About Photoshelter

Hi Daniele,

What functions would you consider to be more professional?

Regards,
Allen

well something like :

- Organize the lightbox, move the photos create a better order
- Marketing/newsletter to photo editors marketing
- Better interface, looks too heavy
- More space for personal info, without going in other page , as well linkable personal site, active links
- Listing as DRR used to have, now it will be hard as they have 35000 photographer, more visibility of photographer in the main page
- easy way to customize your personal page, i found it easy with drr, with photoshelter sorry is too complicate, not time to do it and i am not a webmaster

these now what i think are essential

Price wise is ok, 29 dollars for 35gb, I think for an individual photographer should be enough , I am still using the 10gb as i upload low res but when china will have faster connection i might switch to the 35gb.

I would say photoshelter has a good standard, software and organization is pretty good, is different from drr, does not to have the same but many “migrants” might find easy and continue in the same direction.

If anybody would like to add something we can help to improve the site

best regards
daniele

well allen

i saw just now that you are the CEO of Photoshelter, I am happy to see u here discussing with us, I think is a good sign…..
many dont have home now……

d

some other photographer here in China has problem to migrate from DRR to Photoshelter. I cannot try as i have the 10gb account and there this option is not valid, but the people they just subscribed to the 35gb account and is not working.
I do use the photoshelter uploader which seems the best (but not in case of a mass migration!….)
daniele

I have never used Photoshelter or the late DRR, so I’m curious on how other photogs are using these services. Does everyone upload just LR like Daniele? If so, how does someone access the HR for print use? How do you have the archive in relation to your personal site? Do you have both? Do you ever get assignments from people browsing the site?

Of course, the other obvious question is what separates PS from DRR to keep it running? What’s to keep the DRR refugees from being screwed again?

does anyone else have problems to ftp files from drr to photoshelter ?

I think most of the people upload Hres…. i am one of the few because for me is enough to show photos, IF somebody wants the photos then they will ask me, i am not doing news , so means i can drink a coffee between a request (IF ANY )

Helpful tips in setting up your online archive so as not to be screwed when the company folds:

1. Set up your archive as a subdomain of your own site, so that archive.mysite.com points to your online archive. This way, when the first company goes bust, you can redirect the subdomain to the new company and not have to change your business cards. And anyone following an old link will be redirected to your new site.

2. Back up all your data elsewhere, not just in your archive (but you already knew this).

3. Manage all your metadata, especially captions, tags, and keywords, on your computer in Lightroom or PhotoMechanic or another program so that you can easily transition your images to a new archive.

4. Only pay monthly for the archive service, even if you get a slight break for paying for the year. The other advantage is that when the archive has some temporary problem or goes offline for a while and the company wants to offer you a month or two of free service, it will actually mean something. If you have already paid for the year, then “three months free” is just moving back your renewal date, which doesn’t actually save you any money.

5. Don’t upload more images than you can reasonably manage—which means being able to delete in short order.

6. Trust no one. Verify everything. Always have an escape plan.

FYI Allen – The fact you are here asking questions and getting feedback I think speaks volumes. Well played, sir.

Daniele,

1. Organize the lightbox, move the photos create a better order
You can custom sort any gallery or lightbox. Just choose “Custom Order” under the sort options.

2. Marketing/newsletter to photo editors marketing
We no longer offer a stock marketplace, so we will unfortunately not be marketing to image buyers. We’ve found through experience that trying to create a generalized stock offering is far too difficult in this day and age when competing against Getty. It is much more probable that niche agencies will find success because they individually understand the dynamics of their own market.

3. Better interface, looks too heavy
I’m not sure that I agree with you, but fair enough.

4. More space for personal info, without going in other page , as well linkable personal site, active links
This can all be accomplished through the website customization.

5. Listing as DRR used to have, now it will be hard as they have 35000 photographer, more visibility of photographer in the main page
We have a searchable directory of both photographers as well as virtual agencies. The interface also has browsing by photographer speciality. In addition, we display photographers who have recently created and feature their galleries on our homepage.

6. easy way to customize your personal page, i found it easy with drr, with photoshelter sorry is too complicate, not time to do it and i am not a webmaster
I’m not sure I agree with you on this one. I’m hoping it’s just a matter of getting familiar with our options. Here’s a video:
http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid307704803/bctid1866656958

We’re having an open house at our offices this Thursday in NYC. I hope some of you can swing by to learn more about PhotoShelter.

