Comments on: In Defense of Photoshelter

By: Aaron

Aaron — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 10:56:36 +0000

@Brian R: Thanks for your insights! Similarly, Photoshelter will allow you to insert completely custom CSS, so it’s possible to override most of the styling of the dynamic page elements. What I wish it had, though, was something more like a templating system (like Smarty in PHP for example) where you could say “place the ‘add to cart’ link here,” and “show image thumbnail here.”

But even without that, the fact that there is a Lightroom export plugin for the site and its e-commerce capabilities make it a worthwhile investment in my mind.

By: Brian R

Brian R — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:15:52 +0000

I went through this same decision process over the last few weeks, and came to the same conclusion (use a hosted solution) for basically the same reasons.

I ended up going with SmugMug instead of PhotoShelter – they seem to have a similar feature set but much lower fixed pricing ($150/yr for the Pro level account) and slightly higher variable pricing (12-15% of profits, vs 10%).

I’m still building out my site there, but it seems to be reasonably customizable if you’re willing to delve into some CSS and script hackery.