Phanfare

3.0 stars

"Many great features; one really bad flaw"

April 25, 2011  |   By atlbeth

Version: Phanfare 1

Pros

Fantastic looking albums. Personalized URL & direct links to an isolated album. OK editing online; Excellent desktop editor for building an album and tweaking pictures. Able to make slideshows with music tracks. Speedy uploads. Allows hi-res images

Cons

see bottom-line summary

Summary

My recommendation is 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.

Album organization: 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 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.

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