Jared Polin: Jared Polin, FroKnowsPhoto.com, and have you ever tried to show somebody your
mobile portfolio on any of your IOS devices or iPads only to find that you didn’t have
cell coverage or that you had a very slow connection and everybody’s sitting there
waiting for a website to load as you're trying to show a portfolio?
Well there’s a whole bunch of different portfolio apps out there.
But if you are a Squarespace subscriber, which I am, Squarespace has an app which they’ve
done a terrible job of telling people about but I'm telling you about it now.
It's called Portfolio and if you go ahead and download it you can open it up and I'm
going to show you what it's going to do right now.
So I'm going to enter my information – oh by the way, this is a free app and I know
that I can have it on my iPhone or at least my iPad as well.
So here I'm going to enter this information.
So I go ahead and hit Enter and then it picks up my site.
You can see that it says Jared Polin Photographer, it says “Choose a site to sync.”
I click on that button and then I have all of these other portfolios to click on.
So yes, I want to sync my 100-year-old factory, a day with Gavin DeGraw, I'm going to skip
the Bryan Marcello one, I want to sync myself, Modest Yahoo, my Mom’s photos, Perry Farrell,
and I'll leave it at that.
And then you have right here the sync button and this is all happening in real time.
This is how long it's taking for it to sync – it says 42% -- and this is over my network
at home.
So what Squarespace, the app, is doing is optimizing these photos onto your phone so
you don’t need a mobile connection, you won't need to do anything other than take
out the app, get into it, make sure that your information is already in there, and then
you have your whole portfolio ready to show somebody.
So where are we?
We’re at 95% -- not bad for syncing a couple of hundred photos real quick.
And right here you can see on the screen all of my portfolios.
Now I had an issue with the app at first.
I couldn’t figure out how to enter my information because it was in demo mode but you have to
swipe from the bottom but not the bottom for your IOS information to swipe up but there’s
actually a Swipey McSwiper thing right here, just do it from the sides.
So if I'm going to put my finger right here you can swipe it up and you can see that you
can change things up, I can change the shape, I can add information, don’t add information.
Oh, I like that, it says 47 items.
I can change the shade of the background to black – I like the white – and then I
can scroll over and I can change the size of the thumbnails.
I actually- like them basically almost maxed out like that.
And then here it's already synced, that’s where you put your content in and if you need
help you can do that.
So this- is so simple.
I want to look at photos, I click on this, I have the thumbnail gallery.
I want to get out of it, I pinch to get out of it just like anything else.
So let’s go in – here’s the photo, I bring it up, but if I double tap on it it
goes full screen.
And if I was to turn it sideways my phone would allow me to do this in landscape as
well but for this video we’re just going to keep it in vertical so I can cycle through
it.
I tap it again, I close it down with a pinch of the fingers, and then I can scroll through
and see the other portfolios.
Oh, that’s cool.
And I can also probably change the size of them right here.
Yes, I like that too.
So if somebody just wants to scroll through this way – let me put that back down – without
doing anything they can do so.
But if you want to get into it – what did I do?
Oh, I probably have to go like this, like this.
Oh, you can double tap.
Oh, there it is, I double tapped.
I'm learning it too.
You go through it and then boom, here are your photos.
So I think you get the point right there.
This is really a great thing to have because I know that when I'm at any conference and
there are thousands of people there the cell towers are being jammed, the WiFi is slow.
So if you want to show somebody quickly some photos from your portfolio and you try to
do that and they're just sitting there with a spinning wheel it doesn’t look good for
you.
So to have a light app that literally updated in a matter of 30-some seconds all of the
portfolios that I chose is pretty awesome and it's free if you already have Squarespace
and you just log in and do it.
So that’s simple, this is awesome, it's on my iPad, it's on my iPhone, I have to check
their site to see if it's available on the other devices for Android, I'm not sure but
a lot of us photographers already use these other devices to showcase our work.
So the last thing I will say is about Squarespace.
If you haven’t checked it out yet that is what I use for jaredpolin.com.
When I set it up it took me 30 minutes to create the site that you see up there right
now.
I did not have HTML skills, I don’t have HTML skills.
It is just so simple and affordable to create a website that I had to use it and I had to
contact them to work something out to then get you guys a discount.
But before the discount you have a 14-day pre-trial that you can sign up for at squarespace.com/fro.
Go ahead and do that, you have to enter no information whatsoever in terms of payment,
so if you use it for 14 days and decide that it's not for you then you don’t have to
do anything, just let it go away.
But if you want to sign up for it and you think you want to use it go ahead and use
the code “Fro” when you check out, you get 10% off your first order, that means if
you sign up for a year it comes out to roughly eight bucks a month which is so pretty darn
good for the quality of service that they give you.
Great customer service, I really like working with them, I know that a lot of Fro readers
have gone over and switched to using them because it's just so simple and to have this
portfolio app is a must-have and it's a win right there.
So I'm going to leave it right there, go ahead and check them out at the link below.
And there you guys have it, Jared Polin, FroKnowsPhoto.com.
See ya.