Using email invite tool
From Phanfare Support
You can send your friends and family attractive email invitations to see your albums or your entire site. You can personalize your invitations with your own message and Phanfare automatically includes links to your albums, as well as any required passwords.
In general, album invitations let your visitors then go and visit other albums on your Phanfare site. However, if your site is protected by a password, Phanfare's isolated invitation feature can limit your visitor to seeing just the one album linked in your email.
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Invitation Types
Phanfare provides two types of invitations:
- An album invitation invites friends to view a specific Phanfare album.
- A website invitation invites friends to your Phanfare website.
Album Invitations
If you use Microsoft Windows
To send an album invitation from the Phanfare application, select the album and click the Share Album button or go to the Tools menu and choose Invite Friends and then To This Album. The Invitation Wizard will guide you through the process of creating and sending your invitation.
Missing imageInviteAlbumMenu
Image:InviteAlbumMenu
The first screen of the wizard gives you a basic overview. On the second screen, you can choose your recipients from people in your address book, or you can manually enter email addresses. Then, click Next.
Your album invitation will contain a link directly to the album you've selected, bypassing the table of contents. If your album requires an album-level password, Phanfare will automatically include that password in the invitation.
If your album is protected by a site-level (table of contents) password, Phanfare will provide you two options:
- If you choose the first option, Phanfare will provide the site-level password to the invitation recipients. The invitation will include your full site URL (for example, yourname.phanfare.com) and will include your site password, which the viewer will have to type. We send the full URL of your Phanfare site because we want the recipient to realize that they can return in the future and view photos.
- If you choose the second option, Phanfare will not send the site password. In this case, Phanfare will embed a special random password in the link sent to the recipients. This password will allow access only to the selected album and will not allow the recipients to view your table of contents, or other password protected albums. This type of album invitation is useful when wanting to invite co-workers to an album on your family Phanfare site. You might want to only let the recipients see a particular album, versus your entire collection. For this type of invitation, your site password is not sent in the invitation and your Phanfare site URL is not listed. The user clicks through the link in the email but cannot easily return to your website later.
After choosing which type of invitation you want to send, click Next. You'll see the default invitation text. You can edit this text to say whatever you'd like.
Click Preview Message and Recipients to see what the invitation will look like.
If everything is to your liking, click Send Now. Or, you can make more changes by clicking Make More Changes.
If you use a Mac
Select the "Album -> Invite Friends to This Album" menu.
Click the "Next" button. Create a message and choose recipients as you would when sending out a web site invitation. Click the "Send" button.
Website Invitations
If you use Microsoft Windows
To send an invitation that brings the recipient to your site's table of contents, go to the Share menu in the Phanfare application and choose "Invite Friends and then To Your Website":
The Invitation Wizard will guide you through the process of sending your invitations. The first screen of the wizard gives you a basic overview. On the second screen, you can choose your recipients from people in your address book, or you can manually enter email addresses. Then, click Next.
The next screen will ask you to customize the invitation's subject link and message as shown below.
When sending a website invitation, Phanfare will automatically provide a link to your website's table of contents, as well as the table of contents password, if one is set (as shown below).
In addition, if any of your albums are protected by an album-level password, you will have the option to choose which album-level passwords will be included in the invitation.
Click Next and you're given the option to personalize the invitation text. Then, click Preview Message and Recipients to see what the message will look like. If it's to your liking, click Send Now. Otherwise click Make More Changes.
If you use a Mac
To invite people to view your web site, first select the "Website -> Invite Friends to Your Website" menu. This will bring up the invitation dialog.
Click the "Next" button. On the "Passwords" tab you will be able to optionally specify which password-protected albums you want to allow your visitors to see. Only albums that have passwords set will appear on this page. If you only want your visitors to view non-password protected albums, don't check any of the albums on this page.
Click the "Next" button. On the "Message" page, you can write a subject and message for your invitation email.
Click the "Next" button. Here you can add recipients to you invitation, either by picking them from your Phanfare address book, or by entering the email addresses manually at the bottom of the dialog.
Click "Send" to send the invitation. Each recipient will receive an individual email.
Address Book
To make sending invitations easier, Phanfare Photo includes an integrated address book.
About Email Invitations and Security
To make it easier for your friends and family to view your photos, the link in the email will take them right to your site or albums without asking them for a password, even if your site or album is password-protected.
If your site or album is protected, but they do not sign out when they leave, and they then return directly to your site (e.g. yoursite.phanfare.com) or album (e.g. yoursite.phanfare.com/album/123456) within the number of days specified in your website security options, they still won't need a password. The default is 7 days.
If they go directly to the site or album at any other time, they'll be prompted to enter a password.