Here’s a quick example of the Photoswipe Gallery included with The Turning Gate’s new Theme for WordPress Lightroom web gallery plug-in. Click on any of the images below (after the jump) to see it in action.
All of the TTG Plug-ins are amazing, and if you want an easy to manage, slicker than slick looking web site with galleries (or just galleries, for that matter), then do yourself a favor and visit The Turning Gate to check out all that’s available.
I am a photographer currently selling pictures of local high school sports teams on my web site. I am using SmugMug for my hosting/ecommerce/web building. Much of what they offer I like, but there are also some disadvantages. It’s nice to have them take care of order fulfillment, collecting the money and mailing the finished photos. All I have to do is upload the photos from a LR plug-in and make sure my pricing and settings are how I want them. On the downside they are expensive ($150 annual subscription plus 15% of profits after cost of product). Also the capabilities of their web site building are very limited, e.g. every page must be set up as a gallery.
I have used WordPress.com (but not .org) to build web sites and find that better, but not as good for posting anything much larger than small to medium photo galleries. In looking for alternatives, I ran across TTG, but am a little confused about what it offers. It seems like it is web building engine from within LR, but also a way to generate galleries to use on existing web sites. And then there is a WordPress theme, which would seem to infer that you need a WP site. Sorry to be so long winded, but can you shed any light on my confusion ? What modules would I need from TTG if I went that way and is there an ecommerce componet that can be used ?
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.
TTG offers all of that. You can use one plug-in, TTG Pages, to build your site (you have to have your own site) and other plug-ins (like Highslide Gallery) to create galleries.
The Theme for WordPress plug-in does just what it says: creates a WordPress theme that you upload to your already existing WordPress installation on your website. It assumes a default location of http://www.yoursite.com/blog.
What it does is just (just!) create a WordPress theme to match the site you’ve already created with TTG Pages (though technically you don’t need Pages to use the Theme creator, it’s just that there’s not much of a point in creating your own theme when you don’t have anything to match it.
One of the other products available from TTG is the TTG Cart. I’ve not used it yet but it looks pretty impressive. You can set your own pricing and payment methods, etc. But you have to do the fulfillment part I believe.
TTG Highslide gallery has options to use the TTG cart or to use a service called Fotomoto, which would handle all the fulfillment of orders. You’d need a Fotomoto account first.
If you haven’t done so yet, go over to the TTG site: http://theturninggate.net and look through the documents section. There’s a wiki that covers a bunch of this stuff.
Thank you very much, you have cleared up a lot for me. I did go over to the documents section and read as much as I could read in one sitting and have a better understanding now. Unfortunately, the section on Fotomoto was not posted yet, that is another service I am considering, maybe integrating from WP.
I like the idea of photoswipe but I don’t know if’ I’d “know” to swipe it if I were an average site visitor. I suppose it would be intuitive if you were on a mobile device, but on a PC I’m not sure that I’d think to try to drag it over. Is there a way to integrate clean looking indication that the visitor is supposed to drag photos over?
When the gallery comes up, there are some controls that appear at the bottom so people could us those at first. I suppose you could include some introductory text with the gallery that explains it.
I use the TTg cart (although I don’t have online payment – I invoice my clients for high res files they order) and have found the Cart really good for both my clients and myself.
It looks very professional, it is easy to navigate (haven’t had one client query how to use it) and it stops the problem of clients sending me a filename with a digit or two missing. At the price it is a bargain.