Sell Photos in your Local Currency

You can now sell your photo downloads, prints and gifts in one of the following currencies : USD, EUR, AUD, CAD, NZD or GBP. Your customers will certainly love seeing the prices in your local currency if you decide to make use of this new feature.

In your account there are only two changes you need to notice :

1. when creating a price list, you need to enter its name and currency

Each of your price lists can have only a single currency. Before this change, a new price list was created simply by entering its name. Now both the name and a currency are required.

2. when creating a coupon, you need to enter its currency as well as the usual characteristics

The coupons are now bound to a currency. A coupon in one currency cannot be applied to products sold in another currency.

Although you can have multiple price lists - each in a different currency - and apply them to various albums, your customers cannot combine products sold in various currencies within a single shopping cart. E.g. : if their cart contains a product sold in USD, they cannot add a product sold in EUR unless they empty their cart first. Each checkout is hence in a single currency and your sales page displays the profit, the net profit, and the fee in the currency of each sale.

When setting up your selling price, you specify it in the price list's currency.
This has a drawback for products provisioned by the lab, as their base currency is specified in USD. The base product price is always re-calculated according to the exchange rate at the time of sale. The consequence of this is that your profit can change according to the current exchange rate. If it happened that the exchange rate changed so as to put the sale price below the base price, the affected products would be disabled to protect you from financial loss. Your profit, will probably be large enough to compensate for the currency rate changes, but you are safe even if it is not.

The previously mentioned possible drawback of using a different currency does not affect digital downloads, as they have no base price.

USD remains our settlement currency and your profit as well as your payouts are calculated according to the exchange rate on the day of each sale. You can see each the used exchange rate on the sale details page by clicking "Show Summary". Payouts will also continue to be sent in USD as before.

The currency rate is updated twice daily. The used spread is 3% which is the spread we usually get from our payment providers.

The various currencies can have different processing fees and checkout options. Please refer to the feature list for details on fees and checkout options.

Single photo view redesigned

The single photo view has been redesigned for a more pleasant, usable, and accessible browsing experience.

As you can see in the screenshot below, the "Like" and "Dislike" buttons have been moved into the new panel at the bottom of the page. A new button has also been added into this panel : "Comments". This button displays the comments side-panel which you can also see in the screenshot. The comments side-panel is hidden by default. However, you and your visitors can always see the number of comments on a photo is always visible in the button's caption.

The photo's label, its description, as well as the view and like statistics have all been moved to the new panel at the bottom. The panel will automatically stretch vertically to accommodate your description even when it takes up several lines. You can, of course, still conveniently edit your photo's title and description using their respective editing links next to them.

New styles available for photo home sections

The homepage sections whose content are lists of photos have a new display style and new settings available. These sections are :  Recent Photos, Most Popular Photos, Photos I Like, Featured Photos, and the Album Preview gadget. All of the sections are accessible via the homepage's "Layout" button.

There is a new style for you to choose from :  "full width". This style displays your photos in the full width of your homepage content. The photos are not stretched if they are smaller than the required width, but with this style there is only one photo per row even if the photos are smaller than the full available width.

You can display up to five rows of photos in any of the sections and you can also have the photo label - either the title or the description - displayed below each of the photos. Unlike any other of the display styles, the new "full width" style allows you to directly edit the displayed photo labels conveniently from your homepage.

Changes to registrations and setting panels

The settings have been made easier to manage and navigate in by being redesigned in a single consistent way. The setting panels for albums and categories have been replaced by setting pages which are very much like the Control Panel page, but with the respective settings for albums and categories. The settings are not only easier to navigate within, they also take up the whole page and are more usable and accessible than ever before.

The visitor registration settings can now be set for categories as well as albums and the whole account. The registration settings have also been simplified in there being only one form now - the settings simply change the display mode to either of :  optional, mandatory, not displayed. Even when not displayed anywhere at all before the content is shown, you can still link your registration form from your custom menu, or your custom header or footer.

You can also leverage the standard setting inheritance which is applied to themes and privacy modes. As an example, you can set the visitor registration as optional for the whole account, but some categories (and thus also, the albums within them) will have it mandatory, while some albums will not have the form displayed at all. There is a multitude of variations on the example. It all depends on what you need, but it is there when you need it.

Mobile interface has been updated

The whole BlueMelon mobile interface has been remade to better match the current design and usability standards, as well as support the wide variety of available mobile devices.

You can still switch between the mobile and the desktop interface, but you will find the mobile one to be much improved. New features for the updated mobile interface include :


The mobile interface now supports the voting 'like' button in albums where voting is enabled.

In the single-image view mode, you can swipe your finger to navigate among the photos on touch-enabled devices.

Support for visitor registrations where these are enabled has also been implemented.

Updated help section and a new support system

We have moved both the help and the support system to a new provider.

The support has been moved into an external service. When you use the Contact Us link from any BlueMelon page or the Email Us link at the right side of any help page, you will be presented with the new support interface. 

Before the email is submitted, the support system tries to intelligently suggest articles and questions from the relevant help section based on the content of your email in order to give you immediate answers whenever possible. People often ask the same questions which have been answered many times before. This may save your time by quickly finding solutions to your questions.

Moreover, the new support system makes it possible for you to easily write to us by replying to the support emails. You don't need to go to the support section to submit your replies anymore. You can also add attachments to your messages.

You can also use the new system to post a Public Question. If you feel your problem is of a personal character, simply use the first option. If you feel others may benefit from our answer, ask publicly.

The help has been updated and new sections have been added. You can browse the new help by topic or search.

We hope that the new help and support will help you use your BlueMelon account more efficiently and to the full.

New indication of your running processes

Processing uploads, applying watermarks, and transforming photos (flipping or rotating them) all take time to finish. Until now, when you scheduled an operation, you had to check back if the operation was completed or not.

However, from now on, you can see an indicator of the status of all your currently running processes. The indicator shows the number of current uploads, photos to be watermarked, and photos to be transformed. The indicator is displayed in the top right corner of each BlueMelon page so that you can always easily find out when your scheduled processes complete.

Below, you can see a screenshot of the top-right corner when the indicator is displayed. The photo count is updated real-time, so you do not need to refresh anymore.