Sparkbooth Photo Booth Software News

Paper and Cake have a great set of printable Valentine's Day photo booth props including signs, heart-shaped candies, lips, and more.

This is a maintenance release to improve printer setup:

• The Test button in the printer settings will now always display the print dialog. This should allow you to setup any printer specific settings that are not available on the regular printer setup dialog.
• When Sparkbooth starts with printing enabled, you can now setup printing or disable printing. If you choose printer setup, you can also display the print dialog after setup.

The Wedding Chicks have an online custom photo booth sign generator for weddings. Just select some colors and fill-in the date and names, press the button and you get a stylish photo booth printable sign. Enjoy.

This is a maintenance release:

• Photo layout settings control uses less memory.
• Fix issue where the loading screen hangs on start up if the Flickr uploader is selected.
• Tumblr uploader now works with accounts with multiple sites. Select the site to post photos by entering the correct tumblr.com url (i.e. yoursite.tumblr.com).
• Posterous uploader renamed to "Posterous Twitter". Posterous has different upload APIs, the Posterous Twitter upload uses their Twitter authenticated API.
• Allow negative print margins. This is useful in cases where the actually print area reported is different from actual. For example, if the top of your print is being cut off by 10 pixels. In this case, you will want to enter a top margin of 10px and bottom margin of -10px to push the entire photo down by 10px.
• Change remaining comment character indicator.

Dropbox is a free service that syncs your computer files to cloud server and among your other computers. It has some great photo sharing features that can be used wtih Sparkbooth:

• Backup and upload photos taken by Sparkbooth into an online photo album.
• If you are offline during an event, Dropbox will wait until you are online and automatically upload the photos.
• Share the photo album online with guests with Dropbox's Gallery feature

Here is how you can setup Dropbox to work with Sparkbooth:

1. Sign up for the Dropbox service, and install it on your computer with Sparkbooth. The free account comes with 2Gb of storage space!
2. Create a new folder in the Dropbox Photo folder for your event. For example, C:UsersJohnDropboxPhotosHolidayParty2010
3. Set Sparkbooth to save photos to the folder you created. Now as photos are added to the folder, Dropbox will automatically upload them into your online folder. If your computer is not connected to the internet, it will upload them later when it is connected.
4. To share the photo album, go to Dropbox.com and sign into your account. Navigate to your Photos folder, and select the folder you want to share and press the Gallery button. This will generate a link you can email to your guests, so they can view the photos.

Changes in this release:

• Fix SmugMug gallery selection
• Checks if printing is enable on start, and displays printer setup.
• Prompted dialog text is now customizable
• Added prompt for comment option. Comments will replace photo captions for photo uploads.
• Prompted name, email, and comment values will be sent in custom uploader request
• Cancel prompts with ESC or ctrl-Z
• Re-enable Twitter name prompt with Twitter uploaders
• Prevent exiting fullscreen when displaying settings.
• Sparkbooth 2.4.x is now known as Sparkbooth PE (Party Edition). Sparkbooth 2.5 and Sparkbooth PE 2.4 are the same product, just different product SKUs.
• Fixed updating of Sparkbooth 2.5. If you purchased 2.5.x, please update by pressing Download button from here.

Here is another photo booth card idea. This one is for New Years.

You can do this with Sparkbooth. Have year number cutouts or use a whiteboard, and set the photo layout to the 4-photo strip. Hold up each year number for each photo - it might help to increase the duration between shots.

Excellent article on setting up a photo booth for a school carnival by the folks at Paper and Cake. Lots of useful information on photo booth for kids, and a great set of printable photo booth props that can be used for any photo booth.

Adobe has just released an Adobe AIR update for Mac only that fixes the camera detection issue. Here is what Adobe said:

Today we posted a very minor update for the Adobe AIR 2.5.1 runtime that addresses a known issue related to interacting with a system's camera on Mac systems. This is a desktop only release for the Mac; Windows and Linux users will not be impacted by this issue and will therefore not be prompted to update.

The build number for the Mac update is AIR 2.5.1.17750. We recommend that users update to the latest version of Adobe AIR.

Got a photo booth at your holiday party? Check out these great printable holiday photo booth props at Paper and Cake. Props include Santa hat, Santa beard, Mrs. Claus' spectacles, reindeer antlers, and Rudolf's red nose.