Custom Photo Gallery Websites for Professional Photographers

Welcome to the Dynamic Galleries Blog

Welcome to the Dynamic Galleries development blog.

In our continuous effort to improve our photo website system, we’re publishing update infos to keep clients informed and to gather feedback. This blog is also meant as a resource for clients to keep track of latest features and tips to maximize the potential of our gallery software. Please note that all posts will only be written in english.

In order to be notified immediately of the latest updates we encourage clients to join our RSS feed.

Advantages of the Dynamic Galleries Photo Websites

There are quite a few photo gallery website systems available right now. All have different concepts, functionalities, price models (plans) and philosophy. With his article we want to show what are Dynamic Galleries advantages and unique characteristics among the different photo website systems out there.

Our mission is to empower independent photographers with the best technology, used in our professional photo websites (which are developed by photographers for photographers), to market and run their business online. We provide a service, specifically designed for photographers, that allows them to easily, quickly and at a low cost have their own website to display, share and sell their photos. No technical skills such as HTML, CSS, PHP or SQL are needed. Every aspect of the website can be controlled through an easy-to-use content-management-system. The only software you need to setup your website will be the web browser you are reading this article in right now.

When you hire us you are not just another faceless number among a huge list of clients who receive another website product from a prepackaged template system with some adjustments to style, fonts and colors. Instead you will talk directly to the developers and we will build a completely individual project just for you and do all the programming and custom design work, resulting in a unique website that mirrors your own professional vision.

Compared with other photo websites our gallery system works extremley well with search engines. We have built the program from the ground up with search-engine-compatibility as a top priority. Our galleries are not only collections of images, each photo (and product) has its own page with all print ordering options well presented and easy to use for possible clients. All our different gallery styles not only look nice, it is easy and intuitive to navigate through them and find related galleries and photos. Our websites are not designed to be a huge stock photography archive, they are designed for photographers who believe that each individual photo is a work of art and should be presented that way (along with its custom print ordering options). The Dynamic Galleries backend Photo Content-Management-System, or CMS for short, is the powerful database engine under the hood of our photo gallery sites. It is an easy and intuitive interface to maintain all the content of your site easily and fast. And finally, if you need a new feature the software does not have at the moment we can talk and give you a quote for how much each extra feature will cost, if there is an extra cost.

So, without further banter here are the key advantages of the Dynamic Galleries Photo Website System:

very competitive price, no unclear pricing structure with different pricing plans
no long-term contract, no monthly fee or licensing, just a one-time build fee
modules and features are not depending on plans, you will always get the whole range of functions

no commissions taken from your sales
create unlimited products of your choice, with the prices you want
you decide where and how your prints are made (no inflexibilities with external partners)

no html or css knowledge necessary, we do all the programming and design work for your website
we create a unique design for your site, exactly the way you want it, no prepackaged templates
flexibility and responsiveness others can only dream of (you get to interact directly with the developers)
choose a hosting company in your country (for optimal server response times, of course we can help)
use your own domain (no customerXY.dynamicgalleries.com web address)
good use of the latest web technologies, the software behind Dynamic Galleries is built in-house
the code is continously reviewed and improved, including new features and free updates

Feel free to test the Live Demo of the Photo CMS here.
You’ll find a frontend example page by clicking this link and visit one of the photo pages on Dave’s Website.

Photo CMS Screenshot
Screenshot: Photo CMS

Please contact us if you have any questions about how our gallery websites compare to another particular brand of gallery website that you may be considering.

Improved News Article Image Insertion

With Dynamic Galleries latest version 3.7.7 we updated the integrated web text editor for all the content pages, descriptions and of course article text input fields with some nice subtle features like a words counter, table creation, anchor dialog, find/replace, paste from word functionality and last but not least the new option to insert photos from the server only with a few clicks.

Photographers and other visual artists can use text content like “behind the image” reviews to describe the creation process behind their artwork and therefore to market Fine-Art photos or any other prints of a visual artwork. While writing those image supplementary texts and other content like trip reports, equipment reviews, new techniques or any other thoughts to supplement your photo and gallery website pages you might want to add some of your images. With this update we made this process even easier. The new image insert functionality makes it much easier to manage your articles (blog) in conjunction with your gallery website and serves to elegantly integrate those two modules together.

To add an image to a new or existing article just click on the Image button shown in the screenshot above. A new overlay window will “pop-up”. (be sure a possible popupblocker is disabled for the whole site)

Now you can enter an image URL manually (copy the Embed Codes from any Edit Photo Page) or click on the Browse Server button as shown below.

In the next window you can choose from any of your uploaded photos. They will be structured in tabs, 200 each and ordered by uploading date, so the latest additions show up first.

