How I deliver my photographs professionally to my clients

I use Photoshelter to present and deliver the majority of my professional photography work.  Photoshelter is

1. a photo archiving solution. It is part of my backup strategy for my images;
2. a service to deliver edited results to my clients –  fast and secure;
3. a tool to create web site for professional photographers. The photographer controls, which shots are publicly visible and which only available via a gallery invite.
4. a tool to sell selected archived photographs to the public with an integrated shopping cart.

One of the important questions my clients ask me after a shoot is: “How will you deliver the photographs to me?” Let me talk you through what happens for you after I packed up my camera to deliver the photos to you.

Once I backed up and edited my images, I upload high resolution copies to Photoshelter into my archives folders. Backing up  images is one of the most important steps in the post processing routine for a professional photographer.

Photoshelter Invitation

From the archives I transfer the images files to a  gallery. Invitation only galleries restrict  access  via a personal invitation. After I sent this invention, you receive an email similar to the screenshot on the left.

Sometimes this email lands in the spam filter and requires whitelisting of @photoshelter.com and checking of the spamfilter.

Follow the link and create your own personal password in the client area of my website (hosted on the Photoshelter server). This is only required for the first time.

Here is the screenshot of the linked page after you created the password..

Gallery screenshot

This gallery page has some interesting features. Just under the gallery title (in this case: Vancouver 2010 personal), you can see a couple of buttons. On the left hand side, you switch to a slideshow of all the photos in the gallery. The slideshow is can be viewed on an iPad or iPhone. Photoshelter just updated this feature.

View Options brings up a window, where you can decide on how many images are displayed per page and if you want to activate the image preview. The image preview shows a larger image when hovering over a photo in the gallery.

Image preview in action:

Image preview in action

The social bookmarking icons only make sense, when you are viewing a public gallery.

Clicking on an image opens a single view of the chosen photograph. You will notice that all images are watermarked.

With the first button, you select into which lightbox you want to copy the image. This can be an existing or a new lightbox. The lightbox is a great tool to sort your images and discuss and rate them. You can share the lightbox with other people, who have access to the gallery.

One feature, that makes my professional work easier is the option to download images in different sizes. Clicking the Download button, initializes the process by opening a popup window and presentation of download options.

The watermark is not included in the downloaded image file. It protects my professional and copyrighted work online.

On the bottom of the page, you can rate and comment the images. I love the clean presentation of the galleries and lightboxes and flawless operation. The archives pages is integrated almost unnoticeable into my main web site.

Using Photoshelter for my image presentation gives me the freedom to deliver images fast and give access to photographs, even if I am traveling. That happened to me a couple of times and I was glad to have that tool at hand.

Comment here, if you have any questions or experience with Photoshelter or similar products.

You can join Photoshelter here with a $30 referral discount.