Photo Shelter Process and Meta Data

After months of trying to learn how to develop a thorough website of my photographic images I discovered a site called PhotoShelter (PS) which allows photographers to archive photos and create a gallery-based website of their work. Because the gallery function was hard to develop using Flash (a program I had never used before) on my original website, I did some research into PS and signed up for a one month account. What I immediately liked about the software was that I was able to create and edit galleries of photos which had the built in functionality of a slideshow/thumbnail view. My website has flash slideshows which I created after taking tons of YouTube tutorials on how to build flash slideshows, but the viewer has no buttons to scroll through images so they need to sit through the entire slideshow (which I know no one would ever do) Here is the general process for working with PS.

1. Organize and catalogue your images clearly and add IPTC and metadata to all of your images in Lightroom, or whichever program you use for RAW Conversion. It is important to ADD THIS DATA TO THE IMAGES THEMSELVES at this stage, because if you do it within a program like PS, Smug mug or Photobucket when you transfer images to another program all this data will be lost. This metadata allows people searching the web to find your specific images. Ie. if you're photo has specific tags associated with it within its metadata then when someone types "Portrait of old man in New Orleans" he/she will have a better chance of linking to your image if it has the tags, Old Man, New Orleans. Which I happen to have a good sample of on my PS site. The more people that click on your image, the higher up you appear within a search engine like Google. Im still in the process of doing this because obviously it is a major process and there is no limit to how detailed your description of an image can be. (more on this later) As of now, none of my files have any metadata, but after attending the PS webinar on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) I realize this is an important part of the process if you ever want to sell any of your work. Click here for a 16 min. vid on SEO from PS. If you can batch tag a bunch of images at once and then go in and add specifics that is good.
2. Import your images to the Archive section of PS. If you have certain albums or themed categories I've found it best to upload groups of images into folders within your archive. You can also upload photos all at once and then group them into folders within PS You will want to upload your largest native file to the archive because PS will save it as CR2 if you upload it like that, and automatically covert it to JPEG when posted to a gallery for viewing. I am still trying to develop an organizational strategy for how to store my images and categorize them into folders and I think it needs to really be thought out. This is one of the questions I always ask professional photographers that I meet. How do you organize your photos?
3. One of the neat features of PS is that now you have your native files backed up on a remote server somewhere so it acts as an extra backup. depending on which plan you get you have more storage room. I think I have the standard account (about $34/month) and I have 35 gigs, not really enough so store all my photos but its a decent starting point for images I actually would want people to see.
4. Once you've uploaded to the archive you can create galleries (either public/private/invitation only/passwords protected,etc) so you can send galleries to clients or friends using any restriction you want.
5. You now have tons of flexibility for how to showcase your galleries and customize your site , which is very user friendly on the PS interface.

There are a million other deatils to consider but the takeaways are:

• You dont need to learn to be a web designer to create a good site of your work. There are alternatives. All have a specific learning curves but there are many options out there.
• Better to learn all this SEO/Metadata/IPTC stuff now, because its easer to add Metadata as you process images rather than going back and adding data to a million photos you already have.
• Reflect on your workflow and consider how developing a pro-active system for photo organization can help you sell images in the future.

As always comments and questions welcome!