I am building a website for a client who need to showcase their services with photographic content. I can follow the typical route of hosting the images on the server, and using an image viewer/gallery component.
However, the client wants to be able to frequently change the images, without having to go through me. Thus, increasing the chances of breaking something in the website, or uploading images in the wrong sizes/spec and whole host of problems.
So, I thought that it might be a good idea to direct them to an image hosting service, and then somehow link their website to that. This would allow them to use a fail-proof interface to upload, edit and tag the images. It would decrease loading times of their website. And -I am hoping- this is a good SEO strategy too, increasing exposure through social networking.
The problem is, I have never done this before. I know Google has a photo sharing service, never used it, but it may be good enough for the client. Anybody has any experience or thoughts on this subject?
I don’t have direct experience of doing that. However, jamesdeanephotography.com (to which I have no direct connection) uses photoshelter.com (again, no connection), which seems to be pretty flexible. It might be the kind of thing you’re after.
Loads of choices. Flickr and Picassa come to mind straight away. There are some that are more directly set up for photography portfolios, I’ll see if I can dig 'em out.
It’s not a photography portfolio, it’s images of apartments for rental (whatever difference that makes). I am thinking I could have a local gallery with some photographs, and also make them an account on Picasa (or similar), and put a link to that from the site. Or maybe integrate their online Picasa gallery into a website component so it calls the images from there in real-time. I have no clue if that is possible (without a hack). Don’t want something to break locally, when/if Picasa decide to change something on their end.
Picasa was also the first thing on my mind, because they also have software, and it’s Google behind it.
One last thing, the site is multilingual, 4 different languages for now. I wonder how I could meta/tag the photographs differently for each language from the online service.
The multi-lingual caption aspect is making it sound like a custom build. Having galleries from either flickr or picassa show on the site is simple enough, but adding the capability to have different captions based on language I’m not sure about. Sounds like you’ll either have to build something yourself, or perhaps edit something like this to suit your needs.
Thanks TheOriginal. Regardless of the multilingual tags, should I suggest the client to open up additional image galleries on either flickr or picassa? For the sake of changing and updating the images whenever they feel like it, without tampering with their main website (and risk breaking something). Or bothering me to do it. I will just put an additional link to their online gallery if I have to.
I want an online hosting service that is: fool-proof, easy to use, and allows multiple sub-galleries of non-artistic content.
Eventually I will have to do my own research in flickr, picassa and the rest… I am just too busy right now to do proper testing, so other people’s experience is greatly appreciated.
I’ve only had experience with Flickr. From what I’ve seen so far, it seems like the best option. It’s well-supported- I believe there are plug-ins that enable integration with Wordpress. The resolutions you can upload to are great, and the built-in gallery viewer is nicely done. Cleaner and less industrial looking than Picasa. Just my two cents.
Sorry to be late to the party on this but just for the record I’d have suggested slideshowpro director. You can install it on your own server and provide the client with access to the backend. Easy uploading of photos and tagging etc. You can make a gallery for a particular part of the website that the client can edit freely and it will update effortlessly. They can re-order photos, add, delete, etc. It is pretty cheap and can be bought outright or as a hosting service. The best part is that the galleries stream optimised content to the device that is viewing the website, free working galleries on most portable devices also, including swipe controls.
Not sure how they would handle multi-language captioning but I’d drop them a line, I doubt it is the first time someone has asked the question.
If you wanted to be a bit lower tech about it, just set up a second server that only hosts images and allow them to just FTP them up. This would make it a bit difficult to configure though, I guess. =p
Flickr has a fairly easy API which you could put into play for this purpose.