Just another quick update on the new Photos app that we are working on. In addition to the Facebook and Flickr integration we added last week, you can now also import and export your photos to and from Picasa web albums. All of this is done by simply dragging and dropping photos from your Picasa albums to your SnapPages ones. You can also drag them from Picasa directly into Facebook or Flickr as well. This makes it truly easy for you to manage all your photos from one central location. Again this is still a beta product and we haven't fully released it, but if you want to try it out just log into your SnapPages account and then go to:

http://snappages.com/apps/photos

Last week we announced the beta release of the new Photo app for you to test drive. This week we've updated that app and added in support for Facebook and Flickr. Now you can connect your Facebook and your Flickr accounts to your SnapPages ones so that you can import photos to SnapPages, or move your SnapPages photos to Facebook or Flickr. Now you can easily manage all of your online photos in one place. To move photos back and forth between the different services, all you have to do is drag and drop the photos from one album to another.

We'll be adding support for picassa next week as well as some other new features. Remember this is still a beta so it's not 100% finished. If you want to test these and the other new features out, log into your SnapPages account and then go to the following URL:

http://snappages.com/apps/photos

The new Photos app is almost here! This new app is so much more then just an update, it's a completely new app from the ground up. The current Photos app was one of the first tools that SnapPages ever launched so it's been out there for quite some time and it felt a bit rusty compared to some of the new apps. It used some outdated technologies and we were pretty limited because of it. One example of this was the fact that the version of flash it was written in could only load Jpeg images, which is why we don't currently allow any other format.

For this, and many other reasons, I decided it was time to kick the old one to the curb and come up with something new. Now it's not completely ready to be launched but I decided to share it with you early if you want to start test driving it. If you want to try it out, all you need to do is login to your SnapPages account and then go to the following url:

http://snappages.com/apps/photos

That's it! If you do try it out please give me your feedback. We still have some other really cool features that we are adding before the launch, like the ability to import and export photos to other sites like facebook, flickr, and a few others. Enjoy!

Recently as I was going through the site testing out the features from our last update, I noticed that there are still a lot of users that haven't updated their themes in over a year. During that time, the themes have improved quite a bit from a performance standpoint but not all of these updates were automatically applied. For instance, originally all the website headers were created in flash, but they took a long time to load and for other reasons, all the headers are now exported to html. This dramatically improves the how fast your site loads up and enables it to work on mobile browsers.

How do I know if my theme needs to be updated?
The easiest way to see if your theme needs to be updated is to visit your website and right-click anywhere on the header. If a flash menu pops up then you still have the old theme.

How do I update to the new versions?
If you simply go in to edit your theme and hit the "save" button, it will re-export it using the latest version and your theme will be updated. To be on the safe side, you can do a "save as" and export a new copy in case you want to keep your old theme. Then when the new copy is exported you will need to apply it to your site.

On friday an update went live on the site that should improve the overall quality of all of our users websites. Some of the changes are subtle and some of the changes were more drastic but they are all major improvements. One of the biggest things I wanted to accomplish with this update was to elementate a few elements on your site that were originally created in flash but no longer needed to be and to give all the websites a more professional feel to them. For instance, all the contact forms are now 100% html based and so they should show up on mobile devices now.

Here's a quick list of most of the changes that you will notice on your sites:

• converted contact forms to html
• improved blog comment forms
• improved drop down menus with animation and drop shadows
• added indicators in the navigation to show that there is a drop down menu
• improved photo grids
• improved visual style of new buttons
• decreased load times by opmtimizing code

This is all just the beginning in a long series of updates we want to do to improve the websites in general. This was a big update and it will effect everyone so be sure to let us know if there are any issues you see with this update that we need to address. For instance there was a bug with the drop down menus in Internet Explorer that should be fixed now.