What is Fotocodex?
How to get started	Digital photo considerations
What you'll need	Accepted formats
Signing up with Fotocodex	Image resolution
Forgot your login or password?	Ensuring correct color reproduction
Making your Fotocodex album	Understanding Fotocodex book formats
Creating your album project	Book format basics
Setting up your album gallery	Fotocodex Product Lines
Inviting others to contribute and/or edit
Uploading photos to your project	Understanding Fotocodex pricing
	Base price and additional page pricing explained
	Shipping prices
Changing a photo's category	Taxes
Creating your album's pages	Volume discounts
Reviewing your album
Changing the page order	Ordering your album
Publishing your Fotocodex	Which countries does Fotocodex ship to?
	How to place an order for your Fotocodex album
Received a Fotocodex invitation?	Paying for your album
Accepting the invitation	When can you expect to receive your album?
Contributing photos to another's project	Viewing your orders
Project Recipes	Problem with your order?
Wedding recipe	Problems placing an order
Class Books	Haven't received your order yet?
Calendars	I received my order but ...
	Contacting Fotocodex
ProFlo Beta
What is ProFlo Beta?

What is Fotocodex?

We are a company whose main focus is providing you with:

• high quality custom photo books
• intuitive tools with which to build them
• fun in doing the above by allowing you to invite others to help you in the process
  

It is simple. We give you the tools, via our web application, to build your custom photo book. We then handle the printing and binding of your book. Once it is complete we ship your fotocodex to you.

• MAC or PC
  
• ADSL/Cable or better Internet connection

• Internet browser
• Safari (OS X)
• The Safari browser shows some very slight incompatibilities with the advanced web technology we are using. We have found nothing that will impact your "fotocodexing"
  
• Firefox (OS X, Linux, Windows PCs)
  
• Mozilla (OS X, Linux, Windows PCs)
  
• Internet Explorer for Windows based operating systems

• Digital images

Sign up

In order to begin using the Fotocodex web application you’ll need to establish a user account. All we require to get you started is your name,a valid email address and a user name invented by you.

Once you’ve provided us with that you will be sent your password to your registered email address.

Log in

To gain access to your “stuff” in Fotocodex you’ll need to first login. Using the user name you selected when you registered and the password we either assigned to you or the one you changed to, log in.

Forgot your password or user name?

If you have forgotten your user name and/or your password you may retrieve it at any time by going to the login page and clicking on the retrieve login/password link. An email with your user name or password will be sent to your registered email address.

My stuff

Once you have logged in you will be taken to the “my stuff” page. Here you will see a list of all projects you are participating in. These include projects you have created as well as ones you've been invited to. You will also see a list of all the orders you have placed to date as well as their status.

There is a blue navigation bar just below the main menu which provides you with the options to: create a new project, change your user settings.

Creating a new project

When creating a new project you’ll need to decide which of the Fotocodex products you’d like to create. These are listed in detail on the products page but you may consult a shorter form of this information directly from the create project page. Next to the book format pull down option you’ll see a button “more information”. This will display a summary of the selected book format in a pop-up window.

Select your desired book project format and click on the create project button.  We’ve offer several different book formats giving you the option to tailor your Fotocodex depending on its content and/or use. Once again, the product pages describes each option and detail.

Enter a title for the project as well as a brief description. This information will be used:

• when sending out invitations to others to join in your project,
• on your invoice form when you’ve purchased published copies

At this point you’ve created your project and we’ve created a gallery within it in which you will upload your photos! You may at any time go back and change the project’s title or description. However the format (size and cover type) are fixed and can’t be changed.

The steps we recommend you perform now are:

• Create categories in which to upload your photos
• Send out invitations for others to contribute their photos or participate in the fotocodexing of your experiences.

This project

When you create a new project or click on the project name in the project list you will be taken to the project page.  Here you’ll see the project’s name and description which was assigned during project creation.

You will also see the gallery, the album as well as the invitation manager. 

