Benefits of the cloud

My new website is live: Alaskaphotographics.com

Into the cloud

After many many months of work, my new website is finally live. So what did all the work involve? Mainly, it was editing 40,000 image files, sifting them for content relevance, age, and overall quality, spell check, adding headlines, and basic keyword restructure and QC (although the latter process is never finished!). I ended up with just over 20,000 files when I was done. This cut was in part due to redundancy, some to quality, and the rest to old and out of date, or more improved imagery acquired in the latter years.

2006 Herring Sac Roe commercial fishing fleet during the second opener in Sitka Sound.

In the transition to a new cloud-based service (www.photoshelter.com) I had to give up some of the custom features of my old site, and one that was hard to let go was the grouping or stacking feature. This let me edit loosely by grouping similar photos which enable a designer or graphic artist the flexibility of choosing from a particular scene that had some variation. As a stock photo site, and service, its important to offer designers empty space within a photo so their content can be added to the imagery. Of course, this has no appeal to someone looking for a print to hang on their wall, so serving both audiences, while at the same time delivering clean and uncluttered search results, is a challenge. I hopefully found a balance.

New print paper surface options

Some other great features of the new site are a wider and more diverse selection of paper surfaces for print buyers, including matt, luster, glossy and canvas. This, along with other photo related products (which I find mostly annoying and trinkety) but a few I included may have some utility.

Mountain pond and the Exit glacier and Harding Ice Field, Kenai Fjords National Park, Kenai Peninsula, southcentral, Alaska.

WordPress plugins

PhotoShelter offers a few wordpress plugins, and the images in this post were added to the blog directly from my website via plug in, and they are linked back to the source file there, which saves a lot of copy, pasting and coding.

Buy and download stock photos online

For stock photo buyers, the option now exists to buy images on line and get an immediate link for downloading the hi-rez file. And the things I really like, which were lacking on my old site, is a bunch of stuff you don’t see. Its all the admin features that let me grant certain permissions to established photobuyers and clients. These features can be set quickly, wherever I am, not needing to be sourced from my office.

Nagsragmiut Inland Eskimo dancers from the Village of Anaktuvuk Pass dance at the 2008 World Eskimo Indian Olympics held annually in Fairbanks, Alaska. Drums usually made from seal or caribou skin.

Kudos to PhotoShelter

There are many things I wish www.photoshelter.com offered, but that’s always the case, especially moving towards a template based system. But as one who typically scoffs at templates, I was able to tweak and moderately customize my site within the PhotoShleter framework to look very similar to my old site. I give the whole team at PhotoShelter a pretty good grade for an immense amount of forward thinking and organizational effort. The future will reveal if all of this will pay off.

Celebrating reduction

One thing I am celebrating…Two years ago I was managing two linux server computers, a print workstation, and two primary office workstations. I’m now down to one computer. And that is liberty to a true minimalist.

Some new galleries

You can check out my new website which has a few fun galleries I made including:

• The Best of Alaska
• Alaska Aerials
• Photographers Favorites

Thank You

And many thanks to all of you who passed on comments and feedback about the site, it was much appreciated.