FASO Marks 25 Years With Rebuilt Image Servers, New Dashboard and Artist Society Plans

A live broadcast on October 8 marked 25 years of FASO, the artist-website platform founded by Clint Watson, who built its original codebase and serves as CEO. Engineering manager Ricardo Perez, software engineer Adro Morelos, special-projects contractor Lev, support-development liaison Jason Smith and engineer Sagrario joined host Olya Konell. Watson attributed years of apparent inactivity to end-of-life infrastructure dating to roughly 2002, prompting a rebuild begun around the end of COVID. Lev reconstructed the image servers from scratch, adding support for iPhone photos, PNG and WebP files, and recommending the Display P3 color profile over the older sRGB standard; Smith noted sRGB guidance remains valid. Bulk uploads cap individual files at 50 megabytes, with no set limit on image count. A redesigned account dashboard, the first product on the new foundation, works across phones and tablets; the legacy interface stays available with no immediate retirement plans. Watson said new sign-ups had been deterred by the old design. Perez demonstrated artwork versus non-art image classification, batch uploads, collections, visibility settings and Art Alerts, and previewed bulk editing beyond the current visibility-only action. Upcoming: a passwordless sign-in, the FASO Artist Society, juried exhibitions and AI tools for collector discovery. First-year membership is offered at $99.