So for years now, I’ve had chats with folks like Matt Mullenweg of WordPress and Anil Dash of Six Apart about photography and the perfect CMS (Content Management System) to showcase images. There are obviously some great products out there aside from those two, but none that totally suit my needs as a photographer, to showcase my work, right out of the box. Sure there are some great plugins and such to add onto these CMS monsters, but as a creative person, we don’t always have the means or knowledge to code these things together to do everything we want. And of course there is flickr, which is an amazing site to share your images, but what it thrives on is community, instead of individual ownership. Sure I like sharing images and viewing images, but I want to be able to do it on my own domain, with it’s own home.
So what does it mean to have the perfect photography CMS? I know for me the wishlist is long and a lot of the features I want, aren’t necessarily new ideas or items, but the main thing is being able to install something on my server and be up and running with it, without the hassles of installing and customizing a million other plugins. Ideally, the main user would be photobloggers, a community of people online who like to share their images online on a daily basis. But in reality, I’d also like to have something that would appeal to photographers in general, both pro and amateur alike. Something that they will be able to use to build their one portfolio on regardless if they are updating every day, or just adding in new content every few months.
So over the next little while I’m gonna flesh out my ideas right here, out in the open. And perhaps you’ll want to throw in your two cents, tell me I’m totally on the ball, or tell me I’m out of my mind. In the end, I hope to have some sort of proposal or product spec. which hopefully someone will want to pick up and run with.
For now, I’ll leave you with a couple of questions.
a) What CMS do you use now?
b) What do you like or dislike about the CMS you are using?
c) What would you like to see built in to an all in one, photography based CMS
My current blog engine of choice is WordPress, but I don’t run a full-fledged photoblog.
I tried to last year with Pixelpost, a dedicated photoblogging CMS, but I found that it was extremely underpowered for my needs at the time. (Going back to their site [pixelpost.org], I see that it was finally upgraded, so I may revisit it on an experimental basis.) The user support was abysmal and the plugins were confusing, sometimes because their documentation was not written in English. The system seems to work out for some people, and more power to ‘em, but it wasn’t a good solution to me.
This is some of what I’d like to see in a dedicated photoblogging CMS right out of the box without plugins:
- Ease of installation, akin to WP;
- Drag and drop photo uploading;
- The ability to determine what part of the picture becomes the thumbnail;
- Online editing, akin to flickr’s partnership with picnik (quick fixes mostly);
- Lightbox built-in for showing full size images (or at least bigger versions);
- Watermarking;
- Rating system;
- Categories and tagging (because there *is* a difference);
- Customizable permalink structure, especially useful for people switching from other blog CMSs.
Those are the big ones on my list.
All of the above plus easily customizable thumbnail dimensions. I tire of having to dig through lines of code file after file to change that. Perhaps some easier flash integration as well.
My photoblog is running TextPattern for the last couple of years. And before that PixelPost. I liked PP just as a system to post photos… but if you wanted anything more, you were screwed.
I moved to TextPattern to try it out, and out of the box, it was the simplest CMS/Blog out there. I wanted something that I could mold and build upon. It was clean, simple and easy… no messing with ton of options and features and themes and files. I found a couple of plugins to help out, but most of the site I cut up and made it do what I wanted. And that was Be able to post photo posts with or without additional text and post text-only articles… like what you had and hchamp.
But what would be the ultimate photographer CMS… not just photoblog software, would be a clean and easy program with lots of yummy web2.0 back end, like ajaxy drag and drop, multifile uploads… the ease of creating a gallery, and interoperability of creating photo only posts with gallery images, and having a text blog section… So basically I would love a good looking gallery, photoblog, and text blog system all working together in the backend and all melding into a themed site design…
I’m a computer nerd, so I ended up writing my own system using PHP and MySQL. It isn’t ideal, but it was a good learning experience.
The biggest feature I found lacking in other CMS’s was the ability to easily Geotag each photo location
I’d like to be easily able to geotag the location of the photo (or have it read from the EXIF data once cameras are better at that) – and have that data appear in the final page as meta-data that search engines and browser plugins can read ( ie not just an HTML paragraph tag with 49.52N -79.82E, but also a tag like:
meta name=”ICBM” content=”52.36861657317865, -2.7175068855285645″
Once that data is there, it makes it easier for search engines to find your postings – I’ve messed around with this somewhat – ie a bunch of photoblog postings, videos, and history of the Don Valley Brickwords site: http://wholemap.com/map/area.php?area=TorontoBrickworks
I use Movable Type for photolog.org. Highly customised of course, but it serves my purpose well.
