Welcome FocalPower Alpha Users!

[Greg]

The FocalPower Team appreciates your interest in our soon to be released Professional Grade Photo Hosting and Management service (the FocalPower Service) and we thank you for your willingness to help us make this service the best it can be before launch.   

FocalPower is a widget based photo hosting service designed by photographers for photographers.  The goal of the service is to provide the best professional grade photo hosting around:

• Intuitive and easy to use.  We would all rather be taking pictures than managing them online...
• Upload once, display anywhere.  Stop spending all your time uploading photos over and over again.  Upload your photos once then organized them in as many portfolios as you want; we keep the photos separate from the portfolios giving you maximum flexibility over how to showcase your work.  Use the Photo Sharing Widgets to share you photos on websites, blogs, or forums.  Even use the widgets to create a custom designed photo website or augment your existing website.
• Photo sharing designed around you and your photography.  Our widgets are designed to showcase your work in the best way possible.  The initial sharing widgets are lightbox based, click on the photo displayed by the widget and watch a lightbox open up to display the largest photo possible based on the size of your browser.  Configure the widgets to leverage your photos' meta data.  In the near future, these same widgets will allow you to brand them, displaying your photography business' brand or that of your customer's.
• Secure and control your photos.  The only way to truly protect your photos is to not show them online. This option isn't realistic in today's world, so we help you to protect them using the latest techniques and technology.  Soon you will be able to apply a visual watermark to your images as well as control what internet sites are authorized to display your photos using our Sharing Widgets.  Watermarks can also be another way to apply branding to photos. 

During this alpha period, we need your help to make sure that our design is the best it can be.  Does the system work to meet the goals we have set out above?  Are there other goals you would like us to meet as well?  We need and want your feedback!  Everything and anything is fair game...don't worry, we're professionals at designing software (and we have a thick skin). A customer focus is a guiding principal at FocalPower.  Tell us what you think.  Tell us what you want.  We'll do our best to deliver!

We also realize that you have a busy life, and we appreciate your time to help us as an Alpha User. To facilitate sharing of information we will be using this message board extensively during the alpha period. This will allow you to provide feedback when it is most convenient for you and for us to capture and share information across the entire Alpha User community.  This message board is private and will only be made available to Alpha User community.  (But remember there are other message boards...the FocalPower community is for you as well, so let us know how you want to use it!)

While online photo sharing should be nothing new to you, we realize that the FocalPower way is probably a bit different.  So here is a list of basic usage scenarios we would like everyone to run through:

• Upload photos to your account.
• Create multiple portfolios to organize your photos
• Use the Sharing Widgets to embed your photos on your website, blogs, forums, communities, etc.
• Customize the Sharing Widgets to meet your needs and whims (or those of your customers).
• Lost or Confused?  Don't forget the online help...

As new releases are made available, we will announce them on the Alpha Release Notes message board.  You will also be able to see the last five messages in the welcome screen of the Manager. Details will be given about known issues and new features.  We will also be detailing the features that we are currently working on adding/issues we are addressing on the What's Coming Soon sticky topic.  Our goal during the alpha period is to issue new releases ever 1-2 weeks.  Make sure you check out these topics when you see a new reply.

That's enough yapping...now get to it!   

[Greg]

We have put together a demo page that might help with the alpha users:  http://www.focalpower.com/demo/.

Once you upload photos/create portfolios, you will see the sharing widget code that you can then copy and past into your blog or website.  In the future we will have a configuration wizard to let you set the different options for the sharing widget as well as a way to save defaults for the widgets.  Right now, you can manually change these options within the widget code yourself. 

The widget code looks like this:

<script src="http://www.focalpower.com/app/widgets/lightbox/[IMAGE ID]/240/photo.js?lb_meta_data=headline-copyright-description&d_meta_data=headline-copyright"></script> 

The "[IMAGE ID]" section will be unique for each image uploaded or portfolio created.  The bolded section can be changed to display a different sized image within a webpage (see size demo pages for examples and the value to enter here):     
                     
By default, the current widget code displays all meta data options.  These are divided into two groups: 

Display meta data is shown beneath a photo when it is displayed in a web page:

<script src="http://www.focalpower.com/app/widgets/lightbox/[IMAGE ID]/240/photo.js?lb_meta_data=headline-copyright-description&d_meta_data=headline-copyright"></script>

Deleting one or both of these bolded values turns off the display of that meta data. The hyphens are used to separate multiple values.

Lightbox meta data is shown beneath the larger photo when it is displayed in the light box (user clicks on the display photo)

<script src="http://www.focalpower.com/app/widgets/lightbox/[IMAGE ID]/240/photo.js?lb_meta_data=headline-copyright-description&d_meta_data=headline-copyright"></script>

Deleting any or all of these bolded values turns off the display of that meta data.  The hyphens are used to separate multiple values.

[Greg]

There are two message boards that we are using for the FocalPower Alpha:

• FocalPower Alpha - This board is restricted to just the alpha users.  You need to create an account on the FocalPower forum to view or reply to messages on this board.  Create an account with the same username that you used for your FocalPower Alpha Account and you will manually be added to the Alpha User group which has access to this board.
• Alpha Release Notes - This board lives under the FocalPower Alpha board.  This is where Release Notes are posted for each release as well as other general information about using the system (such as this message chain).  This board is accessible from the splash page when you login into the FocalPower Manager even if you don't have a FocalPower Forum Account.  An account is needed to post replies or join in the discussions.

Joining the FocalPower Forum is not mandatory during the Alpha but will provide all users an additional source of information and resource for the use of the system.