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Galleries on Your Site vs. Photo Hosting

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As photographers, we have to choose where we’re going to host our images online, and it generally comes down to two broad categories of options: third-party photo hosting, or a gallery system on your own website.

I think that too often this gets compared in the wrong way… more on that later.

Third-Party Hosting

One option is to go with a third-party photo hosting service such as SmugMug. They’re good people who have been in the photo business for a long time, and their service allows you to create nice galleries with a variety of image viewing features, without having to worry about the details of administering your own servers or paying for storage as your photos will end up on their servers.

Pros:

  • No need to maintain or upgrade server software or storage space
  • Variety of pro photo lab integrations

Cons:

  • Entire system is under the control of another party
  • Different look and feel than your website (unless there’s extensive customization)
  • You get what they offer, the way they offer it

Plenty of photographers use a system like this, either from SmugMug or a similar service (Zenfolio, Photoshelter, etc) and it works well. If you need pro lab integration, this is probably your best option. On the other hand if you prefer a bit more control, or want a photo gallery experience that’s more closely tied into the rest of your website, I’d recommend…

Your Own Website Gallery

The other option is to maintain your own website (I recommend using WordPress) and use a full-featured gallery plugin such as Envira Gallery or NextGEN Gallery to display your images. You install one of these plugins onto your WordPress website, configure the desired options, and then upload your images to your own site.

Pros:

  • Extensive customization options
  • Can more easily match the theme of your website
  • You retain full control over the entire system

Cons:

  • Requires you maintain your own website

There’s no perfect solution for everyone – it depends on your skills and how you value your time and money.

But don’t let someone oversimplify this comparison to being “the easy option with a hosting company” vs. “you do everything yourself” – it’s not that simple. The reality is that even with someone like SmugMug, Photoshelter, or Zenfolio, there’s an up front setup investment of time to customize the galleries and configure various options. And the major gallery plugins for WordPress have added a lot of features that can compete with the photo hosting companies.

It’s not as much about features as it is about your mindset, how much you want to tweak things, and whether you’d rather have a custom gallery that was designed by you and hosted on your own server versus a customized version of the galleries offered by the photo hosting companies.

Either are valid. Personally I like, use, and am partnered with SmugMug and EnviraGallery. But there are other options out there. Find one that works for you.

WordPress Photo Lab Integration: Not There Yet

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Sarah is an event photographer in Portland, and like many photographers who shoot volume events and sports, she currently has a website where folks can go online and order prints of the images from her events. After the event, you go to Sarah’s website, pick out your images, and can easily buy a 16×20 wall print, or a 5×7 for your desk, or any other number of products. Sarah was chatting with me last week as she’s going to be having a new website built with WordPress and she wondered if she could better integrate photo lab ordering into her WordPress website.

There are a lot of pieces to online photo commerce in place in the WordPress ecosystem (various WordPress web hosting options, themes such as Photocrati that are focused on photography, commerce systems such as WooCommerce that can be used for sales) but the big piece that remains missing is integration with print labs. WordPress photo lab integration is tricky. Focusing on that specifically, this is a bit of a followup to an article I wrote earlier this year that explored the state of WordPress photo commerce.

Selling digital files is possible, but most financially-successful photographers know that the real money comes in selling valuable physical products such as wall prints, canvases, metal prints, or other products delivered by a quality lab. Whether your business model is one of volume or scarcity, working with a pro lab such as White House Custom Color, Bay Photo, or Miller’s is an important bit of the photo product pipeline.

Earlier this week I had a long conversation with a company that has some things in the works, but right now there’s not a great solution for those using WordPress websites and galleries.

An Interim Recommendation

WordPress doesn't yet have good pro photo lab integration, but there are interim options Click To Tweet

Until something comes along in the WordPress world, there are several companies that offer photo galleries and online systems that integrate with print labs. When it comes to flexibility, support, and the general vibe of “we’re photographers who get it” I find myself returning to, and frequently recommending, SmugMug. With four levels of account (ranging from around $3 to around $25 per month) they offer packages that are a good fit for both a casual hobbyist or a serious professional.

You can create photo galleries, customize the styling, and even use a custom domain name to offer a more seamless experience for those coming from your main website. When it comes to print lab integration, you can choose from EZ Prints (consumer) or Bay Photo, WHCC, or Loxley Colour (pro). Personally I’ve had great results from Bay Photo, but I have several colleagues who use WHCC and are pleased. Heck, SmugMug will ship you free sample prints to help you decide.

Why WordPress Photo Lab Integration is Hard: Payments

I suspect that a big reason why we don’t yet have a solid print lab option for WordPress users is the commerce aspect. When things are a simple as having a customer pay you, it’s easy. WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, or any number of other plugins make that simple. But let’s look at what’s involved with photo product transactions involving a third-party lab:

  • your customer wants to make one transaction
  • some of that money money needs go to the print lab to cover your cost on the item
  • some of hat money will be profit for you
  • there will probably be dynamic shipping charges based on their address

With third-party photo hosting and commerce services such as SmugMug or Zenfolio, they take care of this payment processing. In SmugMug’s case, the photographer pays SmugMug a yearly fee. The photographer sets prices that include markup above the product’s cost from the lab[1]. When a customer makes a purchase, they pay SmugMug, and SmugMug keeps 15% of the difference between the cost and the marked-up price. The remainder of the profit goes to the photographer.

