When I first set up my photography site, many moons ago, Gallery2 (back then, eventually Gallery3) was the most recommended software I could find.
After many years of absolute frustration with their inability to build in basic user-friendliness like not requiring DB administrative expertise just to install updates to the software, the core team has decided to drop maintenance of the software entirely. http://galleryproject.org/
I’m a photographer, not a programmer, Jim, so struggling on with this software no longer serves me.
However, I love WordPress, the back-end is intuitive, updates and backups are a breeze, and they have lots and lots of free themes… which is part of the problem, since I’m completely overwhelmed trying to find a nice gallery theme that does what I’m looking for.
So I’m hoping you guys have recommendations.
I would like:
[ul]
[li]the ability to put my own branding / logo at the top[/li][li]customizable menu also at the top, under the branding[/li][li]the ability to group photos into albums and sub-albums, for example: Portraits as a top level album, containing sub-albums Men & Women[/li][li]easy color scheme customization[/li][li]some automation for including a watermark on all photos in the WordPress DB (maybe a plugin rather than the theme?)[/li][/ul]
These are the basics. Some integration with social might be nice (Like / share buttons on photos). The ability for it to read and display-on-click the metadata would be super nice. Photo blogging features would be fine, but the main splash page should be some sort of grid of the top-level photo albums, not the blog. I can link to the blog in the menu. Banner images are fine, but should not push the albums below the fold.
Everything that you want to be able to do can be done better in a dedicated gallery site. My main website is with wordpress, but I host my images galleries with photoshelter. As below:
www.bigmark.co.nz
There are a whole range of gallery sites like photoshelter, shootproof, smugmug, zenfolio, all with pros and cons. All of them do as standard what you are looking for. I’ve got a lightroom plugin that “talks” to my photoshelter galleries, and I can manage those galleries in lightroom. I create a collection, add my images then click “publish” to upload them. If I later choose to edit that image, I can republish it without having to delete it.
I did consider hacking something together in wordpress, but it didn’t really suit the way I was doing business, and as you’ve noted there really isn’t that many options out there. The downside is that gallery sites obviously cost money, but if you only host a small amount of images then there are cheaper packages.
Huh? There are TONS of options, that’s the problem I’m having (which I said in the OP).
No, I don’t want to send viewers away from my own site to a third-party host. Aside from torpedoing my efforts to keep them on my own site to explore what all I do and possibly contact me (this is like the number one SEO / web marketing sin!), I simply don’t have time to keep up with any and all potential changes with regard to User Agreements and copyright for an external site. Nor am I particularly interested in paying for it – I already pay for the web host, why wouldn’t I use it?
(Sorry for adding to the “not what you asked for” crowd…)
I used to use WordPress for blogging and stuff, but it wasn’t tuned for photo galleries, IMHO. It does many many things, and therefore is not a specialized tool. The proper photo gallery tools do photos much better.
Last year I gave up on WordPress and went with Smugmug, with my own domain and branding. I’m happy with it.
It was quite easy to follow tutorials to set up different permission levels in different parts (public vs. private link vs. need login) as well as controlling the marketing and branding (in my case I turned off all “buy” buttons and added my own branding). They allow you to control whether people can download the photos, even adding one of those right-click “copyrighted material” popup menus if that’s how you want it.
A photo site like Smugmug provides all of the other stuff you want (“About me”, “Work with me” and similar pages), and again it works under your own domain name if you choose that. Once I set things up, it was quite painless. Now my publishing is all handled through Lightroom.
The cost was the same as I was paying for my old domain + hosting (<100/year total).
I’m not chucking my entire website (actually, several websites, as I have 2 add-on domains in my hosting package) for a third-party offsite photo gallery. IT DOES NOT SUIT MY NEEDS. Photography is ONLY ONE SECTION of my website.
SO PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD ANSWER THE QUESTION I ASKED, NOT WHAT YOU THINK I ASKED.
Jesus. Is that clear enough now?
This is one of my deepest pet peeves. YOU ARE NOT HELPING by answering a question I did not ask.
I don’t have any personal recommendations, I’m afraid - I’m not that much of a photographer - but from a user point of view, all the themes at 34 Best Photography WordPress Themes (2023) - Colorlib look nice to me! They’re not free, though - they’re all around the $50 mark, so that might be more than you’re looking to spend.
