In March, I moved my online gallery/portfolio to PhotoShelter. I was tired of managing, patching, and otherwise fidgeting with another software package; never mind that PhotoShelter offered some rather attractive features, like price generation and e-commerce features that would have required a lot more work on my behalf to implement on my own.

My initial impressions were somewhat mixed. If you’d like to read about them, you can skip back and read my original article.

In the meantime, I got completely distracted form dealing with, updating, and managing my PhotoShelter stuff. The best part is that while I wasn’t paying attention, PhotoShelter went ahead and made everything better. Gone is the fee for setting up the e-commerce stuff, even with basic accounts. Additionally, they’ve streamlined the payment setup for PayPal users. Finally, their “official” Lightroom Plugin has been updated to support publish services.

E-Commerce: Now everybody can use it and nobody pays to get there.

Though PhotoShelter still gets their cut in the form of a percentage, gone is the $50 onetime fee to setup those features. I never really understood the fee in the first place. It’s not as if it should cost them any more to turn on the e-comm features. Moreover, it means that everybody who’s a PhotoShelter user can start selling their stuff, which I think in the end is a net win for PhotoShelter.

The best part though is the improved integration with Paypal. Previously, at least if I recall correctly, there was a rather convoluted set of hoops that one had to jump through to get PhotoShelter and PayPal working together. Gone. Plug in your PayPal email address and away you go.

Lightroom Plugin now a Publish Service

As time has marched on, the official-though-not-written-by PhotoShelter Lightroom plugin has also been updated. It now supports publish services.

If you haven’t followed my ramblings in the past, I’m a huge fan of automation and smooth workflows. I use Lightroom entirely because of the way it cleanly integrates all the development and image management work into one smooth clean program.

Being able to cleanly integrate with Photoshelter from inside the software I spent most of my time using a huge thing. And the big glaring issue, not supporting Publish services, has been addressed. Images can now be upload, and metadata edited and kept in sync with what’s seen in Lightroom.

Quite simply, PhotoShelter has addressed all the nagging issues I had with their service in March. Any reservations I had in using the service are long gone. If you’re looking for a company to host and sell your images though, I say give PhotoShelter a good look.