atn 33: online galleries for photographers
Today’s around the ‘net is jam-packed with links to web solutions for photographers and an interesting Harry Benson interview.
The first mention I’d like to make is the beautifully presented website of Maria Angela Photography. Maria left a comment and I followed the link to her site and was really impressed. The home page automatically filled the screen and the whole experience was professional. Sometimes Flash sites seem bulky and slow but the Flash effects loaded quickly and effortlessly, adding up to a notable website experience for potential clients.
Are you planning to upgrade your web presence? Many photographers favor going with one of the high quality all-in-one template / hosting services. You’ll have access to multiple template designs, web hosting and customer support. Here are some links if you’re in the market and interested in a little comparison shopping of online galleries for photographers:
big folio – our studio used big folio for a peripheral project and were very pleased
BluDomain – a favorite of many wedding and portrait photographers
Live Books – popular among commercial / advertising photographers
Speaking of Live Books, they have a series of online video interviews with talented photographers. The most recent is this interview with famed photojournalist Harry Benson. One note: for some reason, the video didn’t want to play until I updated to Adobe Flash Player 10 (but that only took a couple of minutes).
A great quote from Benson in the video, on photojournalism: “A good photograph can’t be duplicated, it cannot happen again. It’s over. It’s a moment in life, in history…”
If you’re cool with hosting your own site, programs like Photoshop CS4 and Lightroom 2 can generate a variety of online galleries for photographers (free trial downloads from Adobe let you “try before you buy”). If you don’t have such a product you can use something like the Flash gallery freeware called (imagine this) “Flash Gallery”. I haven’t tried it personally yet but the demos look intriguing. A Google search on photo gallery software turned up a bunch of options, many of them freeware.
If you have any additional info on webgallery suggestions or what’s working for you, don’t hesitate to post a comment. From time to time I’m asked about professional photography website design services so let me know if you have any recommendations.
Another week down…the studio is still a mess of boxes because we’re tied up with post-production. It looks like December will be quieter on the shooting front, though, which should allow us to get things sorted. Tomorrow we’ll head to IKEA to pick up a couple of things and it should start looking like a studio (and not a storage space) soon.
Have a good weekend and see you next week,
- Jim T.
Simpleviewer, from http://www.airtightinteractive.com is really easy to use and shareware/freeware. I know nothing about flash programing, but I am able to update and configure simpleviewer whenever I want on my webpage. I think it’s a great option for those people just starting out. A lot of people feel my website has a good clean look, and ar surprised when I tell them I put it up in 20 hours just by using a tutorial website.
~jonathan keller
http://www.jkellerphoto.com
I just got an email from WHCC promoting PickPic. It looks interesting, but has the one fatal flaw that all such galleries have had so far for me.
When selecting various aspect ratios, I see no way for the client to control what gets clipped from or added to the composition. Worse, I see no way for me to control the same.
I realize that in it’s current form, I would do the final processing, but still if you look at the first picture in the sample gallery under engagement and select 8×10, the guys head gets cut off. I’m not sure how to get a client past that. When they launch their fulfillment option, I can imagine this only getting worse, but we’ll see.
Other sites let the client move the comp around, but don’t limit how far they can zoom a photo. They could, in theory, order an 8×10 of someone’s eyeball from a group shot.
I’ll definitely be checking out sites others mention for sure.
Best,
Jim
I used simple viewer too for one of my client’s site…. it easy to set up, clean and also light weight… And right now i am using it again for my future website.
http://www.photomakers.net
The number of online photo gallery options is really staggering. I find they’re divided into two categories: portfolios intended for a few dozen images and galleries intended for thousands. The cost of some of the portfolios seems high given they lack the features and scalability of the galleries, but their market seems to be upscale professionals who can afford it.
My own comprehensive gallery is driven by the free and open source package Gallery2, which is customizable on several levels from an administration page to themesto hardcore PHP hacking. It also allows you to take orders using PayPal. Inspired by LiveBooks-like sites, I added a splash page with a simple Javascript slideshow.
Jim, Daylight Photo looks to be hand-crafted HTML; did you do that in house? Also, most of the site didn’t come up at first; because the word “ad” is in the URL, Adblock blocks it.
One last point of web etiquette some have forgotten: it’s bad form to automatically resize someone’s browser or start playing music. A better way to is to present them with the option when they first hit the page.
[...] your work on line. Cincy shooter and blogger Jim Talkington’s Around the Net column today is all about online galleries. I use a decidedly lower-priced version for my own website then most of what gets talked about – [...]
Hey Jim,
I didn’t know if you got my other email or not but this site is from showitfast.com. Don’t quote me but I think it is designed by photographers and just recently launched! Only cost $39 per month for unlimited storage and full flash capabilities. Very easy to use! Hope this helps those out there like me whoe were looking and looking for a good affordable option in terms of websites. Thanks Y’all!
-Maria
Time to come out of lurking
I found this site through the videos and have become pretty much a daily visitor. Thanks for such great info!
This is a topic that I’ve been having a lot of fun with over the last few years. I provide web hosting for a growing group of individuals and many of them have wanted an easy to use dynamic photo gallery for sharing family photos, etc.
