Phanfare Website

gpsjoe · Joined: 01 Feb 2004 Posts: 535 Location: Mesa AZ

Not entirely happy with the slideshow feature on Webshots, the website I have been using to post photos, I began to search for a better one. Phanfare is very impressive. It's not free, but they give you a free first month to try it out.

I am very impressed. Here is a sample using the photos from our recent Mount Whitney backpack

http://www.gpsjoe.phanfare.com/album/448355

When this page comes up, click on show slideshow on the right.
When the show starts click on the fifth button from the left on the bottom button bar to enable full screen viewing.

Sit back and watch. The button bar will automatically disappear after a few seconds. It will reappear at any movement of the mouse after that.

Some other interesting features at phanfare.

You can download the entire slideshow from the menu on the right side of the opening web page for the album. For this large slideshow it downloaded a 44.9 MB executable (with .exe extension) and it runs just like the full screen show on the website, but no need to go to the website to run it.

You can easily download all the pictures in the slideshow if full size from that menu as well.

You can have and show captions on any or all images.

Once the button bar on the bottom of the slideshow appears you can uncheck “special effects” and the pictures will stop moving. I like the moving effects on the full screen slideshow but don’t like them on the “toy” slideshow on Webshots.

You can uncheck “show captions” to disable that and you can check “loop” to cause it to loop back to the start rather than stop at the end.

You can adjust the volume and the duration of each slide by moving the slide bars on the right of the button bar.

There are a large selection for the background for your homepage on phanfare. What you see is the one I have selected but there are many more possibilities there.

Go to phanfare.com for more info or to test drive it for a month free of charge.

I doubt that it will work well with a modem rather than cable or DSL hook-up but I don't know for sure.

Tom Treks · Gear Addict Joined: 12 Jan 2003 Posts: 3347

Looks pretty cool, Joe.

I poked around a little bit looking at tech specs and stuff, but I didn't see any evidence that 16x9 is supported. Do you have a wide monitor?

If it does, I'd bet it would look really nice upconverted on a big TV.

gpsjoe · Joined: 01 Feb 2004 Posts: 535 Location: Mesa AZ

I have a 22" Viewsonic LCD at 1680x1050 resolution. I sent my images in resized to 1800x1200 (3:2 aspect ratio). My camera is 7.2 megapixel and allows me to choose the aspect ratio from a menu of 4:3, 3:2 and 16:9. My default choice is 3:2.

The slideshow fills my screen completely side to side and top to bottom for all images except for the vertical shot of the waterfall

Tom Treks · Gear Addict Joined: 12 Jan 2003 Posts: 3347

Yeah, that will work. I was just curious if there is a choice when creating the output exe. That would be a nice feature when sending out DVDs to people who have a widescreen TV and DVD player.

The resolution is pretty nice when viewing straight from the site. I have a big monitor, but not widescreen.

gpsjoe · Joined: 01 Feb 2004 Posts: 535 Location: Mesa AZ

I have not seen any menu choices that allow changing the aspect ratio. I don't know but maybe the .exe is self adjusting to the output device. It would have to be that to some extent because it took my 1800x1200 input and converted it perfectly to 1680x1050.

Does a .exe file copied to DVD play on a TV screen without conversion to some other format?

Tom Treks · Gear Addict Joined: 12 Jan 2003 Posts: 3347

Well, I have an upconverting DVD player, so I would imagine it could play on my bigscreen TV fine as long as there isn't any stretch distortion. That's why I was asking about the 16x9 support. You kind of "custom tailored" the intitial snaps, so it has to at least be able to downgrade to less than 16x9. The pics looked great launched from the site on my PC monitor which isn't wide.