Photo sharing is a Internet connection bandwidth savvy activity. While we are doing our best to provide a state-of-the-art performance level by running a powerful storage and distribution architecture, you may be getting poor response. Here are some questions you should ask yourself. How much bandwidth am I actually using? How can I identify a bottleneck? Am I getting the Internet speeds promised by my ISP or is it just time to consider a new computer?

These may seem like basic questions, but they can not be easily answered.

As an independant tool, Measurement Lab (M-Lab) provides a platform for researchers to deploy Internet measurement tools in order to share data about their accuracy and reliability. Measurement Lab is a brainchild of Google, the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute (OTI), and the PlanetLab consortium.

Measurement Lab also provides tools for users to test their Internet connection speed. The Network Diagnostic Tool allows for testing your connection speed and receive sophisticated diagnosis of problems limiting speed.

While there is no problem running KoffeePhoto from Google’s Chrome web browser, some KoffeePhoto online features (photo uploader and online image functions) do require Java.

Unfortunately, the current release version of Java does not support Chrome. You will have to install Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 Update 10 for Sun’s download page.

Be aware that Sun does not officially support Chrome by now: “Google Chrome requires Java 6 Update 10 (Java 6u10), as indicated in the Google Chrome Help Center. The Chrome browser is new and not officially supported by Sun for Java 6. However, you may be able to use Chrome with Java 6u10 at your own risk. Sun will continue monitoring the acceptance of Chrome in the marketplace.”. More information on the Java for Chrome specific information page.

By now, we noticed no problem with this release of Java. Please report us any problem encountered.

Registered KoffeePhoto users may have recently noticed some changes in their KoffeePhoto web space.

We added a profile page that will allow the users to control the behavior of their KoffeePhoto account.

The current settings provide for:

• defining the account’s default language for navigation and email updates,
• defining the user’s country used, among others, as default for photo print orders,
• changing the account’s password
• as well as setting the frequency of information updates users receive about their account.

These information updates refer to the KoffeePhoto photo sharing activity summary and may include update information about KoffeePhoto.

As language and country information have only been collected automatically with recently created accounts, we invite early users to check and, if needed, update their information for an improved KoffeePhoto user experience.

While future versions will obviously include more controlling features, feedback and feature requests are welcome.

I agree, this might sound strange but consider online photo sharing in the private circle, when sharing photos with the family or with friends. Not everybody would be happy to have his “strange” face from the last party being made public and seen by everybody.

At KoffeeWare, we take privacy very seriously when it comes to KoffeePhoto.

First, you don’t have to share. Yes, KoffeePhoto manages and backs up your pictures. Why would you need to have to share them in order to benefit from backup? No, pictures managed with KoffeePhoto can simply be stored and backed up without having to share them. This said, you will still be able to access them online through your private, password protected page.

Second, when sharing, this does not necessarily have to imply public sharing. When sharing photos using KoffeePhoto, your fellows receive an invitation and can access the shared pictures on a specific, non public URL or on their own private page if they have a KoffeePhoto account.

Last, you can post your pictures on your shared page. This page is accessible to any one with whom you’ve shared pictures, through an invitation or through a link from your personnal blog. In the latter case, if your blog has a certain exposure, these pictures can be considered as being public and may even be crawled and indexed by search engines.

If public exposure is what you are looking for, don’t forget to properly name your album and picture for a better search engine indexing.

So, yes, privacy is the key of photo sharing. It is up to the user to define the level of privacy he requires.

Last but not the least, do not forget to read the photo sharing provider’s Privacy Policy…

Numerous questions came to us about compatibility between KoffeePhoto photo sharing and iPhone. In other words, as iPhone allows for web browsing, what about browsing your KoffeePhoto photo sharing account for your photos and your relatives’ shared photos?

Well, as iPhone displays standard web pages without alteration, the KoffeePhoto pages are displayed smoothly and iPhone’s zooming capabilities allow for proper displaying of the pictures. So, yes, add your KoffeePhoto private page to your bookmarks and start enjoying the KoffeePhoto photo sharing experience with iPhone.

Last but not the least, the nicest part of the story is that KoffeePhoto includes unlimited and free online storage of your photos, avoiding the need for a .Mac subscription.

Those of you who have created their photo sharing account since KoffeePhoto 2.5 already have received their first activity summary in their mailbox. Previous users will receive it soon. But what is this activity summary and why did we add this feature?
For obvious reasons, we do not want you to forget about your pictures. Therefore, the KoffeePhoto photo sharing activity summary regularly provides you with useful information about your photo sharing status, among others: your photo sharing fellows’ recent posts, comments added to your pictures and the backup level of your photos.

Getting into details, we wanted you to know about the latest pictures added by your photo sharing relatives. With this in mind, a section of the activity summary lists all recent photo albums added by people already sharing pictures with you. The more you share photos, the more people will share photos with you.

More, as KoffeePhoto features a mini blog associated to each photo, we wanted to make sure you get the latest comments done to your pictures. Therefore, all recent comments are listed allowing you to reply.

And, last but not the least, as good times are always good to remember, we’ve added a section with randomly chosen pictures from your library.

For all these reasons, we are pretty confident that this addition will provide you with a better photo sharing experience.

With time, new features will be added to the KoffeePhoto photo sharing activity summary.

Each photo album created using KoffeePhoto is also automatically uploaded to KoffeePhoto servers, for online photo browsing and sharing purposes. KoffeePhoto automatically synchronizes content of your albums on multiple computers as your fellows add your albums to their photo library.

In case of loss of data, KoffeePhoto is capable of restoring your whole photo library using your sharing fellows as backup/restoration endpoints. Just reinstall KoffeePhoto and log in with your username and password, KoffeePhoto takes care of everything else. Your high resolution files will be retrieved from your sharing fellows’ computers.

Two guidelines to improve your backup level:

1. Share your albums. Every friend who adds your albums to his photo library also serves as a backup point for you.
2. If you own several computers, use your KoffeePhoto account on all of them. They will all keep in sync and serve as backup point one for the other.

Don’t wait to lose your photo library to take action.

Related links:

• Photo backup using KoffeePhoto

Many of you have extended their use of blogs to adding photos. As you can not publish all your pictures in your blog, photoblogging forces you to make choices in the photos you publish.

Using KoffeePhoto as an image hosting service allows you to easily post pictures in your photoblog while linking back to your shared KoffeePhoto pages for browsing complete photo albums.

Once your albums posted, required HTML code is displayed on the upper right corner of the KoffeePhoto Web Space.

Whether you select the HTML code from the picture page or the album page, it will display the selected picture or a preview of the selected album such as below:

Pictures from Land of Fire
Pictures from “Tierra del Fuego”

URL is simply the URL of the picture or the album where Embed is a complete HTML code allowing you to embed a link to you picture or photo album.