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Great photos in a flash

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During the Herr family’s 102-day journey through 10 countries in 2011, sometimes they “lost Dad.”

Soon enough, the Corona del Mar family saw that their shutterbug was occupied elsewhere, his face behind the camera, his lens focusing to take pictures of “just about anything.”

This was causing Dad — aka Scott Herr, a photography enthusiast — to sometimes be missing out on what Mom (Jackie Herr) and their teenage daughters, Madeleine and Adrienne, were doing during the family’s tours and excursions.

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“As a photographer, you want to be there with your family experiencing all this great stuff, and yet you want to capture the memory of it at the same time,” said Scott, a Canon guy. “It’s really a compromise of how much you forgo and how much you want to capture.”

There has to be a better way to do this, the family thought.

And so after discussions at the kitchen table of their Cameo Highlands home, the Herrs came up with a 21st-century solution: Picfari.

With the free website, https://www.picfari.com, and mobile app, travelers can plan out their photos beforehand using, as a reference point or for inspiration, its expansive database of more than 15,000 photos from about 400 tourist spots around the world.

Alongside the photos are precise GPS locations showing where the photographers took them. With those, the Herrs hope they’ll inspire travel photographers to get the best angles at photo-worthy destinations — like the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, to name a few.

“You waste a lot of time trying to figure things out,” Scott said, adding that Picfari can be that time-saving advice that “helps other travelers find great places to go shoot and make great memories.”

Also displayed are the conditions in which the pictures were taken. Some conditions, like the weather and date, are straightforward. Others are more complex, such as camera’s ISO setting, aperture and focal length.

Picfari also has sharing and customization features, as well as a host of site-specific travel tips.

Travelers oftentimes plan out many aspects of their trip beforehand, Scott said, so why not the photos too?

“What I found is that when you get there, you have an itinerary that you want,” he said. “But then, for all the photos that you want to take, you have no idea. You’re there going, ‘Now what?’”

Jackie said what goes up on Picfari, which launched in March, goes through some quality control.

“Nothing goes up on that site until we make sure all of that’s correct,” she said.

This is a business the family is keeping, well, in the family.

“Travel for our family is such a big deal, for the kids and their growth,” Jackie said. “I think growing this business and keeping it within the family is a huge deal, so that’s what we’re trying to do.”

It’s truly been an effort for all four Herrs, and one that’s going to be continuously updated and expanded.

The business savvy comes from the parents. Jackie ran an agency, which she sold in 2008, that specialized in pharmaceutical and health-care marketing. Scott was in the health-care industry for 30 years. Some of his photos are also on the site.

Madeleine and Adrienne are the “cheerleaders and beta testers.” Their parents are hoping the Picfari creation process gives the girls some real-world business start-up experience as well.

Madeleine recalled Picfari’s early days, with sticky notes galore as everybody was strumming up ideas.

“It’s very cool to see it come to life,” she said.

On the techie programming side, Irvine-based Square 1 Partners does the website and mobile app, available for iPhones and, later this month, Androids.

The Herrs said they aim to keep everything free, and generate revenue someday from it all through advertising.

Picfari may even appeal to niche markets — photographs of Parisian cheese shops, for example.

Added Scott: “We’ll know we have arrived when somebody does a Picfari of Bakersfield.”

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