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I'm in the process of moving my photos from flickr to SmugMug pro. My photos are largely personal, but I have a small handful which have ranked well in searches, and I'd like to sell those on SmugMug.

How should I design my site to primarily serve as my personal photo gallery, but also feature galleries for commercial sales? Can you point me to some good examples of SmugMug customer sites that do this well?

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I don't think we should turn this into a list of example sites that do this well. – dpollitt♦ Jan 25 '12 at 23:44

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I also use unlisted galleries to post work for clients. I can send them a direct link to the gallery and they can see all their images and place orders directly from there. I have publicly listed galleries for fine art images and for portfolio images.

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up vote 6 down vote

I am plagued with this challenge too.

To date, I have opted for the approach mentioned by Mark: private galleries are unlisted, and public galleries shine in all their glory.

I would amend that suggestion with the following:

  • I have put all personal galleries in a specific category; it removes one level from organizational methods (I only have sub-categories & galleries to work with), but keeps everything much cleaner to know what is considered personal and which is public.

  • It was suggested to me that as a working pro, it may be necessary to eventually draw a line in the sand and keep one SmugMug site specifically for public/professional images, and just to pick up a second SmugMug account (likely the 'Basic' or 'Power' user). I like that suggestion, but I'm already two-feet-in to the deep end of organizing via listed (pro) and unlisted (personal) galleries.

  • You might also be able to keep all galleries private and add keywords to your 'sellers' and choose to use a smart gallery to draw all sellers into a publicly listed gallery (or set of galleries).

Good luck with your sales!

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I agree with the suggestions listed here. I actually follow the first one since almost all my private photos are under the "Family" category. Since I am not really a "working pro" I don't need to do a separate account. – Mark Goddard Jan 26 '12 at 4:04
I think the disconnect with using a personal photos category is that SmugMug doesn't currently allow you to make a category unlisted. This would be nice because it wouldn't be shown on your main site but you could point friends and family at an unlisted category. Then within that category they could browse galleries at will. Unlisted galleries don't provide that flexibility and instead require a link to each one. – jsmarble Jan 26 '12 at 19:30
Agreed @jsmarble; really your next best option would be to leverage some fancy customization to hide the category in question from view from visitors. Perhaps this thread has some clues: dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=112556 – Cody Bennett Jan 26 '12 at 20:31
If all of the galleries in a category are unlisted, then the category itself becomes effectively unlisted. I use this to hide most of my personal/family photos. – escouten Jan 28 '12 at 20:22
up vote 3 down vote

I do a similar thing by posting my private photos to unlisted galleries and then using sharegroups to expose them to family and friends. Photos intended for public viewing and sale are in publicly visible galleries. You can also use price lists to control what images people can purchase.

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I think share groups are a reasonable solution but doesn't that require the extra step of adding each new gallery to the share group? – Shawn Ferry Jan 27 '12 at 15:30
Unfortunately yes it does. I would love the ability to have a "smart" sharegroup that automatically picks up an entire category or a simple way to add a gallery to a sharegroup when creating it. – Mark Goddard Jan 27 '12 at 17:23
Do you also password-protect your sharegroup and/or the individual galleries? I like the idea above to also create one broad category and organize private galleries there, but SmugMug does not seem to provide a mechanism to password-protect at the category-level. – webby Feb 20 '12 at 7:54

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