a small feature in the “Orders > Details” and “Orders > Accounting”. All sales and earnings can be viewed in two currencies - selected non-US currency and USD. This was to prepare for a change that is coming to our accounting system.

Our members can offer their products in 5 different currencies: USD, GBP, EUR, CND, and AUD. As a US-based company, we can only keep our balance in USD. While we are going to continue offering these currencies to our members and their customers, we will have to keep everyone’s balance in USD. Starting July 18th we will convert all users’ balance to USD (based on the exchange rate of the day that the transaction happened). There will be no change for our US-based member. Non-US members will see all balances in USD as well as their transaction currency. We will continue sending you checks and PayPal payments in USD, but if you are using PayPal, you can simple receive your payments in your own currency (even if it’s not one of these 5 currencies).

If you have a non-USD balance and would like to receive your balance in your currency via PayPal, make sure to submit your Payment Request ( found in the Dashboard, Orders > Accounting page) before July 18th.

Changing Our Processing Fee Model

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 11:44:57 -0700

When we started Fotomoto we only had premium prints, then we added fine art prints, then cards, and then digital download (with more coming soon!). Digital downloads and cards usually have a lower average price, to the point that our 15% transaction fee would not cover the credit card processing fees, so we added a small processing fee for cards and downloads. Now we are seeing larger orders for cards and downloads, but we are still charging that processing fees. That will change this week.

Starting this Wednesday, we will charge a $0.99 processing fee for all orders below $10. For orders above $10, we wave this processing fee for all products, including cards and downloads. This not only addresses the issue with the previous processing fee, it will also encourage your buyers to increase their order size to more than $10.

As always, we would love to hear your feedback, comments, and thoughts.

Fotomoto Got A New Home!

Tue, 17 May 2011 18:27:55 -0700

We designed our last home page more than 1.5 years ago. That’s a long time in the internet age. With all the changes in our company and products, a new home page was long overdue.

Functionality-wise everything is pretty much the same, except for the featured artist section. Our featured members seemed to change their sites more then we do, and that resulted in broken links to featured images and websites; so we changed our model a little bit, and dropped the “daily” part. Now we simply have Featured Artists.

We’ve completely redesigned our home page, and are very happy with it. Our new home page does a better job of showing our appreciation for simple and clean design.

Welcome to our new home.

New Fotomoto/Lightroom integration via TTG

Mon, 09 May 2011 15:51:46 -0700

For Fotomoto members who use Lightroom, The Turning Gate’s TTG Highslide Gallery Pro has long been an excellent tool, allowing the creation of full-featured and flexible image galleries, automatically enabled for photo commerce with Fotomoto.

Our friends at The Turning Gate recently released version 3.0 of their plugin, now titled TTG Highslide Gallery CE, which offers users more design options, allowing for greater flexibility in visual customization, powerful new gallery functionality, and the same Fotomoto integration you already love — and with the new Fotomoto 2.0, that counts for more features than ever before.

The Turning Gate has posted a demonstration gallery showing Fotomoto functionality in action.

We are excited to see the TTG Highslide Gallery plugin continue to evolve, becoming more powerful and more elegant. As one of the earliest adopters of the Fotomoto API, The Turning Gate has always been a great and reliable solution for Adobe Lightroom users, and now TTG is promising even more Fotomoto-enabled gallery plugins to come. Looking forward to the new additions to the Fotomoto-enabled galleries!

For more information, visit the TTG Highslide Gallery CE page at The Turning Gate.

Upload with Style!

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 20:49:41 -0700

One of the major updates in our new release was our order page. We have bigger image previews, and our high-res management buttons (such as upload button and request via Auto Pickup) are more visible and accessible. With the new order page our members can also see the ordered image and the uploaded one side by side.

Last night we updated one other part of the orders page: the uploader. With the new uploader, members can upload their files several times faster, simultaneously upload multiple images, see the uploading image and its progress, and they won’t have to wait for image processing anymore.

We love to see you get lots of orders, and process them faster!

First New Product Upgrade: Fine Art Papers

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 16:21:29 -0700

We started our upgrade to the new version of Fotomoto last week, and the process turned out to be a bumpier than what we had thought! Everything seems to be under control now (even though the image import from all the member sites is still going on).

Now we are ready to start rolling out our new features and products. Our first update is on our Fine Art papers. After offering 5 completely different fine art paper choices for several months and getting our members’ feedback, we decided to replace our previous offerings with better, heavier papers, and limit the number of choices to 3 (here’s the complete info).

Starting tomorrow, we will replace our current Fine Art paper types with 3 paper types: Epson Cold Press Bright (Textured), Epson Hot Press Bright (Smooth), and Epson Exhibition Fiber. Previously, our heaviest paper was 310 gram. The first two new paper types are 500 gram each, and are ideal for traditional fine art / inkjet prints with archival quality. The 3rd paper, Epson Exhibition Fiber, is a new fiber based paper from Epson that has an amazing vivid result for photos, both color and black & white.

And to make this more exciting for our members, we are going to offer both Epson Cold Press and Hot Press papers for the same price as our old Elegance Watercolor and Ultra Smooth papers. And for a limited time, we will even offer the Exhibition paper (which is 25%-30% more expensive) at the same price!

Since we are changing all of our Fine Art papers, we are going to disable Fine Art prints for our members. You have to go to our brand new Dashboard, in Products, check your pricing, and enable them again. This would be a good excuse to take a look at our shiny new dashboard again.

Update on Update!

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 11:31:08 -0700

So, as we announced before, we started the process of porting our servers from some dedicated servers to Amazon’s cloud servers yesterday. The process itself was supposed to take a few hours, and the worldwide DNS update should have taken up to 24 hours (depending on viewer’s geographical location and ISP). This was / is the biggest change since we launched Fotomoto, and based on Murphy’s law, we knew some things would go wrong. We were fool enough to think we could outsmart Murphy.

Somewhere in the middle of our process, we lost power in the heart of The Startup Zone of San Francisco (read about it here, here, and here), which could have been a nice break, if it hadn’t been our upgrade day. With all the work we have been doing, we could have really used that break. After spending a couple of hours in the office hoping and praying and cursing, we decided to go home and work from there, just before we realized that we couldn’t open the parking gate (yeah, we know, we’re in San Francisco, and we should bike - it’s on our to-do list, right after fixing the launch issue). And the story goes on, but so does life.

The broken launch broke a lot of things that we didn’t even realize were broken until much later last evening and early this morning. As far as we can tell, things are stable now, and except for a couple of issues that we’re working on, everything should be in order. We are still updating and regenerating our image thumbnails, which will take a few more days, but it does not affect the functionality of the site.

We are sorry for the bumpy upgrade. We will have a lot of goodies for everyone once things get stable, which shouldn’t take long. Please stay tuned!

Server updates are coming, be patient!

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 18:36:00 -0700

Starting tomorrow morning (Wednesday, April 6th), we will be updating our servers and porting our data to our new datacenter. Our servers will be down for a few hours, and will be going online and offline during the next couple of days. Please be patient with us while we are working on the update.

To get the latest updates and news, follow our twitter @fotomoto

Fotomoto 2.0 is coming next week!

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 14:23:56 -0700

As you all know, we have been working on a complete restructure of our service for a while now. The new structure lets us expand our service much faster, without any scalability issues. I am happy to tell you that our system is almost ready to go out. All the visible changes are in our dashboard, there will be no change on the widget side. We sent it out to a handful of members last week, and we have only got positive feedback (and a list of bugs to fix!).

Here’s a short list of changes and improvements in the new release:

The UI of our dashboard has been completely changed and re-designed. Things may not be where you used to see them, but you should be able to find them easily, at least we hope so!
We have completely changed and redesigned the backend, which is not really visible on the front end. But trust us, Fotomoto is going to be even more solid, and expanding it will be much easier! Beside the complete UI makeover, you will see a lot of enhancements in the process. For example, you will immediately see the uploaded image and will be able to compare it to the ordered image. There’s a long list of small improvements, and you will get to see them soon!
There is also one new major addition to the functionality on the front-end: Collections. With this new concept, you can have several different “Collections” with different product offerings and pricing, and assign your photos to these collections. With the introduction of Collections, we won’t need to offer individual photo pricing anymore.
We are in the process of porting all of our servers to Amazon. This may cause some hiccups in our service during the next week. Please be patient with us. Also, if you are using any access blocker or firewall on your system (this could be in your .htaccess file), and you are using our server IPs (instead of using *.fotomoto.com) you will have to update your configuration to allow our new servers access your photos. We strongly suggest giving access to *.fotomoto.com (instead of using IPs).
We are updating the image thumbnails and preview database, so we can show bigger and better quality images in the new dashboard. With literally millions of images in our database, it may take a little while to update all images. If you don’t see the thumbnails / previews in the new dashboard, wait for a couple of days, and then let us know.
We have a new “feedback” button in the Dashboard that let’s you quickly send us your feedback, comments, or let us know something is not working the way it should.

Our new system will be activated next week. We know that it took us a long time to get this out, and we are running behind on several things. But with new funding and a bigger team, things will move faster and smoother. We will have a series of updates and feature releases right after this big release. We would love to get your feedback and comments. Please use our forum to discuss the changes, things you like there, and things you like to see there. We’re working hard to make you love Fotomoto even more!

Stay tuned.

The PrintAid+ Project

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 16:03:00 -0700

A few members of our Fotomoto community, Pete Carr, Dan King, and Matt Thomas, have created a great international project to help the victims of the Japan earthquake: The PrintAid+ Project. This project was up and running just a few days after the earthquake and now has grown to ~~about 20~~ 35 photographers and designers. We are proud that Fotomoto’s solution let these artists make this happen quickly. For more information about The PrintAid+ Project, please check their press release, and order prints (for £10 only!) from their site to help!

Supporting our members helping Japan

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 15:52:33 -0700

To support tsunami victims in Japan, Fotomoto members Oliver Fluck and Stefanie Hoepner started a campaign named “Photographers for Japan”. Most participating artists are donating all earnings they are receiving through print sales until April 14. Donations go to the American Red Cross and will mainly be used for medical support of survivors in evacuation centers. We at Fotomoto thought that this is a great idea. We decided to chip in our 15% share on Oliver’s and Stefanie’s sales.

You can find a nice collection of images in Oliver’s online store as well as Stefanie’s website.

They reported that 10 more artists have joined the “Photographers for Japan” fundraiser since its start on March 14.

Getting Started with Fotomoto with RC's help

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 09:11:13 -0700

About a month ago Rafael (RC) Concepcion (Photoshop Guy) contacted us to tell us about his new book, Get Your Photography on the Web (available on Amazon). To our surprise, there was no less than 8 beautiful pages about Fotomoto! This is a great resource for anyone who needs step by step guide for using Fotomoto.

And for people who prefer seeing over reading, he also has video instructions on KelbyTraining called Getting Started with Fotomoto (available to members).

We love you RC!

Blog and Twitter Clean Up

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 15:26:34 -0700

We are cleaning up our services and getting ready for our big 2.0 release. As part of the clean up process, we have moved our blog to tumblr and are using a cleaner template.

Also, we are now using a different twitter address for our Featured Artist announcements: @fotomototoday. Now you can get Fotomoto news and our featured artist news from separate twitter channels.

Some major changes are coming very soon, stay tuned!