THURS 10/30
2pm – 7pm
33 Union Square West
2nd Floor
New York, NY 10003

Sended an email to photoshelter saying my stuff is not moving from DDR (first transfer 3 hours ago and is still pending).
here their reply: This has nothing to do with PhotoShelter really as our servers here are
running just fine its just an influx of people trying to ftp images is what’s killing the DRR machines as you can imagine. The good
news is that we’re still seeing images moving from DRR here to PhotoShelter so hopefully your slot to move images will
come soon. Just be patient and don’t stop or cancel pending transfers just let it run and hope for the best.

susetta

Susetta, from what we can see, there is a single server handling all outbound FTP for DRR. Since several hundred people are trying to move their archives, the load on that server is enormous, and the queue is long. We are seeing movement of images onto our servers, so we know it’s working for the time being.

thanks Allen for replying to us, i can see a great professionality and i am sure Photoshelter will do good, be ready for the migrations…. tons of photos arriving….
d

http://blog.photoshelter.com/

Alan,thanks for your mail. Would you have any other idea why some people keep getting an error message on drr when trying to set up an ftp connection to photoshelter ?

Katharina, People are definitely still transferring files. We are seeing them come through. I would just make sure that you’ve verified that your username/password are working properly by using your desktop FTP software to connect to PhotoShelter. If that works properly, then I’m not quite sure what to tell you. Make sure you follow all these FTP transfer instructions:

http://pa.photoshelter.com/help/tut/archive/upload/ftp

I don’t know if anyone else is seeing this, but when I logged into DRR around 2:00am EST images on my homepage have been
replaced with a ‘?’ and about 80 % of the images in the 1/2 dozen groups I checked also had these ‘?’

Mark

I moved all my stuff fine – moving stuff for a friend (who is stuck on a dialup at the moment) and while all the folders and filenames have been created, and according to DRR they’re sent, not of the pictures are viewable on PS. Weird…

Mark: Same thing happened to me. What can we do?

Ah. When I click on a full size image in the DRR backend to download, it tries to download a 27.5kb file. Damn.

Dave

Have you made the pictures ‘searchable’ in the Photoshelter archive browser?? Because that is something you must do before they will be visible on you public archive. This function is similar to DRR’s ‘publish’ function.

yeah, that’s not the problem. Actually, it’s not even my site – my stuff is already transferred and ok. I was helping out a friend who was stuck on a dialup. All their photos on DRR – even if you try and download the high rez, are coming up as 27.5K files. So the files that are getting transferred to PS are NOT the proper files.

Could we send a collective request to DRR to allow us a few more days for the migration of our archives?
This the least they could do!
What do you think?

Well, I’m in Beijing and I just send by ftp a folder: everything goes fine. I didn’t send them from DDR but my personal archive on HD.
I have to say that the ftp seems more faster than the DDR when it was working.
I agree with Daniele about the problem about the setting of the web page, I’m sorry Allan (nice to found you here!) but it’s not so friendly, maybe because too much used with DDR… I’ll check you video soon.

Alessandro,

It looks like Daniele learned a new way to configure his archive home page at PhotoShelter.

Hi. I found this post searching how to customize photoshelter and I am accord others opinions here. Too difficult to change simple things like background colors or add little text in one side of the main photo. If i put the color html code in the customize page the system ignores me. I have to erase the base of the stylesheets to get my bk color change. But accord the site i can’t put or others parameters to change the things. And all the letters and design goes impredictable. I see all the tutorials i found but all stop at the html part. Only the preset changes. Any tips somebody?

Hernan,

I am a lowly starter account holder at PS, so I have never done customizing, but I thought I should catch up with the latest at PS. Here is a link to the forum there for ex DR users.

http://pa.photoshelter.com/mem/forum/index/FC000XynCs1jTTyE

Good luck.

The customer support at your price level is supposed to be good. I even got Grover Sanchagrin answering my question.

Haven’t had a chance to start working on the site design yet, been trying to get all my blog links etc. upgraded, but will post my findings when I play with the site customisation!

PS tech support is good, and I have to say, I love the customisation on pricing, especially for prints.

I have not luck yet with a solution.

Hernan,

Can`t you just have a regular PS homepage for the time being so that at least you have an entry point for your archive? I recall that those with a customized front page having a regular homepage.

http://www.photoshelter.com/usr-show/U0000ufUFM_UVHz4
http://archive.fistick.com/c/axis5

The above two are LSer Jock Fistick`s PS pages. I hope he has time to chime in here.

Tomoko. At less from standart account you have two faces, One with the plataform of PS (you can’t avoid it) and the custom plataform. My problem is that in PS i have more themes to change the design but very little more posibilities to change colors, add text or links in the customized home page. What i am asking is if someone have luck to change something to give some help where to put the html codes. In my case when i try to add a table or change something the design turns in mess.

Hernan,

Another LSer I know who has a customized page at PS is Cameron Davidson. Look at his site:
http://archive.aerialstock.com/c/cameron/gallery-list
Here is his PS homepage.
http://pa.photoshelter.com/user/cameron

Study the source of the index.html, you will see that he has added text at the bottom in div tags. He has specified the background colors in the top part of the index.html in the form of style sheet. I am not versed in style sheet, so I cannot help you specifically. How about download his page and study it? You could contact Cameron also.

