I come here a lot for advice, mostly because I don’t know that many people in real life whose opinions I respect. I nearly always get good solutions, so I’m coming to the well again.
I want to sell off part of a collection. I have about 100 items in a spreadsheet (there’s a lot of description in the spreadsheet), and for each item I want to include a link to probably 5 photos of the item. Main requirement: each link should be self-contained, i.e. I would prefer if the person looking at the link couldn’t look at photos for other items just by clicking the Next button or swiping right. This is mostly to avoid confusion about which item on the spreadsheet is represented by a particular set of photos. I’m hoping to be able to set this up using some kind of folder analog. I’ll be using Google Sheets, if that makes any difference, so that potential buyers can get to it from anywhere.
I’ll be taking my own photos, and adjusting them (cropping, scaling, possible use of filters) in GIMP, so the photo sizes can be adjusted as needed for the site’s requirements. I am planning on using .jpg format.
This will be relatively short term, probably 3 to 6 months. Free is nice, but I’m willing to pay a modest amount to get closer to what I want. At the end of the time, I expect to close out the account.
Rather than putting them on a gallery separate from the spreadsheet, can you just make a very simple website using something like Wix.com or Squarespace or WordPress? They usually have built in galleries or ecommerce or similar functionality, and that would probably be easier for the potential buyers than trying to go back and forth between a spreadsheet and disconnected photos.
If you do want a spreadsheet, Airtable might be good for something like this.
I would do it in FileMaker. You’re essentially describing a one-to-many relationship between two tables, a table of Items and a table of photographs. And of course it needs to handle images. Don’t think of it as an Excel project; Excel isn’t really built for relational data and doesn’t handle image data elegantly although you can paste images in.
I’m not familiar with that sort of software. I’ll check them out.
Due to the nature of the items, likely purchasers will be doing most of their selecting based on information in the spreadsheet, and only looking at photos for the items they are most interested in. So out of 100 items at the beginning, I would be surprised if anyone was interested in more than 3 or 4.
Yes, it’s possible, but I’ve not been happy with the results in the past. It could be worth experimenting further.
Can you use Imgur? Here’s a folder with three random pictures in it. I don’t believe you can use access to this folder or any information from it, to navigate your way to anything else I’ve posted. It’s also hidden so you need the link to get to it.
Are you able to share a snippet of the spreadsheet with us, along with some pics? Just a few rows would make it clearer how it’s formatted. You can replace the real products with fake text too as long as the columns are still understandable.
There are all sorts of free file hosting sites, but if you wanted to be absolutely sure that your files would still be there after 6 months… there are pay-as-you-go cloud services like Amazon.
This would probably fit under their free plan. You can import your existing spreadsheet and just paste images into a new column. The gallery is automatic. It ends up looking much better than a Google Sheet / Excel, and you don’t have to worry about external photo hosting. And there’s no annoying ads or distracting related content, like on most free photo hosting sites.
Thank you, that looks very nice. My spreadsheet has about 30 columns of data that is important to collectors to differentiate easily, i.e. it would be very awkward to combine any of these fields to reduce the number of columns, Do you think that would be a problem to import as is?
Also, I noticed that the photos in your sample are .png format. May I assume that they also support .jpg?
Yes and no. There is that pesky Next button that takes the user out of the intended content and to elsewhere on their site. I would wish that wasn’t there, if I had my druthers. But thanks for showing me that this much is possible there.
Already have several good suggestions. Here’s another: how about using Google Docs? You can paste the photos into Docs just like a Word doc, and also have the benefit of adding captions if you want. You can paste in a row from a spreadsheet and it’ll render as a table, but it might look kinda bad with all those columns (unless you trim the columns). You can make the sheet landscape.
I doubt that would be a problem. You can just upload the spreadsheet and try it yourself? It’s free to create an account and up to 1000 rows and 1 GB of images. (Viewers won’t need their own account, only you need one.)
In spreadsheet view, having that many columns shouldn’t be an issue.
In gallery view, 30 fields (columns) might be a lot to show all at once, but you can try it. Or you can hide certain fields for that view only, or just don’t use gallery view.
I don’t know your full data structure, but you can also “group by” fields in Airtable and create different categories. For example, if you have some furniture, some electronics, some toys, whatever broad categories you want to group by, you can make a hierarchical List View of those too (instead of having a separate “Category” column"). Airtable is pretty powerful and configurable, but if you just want a dead-simple spreadsheet with images inside, it can do that too.
May I assume that they also support .jpg?
Yes, absolutely, alongside several other common image formats. It won’t be an issue. They also support PDFs, DOCs, PPTs, etc. (like if you have any documents to attach).
The PNGs were just AI-generated example images.
If you need help setting any of that up, feel free to send me the spreadsheet in a DM and I can mock it up for you (privately or publicly, either way).
Not sure if it would help, but if you link to an individual picture, you don’t get that. Of course that would also mean you’d have to provide a link to each one.
Thanks for the generous offer, but you have made it sound fun to try myself. Now I have to go start making photos, 500 photos at 5 per item. Maybe I can get away with fewer. I figure a couple of months to get them all finished, but I can try the setup with just a few items.
Heh, it can certainly be enjoyable if you like organizing things! At one of my old jobs, my team probably spent 30% of our work days inside Airtable, moving things around, writing scripts, making views, importing/exporting things… you can make an entire department (or business, even) out of it. It’s a good product.
@Reply, I don’t think I ever said, but I went with Airtable, and it was really easy to set up (basically, import table, then create a Gallery view with a subset of fields, then publish the read-only Gallery view by using a link, and the user can click on any item and see all the detail behind it). I’ve had a lot of compliments on the presentation, and sold a lot of pens from it. Thank you, I didn’t really know what I wanted, but this is it.