The Gallery

The gallery is where all the photos for this project will be stored.  You can organize your photos within the gallery by first creating categories in which to upload the photos to. We highly recommend doing this as it greatly simplifies the page design process.

Categories

Your gallery starts out with 1 default category: email.

Categories are used to group photos together that you would like to place on the same page or in a related sequence of pages. For instance if your Fotocodex project is a vacation you took with some friends then the categories could be labeled with the places you visited:

• Amsterdam
• Paris
• London
• Barcelona
• Rome

Categories is the Fotocodex way of grouping “similar” photos together. You can think of them as directories, virtual shoe boxes, etc.

Example groupings could be:

• Time or event based:

• such as wedding rehearsal dinner, ceremony, party
• places visiting during a vacation
• school year

• Theme based
• Friends
• Family
• Work
• People based

You are not required to create categories. The option exist to help make your album building process easier.

Creating categories is easy. Click on create category, assign a category name and a brief description and click save!

You can keep creating additional categories, we don’t impose any limit but we recommend you keep it to under 10.

Once your categories have been created you can either begin uploading photos into them or you can send out invitations for others to contribute their photos and/or join in the editing of your fotocodex.

Uploading photos

PC users must click on Sylvia's photo to actually active the uploader. (This only has to happen once after you've indicated you 'trust' the uploader).

TIP: the big 'browse' button you see under Sylvia can be ignored! Use the easier option of drag and drop instead!

Uploading your photos is as simple as selecting them in your file browser, (windows file explorer or MAC finder) or media browser (iPhoto, iView, etc) dragging and dropping them onto the photo of Sylvia. A progress window will be opened in the top left of your screen. You may drag and drop more photos onto Sylvia as you wish.

While the upload is in progress you can't change your browser window! If you do the upload will be canceled! You may open up another browser window though while you wait for the upload to finish.

Moving photos from one category to another

Photos may be moved from one category to another from the category page. Here you will see a list of all the photos assigned to this category. Next to each photo will be a pull down menu listing all the other categories available. To move a photo just select the new category using the photo's pull down category menu and then select move.

This option is useful for moving photos out of the email category into the your project's categories.

Sending invitations

From the project page you will see an icon of a silhouette of a group of people. This is your invite page from which you can see which invitees have accepted their invitation, change their role as well as send out the actual invitations.

To invite people to join in use the form that appears below the “invite others” heading. Here you enter your invitation message and the list of email address for the invitees.

The invitation message is free form. It will be sent out just as typed. We also include in the invitation email the project’s name as well as the description you entered at creation time. See example email invitation.

Press the invite button to send out the email invitations.

Assigning roles to the people you've invited

There are several ways in which someone may participate in your project. They may assume the role of:

• client: this is the default role assigned to anyone who has accepted your invitation. This is the simplest role. A client can contribute photos, browse through your book and/or choose to buy it if they so desire. There can be any number of clients within your project.
• If you wish to prevent people from contributing photos to you project only limiting them to browsing and possibly purchasing it then you’ll need to send them invitations once the project has been published.
• editor: is a client but they can also create and change pages in your book. There can any number of editors within a project.
• book creator: assumes all roles in addition to being able to publish the book. There can be only one creator per project.

From the invitation page within your project you may change people's roles as well as remove them from your project at any time.

Accepting another's invitation to join their project

You can be invited to join in a project to be either a contributor if the project is still open or as a client if the project has already been published.

To be a client you'll need to become a member of Fotocodex if you aren't one already. Click here to see how.

If you are being invited to contribute photos then you have the choice of contributing anonymously by sending your photos to the project's gallery via email or you can upload them by logging in and using your web browser. Doing the latter will properly attribute your contributions to your username.

Fotocodex Book Formats

We offer three product lines and within each you’ll see a variety of offers designed to suit your particular needs. 

The personal product line is designed to meet most digital camera owners needs. It is a high quality product offered at a very reasonable price. Editions come in both soft cover as well as hard cover.

