I’ve been looking for a better way to manage my gallery online and make it easier to clients, both new and old, find and purchase my images. Photoshelter seemed to offer a lot of really nice features; easy e-commerce setup, built in pricing using Fotoquote, build in licensing for stock photography, and most importantly for me it offered a way for me to avoid having to patch and modify another piece of software running on my own servers.

Unfortunately, after having played with it, I’m just not sure whether I like Photoshelter or not.

The Trails of Trials

The trial of trials is simple, how do you expose functionality during a trial period that doesn’t hurt you later. Do you, for example, expose all the functionality to the user to let them evaluate it, or only what they’d have access to at whatever account level they signed up at.

Photoshelter does the latter, exposing only the functionality available to the account level you signed up. If you sign up as a basic user, you don’t get FTP access, or e-commerce stuff–they aren’t part of the plan. In retrospect, I want to be clear about this, e-commerce functionality is available to basic users for a 1 time $50 setup fee, not that it’s not available at all. What I’m talking about here is the ability to preview the e-commerce functionality prior to actually setting it up.

That said, exposing the majority of standard or pro features might not be a bad idea for all trial accounts. For example, having FTP access for 14-days could help basic users get their initial images online quickly so they get a better feel of the service. Moreover, having experienced FTP access may help push some people towards the higher tier accounts.

Is Photoshelter’s trial strategy the best?

I don’t really know.

On one hand, I’d love to have full access (even if some things, like a sale, can’t go all the way through to completion or aren’t presented to users) so I could evaluate the full functionality available. On the other hand, having access to only what I would have access to normally does mean I get a better feel for what the normal experience is like. Either way, I do applaud Photoshelter for offering a try before you buy system, even if it’s not free.

Workflow

Like the old saying in real estate, “location location location,” I feel the the 3 Ws of photography are “workflow workflow workflow.”

Why do I care so much about workflow? Because it’s the thing that gets you back to shooting, or to spending time with friends and family, instead of dealing with what you’ve already shot. To that end, I’m a huge proponent of Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom. I’ve yet to find a better package for the single photographer to manage their raw material and finished images. In fact, I think Adobe has largely missed the boat on not expanding LR to being a full DAM package, but that’s for another time.

Photoshelter positions itself as a 1 stop shop for the sales and licensing of images. As far as I can tell so far, it is. The problem I’ve been having is finding a way to work it into my workflow seamlessly.

Uploading

Photoshelter supports a number of upload mechanisms, though the reserve the simplest, FTP, for the most expensive packages.

Web

The web client is well just like any other web client; log into your account, upload the files you want. It’s not much different from uploading to a blog or any other image hosting service. It’s by virtue of the mechanism, the most limiting way to get pictures uploaded, but it works well in a pinch.

Desktop Client

The desktop client is Photoshelter’s attempt at providing a streamlined FTP like program for people to upload images. To me it seems like a kludgy hack to get around actually providing FTP access for some strange reason.

It’s also has a few problems, though I don’t think they’re Photoshelter’s fault.

The desktop client is written in Java and uses GUI library for the interface. The problem is whatever library it uses isn’t compatible with the 64-bit version of the Java VM, at least on Windows. Even if you have both the 64-bit and 32-bit VMs installed on a 64-bit machine, the 64-bit VM will take precedence. In the case of the PS desktop client, that means it crashes before it launches because it’s not compatible. The workaround is yet another kludge; force the program to run in XP SP3 compatibility mode. That in turn results in a UAC prompt every time you go to run the client.

Well the other workaround is to uninstall the 64-bit JVM, but I actually need that so it’s not much of a workaround for me.

FTP

FTP access to Photoshelter is available with the Standard ($330/year) and Pro ($550/year) plans. FTP allows you to use whatever client program you want, instead of only their solutions.

To be honest, I think FTP should be available for all accounts. While I can see the attraction of using it as a feature to up sell with, you’re already working with very different storage and transfer limits, with the various accounts. Moreover, FTP is one of the most straightforward ways of integrating Photoshelter into an existing workflow.

Granted I am looking at this from the perspective of a basic user not a standard or pro user. However, given that there aren’t any upload limits placed on using the Photoshelter client, or for that matter upload limits at all, I see little reason to make it difficult for basic users to integrate the service into their workflow.

Managing Images

Photoshelter provides two ways to organize your images, though you have to use both. First, there are albums. Albums are analogous to folders or collections in Lightroom. Second are galleries. Galleries are the “user facing” side of Photoshelter, it’s what’s published on your site and what your clients see.

The split between albums and galleries in many ways makes sense. There can be a much finer organizational structure behind the scenes than what is exposed to the world. Moreover, since images can be packaged into multiple galleries, and galleries can be made private or client specific, the photographer can tailor custom galleries of similar content from multiple albums to present to a client.

That’s fine, but it also means that you can’t just upload and expect things to be published. You have to go into the web based management interface and publish things manually. Again, I see this as a workflow problem, not a big one, but an inconvenience nonetheless.

Metadata

Photoshelter, as they should, supports the whole range of metadata available in the IPTC and EXIF standards. This is good. The bad goes back to workflow. If the metadata isn’t already setup locally before you upload, it has to be re-entered manually both locally and remotely. As of yet, I’ve not found a mechanism to sync metadata between a local copy of the image and Photoshelter’s servers.

Conclusions

As it stands, I would like to see much better integration with Photoshop Lightroom without relying on 3^rd party developers to put out export plugins. Specifically I’d really like to see a publish service with the capability of updating images and metadata without having to enter it manually.

Beyond that, I’d like FTP access, but I’m not in a position where I can justify paying the $200 a year more to get it, so I’ll soldier on with the Photoshelter desktop client and the problems it has with being used in a dual 64/32-bit Java environment.

Beyond that, it’s too early for me to call.