Pro Photo 4

I have previously reviewed past versions of pro photo with good reviews, and although I do work exclusively with the software, I try to be as little bias as possible. :) So without further ado, let’s get to the good stuff.

Pro Photo 4 has definitely leaped once again another straight bound from the previous iterations. While the new version has plenty of new features, most of this version was about refinement and polish. Specifically the menu system was completely overhauled from the last two previous versions, as well as the back-end area and the galleries were rebuilt using html 5 to work on all mobile devices. The menu system in place is now the biggest feature in the entire package with the single most flexible features. In fact, by pro photo 5 I don’t really see all that much more that they can do to add much to it, with the exception of the ability to add images that you can have a hover state with.

The menus have what seems like an endless array of options, you can now drag and drop them into place where you want, so no more external plugins, you can add images to every menu item, be it icon or a full replacement, custom fonts, custom menus, special drop downs, even add pro photo’s galleries straight into the menu. You can add 2 menus if you would like, and even a customized widget menu wherever you can place a widget, that means VERTICAL menus, which adds a whole new layer of fun. This is awesome because we’re not limited to only “the bar” any longer.

The ability to add custom fonts throughout the entire pro photo software was implemented finally, using google fonts or the squirrel font system. You can download any font and run it through a font generator and simply upload the file. The tutorial is simple to do, and it’s finally super easy to implement unlike hand coding it like it usually is. This helps designers out immensely, and pro photo users will be happy to add something to their site that will make it stand out from the rest.

This version also saw an entire redo of the admin back-end like previous versions, only the functionality and ease of use is just so much easier. Now there’s a dropdown of menu options for faster access to all the areas, and a home page with grid of options to choose from. Everything is spelled out and should be much friendlier and easier to use for new people to pro photo. The menus are now way more intuitive and the look and feel are great to match.

I think one of the biggest new additions that people are going to be raving about have to be the new grids. What the heck are grids you say? Grids are new and starting to become really trendy in the photography world. Basically you can choose to have your posts setup in a grid of boxes with several options instead of showing say just photographs, if you want to see this in action just go through some of the archives, as I’ve set excerpts to grid style. The front page also features hover grids I’ve setup to show latest posts. The new grid features are pretty flexible and while there’s only a few grid styles available right now, they have promised more to come soon. This is one of my new favorites to Pro Photo 4 as a whole next to the rebuilt menu system.

Grids are a great new feature to the bunch, but I think grids are mainly purposed for people who want to have home pages, or web galleries as just having them setup as a regular post on the blog doesn’t make much sense. Since they’re built to display posts, pages, or galleries, having grids in posts of posts defeats the purpose of having them. Luckily there’s options to show them on the archive and category pages as excerpts and different types that you can add suited for your use. You can also place them anywhere you can insert a gallery so basically it’s wherever you want them to go. Oh, did I mention there’s a grid WIDGET as well? They are just as flexible as the normal grids in P4 and can be placed wherever a widget space is in pro photo.

This is a header slideshow combined with a grid.

When the galleries got re-coded to html 5 standards the idea was to update pro photo to be fully compatible with mobile devices. That being said they added mobile versions of the site that you can customize in this version. This is a huge new feature and could eventually even be a standalone product by itself if they ever decided to push it that way. However, I do think that this is one of the features that I wasn’t as impressed about. It’s new, and still needs a lot of work to make better. Later on into the build process they added an option to simply show the site normally across devices, so it’s not something you’re required to even have or use.

While the mobile features are very nice, the actual styles and customization is still too limited for my tastes, on top of that, it’s klunky to do any design for because there’s no “preview” for it yet. So basically, every time you change something to the design of the p4 mobile page, you have to go between the computer and view it on your mobile or tablet to see the difference. It’s fine if you’re making one or two changes, but when there’s quite a few things to choose from, it can get tiring to continuously go back and forth. I’m one of those people that get way past knee deep into the design (obviously) and not having an array of mobile or tablet devices to test my design out on also makes me worry if it looks the way I intended it. There are a few features built into the mobile version that will have users thinking about which way to go, it has streamlined navigation compared to the regular site, and a lot of the same customization options you have with the menus on the regular site as well. I can definitely see this getting better and more intuitive in the future.

Social networking integration was finally added into place. I was also super happy with this addition, pro photo took the ideas from the designers of placing the social networking below posts, except now they don’t just link to the user pages, they’re shareable, which you can see below the post. Click one and share the review! :) They’ve added all the major social networks, and the buttons are customize-able to include icons or images, and can be placed how you want them to be.

In this version another big thing, and this is going to be epic what I’m about to tell you…pro photo has auto updates now. Why is that so important? Because I’ve been told not only is pro photo 4 automatically going to be updating when there are bug fixes, but we’ll be getting new features, new changes, and more refinements ALL YEAR LONG…FOR FREE. So if you’ve purchased pro photo you’re going to be in for a huge treat. There are going to be more grid styles added, more refinements and maybe another large feature or two before work on pro photo 5 begins.

You know what I think is the best of all? The price. there wasn’t any change to the price, $199 for the install it yourself version, $279 for the handheld version, and of course the upgrade from pro photo 2 or 3 is only $89 if you already own previous versions.

You’ll see a lot of refinements with older features, especially menus and galleries, but the biggest new features are all in the review. I think you’ll find a lot of the features we already had, have been improved upon in some way. ProPhoto 3 worked great, but it was still too limited to build a full website out of. Look at the new H2 site as an example. You can’t even tell that it’s a ProPhoto blog any more. I say “site” because that’s where the future of pro photo is headed. It’s not just a blog any more. With Pro Photo 4 and beyond you can do away with the flash sites and intro pages and have it all in one place. This, of course is the best feature of all. In today’s social world we want everything to be quick and fluid, and it’s easier to manage one site over several. I was a photographer for 6 years, and I only updated my portfolio site once a year because it was separated from the blog and too clunky to mess with. With P4 there’s no need to ever leave your site to update anything and with the new grids and galleries, they can be updated quickly when you add pictures to the site so you don’t have to go back and do them so often. Overall this is another great product from Netrivet and I look forward to all the future updates until Pro Photo 5.

Make sure to ask any questions or feel free to talk about the review in the comments. :)

Matt-