The semi-professional line is designed to meet the demands of the high end amateur or semi-professional product. We use a high quality photo paper which

The professional product line uses 100% cotton rag fine art paper,  the best digital printing technology to date and a meticulous, almost manual production process to ensure the utmost quality is achieved. The book’s pages are sewn to add extra durability to the binding. 

Within each product line you will have a variety of formats from which to chose. We offer a cloth covered hard back edition as well as soft back editions for the personal line while in the professional line we only offer a hard back edition in several sizes.

Please consult our product page for the latest information on our product offerings.

Building your book

All Fotocodex books consist of a:

• front cover
• book pages
• back cover

All Fotocodex books require that you build:

• the front cover
• any even number of pages between the specified minimum required and the maximum allowed

Depending on the book’s format you may also have the option of designing the back cover.

Some book formats allow for “full bleed” which means that  the book’s page contain no margin allowing for the photos to cover the entire page, i.e. “bleed off the page”. This will be indicated in the description of the particular book format. <Sample>

Building the album

Click to see a quick video guide about creating album pages

There are two important tools provided by the Fotocodex service you will need to get familiar with in order to build your album: the page visualizer and the page editor. 

The page visualizer allows you to view your book as a series of “spreads” much like you would view a real book. It shows you two pages at a time.

The editor is used to build or change the contents of a given page.

Album building consists of the following process starting from the page visualizer:

1. click on add page
2. choose a template from the list provided in the left hand column
3. select the category from which you would like to select your photos
4. drag the photos from the category and drop them into the appropriate image frame
5. move and/or resize your photos if you need to using the optional controls. (Click on the “+” in the lower left of the image frame)
6. If there are text frames then replace the <Texto> with your desired text.
7. Save the page or save and add a new page

Page Design and Templates

Pages are designed by selecting a template while in the page editor. A template consists of a series of frames in which you can place images and/or text. In the template selection list running vertically on the left hand side of the page editor  image frames are black with a bull's eye and text frames are indicated by a blue rectangle with letters running through it.

Images are placed within image frames by dragging an image from the list of images appearing at the top of the editor into the appropriate image frame box. The image will be automatically sized to fit into the box. You have the option to move the photo around within the frame and/or zoom into the photo. These controls are opened by clicking on the “+” sign located in the lower left hand corner of the image frame. <sample>

When selecting a template pay attention to the aspect ratio of its image frames to ensure they match that of your images. If they don't match then you might see strange scaling behavior of your images!

While in the editor, if you roll your mouse over a template you will see some descriptive information appearing like:

    1
    2:3
    203 x 135.33

This indicates that this particular template has 1 image frame whose aspect ratio is 2:3 and is 203mm x 135.33 mm big.

You enter text into text frames by simply typing in your text. Depending on the design of the templates you may have the option to select which font you would like, font size, font style (normal, bold, italics), font color and how you would like the text justified (left, center or right).  One word of caution: pay attention to how much text you type into a text frame. You don’t want to overflow it! <sample>

Reviewing your Fotocodex & Changing the page order

You can review your fotocodex at any point by entering the page visualizer from the “album” option located in the “my stuff” page or by exiting out of the page editor if you are building a page. Once in the visualizer you will see a list of page numbers bracketed by the front cover and back cover Fotocodex icons.  (sample here)

To view a particular “spread” click on its corresponding page number.

To reorder pages simple drag the page number from its current location to where you would like to place it.

You cannot move the location of the book’s front and back covers!

In the page visualizer, towards the bottom of the page, you will see a table with blue headings which informs you of the minimum number of pages required to publish this book, the current number of pages that have been created so far as well as the maximum number of pages allowed.  (sample)

Publishing your Fotocodex

Before you or the other people participating can order copies of your Fotocodex you’ll need to publish it. Publishing it causes several things to happen. The Fotocodex system verifies the following:

1. your Fotocodex contains at least the minimum number of pages and no more than the maximum
2. it contains an even number of pages
3. all frames, whether they are image or text frames, must be filled in
4. book covers must be defined

Since more than one person may be editing your fotocodex at the same time it might be the case that it actually contains more than the maximum allowed pages. What you will need to do is to decide which to remove thereby reducing the page count to within the number allowed.