This probably isn’t going to work without some sort of third party in the WordPress world. Whatever plugin facilitated the purchase would need to understand how to talk to APIs from any labs that it could use. Photographers would have to figure out some sort of pricing split with their lab. Realistically, labs aren’t going to negotiate pricing agreements for these splits with individual photographers.

I suspect that if it were easy, we would’ve seen a solution from Envira or Photocrati or one of the other WordPress gallery plugins.

There’s an opportunity to make this work, but the coordination aspect between the photographer / website owner, the print lab, and the software used as orders is the complicated part. One simple solution would be for print labs to offer the plugins directly, but I haven’t heard any rumblings of that being something they’re thinking about. That said, that might be a good question for me to ask when I visit the huge trade show at ImagingUSA in a couple months.

In the meantime, SmugMug, Zenfolio, and Photoshelter are likely to continue to handle the majority of online print ordering business.

  1. some of the cheaper SmugMug plans don’t allow for markup/profit, but that’s not core to this explanation  ↩

The State of WordPress Photo Commerce

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Yesterday Woo announced a photography extension for WooCommerce that, in their words, is

designed to assist professional photographers with the day to day management and sale of their images

Could this be a long-awaited fully featured WordPress photo ecommerce system? No. It falls short in many areas. Brian Krogsgard over at Post Status wrote a good article about Woo’s entry into this field, and he notes some of the shortcomings and areas where the current WordPress photo systems fall short.

Non-WordPress Photo Commerce Options

Brian noted (and perhaps underestimated the power of) several non-WordPress photo commerce platforms that are available (generally as hosted services for varying price points)… we’re talking players such as:

These services all offer varying feature sets, but at a high level they’re relatively similar. Nothing in the WordPress world comes close to the photo commerce options of these systems.

Features of Web Photo Commerce Systems

To look at what’s missing in the WordPress world, let’s take a look at features needed by serious photographers looking to sell prints or digital downloads, as well as some of the nuances of the photo industry. As someone with a background in software development who has also worked as professional photographer in some capacity for six years, I feel comfortable in outlining a set of user requirements for a full-featured photo commerce system.

  • Easily upload images, ideally with integration into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Aperture (or the replacement Photos app).
  • Galleries of images that are either publicly accessible or password-protected.
  • Dynamic galleries driven by metadata.
  • Digital download sales with the ability to sell multiple image resolutions (to sell high-res and low-res versions).
  • Manage download limits or expiration dates for digital downloads.
  • Integration with professional printing labs that will print and deliver physical images. Think WHCC, Bay Photo, Miller’s / Mpix, etc. More on this below.
  • Proof delay for print orders so that a photographer can review/prep orders if desired.
  • Self-fulfillment print ordering where the photographer handles all of the printing and delivery – this is the only delivery method supported by the WooCommerce extension announced this week.
  • Allowing clients to make picks or a list of favorite images prior to a sales presentation.
  • Support for multiple pricing lists such that different prices could be applied to otherwise-same products.
  • Support for offline invoicing and payment.
  • Photo rights protection features such as server-side watermarking or download obfuscation.
  • The ability to offer public galleries with individually-shareable photos much like one can share or embed an image from Flickr.
  • Embeddable slideshows so that gallery images can be shared elsewhere.
  • Per-gallery options as to whether or not photos appear in search engines.
  • Collect sales tax and VAT appropriately to comply with regulations.

A WordPress solution wouldn’t need to have all of these options, but realistically it would need most of them to compete with the current marketplace of non-WordPress options.

The killer feature (that will help such as system gain traction) is the pro lab integration – which is also the most complicated and expensive to implement. Professional labs offer their own catalog of products, with various options. In addition to getting a photo printed on multiple sizes, you can choose from multiple paper types. Or a surface (such as a metal print or canvas) that’s not even paper at all.

Editor’s Note: See this followup article on WordPress print lab integration.

A WordPress photo commerce system would also need to handle how the payments work as money flows from the client and is then split between the lab’s printing fees and the photographer’s profit.

With WordPress, Looking Forward

While I love WordPress for many uses, one question that ought to be asked is whether or not WordPress is the right system to handle online photo commerce. As a content management system, WordPress (and other WordPress plugins) provides features for adding and managing various information and products, so while it could be done with WordPress (and a ton of work to build all of the missing parts), the question is whether it should be done with WordPress, or whether some of the specialized features noted above are better handled by dedicated third-party services.

The new WooCommerce extension is a step forward, but it is a small step. NextGEN Pro offers some commerce capabilities, but is missing some major pieces (namely any sort of lab integration). Last weekend at Pressnomics I had a chance to chat with Erick Danzer from Photocrati (the maker of NextGEN) and we talked about some of the challenges and opportunities in the space. They’re looking at it… but it’s quite complicated as noted above.

WordPress is a great option for a photographer’s website and blog, but at this point (early 2015), solid photography ecommerce solutions are best provided by a non-WordPress hosted provider who has the infrastructure required to serve the photo-specific needs of photographers.