PhotoShelter Makes A Compelling Option For Pro Photographers
With Adobe announcing Photoshop CS3 today and having written a short piece on a new breed of photographer, someone I call the “middle class photographer,” I thought it might be a good time to look at PhotoShelter, a photo cataloguing and sharing site.
PhotoShelter has been around for some time, but they recently launched a new program for pro members that offers up to one terabyte of online storage.
In addition to organizational tools like galleries, lightboxes for potential clients, and integrated sales through Paypal, PhotoShelter offers locally and geographically redundant, server space and robust search capabilities.
All this does not of course come without a price. PhotoShelter’s 500 gigabyte storage plan will run you $600 per year and the one terabyte of storage goes for $1000 a year.
Photoshelter is not a Flickr alternative, rather the site is geared at the professional photographer looking to catalog, store and sell their images online. That said, some Flickr users who are getting more serious about their images and are considering a possible career shift might want to have a look at PhotoShelter.
The folks at PhotoShelter gave me a test account earlier this month and after testing it out for a few days, here’s what I found.
Uploading from remote machines via the web form is impractical for anyone who’s just dropped as much a $1000 on a membership. There is a beta uploader that uses a Java applet to allow for drag and drop transfers. In my tests the Java applet worked beautifully, but since it is in beta you may not want to trust your important images to it.
Thankfully PhotoShelter has a cross platform uploading tool that can be downloaded from the site and makes uploading images a breeze.
Once your images are on the site, you can browse them through a two-paned interface, on the left you’ll find your upload folders and on the right the images (see screenshots below). There’s good support for both EXIF and IPTC metadata.
Your image archives are searchable, and images can also be tagged and flagged to make finding them easier. The organization interface also supports drag and drop operations for most tasks including moving photos around in your folder structure.
To help you sort and present your images, Photoshelter offers the ability to create galleries and control which images and galleries are public and which private.
In addition to the gallery metaphor, PhotoShelter also offers something it call Lightboxes, which mirror the functionality of an old real world lightbox. Essentially it’s like gallery but you can then send out invites, to say a client, and get feedback on images.
There are also a number of tools for professionals looking to sell their images. The sales end is handled by creating pricing profiles. In order to sell an image, you have to set up a pricing profile which describes how much the image costs. Once you’ve created a profile, you can link it to one or many images and re-price them in batches.
There are options for both royalty free images and rights managed as well.
PhotoShelter also has a Virtual Agency which allows a group of photographers to form their own “agency” by linking their collective PhotoShelter archives. They can market themselves together through a shared public webpage that also includes the ability to showcase galleries and provide image searching.
While it’s definitely out of the price range for the casual photographer, PhotoShelter has some nice features and offers a compelling all-in-one solution for the budding pro photographer.
PhotoShelter’s beta online drag and drop uploader. While it is a beta I had no problems — YMMV
The standalone uploading app — works as you would expect
The main organizational tool. Folders on the left and then images on right.
Browsing through individual images.
The image browsing view with metadata tab selected
A nice bit of Ajax trickery lets you create a new gallery directly from the image browsing view
Same as above, but this time I’m creating a new Lightbox rather than gallery.
