Next generation Image display (gallery / blog / other)

[RobOK]

Lightroom Version Number

Latest LR

Operating System

1. macOS 11 Big Sur

I have long used Zenfolio to publish galleries out of LR. I also have used Turning Gate (TTG) based galleries and quick galleries with LR itself.

I want to get more creative with my display of images, more creative for me and potentially for people looking at my images. One direction is to have more writing with images. This could be a SquareSpace blog or Adobe Creative Cloud Express (formerly known as Adobe Spark).

What I was thinking of though is having a collection of images (mostly travel, family, and friends) that were well tagged (presumably in LR). Navigation would be dynamic and assisted (recommendations). So if you were on a picture of Bob and Sally in Hawaii with a red wine, you could then go towards more pictures of Bob, or more pictures of wine, and so on. My images are NOT tagged very much, so that may be a stumbling block.

On this point of dynamic navigation, does anyone know of galleries that allow for tag based navigation without having a very hierarchical folder structure?

Any other innovative image galleries (that are not folder based) would be interesting!

Thanks,
Rob.

 

[Califdan]

Have you tried using the search option within Zenfolio? It will find galleries, collections, videos or images based on their name, title, caption, keywords photographer and possibly other metadata as well.

Take a look at my Zenfolio site (www.danhartfordphoto.com). Click on Public Galleries then the magnifying glass (upper right corner when using a computer). Type in something like Train or cuba or portrait or coyote. in the search results select "Photos" (as opposed to Galleries, Collections, or Videos).

In my case I have the same photos in several different galleries (in different hierarchies) so there are many duplicates, but you can get the idea. It's a bit rudimentary but does work.

Dan

 

[RobOK]

I can try that, I do have a big Zenfolio site... Zenfolio | Capturing Moments In Time EDIT: I didn’t even have the search bar displayed! It is now. It seems to be brining back too many false hits, maybe i have some bad meta data.

But i am envisioning a more dynamic navigation for users that presents options. See more of.... and then related people, locations, time frames. “See more from the same month”, See more from Tuscany, See more from Italy,

I know I am stretching the limits, so this is maybe more inventing a new product, or maybe it exists and I don’t know...

 

[Califdan]

Probably not as sophisticated as you want, but if you're looking at a ZF image, you can open the pane showing all the keywords (these came from LR via the Publish Service), and if you click on one you get the content that has that KW. In case below of an image in Oregon, I clicked on "lighthouse" from my list of keywords.

After clicking "Lighthouse" I got a grid of all my "Lighthouse" images (or at least all that have the keyword)

From this grid I clicked on one of the sunset lighthouses photos in the 2nd row which gave me the single image view of that image and then selected keyword "Peggy's Point" (happens to be in Nova Scotia) to get all the images from that location. I guess you can just go on like that forever. Probably not as "user friendly" as you'd like (perhaps customizable?) but if you've already invested a lot of time in Zenfolio may be enough.

 

[RobOK]

Interesting! You’ve taught me more about Zenfolio!!

 

[Linwood Ferguson]

Smugmug is a bit like that also. I recently did some galleries for my relatives. I tagged all the photos by doing facial recognition, and since many were digitized scans also tagged them with dates as best I could.

Then I created "smart" galleries at Smugmug (not in Lightroom). So I had:

1) A timeline, year by year, with all the photos for that year.
2) A gallery for each individual, that pulled in all photos in which they appear.

Then I built a little HTML family tree, and put in there a link from the tree to each of (2).

And finally I had a gallery of unknowns -- those that had faces not confirmed, hoping people would identify them and help me (hasn't worked very well, turns out 50-100 year old photos have few people around now who recognize those in them).

The point is that once you do keywords, you are pretty much golden, since you can arrange things on the fly (at least on Smugmug) with smart galleries against any combinations (including boolean conditions) of keywords.

They also have a search o course.

The hard part is getting everything keyworded.

