Build your own photography website

[GeorgeKat 0]

I'd like to hear some opinions, experiences and advice on setting up a website to make pictures available for viewing and for sale.

I'm interested in recommendations for:
Obtaining a domain name
Renting server space
A good format for showing and selling pictures

Criteria:
I don't want my pictures stolen
I don't want to share profit by using a picture selling service
I don't want to become an expert web designer but I'm happy to tinker
I want it to be easy to add / remove pics and to respond to enquires

Thanks in advance

[Fast 0]

Buying a domain name: http://www.google.com/a -or- http://www.godaddy.com

Hosting: I dunno on that one. Search for web hosting and check out prices. One that I have heard to be ok in the past was dreamhosting. Godaddy also offers hosting.

Pictures: JPEG - the standard for showing pictures on the web really.

Easy software:

There are a couple different takes and a lot of it depends on how much you know about designing websites. What I use is Gallery2. http://gallery.menalto.com It runs on PHP and is one of the better looking gallery programs that is free. It has eCommerce integration through either a third party picture producer (there is some profit sharing that most of them request) or you can set it up so that your customers pay you with paypal and you have to fill the orders yourself with your prefered photo production person/lab.

~D
Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me.
Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

[Laszloimage 0]

I set up my domain and etc. at www.godaddy.com
Right now I have 100GB disc space 1000GB band witdth/month for 5yrs for $300.
If you want to maintain your own site you have no choice but you have to be a little bit of web designer.
I know because I wasn't and now I kinnda stock with the limitations of MS Front Page. Dream Waver is lot better. Also I recommend Flash based photo libraries with a watermark on your images to make them "steal safe". Also Flash gives you a lot more professional look to your web site. I have to rebuild mine to....lot's of time though.
-Laszlo-
www.laszloimage.com

[dragon2 0]

Try ImageVue for a very easy/fast Flash gallery.

ciel bleu,
Saskia

[GeorgeKat 0]

Thanks for your help guys.

[linestretch 0]

I used godaddy for hosting and web-domain name for my site....and am using shutterfly for the selling of photo's....ONLY to make it simpler for selling them. You can watermark your photo's with shutterfly which is nice too. Obviously I would make more if I sold them myself but wanted to try this route. The shutterfly pro gallery is 100 bucks a year. You could probably find a cheaper/better method. This was my first shot at it. And I used frontpage for the website which is also a first for me.

my pics & stuff!

[The111 1]

I use godaddy for MY SITE (both domain registration and hosting). I pay around $3/month for way more bandwidth/space than I need, I think.

I built my site myself, using NOTEPAD. I learned all the coding from w3schools.com.

www.WingsuitPhotos.com

[shropshire 0]

That's a great site mate and you can't beat the N++ programming language

(.)Y(.)
Chivalry is not dead; it only sleeps for want of work to do. - Jerome K Jerome

[pilotdave 0]

Your site is very nice... I'm just curious what work you need to do every time you want to add more pictures though. Do you have to edit html each time, or is there automation to format the pages when new pictures/galleries get added?

I thought about building my own photo gallery site when I bought a still camera, but once I took a look at the professional services available, I never looked back. I'm not shooting pictures to make money, so I both don't care about them keeping some of my profit but I do care about keeping costs low. But mostly I wanted an easy way for people to find pictures of themselves and order prints, which I'm not interested in doing myself (though I did buy me a fancy Epson R1800 printer).

I ended up getting a pro account at Smugmug because it just makes dealing with LOTS of pictures really easy. I choose the pics I like, crop them and add captions in Picasa, then upload them to smugmug and add keywords (the name of each person in the pic and other info). I can have a whole new complete photo gallery online on sunday night. Smugmug also automatically watermarks the pictures as they upload.

I can add right click protection to prevent people from downloading them really easily (you can still take a screen shot of course), and I can choose whether or not people can download full-res versions for free.

I think the best part is that I have unlimited storage on smugmug, so I upload ALL my pictures to a private backup gallery. I have over 10,000 pictures (over 30 gigs) uploaded already, and I've only been taking pictures since last summer.

Smugmug also let me use a custom domain name, which I bought separately, and customize the look of my site.

I personally wouldn't mind even more control over the look and functionality of the site, but I sure as hell couldn't program a site like that on my own.

So for me, it's more than worth the yearly cost and 15% of the profit on pictures sold (but I can set my own prices). But I can understand why someone would want to build their own site, if they have the time to maintain it.

My photo gallery is at http://www.SkydivingStills.com if anyone wants to see what SmugMug is like... They also have a fully functional 14 day free trial. You don't even need to give a credit card number or anything... just an email address (and they don't spam at all).

