hm....so i have looked through this for a while now......
i miss an important thing: what i want to do (among other things) is having my photos exposed in caf�s and the like, and customers go to my website and order a framed print for example. this means that i print the picture and frame it by myself. but in smugmug and those others you can only use their labs as print services! And I don't know if you can add customized products?

What do you think of that?

I use smugmug for a place to send people, WHCC for printing. (Just an opinion here) hope I understood you correctly? I think you're making a mistake by thinking that buyers will see a print hanging on the wall and then go online to purchase it. I would do whatever I could to get them to leave the establishment with the print while they still have their hands on it. Not saying it wont happen ,but I'm guessing the percentages would be pretty low that they would go online later. I would put them together ready to sell. I have prints in 30 stores, They sell great in the stores, but very little online action. Just my experience. I think it has to do with the fact that: A lot of people buy art spontaneously, once the buzz wears off they might change their mind. "Do I really need this print"?

I guess I'm interested in something like SmugMug or ZenFolio - not for stock, but for people to buy prints directly without the need for me to submit an order to a print shop like WHCC on their behalf.    Which is better/cheaper/easier for a nontechnical person to use?  I want to post a photo, then let them order prints themselves, but some of these people can barely grip a mouse...

What's "self-fulfillment"?  Isn't that what I'm looking for?

i finally went with zenfolio. it is the cheapest....and it seems to offer what i want. it is a bit uncustomizable though...
here is an example
www.eyecatchlight.com (but still under construction)

I thought you wanted to use something with your own web hosting.

La donna � mobile. 

Quote from: FD-amateur on April 14, 2010, 01:12

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on April 13, 2010, 22:48

I thought you wanted to use something with your own web hosting.

La donna � mobile. 

hahaha, vero, molto mobile......

Sometimes I like to tease. You catched the ball well. 

I'm trying to get Gallery2 to work on my site http://www.maigi.com/stockimages/. But I guess you already tested it. I was looking for lazy people solution, where you can make uploading and keywording stuff as easy as possible. They are working on new version Gallery3, but it hasn't shopping cart function implemented yet. It you are a programmer...

Maigi, Gallery has awesome support if you run into any problems. A really knowledgeable guy on staff there helped me integrate it into a photo group site that featured galleries by 70+ members. I had some problems getting it to fit well in my template and they were great. Their forums and tutorials will answer many questions. It's not a simple program but has a lot of cool add-ons, they call them modules http://codex.gallery2.org/Gallery2:Modules There is an ecommerce one that integrates with Zencart http://codex.gallery2.org/Gallery2:Modules:zencart

... helped me integrate it into a photo group site that featured galleries by 70+ members.

Could I see the website?

Here's the gallery link http://copamilwaukee.com/New/gallery2/main.php I used the Siriux theme.

It's not keyword-searchable and it has no cart. So what's the point? Coppermine is keyword-searchable. The third party solutions too. This just looks like a flat HTML gallery like done with good old Arles (from DigitalDutch), almost 10 years ago. I had the impression people here wanted to sell, not to show.

hey don't fight 

both selling and showing are important and interesting. coppermine also offers a shopping cart now... it's just kinda unprofessional i find...

Cool your jets. The Gallery is searchable, look at the bottom and there is a search box.

I looked for "man" and "male" there and it returned nothing, nada, wala, nichts, de rien, niks. Don't let that spoil your fun! Just trying to be helpful if you're interested in sales. For now, I just keep looking on DT to buy ;-). Time = money. Gnite.

For those still interested in an image gallery to drive both Google Images and Sales, I came up with a fast and workable solution that fulfills both goals.
Having abandoned Clustershot and the many Open Source PHP/MySql frameworks, I reverted to my old HTML(JS) solution, the Arles generator, that always worked fine.

* Clustershot was very difficult to integrate and asks 50$ per year, while I have my own server (for mulitple sites) for 100$ per year.
* The numerous OS galleries (Coppermine, Gallery2) can be buggy and they are not really stock oriented with their ratings, comments, etc...
- It takes (too much) time and PHP knowledge to modify the sources, and with every next version, you can start all over.
- The free cart plugins can be buggy, they are not supported, and hence they can have security issues.

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The major disadvantage of an HTML gallery is that it is static and not searchable for keywords, etc.. You can easily add/change/remove images by regenerating it, but for the user it is static. When you consider that your own gallery will never attract buyers in volume, but just browsers that might get interested, it is a lesser disadvantage. In return, you'll get many other advantages.

* SEO optmized: the images appear along with their textual meta-info in one single DIV, which the Google Image robots love, and the title of the image is repeated in the page title. This is an unbeatable solution in SEO since a robot will never issue a query command on a site: it just tracks the static pages.

* Fast: I made a prototype in a couple of minutes. Fine tuning the design took a bit more, but all info for the generator is stored in a text-only parameters file so the process of adapting design and type of info to show is very transparent.
Once you have the design in place for one gallery, you can just copy the parameter file and change folder names for source images and gallery title.
All image info is taken from the image's IPTC.

* The watermark looks good and is very adaptable. You can also add image overlays to brand your shots.
The resizing is done by superior algorithms, since they are done on your local PC and not on the server which usually has crap fast algorithms: the resized images look better than when resized in one of the OS frameworks.

* How to sell from your gallery? (to the spot-buyer). It seems you can easily add a cart but I didn't explore that solution. I just put in a link to the image on the site with the highest prices, and for me that's the 3DStudio. You can use any link though since the generator is very versatile.
To avoid having to poke in the link or image ID every time I regenerate the gallery, I put it in one of the unused IPTC fields of the image itself.  I put the image ID number in the IPTC-field 'special instructions' and the script of the generator does the rest, like adding "http://t3ds.com/" in front of it.

Quite some work if you have thousands of images, but you can replace the link then by a generic link(s) that point to your port on one or more sites. Even if you have no time to put in all the individual image IDs, you can catch some referrals straight from Google Images.

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Demo.

This is the standalone gallery: link,
and this is a version embedded in my site (Joomla) in an IFRAME: link, with the copyright notice and the home button removed since they are on the site already.

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If there is some interest in this solution, I can write a short tut or just send me a pm.

Ktools Photostore should be considered seeing what has been suggested here.

I'm well aware of Photostore, and I have been considering it too. With this solution, I just wanted to notify some photogs that don't fancy a full sales-ready gallery, but just a net presence. I just get 40-100 unique hits per day, and I'm in front of Google. No volume buyers are interested in sites of modest photogs.