When you indicate you want to publish your fotocodex we review it checking to make sure it completes the above requirements. We will also provide you with a warning if we encounter photos whose resolution does not meet our minimum quality requirements for the given size of image frame it has been placed into. This is a “soft” warning meaning we will allow you to go ahead and publish your book once you indicate your acknowledgement of the warning and your approval to go ahead.  In indicating your acceptance you are also agreeing to assume responsibility for any print quality problems that may arise due to insufficient resolution.

Placing orders for your Fotocodex

You can order published Fotocodices of which you have access to either as their creator or as an invited participant. To place an order select the Fotocodex you desire from your “my stuff” page and from there you will see the option to “order”.

On-line ordering is easy and follows a typical “on-line” purchasing flow. You first indicate which product finalizing any remaining details such as quantity desired and if ordering a hard back edition the color of the cloth covering. Continuing on from this page you will be requested to enter your billing information. If you are shipping to an address different from you billing address then you’ll indicate that option on this page.

If your shipping and billing addresses are different then you will need to enter the shipping information. Note that shipping is setup for a handful of countries only. If you don’t see the country you desire in the ship to list then please send an email request to support@fotocodex.co.uk asking us to add your country. (We just need to update our shipping and tax tables in order to include it.)

Continuing on you’ll see a preliminary invoice listing the details for your order. Please review this carefully before placing your order! If everything looks in order then continue on to enter your payment data. If you wish to change any aspect of your order you may do so by either canceling out of this process and starting again or using the back button to reach the data you want to change.

Payment wlll be handled by the bank “La Caixa”. Any payment information entered on these pages is handled directly by their service and not by Fotocodex. Hence we do not know, nor do we keep any sensitive payment information within our system.

Image formats

Fotocodex only accepts JPEG images. Recommended quality settings for these should be: maximum quality (minimum compression).

Image resolution

The number of pixels in your images will determine up to what size they can be printed. For the Fotocodex Personal line our rule of thumb is that a printed photo must have 9.45 pixels per printed milimeter (pppmm) (240 pixels per printed inch pppi). For instance, a photo having a resolution of 2048 x 1536 can produce photos which can be printed up to 216mm x 163mm (8.5” x 6.4”) without seeing pixelation effects:


In our Professional line we recommend the above and a maximum of no more than 11.8 pixels per printed milimeter (300 pixels per printed inch). 

Fotocodex will automatically handle the “downsampling” of the images if they contain more pixels than are required.

The low resolution warning in the page visualizer or page editor is triggered by applying the 9.45 pppmm (240 pppi) rule to each photo being placed into an image frame. The image frame determines the size at which the photo will be printed.  Hence if you encounter this warning it is telling you that the photo you are placing into the image frame does not have a sufficient number of pixels to be scaled up to fit into this frame.

Ensuring correct color

This is a complex topic as there are many factors involved. Fortunately there are standard mechanisms in place that enable you to ensure your digital photos will be processed correctly. First some simple rules:

1. We accept only RGB images!
2. All digital photos submited to Fotocodex should contain an RGB color profile. If you don't know what this means, that is ok, most cameras automatically include this.
3. Any digital photo submitted to Fotocodex which does not contain a color profile will have an automatically assigned profile of sRGB.
   
4. We accept any valid RGB color profile included with the images.
5. Your monitor should be color calibrated to ensure that you are seeing the digital photos' colors properly.  
   

If for some reason you have CMYK images you wish to include in a Fotocodex album, then please convert them to Adobe RGB before uploading them to Fotocodex. This way you may perform any color adjustments that might be needed.

