Looking for photographer to provide sample photos for new photography cms website

[andrewpmoore]

Hi,
I've spent the last couple of years working on a content management system for photographers, which is now getting close to going live. It's a fully hosted service allowing you to sell photos through a paypal shopping cart, have lots of differing style galleries, availability calendars, news pages with rss feeds, contact forms etc.

I'm interested in looking for any photographers that may be able to provide sample images for some of the templates we currently have.

I've got a couple of photographers on board so far, but feel one or two more would be beneficial.

For providing your pictures, you would be credited for them and also have the ability to get a free site once we go live.

If anyone is interested PM me and I'll send some more details and a link to our site that's under development.

I've not mentioned the site name here in the post, as I'm not wanting to be seen as trying to promote the site itself.

Cheers
Andrew

[Picture North Carolina]

As opposed to asking photographers to hand over their valuable, copyrighted works to an unknown person, rather why don't you hand your application over to photographers for beta testing?

And it's usually ok to publish a link to your site if another member asks.

What is the URL?

[spkerer]

*sniff* *sniff*

Yep, I smell another one coming on!

[andrewpmoore]

I've managed to get all the photographers I need now.
Once the site is up and running in full beta form, then I'll let people know the URL.
Thanks to those who replied

[andrewpmoore]

Well it's taken longer than expected as we've kept adding more features.

As the url was asked for on this, and the site is now up pretty much 24x7 as we add the finishing touches, here's the url: http://www.folioflow.com

Any comments greatly appreciated, as we offer a free service anyone can give it a go.
Let me know if anyone wants any more information.

[snails]

Well it's taken longer than expected as we've kept adding more features.

As the url was asked for on this, and the site is now up pretty much 24x7 as we add the finishing touches, here's the url: http://www.folioflow.com

Any comments greatly appreciated, as we offer a free service anyone can give it a go.
Let me know if anyone wants any more information.


Good luck.


How about you give us some reasons to go with your site over SmugMug or Zenfolio?

[Picture North Carolina]

Please post links to real, live photographers currently using your service. thanks.

[jamesb]

Good luck.


How about you give us some reasons to go with your site over SmugMug or Zenfolio?


^Agreed. Why should we choose you over the others?

[andrewpmoore]

Thanks for the message. It's more of a website for creating your own commercial website. So it's more about individual websites and great templates with lots of ability to customize to suit your branding.

So sites like smugmug are great for uploading loads of images, but you are stuck with their layouts from what I can remember, so everybody's site looks the same.

So with our site, you've got 8 templates to choose from (2 more coming soon), you can change the colors, add backgrounds images to the site. Plus each page type - gallery, contact & maps, availability calendars and general news/blog pages all have multiple styles to choose from for each type of page.

[andrewpmoore]

Please post links to real, live photographers currently using your service. thanks.

www.markharris.co.nz is the contact got from here (username harroz), I'm sure Mark would be happy to let you know of his experiences as he's been great in offering suggestions throughout the last year - I've a few suggestions for Mark on improving his site too as we are happy to review any site with us and suggest ways we think it could be improved.

Through other channels I've worked with Brian Harris who provided me with the sample website: http://gila.folioflow.com and John Carroll who provided this images for: http://vistula.folioflow.com/home site.

Cheers
Andrew

[Box Brownie]

I had a quick look and two things struck ~ you talk about a free service but with paid for options/upgrades should 'users' wish. So sorry if I have missed it anywhere how much for the paid options and what do you get for the money.

Next ~ business model I see that all the images on the example sites are on the Amazon S3 service, last time I looked at that it has not insignificant costs associated with it! If the service is free I surmise you are hoping that enough users will upgrade to the paid service and hence fund the S3 and other parts that are a cost to your provision of FolioFlow?

As I say sorry if I have missed anything but I like transparency and up front clearness for & of any product I might consider using........and so far this product is not in my comfort zone :(

Edit - sorry I found the page where the prices are listed by clicking on the "Sign Up" button..not quite what I would normally expect...I would suggest such a page/list also needs to be in the FAQs at the very top :)

I now seeing that page see mention of the number of image sets per 'level' of payment but where is the info for just how many images can be uploaded in total???

Now I am the areas I am seeing and commenting on are just ones that need a little crafting but IMO such lack of fine detail or links to find them easily can be sorted? But why not already?

[andrewpmoore]

Thanks for your comments.
This page (http://www.folioflow.com/ff/page/website/home/pageId/551) displays the information on what you get for the different services.

There's quite a tight limit on the number of pages for the free service as you are correct that the image hosting (and the application servers, databases etc) are all using amazons cloud services. With the free service you've also got to log in at least once every 30 days to keep the site active, as you obviously know the hosting and disk space isn't free to us. Therefore the intention is that people will choose to upgrade for the paid service if they like the free service.

It's a good point about the transparency, as the information is only currently shown under the 'sign-up' section, which I can see doesn't make it obvious before people will feel they are having to commit to something. I'll do some work on that to make it more obvious.

Cheers
Andrew

[andrewpmoore]

Just to follow that up, I've changed some links around so that it's more obvious where to get to the prices. It's nice and quick to do - as the main website is running in exactly the same admin system as users use for their sites!

[snails]

Flickr's free account allows up to 200 photos.
Your free account is limited to 3 "image sets." What is an image set?

A SmugMug Pro account is $149/year before discounts and coupons. That comes out to $12.41/mo.
Your Premium service is 19 GBP/mo. That's $29/mo at the current exchange rate.
What do we get for over double the monthly price?

[Box Brownie]

Andrew

You really need to answer the question about numbers of images per account and just what an image set is i.e. how many images??? I raised this and Scott (snails) asked as well ;)

Now for photographers that is the most transparently lacking bit of information IMO !!!

[andrewpmoore]

Ok following the questions on image sets obviously it's not clear what they are.
You associate a set of images to a page, be it a "about us" page, "home" page or "gallery page" etc.

So I've changed the wording, so it's an unlimited number of images per page.
Depending on the type of page this obviously varies. For example of the choice of approx 10 gallery styles, some of them will allow 50 images, some will allow unlimited images.

The pages with the smaller number are suitable for showcasing portfolio pictures and often rely on javascript for presentation effects (e.g. http://www.markharris.co.nz/ff/gallery/website/markharris/pageId/758). A page with unlimited images would be more like the following - http://www.markharris.co.nz/ff/gallery/website/markharris/pageId/1106

I know flickr offers 200 photos uploaded for free, but then you just end up with your photos on the flickr site instead of having your own site laid out how you want.

I hope that clears it up a bit. Let me know if there's anything else you want to know, as it's all good feedback and I appreciate it.
Cheers
Andrew