Our support team deals with photographers all day, every day. We know how people struggle with technology. And we think the software that professionals use can be part of the problem… making things worse, not better.

How does this make sense? - Hosting your images with one provider, but your website somewhere else. Creating customer websites with a third provider, and mobile apps with a fourth. Designing albums with a fifth, and proofing them with a sixth. Branding your blog images with a seventh, but actually blogging somewhere else again!

Each time there's another piece of software to learn, another subscription to pay, another set of images to upload, and something more to go wrong. And every time you up the ante - by adding a shopping cart, your own branding, or your own URL - there’s someone holding their hand out for more money.

We developed Workspace so you could do it all on a single platform. One upload, one subscription.

Partly it was in self-defence. If you want to offer something special in your shopping cart - like our beautiful books, albums, boxes and frames - you won’t get anywhere with the likes of SmugMug, PhotoShelter, Zenfolio and Pass. All they offer is generic stuff - printing and photo books from the Big Boy Manufacturers. The world will be a boring place if that's all there is!

When we started, Workspace was a step into the unknown. I'm very proud of what we did, but looking back I know what developers mean by MVP - minimum viable product! I got off the phone this morning from someone who’s always loved the software, but we needed feedback from intrepid users like him to really make it hum. I can see now that it started out not quite intuitive enough to be compelling, not quite well enough integrated, a bit clunky.

So this March we began an almost complete rewrite, and we think it's a huge step forward. Read on for the highlights...

FREE ALBUM DESIGN AND COLOUR CORRECTION. It's Workspace that allows Queensberry to offer these unique services, already responsible for over half our current business. We've done a lot of tidying up behind the scenes to cope with the workload.

SPEED AND RELIABILITY. Web pages draw 2-3 times as fast on both the photographer and client sides … and we haven't squashed so many bugs since we lived in the tropics!

UPLOADING IMAGES - all five upload options rewritten - faster and more reliable.

SIMPLE, CONSISTENT SHARING. Share single images, image collections, albums, storyboards or blog posts. Share to FaceBook or Pinterest, Twitter or LinkedIn, Google or Tumblr … or just email a link! All using the same ultra-simple set-up dialogue. And it’s just as easy for your customers to share as for you.

COLLECTION SETTINGS. You have remarkable control over what can be done with your images. It takes literally seconds to set the privacy status, sharing parameters, price lists, watermarking etc associated with any collection.

FULL SCREEN VIEW. Got a big screen? Use all of it when you’re working in your image galleries.

TRACKING PAGE VIEWS. You can see exactly how many times people have viewed your image galleries right there in Workspace. Automatically - no set-up required. It’s a great motivator to get out there on email and social media to boost your traffic, encourage sharing and build your business.

STORYBOARDS. Great for posting a branded/watermarked group of images to Facebook, Instagram or your own blog. Download them and use them anywhere. Completely rewritten, and you get to retire yet another stand-alone app!

CLIENT WEBSITES. Completely overhauled. New layout options and much more configurable. This by itself is such a powerful feature, and much improved by user feedback.

MOBILE APPS. Your customers can add any image collection to the home screen of their mobile devices. You can include as many images as you like, and the first fifty will be cached on the device for offline viewing.

BLOGGING. Right there in Workspace, or you can push posts to your Workspace or Blogger account. Either way you can use the same Sharing feature to promote your post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google etc. Nothing extra to set up - the blog shares the same look as the rest of your Workspace site. You can add author profiles too.

MULTIPLE USERS. Recently we added the ability to allow multiple users to access your Workspace account, or for a single user to access multiple accounts. Now each user can set up a profile with their own email, website, social media and biographical details. An excellent way to personalise your blog.

WE EAT OUR OWN COOKING

There is a huge amount of power in Workspace. We know, we use it all. The entire Queensberry website is built on Workspace. We sell in Workspace. We blog in Workspace. We use all those juicy sharing features. In fact after two short years Workspace handles most of our business.

It can do the same for you, and we're here to help it happen.

Cheers,
Stephen