LiquidAlbums: Conversation with Tom Giammarresi

Tom Giammarresi founded LiquidAlbums.com in November 2008. Tom has been involved with the photo album and scrapbooking software industry for over 18 years. He started by creating "Multimedia BabyBook", which he began selling through shareware companies, then on the internet and later on through retail channels including WalMart and BabiesRUs.

In this conversation, Guy talks about the LiqidAlbums concept, and how you can use content from Scrapbookpresentations on LiquidAlbums.

Geetesh: Tell us about LiquidAlbums, and how easy is it for beginners to work with.

Tom: After having created and marketed desktop scrapbooking software through retail channels, I realized that an online version would be easier to use and market, and be more responsive to user feedback. Historically desktop versions have had more powerful capabilities than online versions, and online versions make it easier to share with others. LiquidAlbums.com combines the benefits of both environments by using state of the art technology like Silverlight to bring advanced editing capabilities to online applications including editing and multimedia.

In terms of ease of use, it starts with the fact that there is no software to buy or download, all you need is a browser on either a PC or Mac, with the free Microsoft Silverlight plug-in. Users can use it for free, the only charge is for people that want to export the album to an image format on their computer in PDF, JPG, or PNG, or want additional online storage.

The album wizard makes it easy to create a complete album in just a few clicks by creating the necessary pages to display the photos, backgrounds, page layout and frames you select.

Liquidalbums.com makes it easy to share albums by providing the ability to send a URL link that directly displays the album, or by sharing their albums with other members of LiquidAlbum.com.

It’s easy to add your photos because in addition to uploading photos from your computer, you can use the ones you already have on Flickr, Photobucket or Facebook (including Facebook friend’s photos).

Geetesh: Can a user work with a scrapbook on LiquidAlbums.com and add their own embellishments such as the ones available on ScrapbookPresentations.com?

Tom: Yes, in addition to using their own photos, audio and video, users can use their own media such as backgrounds, art elements, frames, album covers and textures. I believe that embellishments and stamps on ScrapbookPresentations.com equate to what we call art elements in LiquidAlbums.com. They are basically PNG files with transparency which embellish the pages. Our backgrounds are what you call backdrops and are basically JPG files of 2400x2400 pixel size. LiquidAlbums.com supports JPG, and PNG.

The elements for a LiquidAlbum “kit” are:

• Book Cover graphic (.jpg at 2400x2400 pixel)
• Page background graphic (.jpg at 2400x2400 pixel)
• Art element graphics (.png at 1200X1200 pixel)
• Frame graphics (.png at 1200x1200 pixel, with transparent opening)
• Texture graphics (.jpg at 1200x1200 pixel)

All files preferably under 1MB. Any dpi is Ok, but we tend to use 96dpi.

Note that frames are particular because inherent in the name is information about the location and size of the photo opening, for example a frame called: FrameD-28-29-9-19-.png has a photo opening that is 28% to the left, 29% down from the top, 9% from the right and 19% from the bottom relative to the frame size.

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