Overview

A gallery is a group of images that are used for displaying and/or delivering images. Created from images contained within one or more archive folders, galleries are typically the next step for photographers after images have been uploaded. Whereas your archive, the landing and storage location for all uploaded images, is inherently unpublished and accessible only by you, galleries are either displayed on your public PhotoShelter site or used to deliver images to a particular party.

While you are theoretically "copying" an image from your archive when you add it to a gallery — in that the uploaded image remains in your archive and is not moved from the archive folder — you are not using up additional space in your archive by creating galleries, as you're not truly creating multiple copies of this image. You may create an unlimited number of galleries with no storage implications.

A gallery may have one of four levels of visibility: public, password-protected, invite-only, or unpublished. By default, public and password-protected galleries are listed on your public site, but you may opt to "un-list" any gallery.

You may send gallery invites, assign download and security permissions to individual users, or allow for anonymous hi-res downloading from a password-protected gallery. Read on for details!

Contents

Creating a Gallery

You can create a gallery in two ways:

1. From the Galleries page, click "Add Gallery," and enter the name of the gallery you'd like to create. The gallery will be empty upon creation; you must return to the archive to copy images into it.
2. From the Archive Browser , you may select one or more images and click "Publish to Web Gallery!". This will bring up a dialog where you may create a gallery, add images to it, price images, define its visibility, and assign image searchability and permissions — all in one step!

This "Publish to Web Gallery!" button may also be used to add images to an existing gallery.

A quick tour of this dialog:

• Gallery Name: Enter the name of a new or existing gallery, or click "Browse" to choose an existing gallery name. If you've created an Album Description for this archive folder, check the box to carry the Album Description over by default. More on naming galleries.
• Image Pricing: If you want to make the selected image(s) available for online sale, you may assign a pricing profile here by checking the box of the sale type (prints, packages, personal use, rights-managed, or royalty-free) that you want to enable. Once you've checked the box, you may choose from the available pricing profiles in this category. If you have not created any pricing profiles, you'll see a link to where you may get started with this. More on pricing.
• Make Searchable: To make your images globally searchable to the public (outside of the gallery, within which they're always searchable), check this box. More on search.
• Gallery Visibility: Set or change the gallery visibility by checking the appropriate box. More on visibility.

Shortcut: If you want to copy all images in an archive folder to a gallery, click "Publish to Web Gallery!" without selecting any images, the "create" prompt will appear and all images in the folder will be auto-selected.

Gallery Naming Tips & Guidelines

When using the "Publish to Web Gallery" function in your Archive, either type a new gallery name or the name of an existing gallery. Our auto-complete technology will fill in the remainder of gallery names, so often you'll just have to type a few characters before the full name will populate. You may also click the "Browse" button to see a drop-down list of all of your galleries.

If you've created a gallery before, the last gallery you copied images into will appear right under the field. To copy your selected images to this gallery, click on the "Last Gallery" name, and the name of this gallery will auto-populate the gallery name field.

You may not create more than one gallery with the same name.

Gallery Visibility

A gallery has four different states of visibility, which may be changed from the gallery thumbnails page, the gallery list, or when copying images to a gallery from the archive.

The four states are as follows:

• Public: Listed on your public PhotoShelter site. Anyone who clicks the gallery may see the images within it.
• Password-Protected: Listed on your public PhotoShelter site, but when clicking on the gallery name, the visitor will be required to enter a password (that you've defined and shared with the visitor) to view the images within.
• Invite-Only: Not listed on your public PhotoShelter site. The only way a recipient can view this gallery is through an invite you've sent through PhotoShelter. The invitee will have to log into a free PhotoShelter client account to view the images.
• