Wedding couples may be overwhelmed when trying to decide how to best share their wedding photographs among friends and families. There are many photo-sharing websites to choose from, but they are often cluttered with overwhelming features, limitations, and fees to confuse the photo sharing beginners.
Founded by independent entrepreneurs, Photoblog.com presents itself with a unique non-commercial approach, and offers a wealth of features and simplicity to its growing followers.
Creating Your First Photoblog Account
Photoblog boasts a simple and user friendly interface with unlimited free access to all public users. With the site's multi-language support, showing your latest wedding photos to your aunt in Spain is just few clicks away. Brides or grooms that want to start visually blogging their wedding photos need to simply register an account. Once an account is created, wedding couples are free to create a journal entry and upload their digital photographs instantly.
Your Photoblog Account Homepage
After creating a photoblog account, a bride or groom is greeted by their personal photoblog homepage. This homepage allows the user to create, edit and manage their photoblog, messages, and friends.
Your Photoblog Settings
A wedding couple can access their account settings from their personal homepage. The account information allows a user to customize their photoblog profile and security settings. Users may add profile pictures of themselves, change their contact info, or even their time zone and geographic location.
Adding & Editing Your Photoblog Entry
After a photoblogger is happy with their profile, they can start creating their blog entry and upload their digital photographs. From the personal homepage, a user can click on "New Entry" and begin a blog entry. Once a photoblogger is at the New Entry screen, they can simply attach the images they want to upload.
Every day, a user can post one entry and upload up to twenty photographs. They can then add metatags, a caption, and allow or forbid comments. Once a photoblogger is happy with the entry, the entry can then be saved. The photoblogger can click "View this entry" and view the photoblog entry they added and make further edits if they’d like.
After finishing the photoblog entry, users can click "Your Blog" and be brought to their photoblog’s page. Visitors can browse journal entries, and post comments.
Browsing Other Photoblogs
Users can explore other photoblogs by clicking on "Browse". On the browse page, a photoblogger can view the latest blogs. They can browse random photoblogs, their friend’s blogs, or even browse by geographic location.
Another great content resource of photoblog.com is its own blog. The Photoblog Blog shares pictures from other interesting photobloggers and offers a wealth of content. The blog offers up-to-date site announcements, press releases, and photography related articles. Users can read up on the latest camera reviews, tips and tutorials, and do-it-yourself articles.
Our Impression
Photoblog is a great way for wedding couples to share their wedding photographs with friends and family. It is a free and easy-to-use service that offers a no-nonsense way of uploading photos without an intimidating deluge of features that wedding couples might not necessarily need. If you’re interested in getting into photoblogging, and wondering where to get yourself started, Photoblog.com is an excellent introduction.
Thoughts from One of Photoblog.com’s Founders
Photoblog’s primary founder Michael Zhang was kind enough to provide Wedding Photography Directory with insights into Photoblog.com’s history and roadmap ahead:
Question: What is the history behind Photoblog.com?
Michael Zhang: We don't have much of a history yet, since we're not even a year old, but we launched in April of 2006. I'd been interested in photography for quite some time, and had also developed a few large web communities, so I decided to blend the two into a photo sharing service.
Question: Photoblog.com is one of the more user friendly designed photography based websites. What were the design goals in developing the website? What was the process behind balancing user interaction and design?
Michael Zhang: Our goal in designing the website was to impose as little of our own design on our community members as possible, while allowing their photographs to be the main focus of their pages. We try to be as unintrusive as possible with our advertising, using text links in certain locations. As long as we can cover our expenses each month, we're fine.
Question: What are some of the features on Photoblog.com that wedding couples could find helpful?
Michael Zhang: Photoblog is a great and easy way to document life. Uploading photographs to specific days can help you look back on and enjoy the memories you had. We have many new parents documenting their first child's life by uploading daily photographs. It's interesting to see how time can be preserved for future enjoyment.
Question: What are some of the user interaction challenges and surprises you encounter while creating and maintaining the site?
Michael Zhang: Different people have different needs. It's hard to satisfy everyone, but we definitely try. The community is getting along pretty well.
Question: Photoblog.com supports a variety of languages. How did this process of language implementation start and evolve into what users are able to access today? What are some of the benefits of localization? What future languages are you interested in adding?
Michael Zhang: We're interested in adding the major languages of the world right now. If we can get those working properly, then we might look into lesser spoken ones. Localization has helped us reach people all over the world, bringing even more variety to our community.
Question: Photoblog.com hosts its own blog and it’s more than just an ordinary blog. What drove you to transform it beyond a blog?
Michael Zhang: Our companion blog is meant to showcase work from our members, as well as to provide informative and helpful tips, tutorials, and other useful things that could benefit the community. We're hoping the service and blog will be able to stand on their own, but also complement each other.
Question: Photoblog.com is pushing the established concepts behind blogging, What are you thoughts on the blogging phenomenon? How do you see blogging evolving over time?
Michael Zhang: Blogging has become more and more mainstream, and more and more powerful. Photoblog might not be able to take advantage of the power aspect, but we're definitely helping people document their lives and showcase their work.
Question: What are some trends, or areas of digital photography do you see becoming popular? How do you think the growing usage of digital photography will affect Photoblog.com? What are some digital photography fads or features do you see not succeeding in the long term?
Michael Zhang: I think more and more people are carrying digital cameras around with them casually, with no goal in mind but to see what they can capture our of their everyday life. Our service is great for those who want to take snapshots and save them chronologically.
Question: Photoblog offers many ways for people to communicate in a more personal way. What are some features or ideas are you considering adding to Photoblog.com?
Michael Zhang: We're looking forward to adding features that help the community communicate more efficiently. I can't say exactly what we're going to develop or when, but we have some pretty good ideas on what we want to do.
Question: How has the user response toward Photoblog.com affected your site development and personal life? What are your future aspirations for Photoblog.com? What other comments would you like to add?
Michael Zhang: I'm currently a full time student, so I cannot give Photoblog my full attention, but I try to give it as much as I can. We're hoping to build as large and as strong a community as possible, but other than that, we're taking everything one step at a time.
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