I’ve never worried too much about an internet site to sell my work.  Perhaps it’s just an excuse to be lazy, but I’ve always felt images like mine have to be seen in person to be appreciated ... they look OK on the web, but not much different than the millions of others all over the net.  I don’t even actively pursue sales or promote myself ... I enjoy the freedom of retirement and I really don’t want to be committed to any particular activity other than what I feel like doing at the time.  I guess this website is a good example ... sometimes I feel like writing about something so I do.

Be that as it may, recently I was asked to do a small show by a friend.  I sent out a few invites, and was surprised by a request as to where my work could be purchased online.  I decided it was time to create some type of site, not really to solicit business but more to allow those who may have seen my work an avenue to make, or at least consider, a purchase at a later date.

The first step in this process was to investigate other landscape photographers sites and observe how they work.  I spend time every week visiting photographers web sites to admire and learn from their work, but I’ve never really payed  much attention to how their sites are organized.  My goal was to have a little site up and running by the time this show opened, so I also checked out all of the hosting type sites such as smugmug and zenfolio.  Because I was short on time and only needed 9 images in the initial site I decided using  iWeb was a quick and easy solution. I really don’t need a “shopping cart” per say, since most of the time the buyer is someone I know and we’ll just talk on the phone.

In about an hour with iWeb I hacked together a little site basically creating a page for each image, and linking them with some menus and previous/next buttons.  The end result wasn’t too bad, but to update and maintain a gallery like this is too time consuming and too prone to errors. iWeb galleries are nice but I wanted something even easier ... something I could do right from Lightroom would be perfect.  A google search led me to The Turning Gate and after trying out the demo I went ahead and purchased the TTG Highslide Gallery Pro.  To use this for a commercial site I also had to purchase a license for Highslide, the engine which allows the gallery to display the images the way it does.  It is very configurable, and even includes the ability to utilize a PayPal shopping cart.  Total cost was $69, but in all honesty I really didn’t need the features in the Pro version (yet anyway), so I could have just bought the Standard TTG Highslide gallery for $20 plus the Highslide license for another $29.

Once you load the module into Lightroom, you can build a gallery quickly.  The end result is very customizable, including colors, what is (or is not) included,  thumbnail size (most of the web modules I tried created thumbnails that were too small) as well as image size.  In addition this isn’t a flash gallery but instead uses javascript ... it works fine on my iPhone. (Ok, not a big deal. But it’s kinda cool to show this to a friend on an iPhone.)

To set up a gallery is pretty easy.  First I created a collection for each of the various galleries, and I added a Title and Caption to each images metadata, which is used for the images when the gallery is created.  I modified some colors and border sizes, created a few menu items and added the links so the pages would work inside the main site, and finally set up the upload options. Once it was configured I saved a template so it was easy to create new galleries.  If you want to see what I ended up with, you can check it out here ... Gallery 1.

I’ve also been playing with another option, TTG Client Response Gallery. This web gallery enables viewers to make comments about individual images as well as the overall gallery.  I’m trying this as a way for my kids to order portraits when I do sittings of their families.  No shopping cart needed, I just need a nice easy way for them to let me know what they want.

All in all a very simple clean and yet effective way to create web galleries.