You can use Share in Fotoware Alto to make content available to one or more recipients. Recipients can access the share without signing in while the share is available.

You can also create and send a share (an empty share) before adding content to it. This is useful when you want to prepare and distribute a share in advance, for example before an event, and add content as it becomes available. Content can also be added to the share automatically using business rules.

Fotoware Alto users can access shares from Fotoware Alto. External recipients access the share using the link in the email.

If you send a share to yourself, you don't receive an email. Instead, a notification appears in Fotoware Alto, and you can access the share from the main menu.

You can style the shared email that Fotoware Alto sends and the share page to include links to your terms and usage restrictions, or to add your custom logo. The share page can serve as your permanent link to branding or press materials.

You can embed content from Fotoware Alto on websites and landing pages. Fotoware Alto provides either a direct image link or HTML embed code.

The embed link allows resizing in the embed viewer or by directly updating the width and height values, e.g., https://demo.picturepark.com/v/n1HWVr32/?width=1200&height=801.

👉 VIDEO: How To Embed Content in Google Doc

Powering the best of the internet | Fastly offers reliable, fast, and customizable options to deliver shared content from Fotoware Alto. Fastly offers real-time observability, baked-in security, and programmatic control.

The CDN (Content Delivery Network) can be enabled per customer to distribute email shares and embeds via Fastly. Both the default caching time and the serving of stale content are also configurable per customer.

A Fastly-specific mechanism called Shielding increases the likelihood that stale or embedded content is served when Fotoware Alto is unavailable (due to maintenance or other issues). With Shielding enabled, the origin server receives all requests from a single designated POP (point of presence) rather than from multiple POPs across the Fastly network.

Shielding provides the following benefits:

• Improves cache hit ratio (CHR) - increases the probability of end-user requests resulting in a cache HIT.
• Speeds up connections - reduces connection setup latency for MISS and PASS requests that must be served from the Picturepark (now Fotoware Alto) API.
• Reduced number of requests to the PIcturepark API.

Please contact support if you need assistance with this feature.

Media Optimization (IO) enables you to crop, resize, sharpen, change transparency, or rename images using the media editor, requiring permission to edit images (role permission). The images can then be integrated into websites, e-commerce stores, or other apps. Content Delivery Networks (CDN) further improve global delivery and availability.

Media Editor

The media editor lets you dynamically make advanced transformations and image optimizations without changing the original. You can see the results instantly in the preview on the right. You can execute various modifications and validate your results by enabling or disabling them, and you can also chain everything together for multi-layered optimizations.

The following rendering actions are available:

• Crop, resize, rotate, sharpen.
• Alpha channel transparency (replace).
• Conversion into JPG, PNG, or TIFF.
• Rename the default filename for SEO purposes.

Conversion presets

Editors can save their settings in the Media Editor as content presets for later reuse on the same image.

Additionally, editors can create conversion preset templates in settings, making them available for any image, provided they have the Manage conversion preset templates role permission.

A conversion preset template requires:

• Name: the name that appears in the Media editor
• Description: for internal purposes, not shown anywhere
• Template: the conversion string (with the option to add a placeholder for a focal point)
• Output format: the source where the conversion settings are applied

Common conversion preset templates are in use for

• Website hero or header images.
• Product shots used in commerce stores.
• Detail extracts from large-scale images.
• Different social media channels.
• Placeholders in sales presentations.

Permissions

If you want to enable your users to create and update conversion presets, the user's role must have “manage items” permissions on the layer “Image Analytics.”

Focal Point Editor

The focal point editor for images enables users to create, update, or remove focal points, including those generated by AI providers such as Azure. Permitted users can create either a single focal point or a bounding box around an object, such as a face. 

Click on the image to create a focal point, and click and hold to create a bounding box.

Each focal point has:

• Identifier: the short name of your focal point
• Confidence level: a number between 0 and 1, where 1 is 100% confidence.
• Optional reference: additional text which serves as a description.
• The bounding box also had width and height fields.

All information will be saved in the Image Analytics Layer of the image.

Cropping around Focal Points

For every Content Item, you can create focal points in the Focal Point Editor or via cropping to focal points from within the Media Editor. Additionally, AI Tagging proposes focal points for available areas of interest within an image. Depending on the model you choose, AI can also propose brand names, text, or demographics.

All focal points are saved to the layer “Image Analytics”, from which you can select the ones to apply as a crop onto your images in the Media Editor.

You can create (2) or select existing focal points (1) for cropping in the Media Editor.