Example email invitation

The text below is coded to point out which text block comes from where. The email itself will not send out in this coded format.

Codes are:

• User's invitation message

• Project description written by the user when creating the project
• Fotocodex generated localized text.
  

Dear friends,
As we mention the other day, we won’t have an official photographer … We are making our wedding album with your help! The outcome of that will be for sure more fun, close and real

We'll create our wedding album using your photos! It will be something very special for us and will be without a doubt something very special for all of you to participate in.

If you are being invited to contribute your photos then please perform one of the following:

Click here to accept the invitation and upload your photos using your web browser.

What are you going to do with all those digital photos on your computer?
www.fotocodex.com

Product pricing explained

Product pricing is based on a base offering which is a combination of book cover type (hard or soft), page size and a minimum number of printed pages. Additional pages may be added up to the maximum number listed in the product tables below.

Example price calculation for a hard cover fotocodex personal edition: 52 pages, 290mm x 200mm page size:

base price	= £22.99
additional pages	= 52 pages total  - 24 pages included with base price
	= 28 additional pages
additional page price	= 28 pages * £0.65/page = £18.20
Total price (with VAT)	= £41.19

What countries do we ship to?

We can ship anywhere as long as you are willing to pay the shipping costs! Really! If you don't see your country listed as a ship to destination when going through the purchasing process it is because we have not yet added the shipping costs to our tables. This is an easy process for us to do! Just send us an email at support@fotocodex.co.uk informing us which country you would like to ship to.

Currently supported countries are:

Shipping Prices

Fotocodex albums are shipped to their final destination using the postal service's parcel post shipping rates. Prices are calculated based on package dimensions and weight.

Taxes

Taxes, unfortunately, are a fact of life. Tax is calculated based on the final destination. For instance shipments within the EU have a value added tax of 16% while shipments to the USA are not taxed.

Volume Discounts

With our personal and semi-professional line of products we are able to realize some cost savings if we produce your Fotocodex album in quantities and we pass these savings directly on to you in the form of volume discounts.

Our current volume discount structure is:

Volume (copies of the same book in a single order)	Discount
10 - 25	6%
26 - 99	8%
100 or more	10%

The professional line, due to its very manual production process, defies any efficiencies of scale and hence we are unable to offer any volume discounts.

When can I expect to receive my order once I have paid for it?

Our production goals are to print, bind and ship out your Fotocodex albums within 10 working days from when we have received your payment. The actual amount of time it will take before you receive the order depends on which country you are shipping to.

Accepted methods of payment are:

• credit card

Viewing your orders

You may view your orders at any time by logging in and entering the My Fotocodex page. Once there you will see a table which lists all your orders, their status and their reference number.

Problems placing your order

If you are experiencing problems placing your order please take careful note of the the operation you are trying to perform and any error messages the system is giving you. Before contacting our customer support team we ask that you please look through our help section in an effort to see if the problem is explained. If you are not able to resolve the problem through this manner then please contact our customer support team. Please include as much detail about the issue as possible.

If you have yet to receive your Fotocodex album

We try our best to get you your Fotocodex album to you as soon as possible. If you received an email notification from us saying we have shipped your order but you not yet received it then please contact our customer support team. We will do our best to track down the order.

If we determine that the order was lost we will produce another copy and ship it out as soon as possible.

If you are not satisfied with your Fotocodex album

We strive to produce the highest quality albums possible. If for some reason you are not satisfied with the quality of the product then please let us know! Contact our customer support team.

Our process of resolution will be the following:

• Problems with the binding or covers
• We will replace the product once we have received the original back from you
• Our policy is to reproduce the book correcting any defects while so doing.
  
• It is not our policy to provide a refund of the price paid
  
• Problems with print quality
• We will review your complaints carefully. However if the print quality problem is due to the use of low resolution photos then cannot accept responsibility for the poor quality. The system provides sufficient warnings whenever it encounters photos with insufficient resolution.