I’ve used typepad for my photoblog visualpalate for 4 years; it’s improving (at last re-allowed larger images). What I would really love (and typepad doesn’t offer) is to publish galleries in a custom format, in which the CMS is transparent. Something suitable to selling images to editors, art directors and the like, in which the site appears to be other than a generic blog “read: amateur” in format, rather a CMS suitable to professional presentation.
I currently use pixelpost and while I’m pretty happy with this photoblog-focused system, I still haven’t been able to install any workable search tool — as i’d like my site to be full searchable. I think coming up with a variety of ways for people to get access to content from the original homepage is so important.
I currently use Movable Type for hswilkinson.com, my photography site, but I just switched to WordPress for geekcookbook.com, my food site. Movable Type is just too much of a pain to deal with now, and I’ve thought about switching my photo site to WordPress, even though that won’t be the ideal solution.
I think that something similar to the Flickr upload page would be great for personal photologs. It needs to be able to use whatever template I design, but the bones behind the Flickr upload would be great.
I’ve used Textpattern for the entire life of my photoblog. I’ve thoroughly hacked it into submission so it handles EXIF data, automatically makes thumbnails, and displays comments in a nifty little Lightbox. That said, commenting is still not implemented perfectly, and sometimes I yearn to break my fixed-width design (a panorama does not look good at 720 pixels *wide*).
I feel like it needs a redesign. But what do people look for in photoblogs nowadays? I designed Lumilux almost 2 years ago, when these creatures hadn’t been completely tamed.
I found Expanse CMS to be quite useful. Should try looking that that and some of the designs around that show you its full potential.
I am using Phormer script (http://p.horm.org/er) – does not require mysql, just php on the server side. Easy to use, easy to create thumbnails. There is ony one problem – from my point of view – there is no batch upload AFAIR…
I am using Coppermine, and it works perfect for my needs. I just want to show photo’s, create folder which not everyone can see and batch upload, does do all of that.
I don’t have a Photo CMS at the moment, but have used other CMS in the past to create other sites. It just doesn’t work if your site is dedicated only to Photos and catered only to your clients.
One thing I would like to see in a Photo CMS is a password protected portion of the site where my clients can view their photos privately and select which photos they like so I can do any post production on them and then get it printed for them.
As opposed to a website which shows all my photos to the public.
We suggest Pho2Book. Powerful Photographer CMS. Try it free for 15gg.
try zenphoto.org and download zenphoto. So far I am extremely pleased.
I am looking for a god CMS right now.
I write, so I need a tool that lets me show off my writing.
I post music, so I need a tool that lets me play music.
and of course the photos.
Something I really don’t like about common photo displays online is that they almost always use a date or name to sort.
Think about this, the photos you posted last year, will by default, be placed at the TOP of the view, (assuming you use the filename the camera gave the photo) Now you have posted photos all year, and for someone to see your NEWEST photos, they have to scroll down to the bottom to see the latest.
Notice that unless you can set the display to sort backwards, that will almost always be the case. Annoying.
Now, if you set the sort backwards, that is almost always a system wide setting, AARRGGH, now all the text files are sorted backwards.
Why would I want to keep the filename the camera gave? Because I KEEP the original untouched in an archive, and only display the touched photos, if I ever need to go find that original, I KNOW what it is, because the touched photo has the same name as the original.
Anyways, a good CMS should allow batch uploading, gallery permissions, subgalleries, exif data, print for free, print for fee, comments, ratings, oh, I could just go on.
Sorry about the late response but we’ve just launched a new flash photo CMS- http://www.readyphotosite.com It has multiple tools and being a photographer myself I tried to implements all the features I could think of and that didn’t cost me a fortune to develop
We have built it an option allowing to password protect the galleries
It’s a very interesting subject I was looking around about more information but you got really what i was looking for in your article so thanks and keep it up you have a great blog .
I’m very interested in CMS and all its related subjects.
I use http://concrete5.org for my photography website (inneroptics.net). the CMS itself is free, it’s got really good support for photos, you can group them into sets, and assign any kind of attributes to them, can easily limit the privileges of who can see what, and it’s easy to set the max sizes for your images. plus the CMS is all edit-in-place, which is really slick.
these aren’t necessary to make a photography site with concrete, but i’ve been selling some of my photography related packages here:
http://inneroptics.net/concrete5/
This cms looks good. http://www.myindustrycms.com.au/65/65/cms-packages/photographer-cms-website.php
Alkaline (http://www.alkalineapp.com/) is a CMS for photographers. It’s new so I haven’t tried it yet, but you can download a free trial.