Phanfare Pro adds site customization, custom domains and fine-grained access control to consumer offerings

Princeton, NJ (August 3, 2009) -- Phanfare today introduced Phanfare Pro, an archival photo and video hosting solution targeted at prosumer and professional photographers. Phanfare Pro enables photographers to store, organize and display high resolution digital images and videos online using a suite of tools. Photographers are given their own unique web address where viewers can see their work. Photographers can fully customize the appearance of their photo and video albums and use their own internet domain.

“For a photographer, safeguarding your photos and videos against loss is critically important” said Phanfare CEO, Andrew Erlichson. “With Phanfare, not only do you get the peace of mind of knowing you wont lose your media, but you can display it on your own fully customizable website and get the benefits of an integrated eco-system of tools and services.”

Phanfare is supported by plugins for Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture, popular pro workflow tools. Pros can perform initial selects within these tools and then push images up to Phanfare, controlling by rating whether particular images are published or hidden within the Phanfare system. Phanfare is also supported by plugins for consumer photo organizers Google Picasa and Apple iPhoto.

Each Phanfare Pro site also supports up to 1000 subsites, each with its own URL and password security. Subsites are useful to group work together by genre or client. Phanfare Pro also supports the use of custom domains so that the photographer can present a unified brand to the consumer. No Phanfare branding appears on the web albums.

One of the benefits of Phanfare is tightly integrated mobile integration through Phanfare Photon for the iPhone and iPod touch. Phanfare Photon wirelessly synchronizes photos and videos to the iPhone and includes rudimentary editing and sharing tools. Changes made on mobile devices are reflected in the service automatically.

Photographers can also control what viewers can do with their images. There are options to suppress the downloading of fullsize originals, the ordering of photo merchandise and the viewing of EXIF data.

Videos are converted to h.264 for maximum compatibility on the web, but are also retained in archival form. Image editing within Phanfare is non-destructive, allowing reversion to the uploaded image at any time.

All accounts come with full screen musical slideshows for each album including photos and videos in a unified narrative format.

Phanfare supports the Eye-Fi SD memory card for wireless upload from digital cameras and RSS feeds for display of photos on digital picture frames.

Phanfare Pro is priced at $99.99/year and includes 20 GB of archival storage. Phanfare utilizes the Amazon S3 storage service. Amazon S3 is a reliable storage service that stores files in multiple geographically distributed data centers. Phanfare offers additional 20 GB storage blocks for $49.99/year. Phanfare Pro is available immediately at www.phanfare.com.

Based in Princeton NJ, Phanfare was founded in 2004 by Andrew Erlichson and Mark Heinrich. Phanfare stores over 150 TB of photos and videos and reaches over 500,000 consumers per month.