Dave

[The111 1]

Quote

Your site is very nice... I'm just curious what work you need to do every time you want to add more pictures though. Do you have to edit html each time, or is there automation to format the pages when new pictures/galleries get added?

Thanks Dave. This is going to sound worse than it really is, but here's what I do to add a new gallery (not including tweaking each picture in a photo editor ).

I will use my recent February 2007 gallery as an example:

1. Use a batch renamer (Adobe Bridge for example, or the free program "Batch Renamer" from sourceforge) to rename all the picture files to "2007-02_pXX.jpg" where XX is 01-99.
2. Make thumbnails named "2007-02_tXX.jpg". You could also just opt to have the thumbnails be "true" thumbnails (web-code-scaled-down versions of the actual files), but web browsers render to scale very poorly (especially when you're rendering frmo 600px to 150px, so I render my own thumbnail files (from the original full-scale images).
3. Take my batch of "template" html files (1 for each picture - each jpg has its own page) and use a batch text replace tool (Coffeecup is free) to replace all instances of "month year" with "February 2007" and "20xx-xx" with "2007-02". I also have to batch rename the template html files as with the jpgs.
4. Add a thumbnail to the main gallery page for the new sub-gallery.

All the above takes 30 minutes TOPS. Probably much less. The most time-consuming part is that I have to go into each file and type out my "caption". That probably takes an hour or two for 60 pictures, but I really enjoy the story telling aspect of the captions, so I do the work. By far the most time-consuming thing is going through 500 pictures from an event and deciding which 60 are the best. Then tweaking each picture manually, one by one. This combnied process probably takes anywhere from 3-5 hours.

It took me two entire weeks to design the entire site, but it only takes an evening to prepare and upload a new large gallery. I only do this once a month MAX, so it's worth it to me.

Smugmug looks nice but you lose control over some minor things which are very big deals to me. Sharpening (unsharp mask, specifically) is one of the most powerful tools we have for displaying digital images on a computer screen. That is why I manually render separate 150px and 600px jpg's from my original images. You must sharpen at the final resolution, and not earlier. "Automatic" photo galleries make final sharpening impossible, besides the fact that they force auto-browser-rendering as I mentioned above. Pbase.com is another nice online gallery I've seen (though it suffers the same problems I just described). But I like their layout. I even "borrowed" some ideas for my own layout.

www.WingsuitPhotos.com

[pilotdave 0]

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"Automatic" photo galleries make final sharpening impossible, besides the fact that they force auto-browser-rendering as I mentioned above.

True that you can't sharpen each size (I almost never sharpen anything anyway), but smugmug doesn't use "auto-browser-rendering" to resize pictures. When you upload, they create about 4 copies of the original and resize them (in a server background process) to each size they use on the site. They apply your custom watermark to the small, medium, and large copies, and to the thumbnail if you want. They don't watermark the original, so when someone orders a print it isn't ruined.

But yes, I definitely give up a lot of control in exchange for a lot of time saving.

Dave

[Fast 0]

Quote

Quote

"Automatic" photo galleries make final sharpening impossible, besides the fact that they force auto-browser-rendering as I mentioned above.

True that you can't sharpen each size (I almost never sharpen anything anyway), but smugmug doesn't use "auto-browser-rendering" to resize pictures. When you upload, they create about 4 copies of the original and resize them (in a server background process) to each size they use on the site. They apply your custom watermark to the small, medium, and large copies, and to the thumbnail if you want. They don't watermark the original, so when someone orders a print it isn't ruined.

But yes, I definitely give up a lot of control in exchange for a lot of time saving.

Dave

Which is why I use gallery2. I have the code local so I can make it do whatever I want / look however I want. It is just as easy to upload pictures AND it integrates with an online photo fullfilment service. Best of both worlds.


This is my site, (I have a gallery for my roommate and dad on there too) please don't crush my bandwith. http://skymarshal.dyndns.org/gallery/

~D
Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me.
Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

[LukeH 0]

this is one of the nicer site's i've seen http://www.brunobrokken.com/

[Fast 0]

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this is one of the nicer site's i've seen http://www.brunobrokken.com/

I think the site design could be easier to use, but... the photography is simply amazing. The pictures on that site speak for themselves.

~D
Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me.
Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

[bdazel 0]

I'm curious if any Dropzone has tried to route all still picture sales (both prints and digital downloads) through a single website, and whether that was successful? I envision each photographer will make a proportionate amount of $ depending on his/her own skills and salesmanship ability, rather than a flat fee for the cd (with a cut going to the DZO, of course!).