Tim Jameson Photography is go…

Something I’ve been wanting to do for a long while is build a fully fledged online portfolio of my photography. But, what I didn’t want was a generic looking site, like so many you see on the web today. Photography’s all about creativity and individuality, so why let images down with an overdone ‘teak effect’ pre-installed template surround (hmm, nice).

After much hard-work and many late nights, the new portfolio is now live. Here’s how I got there.

Must-haves

The list of must-haves I wrote for myself included:

• Ability to elegantly showcase portfolio of best work
• Stock photography sales with fotoQuote ease of pricing and allowance for pounds sterling via PayPal
• Multi security methods for offering different access levels
• Fully customisable templating structure
• Good bandwidth and storage allowance (35GB +), allowing me to utilise as an online archive for safekeeping/backup of all my work
• Fairly priced

I spent some time looking into a number of online packages, which included toying with the possibility of installing and configuring the new beta of Gallery3 on my server.

Options I looked at

• Gallery3 install on my own server: great reconfigurability and essentially free, but high storage space costs unless running a standalone server (but then there’s the effort of server maintenance and I don’t have time for that).

• Zenfolio: slick interface and well priced, but no true template customisation (I want to have full control over the way everything looks). Also, don’t like the way you price photos for sale. Can see it’s a great option for someone who wants simple ease of configuration, but I’m a developer and don’t mind getting my hands dirty in this respect.

• SmugMug: looks quite nice, but falls at the first hurdle in that I can’t sell in pounds sterling (although I guess this may change).

• Photoshelter: initially looks fairly expensive. But, once you delve deeper a wealth of features become apparent. Take a look here.

• Redbubble: looks quite good, but get the feeling it’s slightly too diverse in its intended application — I’m a photographer and want something dedicated to professional photography sales.

The customisation and fotoQuote facility of Photoshelter sealed the deal for me.

Onto the set-up. Getting things configured was straightforward, helped by the video and written tutorials available. The interface is slick and streamline and the process for setting up a seller’s account was painless. The part that took some time (went as far as a 4am-er last weekend) was the customisation, not because Photoshelter makes it tricky, but because it took me time to decide exactly how I wanted things to look and function.

So, I’ve now got myself a lovely little SEO friendly platform from which to showcase my best work, sell stock photography and share private galleries with family and friends. It’s a joy to use and, to put the icing on the cake, the Photoshelter desktop uploader (I use Mac OS X 10.5) hasn’t let me down once; something I haven’t experienced from other such software.

Price per month comes in at around £18 for a ‘Standard’ membership, which, once you’ve taken storage and comprehensive feature set into consideration, isn’t too bad. After all, this is a professional application, so you should be able to recoup your outlay through sales.

Just got to find time to upload rather a few GBs of photographs now!

My ‘Tim Jameson Photography’ portfolio is here.