Gallery 2 and another free and open source software (foss) is Coppermine Gallery. Both Gallery and Coppermine have an impressive feature set, easy to use, easy to modify to match your own site (or they can be your site.)
If your are a DIY person, both of these options are highly customizable and very flexible. If you don’t know how to code, or don’t want know how to code (nothing wring with that either!) there are many pre-made templates and modules that can be easily added. If installing these scripts are beyond your skills or you’d rather have someone else do it for you, most web hosts will install these for you (likely for a fee though.)
With so many high quality open source gallery packages available out there, I can’t imagine spending the hundreds to thousands of dollars some of these other companies are asking.
This morning I finished setting up a web site for an area Humane Society web site using Joomla. Joomla is an open source content management system that is very modular in design. Since they are on a very limited budget, this approach fit them perfectly. There a well over a hundred gallery, image and slide show modules available for Joomla, from commercial pay for licenses to GPL (GNU General Public License).
In keeping with the open source theme, I’ll leave you with a link to a Wikipedia Comparison of photo gallery software. It lists both open source and commercial licensed gallery solutions.
It looks like quite a few of us like “getting under the hood” and tinkering with our sites. What in the heck DID we do before the internet? Thanks for the recommendations, all, I’m going to give Gallery2 a spin.
Matthew, thanks for the heads up on the Daylight Photo / Adblock! Long story about how it came to be in a folder named “ad”. It’s all due for revision and we’ll get that cleared up. And, yep, it’s html done in good ol’ Dreamweaver that we did in-house. Our prior site was custom designed Flash but we went ‘old school’ with this one.
I have been using ifp3.com, but have been looking at other options. Thanks for all the great info posted.
Hi Jim,
I did my entire website with a template I bought from Flashden. http://www.flashden.net
I didn’t even know how to use Flash. Most of the templates are XML based. I didn’t know what that one was either but went to download a free shareware from versiontracker.com, and just edited everything with that program. When I go to Flash, it reads from the XML that I edited. Changing menus and content is a breeze since it’s text based.
I paid about $35 for the entire template!
I’ve recently started looking for nice but cheap flash gallery software. I’ve found Simple Viewer. I have created few galleries with it so far, one with my friends photos
Other one from Outdoor Life Style Session
The same site gives few other options, I’ve used one recently for shots from Puppy Market
Both version are free. Only thing that can discourage is small link in bottom right of flash. For now I’m fine with that but like I said, I’m still searching.
I use dripbook.com
I really like it so far. I have the premium account and you can customize and export your website to another host.
I got in during beta testing and got the premium account for $10 a month
http://www.dripbook.com/Robotmotel
Playing catch-up! And wow… you have perfect timing. I’m so tired of the service that I use for print sales/display, I’m looking for something else for my 2009 season. I’d looked into BIG Folio/NextProof recently and I would love to hear more about how you used them and how it went.
I just came across a very nice script for displaying photos and more. It’s called Highslide JS and it touts itself as:
There are already plugins written for Joomla, Coppermine Photo Gallery, WordPress and others as well. Its free for non-commercial or non-profit organizations and pretty affordable for commercial use ($29). I think commercial covers most readers of this blog. Its very well documented and easy to use.
The end result is quite nice.
http://highslide.com
My site is a bit out of date and sad at the moment… but I to have been using Joomla and Gallery2 for some time now.
The only downside I’ve found so far is getting carried away with gimmicks and modules… and then finding the site has slowed dramatically, or I’ve gotten myself unfocused with all the fun.
I’m more than happy to help out if someone wants to dive in. I’ve redesigned and hacked away at them both a few times, and have picked up some tricks along the way.
I use the Adobe Web Gallery in Photoshop CS3 for all my galleries on my website (www.QuietArtPhotography.com). I created a custom template by copying one that looked close to what I wanted. It took a great deal of time diving into the html and making lots of mistakes, but it’s been worth it for me. Now that I have spent the time on it, I can update my templates in Dreamweaver and my whole website is updated in about 30 minutes with new features or photos or whatever.
I paid GoDaddy $75 for two years worth of domains and hosting – thats a lot better than even a $10 per month account at someone elses domain (at $10/month that equates to $240 for two years compared to my $75). You have to spend a lot of time developing it if you want a custom solution, but if you use one of the 15 or so default templates in the Web Gallery feature you save a lot of time and you don’t need much html experience. If you do go fully custom, consider the cost of your time – I spent MANY MANY hours (upwards of 100 hours) to develop what you see on my website.
Here’s my attempt to save every dime I could – albertreynoldsphotography.com. I used my limited but, growing knowledge of Adobe Dreamweaver to create the site and used flickr to create a flash gallery, used their share feature and embedded that code into my portfolio page.
Total cost for 5 years – $35 for my url through godaddy with free hosting.
I really like the prebuilt templates from some of the companies listed but on my beginner photographer budget really likes my current $7 a year.
What do you all think?
Thanks for the wonderful tips and that website you are showing is built with Showit – http://showitfast.com and just for full disclosure it’s my company
and my website – http://davidjay.com – is also built with it so let me know if there’s anything we can help with.
All the best,
DJ