Just click on the desired image and it will be added. You can now additionally adjust width, height, alignment etc. of the image in the dialog box or finish right away with a click on the blue OK button to add the image to your article.

That’s it.

Note*: If you want to add lots of photos for a trip report for example there is another handy feature available which is explained here.

Note**: Of course you can still add images completely manually by navigating to a specific Edit Photo Page, copy one of the available Embed Codes and paste it in your article. Note that the article text editor must be in “Source” mode, not “Visual” mode, for this to work properly. You can see the Source button at the top right of the text editor panel.

The Photo Wizard

In addition to our normal Photo add/edit modules we developed the new Dynamic Galleries Photo Wizard module for all our customized photo websites. You can now easily add or edit a whole bunch of photos at once. You just have to navigate to the module, select a gallery and therein all the photos you want to edit. In this form you are able to alter all the desired information or settings of a photo all at once and hit the update button at the bottom of the form.

Photo Wizard Screenshot Screenshot: Photo Wizard

The Photo Wizard helps you editing specific information for a lot of photos at once. For example if you want to add (or remove) a new product to a gallery you don’t need to add the product to each photo manually.

As you can see in the screenshot above you can edit the photos additional galleries, location, keywords, rss feed and news stream visibility and/or search tags all at once, without having to edit each photo individually.

Most of those dropdown boxes will give you four options. The first is to change nothing and leave this setting/data as it currently is. The second option for example is to add keywords to the existing keywords of the selected photos. With the third option you can replace all keywords of all selected photos with the new ones you provide in the input field below the dropdown box. Another option is to remove only one single keyword (like latest or favorite e.g.) from all the selected photos. The last point gives you the option to delete all keywords from all selected photos.

All these options are roughly similar for most of the photo information you can edit with the wizard. The standard setting for all data is to don’t change anything so you don’t edit or delete a lot of photo information accidently.

This feature will save you a lot of time, especially when editing products, keywords or locations of a whole bunch of photos!

Special Discount & Coupons

Today we want to introduce to you the Special Discount and Coupon modules available for our photo and gallery websites. You can use the Special Discount feature for various purposes like promoting a “Print of the Month”, “Weekly Tour Deal”, “Limited Editions” or whatever image / product you want to offer on your website.

You can choose the Special Discount widget to be displayed at the top or bottom of each content page you create. With this widget you can also promote a product on the websites start page. To enable the feature navigate to Shop -> Special Discount in the Content-Management-System menu bar. There you choose a photo with the Gallery and Photo dropdown boxes, put in a Title like “Print of the Month” for example, the discount you want to offer in percent and finally hit the blue “Update Special Discount” button. The offer can be disabled at any time by clicking the red “Disable Special Discount” button at the bottom of the form. Below you see a screenshot of the Special Discount form. You can also login with the demo account and see it “live” by clicking the following link: www.dynamicgalleries.com/public/demo

Special Discount Form

Once you have activated the feature and created a first offer the widget will show up on all pages on which it is enabled. An example can be seen in the screenshot below. Of course the appearance varies depending on your sites design and stylesheets. The photo will always be shown at the left of the widget while the label will be displayed bold with a ” – ” and the photos / products title next to it also with bold font weight but a slightly smaller font size. The photos / products description is shown with a little vertical distance. At the bottom of the widget a link is automatically generated to lead the potential customer directly to the page of the promoted item. Of course the photo is linked as well. Below you see a screenshow how it will roughly look like.

Special Discount Offer

On the promoted items page the Special Discount label will be displayed – depending on your sites design – below the image at top of the print information box. All prices in the Available Products dropdown box are marked as reduced prices and the discount is automatically deducted from the normal prices.

Autumn Forest Abstract Offer

Next to the Special Discount feature the Dynamic Galleries Photo-Content-Management-System provides a coupon module where you can create and edit an unlimited amount of coupons. Get there by clicking Shop -> Add / Edit Coupon in the menu bar. When adding a new coupon the app automatically generates a random code for you. Of course you can type in any code you want like Christmas Special or Birthday XY. The only limitation is that the string has a max length of 50 signs. This is the code you can communicate in your Blog, Social Media or Email newsletter to the customers. The shopping cart on the frontend website provides a Discount Code input field where the code can be inserted and used by clicking the blue update button. See the screenshot below.

Dynamic Galleries Cart

The Add / Edit Coupon form has a lot of options which we will explain in more detail now. The first major choise you have to make is the mode of the coupon. Mode 1 subtractes the number given in the Amount input field directly from the items price. Mode 2 reduces the items price by the amount specified in the Amount input field as a percentage. For example a coupon in Mode 2 with an amount of 20 will reduce the products price from 50 to 40 while a Mode 1 coupon will reduce the price from 50 to 30.