Another LSer I know is John Lander. His PS site is here.
http://www.photoshelter.com/c/asia.images
He is also an ex-DRR user. He told me he would be away from his home this past week, but he is inside Japan at least.

I’ve been a fan of Photoshelter for some time now. Great guys and a great product. I was able to customize my archive site very easily. I would highly recommend it for any professional photographer.

http://archive.kevingerman.com

If I understand correctly, I think Hernan wants to make his PS archive site his homepage. As such, he wants to have text and other things he used to have at DRR.

I can’t found something like I want to do. I tried reading the source code of page that have something close to what i want to do but don’t appears different sentences that i found in my own source code.

Hernan,

How about this Dave Walsh` site on PS?
http://pa.photoshelter.com/c/davewalshphoto

I think Dave W. used a new template, Caboose, to give a look of the old DRR site.

I should point out to everyone on PS that for search engine optimization, you need a gallery caption and it is better to have image filename containing the subject matter of your image.
I have often replaced the filename of my image with the title of the image. In my opinion, the automatic PS setting for a gallery of taking the filename for an image rather than the title of the image is weak in terms of search engine optimization. Of course the title of the image in question does come up with the image display, but in my opinion the gallery display page is where you can compete with a group of images other photographers have shot on the same or similar subject matter. These would show up in Google Web.

Hey Tomoko – yeah, I’m using Caboose, probably temporarily, until I get round to playing with the html and CSS. I basically have a html splash page at www.davewalshphoto.com which is optimised more than the PS page. It’s an imperfect solution, but one that will have to do me for a week or so.

Hi Dave,

Do you think you can help Hernan? I am leaving tomorrow for Tokyo and will not be able to keep up with this thread. Not that I know how to help Hernan.

Don’t worry Tomoko and have a good trip. I suppose that is more time learning html and css. Thanks

To be honest, I haven’t tried the manual customization yet, so not sure if I’ll be much help. When I do, I’ll post my findings….

Uff. Finally I understand the way the plataform works. And i found an error I did that turns the design into a mess. I recommend the use of some spelling check software to write html codes to avoid mistakes that make all the things not work.

Anybody have already sent images with Light box WITH ALL IMAGES OF A FOLDER SETTED ON HIGH RES DOWNLOADABLE?
It’s possible to set just one by one images (!!!) but not all the images.
I found the way to do it weeks ago after almost one hour to found out how to do that. Now, simple, I don’t remember how I did it!
It should be on that page of th light box, it’s the more logic place, but, no way, it’s not there.

I just found another problem at PhotoShelter. Right now your PS homepage and each of your galleries on PhotoShelter has a RSS feed. Under each image, an image caption is shown and there is a link with your name highlighted. This link is not to your PS homepage but to the main PS homepage. These image captions are indexed in Google Blogs, so potential users of your image will have a hard time finding about you.

I hope PS will rectify this problem. Because I am not in the Photographers` directory, it would be difficult for anyone to find me and my contact info.

I’m sorry Tomoko, i don’t understand. I open mine gallery and select a picture. Yes, there is the caption (must be!) end my name and the copyright. There is also the link to my contact but I don’t find the one you are talking about.
Down on the right there is the link to Photoshelter, but it’s ok…

Alessandro,

Look at your PS site:
http://pa.photoshelter.com/user/alessandrodigaetano

You will see right below contact photographer, “subscribe to RSS.”
Click on it, and you will get a page below which depends on your browser. Mine is Firefox and can read the RSS feed.

http://pa.photoshelter.com/usr-show/U0000yfYW_1HnpM8?feed=rss

Scroll down to see your name highlighted. A click on your name will take you to the PS main website, and not to your PS homepage. If you have a starter account, you don`t get your name listed, so looking to contact the person for the image gets nowhere.

It seems something is being changed at the PS site. I hope that there will be improvements.

Wow Tomoko, I just check the link. I don’t have idea of what it is! I’m busy with other think at the moment, I should find out the time to work on it…

The new Photoshelter widget is really exciting. It allowed me to put some slideshows on my modest myspace page without the worries of copyright issues of uploading individual photos. http://www.myspace.com/bfrankphoto

Well, I finally find the time to work on PS. It seems that all the problems are over, I found the way to set as I want the site…

alessa’ : era ora!!!
rimetti a posto la location, stai ancora a beijing…
er pupo che dice?
d

:-)

Dove è che sto Beijing come location?

Er pupo comincia a prendere un minimo di ritmo: cominciamo a dormire un pò più decentemente… cioè ci svegliamo due, tre volte per notte!