Updates Galore!

Hello fellow 72 users! Hope your doing well. It may seem we’ve been lacking in the blogging area lately, but I promise that will profoundly change after this incredible update.

We’ve been working extremely hard on fine-tuning and integrating tons of exciting new features for members over the past few weeks, features that will greatly increase the overall usability of 72photos and encourage communication between users. These features in question have finally materialized and have been released today.

I’ll spare the more technical details and jump right to the list of features/changes included in this months update:

Flickr / Picasa Importing

We’re extremely happy to introduce our long awaiting Flickr and Picasa importing features. The new Flickr importing feature not only allows you to import all your public & private flickr photos, but also has the ability to import your photo sets (automatically creating 72photo galleries for them!). But wait! It gets better. We’ve also included a “Merge” option you can select during import to grab photos from your flickr account that you may have added after your initial import. Picasa importing has also been added. We’re still working on ways to accommodate very large flickr and picasa imports, so if you happen to get timed out, you can re-run the import with the merge option to continue where you left off. Pretty nifty, eh?

Configure 72photos Wizard

We’ve developed a new wizard to help you setup your basic account information in 4 easy steps. For new users, this “Wizard” will popup on your first login and for current members you can access the wizard via the “Configure 72photos” on the left side of your dashboard.

User Messaging

Send personal messages to your friends and other users on 72photos with the new messaging system. Messages support embedded photos so you can show your friends that cool photo you saw on 72. Messages work in “conversation” form to make having a message with multiple people a breeze and to keep your inbox organized.

Find / Invite Friends

Find out if your email contacts are already on 72photos and automatically add them as your friend or invite them if their not with the friend finder feature. Located at the bottom left of every page in your dashboard (Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo currently supported).

Updated Profile Photo Selector

You now have the ability to crop your profile photo in any way. Your original photo is always saved giving you the ability to re-crop at anytime.

There’s much more to these updates then I’ve included in this post, so in order to help everyone maximize their 72photos account, we’ll be posting periodic updates over the next few weeks elaborating on certain areas of the system.

How about that for an update? Let us know what you think!

The Need For Speed

Wow, has it been an exciting few weeks here at 72! After our official release of 72Photos we’ve received hundreds of new members, thousands of images and a whopping 350% increase in web site traffic.

As our community continues to rapidly grow, we have started to see our existing server infrastructure peak resulting in decreased site performance. Because of this we have installed some new powerful servers, upped our internet connectivity and the time has now come to stretch these bad boys legs.

During Friday the 27th and Monday the 30th our techies will be bringing these new servers online one-by-one as well as transferring gigs and gigs of images and profile data. I’d like to apologize in advance for any slowness or interruption this may cause, but I promise you it is for the greater good.

So Jon, what else does 72 have up their sleeves?

Well I’m glad you asked that question! Besides fixing a few bugs with the previous release, we have a few concoctions coming your way shortly:

• Flickr Import. Ability to import images and tags from your existing Flickr account


• First Time User setup. When a new users signs up an automated wizard will assist you in configuring your profile, uploading images, creating galleries and inviting people to view them


• User to User Messaging. We’ve build our own internal messaging system that will allow you to send each other messages (not comments) which can be read from their your personal dashboard page


• Inappropriate Image Reporting. A more advanced version of reporting inappropriate content or copyrighted material to 72 administration


• Friend Search. Search for friends by name, sex, age, location, e-mail address. If your friend was not found, you’ll have the ability to send an e-mail invite to them to join us.

The 72Photos team and I would like to once again thank all of you for your continued support and wish to remind you that we are always looking for bright new ideas that enhance our overall community.