Edit Coupon Form

Next to the Mode and Amount options you can specify the use and limitations of the coupon. First you can set a Minimun Cart Amount the coupon needs to be redeemable. For example you can set the Minimun Cart Amount to 100 so a customer needs to buy something for at least 100 EUR / USD (of your choosen currency, which you can set at More -> Site Options) to be allowed to use the coupon. You can also limit the use of the coupon to a specific registered user or a specific product like a Photo Tour, Workshop or a special framing option. Last but not least there are some fixed system-coupons available like a Welcome Coupon for new registered users which is named accordingly “registration_coupon”. You can edit all the settings for those coupons so a new registered user gets a 10% discount on the first order for example. If you have any feature requests or questions feel free to leave a comment.

Admin Panel on Frontend Sites

With this blog post we want to introduce to you the practical and easy to use functionalities of the Dynamic Galleries Admin Panel. This panel is designed to give you easy and fast access to the relevant pages in the CMS so you can edit all the data there and then directly go back to the frontend pages. To use the panel you need to be logged in with the Admin role. You can also see and use the panel when using the demo user but you will not be allowed to change any data in the CMS. When logged in you will find the semitransparent panel fixed on top of each page. The panel generates individual “smart links” on each photo, gallery, news article, comment, search and content page of your website.

For example on a photo page the admin panel looks like this:

Admin Panel Screenshot

On each photo page the admin panel provides links to the specific CMS forms to edit the Print Info Text, all Photo Data or the General Site Options.

Edit Photo Form

When you have finished editing the data just click on the Visit Page link and directly go back to the specific Frontend page.

On article, cart, contact, search and other content pages the Admin Panel will generate links to other corresponding CMS forms. For example when browsing through a gallery the panel provides links to add a photo to this gallery or to rearrange the photos sequence of the current gallery. Feel free to log in, try it out and have fun.

Image Search

Today we want to introduce the Dynamic Galleries image search in more detail. First we want to give you some background information on how the image search works technically and then explain how to set it up and use it with our software.

When searching for a specific search term and crawling through images in the database and files on the server our search algorithm considers all the information you have provided when uploading an image. Our app is looking for the search term in the images title, url-name, description, file name and of course among the keywords. Since the algorithm needs some data to work with it is your job to name the photo files properly and add some relevant words/tags at least to the keywords input field. For example an image of a waterfall in Iceland can only be found when those information are attached somewhere to the file name and / or database fields because the software can’t see the image like we humans do.
Bad: “IMG_1234.jpg” Good: “skogafoss_waterfall_iceland.jpg”

If the algorithm finds one or more images they will be displayed on the search result page. The search results are by default ordered by their popularity (unique views), except for the term “latest” where all images tagged with the keywords latest are ordered by their uploading date. Another functionality is that the algorithm recognizes when someone is looking for photos of a specific year. So when a search term is 2012 for example, all photos uploaded in this year will be found automatically. Photos tagged with 2012 will also be in the results. Furthermore several keywords can be combined into one search. You can narrow down the results by separating multiple keywords with a comma. If you only want images of a stream during autumn to be found type in “stream, autumn” for instance. Of course you can exclude certain photos which you don’t want to show up among any search results. Just set the search option to no, dont include in search when uploading or updating a photo.

Let’s dive just a little bit deeper and have a look at another aspect of the Image Search. People might be looking for the same image but use different search terms to find it. Of course you don’t want to tag an image with all possibly relevant keywords. To bypass this we have implemented Search Variations. You can add /edit them in the Search module. If you have some images displaying a little waterfall or cascade one useful search variation is waterfall with its variations falls, stream, cascade, cataract and linn. When you have added and activated the variation like displayed in the screenshot below the algorithm will find images matching one of the terms of the variation pool. Some relevant Search Variations might increase the search success rate and provide more relevant images for a search.

Our image search functionality comes along with a specific page like www.yoursite.com/search and can also be accessed easily at the bottom of nearly all pages of our frontend sites. You can use this search page to offer an alternative method of presenting and accessing your photos via search suggestions and/or the search tag cloud.

You are free to edit and design the search page the way you want it to. Just go to Page -> Edit Site Pages and select Seach Page Suggestions like in the screenshot above.

A little introduction text how to use the search form and the input field with the search button are fixed. Everything else is up to you. In the example screenshot below the search suggestions are presented as links within a table but you also might like only to use the cloud tag or images to provide links for specific searches.

To edit the tag cloud go to Search -> Edit Tag Cloud. You will see a form as in the screenshot below where you can add up to 20 search terms. You can alter the size and colour for aech of them separately. When visiting the Search Page the tagcloud will start to rotate-in and all the tags can be accessed while hovering with the mouse over them.