 

[Replytoken]

Flickr is quite easy to add tags that a user can easily use to navigate. And you can easily add tags when uploading files in bulk. I find it to be a user friendly program for guests to wander around beyond just using the folder hierarchy in programs like ZF or SM.

--Ken

 

[RobOK]

@Ferguson - thank you, yes, something like that I have in mind

Flickr is quite easy to add tags that a user can easily use to navigate. And you can easily add tags when uploading files in bulk. I find it to be a user friendly program for guests to wander around beyond just using the folder hierarchy in programs like ZF or SM.

--Ken

@Replytoken (Ken) -- I was thinking about Flickr. I had a Flickr account a long time ago, but have not used it in many years. I have to admit, I thought Flickr was dying off, did it get new life? Or maybe I am mis-remembering?

 

[Linwood Ferguson]

@Replytoken (Ken) -- I was thinking about Flickr. I had a Flickr account a long time ago, but have not used it in many years. I have to admit, I thought Flickr was dying off, did it get new life? Or maybe I am mis-remembering?

Some few years ago Flickr was purchased by Smugmug. It still exists, but much of what was free is no longer, though some things remain free. How widely used I do not know, though personally I almost never have anyone point me there to show me something. But there are no signs of it vanishing if that is your concern (though I never understood why SM wanted a free competitor it had to pay for). Just be sure to check what you want to do (including volume) fits with what you want to pay. To be fair, Smugmug and Zenfolio mentioned above are all for-fee (and I think more).

 

[Zenon]

I was paying Zenfolio $150 a year for a personal website. Since going subscription I use Portfolio which comes with the plan. C1 Pro had an offer last summer. Portfolio free via SmugMug for one year. What happens after that? Last I checked Portfolio via SmugMug was $180 a year.

Flickr allows free hosting to a limit then you have to pay. I use it very sparingly.

 

[RobOK]

I was paying Zenfolio $150 a year for a personal website. Since going subscription I use Portfolio which comes with the plan. C1 Pro had an offer last summer. Portfolio free via SmugMug for one year. What happens after that? Last I checked Portfolio via SmugMug was $180 a year.

I could see doing the same. How do you find Portfolio? I don't really use any Zenfolio unique features. Portfolio is probably fine for personal light sharing. Would not do what the original post of this thread is about ofc.

Any more unique Gallery sites out there?

 

[Zenon]

I could see doing the same. How do you find Portfolio? I don't really use any Zenfolio unique features. Portfolio is probably fine for personal light sharing. Would not do what the original post of this thread is about ofc.

Any more unique Gallery sites out there?

I didn’t sell so I never used Zenfolio to its full potential. I just wanted a decent personal website. For my purpose Portfolio is perfect. With the plan it’s like getting LR and PS for free.

I don’t know about any other sites. Before Zenfolio I used a website hosted by a daily online contest called Digital Image Cafe.

 

[Zenon]

I should add I’m not sure I’m using everything Portfolio has to offer either. There may be more advanced levels based on what Smugmug charges.

One thing about portfolio via Adobe is you can import collections from LR. I know that portfolio is not integrated using C1 pro.

 

[Zenon]

One more thing. You can use the free domain name that comes with it but the word portfolio is in it. I opted to get my own via Namecheap.

 

[Replytoken]

(Ken) -- I was thinking about Flickr. I had a Flickr account a long time ago, but have not used it in many years. I have to admit, I thought Flickr was dying off, did it get new life? Or maybe I am mis-remembering?

I was never a fan of Flickr, but when I worked on a recent project where I wanted to share images to gather comments from family, I gave it a spin. It has reasonable controls for privacy, but as I said, they have the whole tagging thing down pat from a user perspective. Their tagging system reminds me of a good word cloud on a blog or Gmail's Labels. It require little effort on the part of the user to click and see what it brings up. My advice is to play around with it by visiting some accounts that are well populate and you can then judge for yourself. There were some other platforms that I researched that supported tagging, but most were for shared video reviewing.

I cannot recall if Squarespace has similar features, but it is worth exploring. Regardless of what you choose, give it a trial spin before committing. Flaws and lacking features that were not visible during research seem to come to light when trying to actually use a platform.