Are these the sort of themes you’re looking for? I hope someone comes up with a recommendation for you based on personal experience soon!
Please forgive me for trying to be helpful to a fellow photographer. I love photography and feel the pain of trying to make a site work. I have a strong desire to help fellow photographers in any way possible.
Often when I ask a question, I receive an answer to the question I did not ask: sometimes I think I know the answer and the person offers an alternative I had dismissed based on faulty knowledge, or an alternative I never knew of.
I feel your response is a bit harsh for people who only wanted to give a helping hand.
…my, aren’t you positively charming? A real prince of politeness.
Hey, if you choose to crowd-source free answers from a messageboard, you get what you get. If you want a professional answer I would be more than willing to give it to you for the payment of my standard fee. If you want to increase your odds of getting an answer closer to what you are looking for on a free site though, then a simple “thanks for your effort, not quite what I was looking for, but I appreciate the time it took you to post” will do a lot better than ranting and raving at people simply trying to help you.
And for the love of god, I did actually answer your question. Don’t blame me for reviewing the specs that you laid out in the OP and suggesting options that met with your spec. Plenty of people use solutions like smug-mug integrated seamlessly with their wordpress site. But hey, you do what you like.
Now that you’ve revised your spec with new requirements, I’ve actually got the perfect solution for you. But I’m not going to share it with you: do your own damn research and find it yourself.
As for next-gen gallery, its only the most popular gallery plugin on the internet, and I’m surprised that wasn’t the very first thing you would have looked at. After all the basic package is free which is perfect for someone who is apparently as cheap as you are. I’ve evaluated it extensively and used it on occasion, and in the time it took you to post your ungrateful rant you could have installed it, started testing it and seen whether or not it suited your needs. I’d be happy to share my experiences with you, but not for free now sorry. And I doubt that anyone else will be rushing to help you out either and I don’t blame them.
I spent a year evaluating solutions for my website before settling on the combination that I did. Every six months I evaluate new options, and I am in the process of making a transition to a new gallery hosting platform at the moment. I’ve looked at and trialled and used practically every gallery hosting solution on the internet in the last four years. Its a shame that you won’t be able to tap into that knowledge base because you couldn’t control your temper.
I say I can’t, here’s why. Let’s get back to the question I actually asked.
Second answer says: try something like smugmug.
And apparently I’m supposed to be thrilled that both of you ignored my question and attempted to derail the conversation? Really? It’s too much to ask that you take me at my word the first time? Come on.
If you were addressing me, then I would appreciate that you quoted me so that I know that you are talking to me. To do otherwise is simply rude and passive aggressive, and a pet peeve of mine.
Your question was not ignored. It was answered.
The first answer wasn’t just “try something like smugmug.”
The first answer was it will be difficult to find a solution only in wordpress that will suit all of your requirements, have you considered trying a dedicated gallery solution that will do everything you are looking for, relatively hassle free, because you are a photographer not a programmer?
You derailed the conversation when you decided that that answer wasn’t good enough and instead of simply ignoring the answer you decided to have a rant over something that you admit isn’t something that upsets other people, but is simply a “pet peeve.”
Next gen will do most of what you are looking for. Its biggest downside is that it doesn’t always play well with other themes: I’ve had two themes actually stop working properly due to Next gen, and it took a hour or so of disabling plugins to determine what the problem was. And that is the risk you take with any plugin. Having said that Next Gen is a well funded plugin owned by a reputable company that probably won’t go out of business. Use the free version to evaluate whether or not it works for you: if you eventually change to a theme that is not compatible then you end up with a whole lot of redundant nextgen shortcodes throughout your site.
I would also recomend looking at Photocrati if you are looking for a theme, who acquired nextgen in 2013 and have integrated them into their themes. http://www.photocrati.com/
No derail intended, just friendly advice–the kind of advice I might share with another guy at work.
Surely there might be some discussion about the merits of different options, but I don’t expect my friend to respond rudely. My friend might not be “thrilled” about not getting the exact answer, but he would appreciate that I thought about it long enough to contribute from my own experience, and he would appreciate that I was trying to spare him some pain I went through.