Adding a lot of relevant data (e.g. file names, text) to your images will not only help our site internal search to find the photos possible clients are looking for, it also helps search engines like Google “to see”, index and rank you images. It is all about relevant content.

New Sitemap Feature

IMG_0360-Kopie-BlogCover-2

The new Sitemap Module

With the last release of our gallery software we have implemented another new module named Sitemaps to improve the SEO performance of our websites. You might ask: What is a sitemap and what do I need it for? So in this post we will first explain a little about what a sitemap is and then we’ll explain how to use the new feature with the Dynamic Galleries System.

A sitemap is an XML-structured file with a list of all the pages like photos, galleries, articles etc. of a website. Google and other search engines have automated programs called spiders or bots which periodically crawl through a website to evaluate and index the various pages for their search results. These programms can only index pages and content that they can find through links on your site or from other sites on the web. Here the sitemap comes into play, because it allows the spiders to see all the pages and content of your website, even if some of them are buried deep in your site or not linked at all.

Sidemap Code View

The sitemap will not improve a pages ranking in the search engines results, but it can help to increase the number of your websites pages that are indexed and found in the search engines. Another potential advantage is that the sitemap will list all your photos along with the corresponding title, location, and caption information. This could be beneficial for image search results because it’s telling the spiders the specific information about each image. Depending on the quality of your image descriptions you provide helpful information for the spiders that they normally have a hard time getting themselves since they cannot “see” the photos like we humans do.

So now we want to explain how you can start using this feature in our photo websites. The sitemap feature is set up to function manually. In other words, you have to select to generate the sitemap for the first time and each successive time. You can do this by going to More > Sitemap.

All your visible and not password protected articles, content pages, galleries and photos will be added automatically to your websites sitemap to improve search engine performance and visibility. You can additionally select pages like the NewsStream, Search Page, Guestbook, Contact and Payment Form etc. Now you can generate the sitemap with the Create Sitemap button on the bottom of that form. When you do that the application will automatically compile all your websites pages from the database and will create the sitemap.xml file. It will also link that sitemap.xml file within the robots.txt file so that the search engine spiders know where to find it.

Sitemap Form

The sitemap will not automatically update whenever articles, photos, galleries or pages are added, so you must do this whenever you want to update the sitemap file. We have build it that way because there are situations when you probably do not want to publish a gallery or specific articles and photos directly after submitting or uploading them. For example, you have created a new gallery and then uploaded 10 photos to it via our Add Photo Wizard to create a Trip-Report. You will then probably go back and modify photos titles, locations or other information and you might go back and modify the gallery or the article to add more text and change the formatting. You might not want to publish the new article and make it live until everything is exactly as you want it to. That’s why the sitemap updates have to be triggered manually.

A sitemap will never be detrimental to your search result or page rankings, so you don’t have to worry about updating it all the time. Mainly you’ll just want to update it after you have added an article, a gallery or a big batch of photos.

The Dynamic Galleries websites are already very search engine friendly, and the various galleries, photos and pages are already very easily navigable by search engine spiders. Nevertheless, the sitemap will ensure that all pages get indexed and may prove further beneficial for image indexing as well.

Mobile Photo Navigation

Mobile Photo Navigation

Next to the SEO performance of our gallery websites another very important characteristic is the ease of navigating through the galleries and photos. We design the gallery sites and all elements visually intuitive so they invite your viewers to spend time exploring your photo collections. One part to achieve this is the ease of the simple act of navigating from photo to photo and of course to find related galleries and photos. Under the hood of our websites are some complex features that make this simple act even easier.

Of course you can use the obvious arrow buttons next to the photos to move to the previous or next photo in a gallery or search result. What you also can do is use your keyboard’s left and right arrow keys to do the same! Additionally you can press “d” to enable our darkness functionality to focus even more on the photo.

In order to further increase the usability of browsing through galleries we have just added swiping functionality for mobile devices like iPad and iPhone (and other smartphones too) as well! Mobile device users are used to “swiping” their way around the web with one finger motions. Now they can easily “swipe” left and right directly on the photos to navigate through the galleries.

Individual Payment Page

Individual Payment Page

You might ask why does the DG System need a generic payment page while it offers all the e-commerce functionalities of an online shop like creating fully individual products, coupons, discounts, shipping zones, cart, checkout etc. It comes in handy when you need to receive money from a customer for something that doesn’t have a set price on your website and thus can’t be put into the shopping cart. Most commonly this is useful for image licensing, which almost always involves a variety of pricing numbers depending on the client and the image usage. You can send the customer an invoice along with a link to your generic payment page, making it easier for everyone involved.

The address is at http://www.YOURSITE.COM/payment/

So, for example, Daves is at: http://www.dave-derbis.de/payment/

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