Good luck,

--Ken

 

[johnbeardy]

I want to get more creative with my display of images, more creative for me and potentially for people looking at my images. One direction is to have more writing with images. This could be a SquareSpace blog or Adobe Creative Cloud Express (formerly known as Adobe Spark).

Have you tested Spark? It can be pretty effective for ad hoc story-style projects where you want to include text sections alongside images, and it might allow you to define a little more clearly what you mean by "more creative".

 

[RobOK]

I had already created a Portfolio, but I think there are more advanced tweaking options than when I first tried. Robert OKeefe

I have used Spark, again a while back. I wish Spark had access to Lightroom images the same way Portfolio does.

 

[prbimages]

I wish Spark had access to Lightroom images the same way Portfolio does.

It does!

 

[Replytoken]

I had already created a Portfolio, but I think there are more advanced tweaking options than when I first tried. Robert OKeefe

I have used Spark, again a while back. I wish Spark had access to Lightroom images the same way Portfolio does.

Portfolio is great for images, and its free is you have a subscription, but there is no support for tags or for you to blog.

--Ken

 

[johnbeardy]

I have used Spark, again a while back. I wish Spark had access to Lightroom images the same way Portfolio does.

It does!

Exactly, though it is slightly different. Portfolio's integration with LR clones an entire collection, which can be fine for some circumstances. Meanwhile Spark's LR integration clones an individual image or selected images in a more freeform way, integrating them with text sections which you mentioned in your initial post.

I use the word "clone" because in each case your LR images are being copied at that moment, or "published" might be an alternative. If you change the collection or those images in LR, the clones published to Portfolio / Spark are unaffected, and only in Portfolio's case can you refresh the collection - in Spark you'd have to replace them.

This difference in refreshing the output means that in my view Portfolio is more about efficiency and is for one's longer term web site, so it's perhaps just an alternative to what you've been doing. Spark however is more about releasing a story or report or Powerpoint. It has a lot of layout flexibility and is like a baby brother of web applications like Shorthand which multimedia companies are using to produce more creative web content such as this BBC report The fight for Dragon Island.

So while I am not clear what you mean by "more creative", I think that with Spark there's a qualitative difference in how you're sharing work and it does appear to meet a couple of your criteria.

 

[RobOK]

@johnbeardy thanks for your details about portfolio and spark.

To be honest, I don't know what I am looking for. I know that I produce a lot of images, some of them not too bad, and 99% of them are never seen by anyone but me! (slight exaggeration, but you get my point!)

So I am thinking about more ways to get my images and ideas out there!

 

[Zenon]

While you can’t blog with portfolio it comes with the plan so why not use it. You can have another site for blogging with a link to portfolio.

There is also Behance which I think is a kinda of LinkedIn thingy. I opened it once but it’s now for me.

 

[Zenon]

I meant it’s "not" for me.

 

[RobOK]

Thanks @Zenon

To all, thank you for posting. The point of this thread was -- is there anything new out there for putting images out in the world. I think the answer is "no", but I thought it worth a question.

I think the traditional Gallery options (SmugMug, Zenfolio, Format, Flickr) are getting stale. Social Media (Insta, FB, 500px) had a different set of challenges. Blogging platforms are mature.

I think there is an opportunity for something new!

 

[Replytoken]

Blogging platforms are mature.

Yes, and if you have a dedicated audience, then blogs work well. But if you are asking what is new, then I would say that Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and TickTok are one answer. I blogged about a nonphotographic topic a number of years ago to a very small audience and enjoyed writing. I had hoped to continue blogging about my photography, but my life has been far too busy to allow me to do so. In the meantime, I have started to wonder if we may have achieved media saturation. If I had free time to blog, I would only do so because I enjoyed writing and communicating with a small audience that I knew personally. I am just not sure how many people are interested in looking at photos in a world awash in images and videos. I do not mean to be a wet blanket, as I also have a lot of images that have never been seen, but it is good to know your audience.

--Ken