Any use to professional photogs?

arossphoto · April 8th, 2006, 08:21 PM

I run a site for professional photographers and I'm in the process of upgrading my discussion forums to vBulletin. I'm looking for a gallery solution that will be of interest to my members, but so far I have been very disappointed by everything I've seen, including PhotoPost Pro, for the following reasons:

- If professional photographers are going to spend time uploading images to any online gallery, it has to contribute to their online marketing and the images have to be accessible to potential clients.

- The gallery system has to be searchable by potential clients who are looking for a specific type of photographer in a specific location. In other words, it must be searchable by speciality, city, nearest major city, photographer's name, etc.

- It has to present their images in a clean, professional manner. Clients don't care about the file size, dimensions, etc.

- The gallery should be integrated with member's discussion forum profile so their contact details, biography, etc only have to be entered once.

I hope I'm wrong, but from what I have seen PhotoPost Pro does not meet these requirements.

If it is possible to make it work for my purposes please let me know.

Thanks,

Andrew

SaN-DeeP · April 10th, 2006, 08:18 AM

PhotoPost Classifieds seems to be the perfect solution for what you want to acheive.

Check the extensive feature list here:
http://www.photopost.com/class/featuresphp.html

Quote:

User Features

NEW! Sellers can place classified ads for fixed prices or with optional eBay style bidding enabled
Sellers can upload several photos to display with each classified ad
Sellers can set an expiration date for each ad
SOLD IT! and RELIST IT! options to disable/re-enable ads
NEW! User feedback system to provide ratings and feedback for buyers and sellers
Contact seller page allows buyers to contact sellers without revealing seller email address
Search by keyword

Chuck S · April 10th, 2006, 08:31 AM

I think PhotoPost Pro should work fine. Now take note not every application you find is going to have every feature you may particularly want.

Quote:

- If professional photographers are going to spend time uploading images to any online gallery, it has to contribute to their online marketing and the images have to be accessible to potential clients.

What do you mean by this one? Images are accessible for users to view.

Quote:

- The gallery system has to be searchable by potential clients who are looking for a specific type of photographer in a specific location. In other words, it must be searchable by speciality, city, nearest major city, photographer's name, etc.

PhotoPost Pro has 6 extra fields you can setup for each category and those fields are searched if someone enters a keyword on search. There are also unlimited extra fields setup per cat but those are non searchable.

Quote:

- It has to present their images in a clean, professional manner. Clients don't care about the file size, dimensions, etc.

PhotoPost Pro is very cleanly displayed and very configurable in how it is displayed. You can turn off filesize dimension etc if you do not want those displayed.

Quote:

- The gallery should be integrated with member's discussion forum profile so their contact details, biography, etc only have to be entered once.

No Gallery software that integrates with a forum for authentication means is going to be integrated with the forum profile since we do not manufacturer the forum and only code our own software not that product. However there are many modifications avaiable here from a simple gallery link in the profile to displaying the members latest photo uploads that you can get from the modifications forums here if your running vbulletin 3.X.

arossphoto · April 10th, 2006, 10:14 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chuck S

PhotoPost Pro has 6 extra fields you can setup for each category and those fields are searched if someone enters a keyword on search. There are also unlimited extra fields setup per cat but those are non searchable.

Thanks for the replies. Sorry if I didn't explain my points more clearly, but I think you guys might be misunderstanding my key requirements. I need a gallery system that will help potential clients find the right photographer in the right city. If I'm not mistaken, the categories and fields you're referring to above are for individual images. So if someone searches for "architectural" and "New York" it is going to retrieve architectural images of New York that could have been taken by photographers from anywhere on the planet.

What I need it to do is return a list of photographers who live in New York and specialize in architectural photography. The search results would ideally include the photographers name, location, a thumbnail image from their gallery, and a link to their main gallery page if a potential client wants to see more. That gallery page should include the photographer's contact details so clients can easily contact them.

I know no program is going to do everything I want, but from a community building perspective this would be ideal for professional photographers. If I'm going to get them to participate in our forums more I have to be able to help them improve their businesses and help potential clients find them quickly and easily (that's what I meant by "accessible" in my first post, which admittedly was a vague word choice). I also need to make it easy for them to update the images in their gallery as well as their contact details. And that means that they should only have to log-in to our site once and enter the information once in a central location for both the discussion forums and the image gallery.

Maybe that's asking too much, but if it could be done it would help to create one kick-ass online community for working pros. I have seen other online photo communities that have figured out how to do it. So I know it's possible. I guess anything is possible if you've got enough money, and I can't spend a fortune on this, but I would be willing to pay for a custom solution.

Cheers,

Andrew

Michael P · April 10th, 2006, 01:32 PM

What you are looking for goes way beyond the design of our systems - you are looking at more like a directory than a gallery setup. You would need to modify any of our products to do all of the things you would want it to do - modifications that I do not believe are trivial.

arossphoto · April 10th, 2006, 01:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Michael P

What you are looking for goes way beyond the design of our systems - you are looking at more like a directory than a gallery setup. You would need to modify any of our products to do all of the things you would want it to do - modifications that I do not believe are trivial.

Yeah, I thought that was the case and that's why I asked the question. I'm no programmer, but I did manage to create a php/mysql directory for our members that is searchable by photographer's specialty, city and nearest major city. Compared to what you have developed I thought this was a fairly basic project and only requires searching of three fields in a member's profile. The search results would then list all galleries that match the search. Sounds simple to me, especially when I see some to the mods and hacks that have been developed to work with vBulletin, by I'm sure the reality is quite different.

I guess my search continues.

Cheers,

Andrew

arossphoto · May 14th, 2006, 12:44 AM

I'm still searching desparately for a solution for my member portfolios, but so far have come up empty. I've asked over at vb.org and vbhackers, but I can't even get anyone to give me a quote for a custom solution. I'm really baffled by this.

I see there are forums here for modification requests, etc, but they are all private. Do you think there is anyway to modify PhotoPost Pro to add the member bios, specialities and search features I need?

I found a site that has developed a vBulletin integrated portfolio system that is exactly what I'm looking. Unfortunately, they said it's a custom solution and they don't want to share it or sell it. It's very cool if anyone is interested in having a look:

Society of Digital Artists

I'm desparate, so if anyone has any suggestions at all please let me know.

Thanks,

Andrew

arossphoto · June 3rd, 2006, 09:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by arossphoto

I see there are forums here for modification requests, etc, but they are all private. Do you think there is anyway to modify PhotoPost Pro to add the member bios, specialities and search features I need?

I guess that would be a big NO. That's really unfortunate.

Chuck S · June 4th, 2006, 09:15 AM

As Michael said you would need to modify any of our scripts to meet your specific needs.

arossphoto · June 4th, 2006, 09:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chuck S

As Michael said you would need to modify any of our scripts to meet your specific needs.

I understand that, I just asking if there was a venue here to find someone who had the skills and experience to modify your script to suit my needs. I still don't know if that's even possible, or if there is an active community of people who produce modifications for PhotoPost, like there are for vBulletin for example.