If you have ever tried to create an album from an event that you have photographed, you know the difficulties that can come along with the creation process. If you have experience using Adobe InDesign, you are off to a good start and most definitely have full control of your album. However, InDesign is a complex program that takes time to learn and even more time to become timely and proficient with. A ways back while listening to a podcast I heard about Fundy Designer. Fundy is an all-in-one design suite that can be used to design, sell, proof, and print with ease. The application goes beyond album design and covers many aspects of your photo business, helping you focus on providing your clients with beautiful, timeless prints, along with a variety of other options to help your brand grow.
After a few weeks of experimenting with the software, I had the chance to meet and talk to Fundy’s founder, Andrew Funderberg. Funderberg is a great guy and is truly trying to simplify the lives of photographers with his program. Fundy v6.5 is the version that is currently on the market. In this version, photographers have the ability to create custom albums, sales and proofing galleries, blog collages, and brand images all while easily connecting you with the best labs in the industry. In mid-spring, Fundy will be releasing v7. When I sat down with Fundy himself, I had the chance to go through v7 and check out some of the key upgrades that the program will have.
One of the coolest features that Fundy boasts is its drag and drop technology, where you can literally design and album by dragging and dropping images anywhere in your album that you please. With the release of v7, Fundy will have new, patented automatic design technology that creates an album based off the timestamp on your image, creating a beautiful album that's accurate to the timeline of the wedding or event you shot. After the album is created, you can go in and reposition, crop, or move your images in virtually any fashion that you please. Some other feature that v7 will have include a faster, more user friendly interface, a revamped design picker, and a professional image designer and organizer.
Fundy goes far beyond album design and is truly an all-in-one print sales machine. If you are looking to consolidate your sales workflow and interested in focusing on selling prints to your customers, I strongly suggest you check out Fundy. You can view the video for a more in depth look at v7 or head over to their website and download a trial of v6.5. If you are a seasoned Fundy user, or have experience with the program, feel free to let us know what you think in the comments section below.
The video tells everything and shows nothing. Lets hope that it catches up to smart albums because V6 was very slow and had no shortcuts.I will be happy to see if the upgrade is worth it.
Not to mention the lack of a volume control on the video, and the background music that is just as loud as the vocals. I hope they're better at making software than they are at making videos.
Hi, while I love Fundy and their team, the proofing side has a major draw back for me: The page numbering on the client proof is different for the page numbering in the Designer (as the proofer considers for some mystery reason the cover as page one). This is a major screw up that can send you spinning if you have a client that refuses to use the provided links and just responds in an email with their changes. Just by looking at their email, with requested changes on pages lets say numbered 4,8,9 22, you will go ahead and make them on your end where the page numbers don't match. I cannot for the life of me know why they were thinking when they implemented this, but definitely not easy or time saving. Actually it took me about six weeks and multiple phone calls to figure out that we were looking at different page numbers. Anyone else had this particular issue that I hope it has been addressed in Version 7!
Yes it needs work perhaps v7 will be better, somethings are clunky like when you type your name of the album the characters are so small, they need to fix this, plus their new products offerings pop up on the screen when you open it even though you already have that version, kind of annoying. Have not tried their online proofing to see if the page numbering matches or not. It is a bit slow so hopefully v7 will fix that as well.
"If you have experience using Adobe Illustrator, you are off to a good start and most definitely have full control of your album."
Uhm... Illustrator? You definitely mean InDesign. Illustrator is for vector graphics mate.
I tried out Fundy Designer in the last version and was not very pleased. The main problem was that the album file grew bigger and bigger because they saved all the images in it even the ones I already deleted from the album or exchanged with newer edits of the same image... Is that issue fixed in the new version?? Because that was the biggest no-go for me and an easy to fix issue (I am a software developer myself...).
You are definitely correct, thanks for catching that. I'm not sure of that detail, however I will be experimenting more v7 soon and will hopefully have a more in depth review in the future. I'll keep an eye on that. Thanks.
i finally hope they alphabetize the jobs so i can find them fast instead of scrolling through all of them, that would be a great help, and if it dont crash as much , i found i have to clean out the folder of old jobs so that the program dont crash . Oh and i hope it is able to handle a job with over 300 images in with out crashing. and thats about it
how much does this cost?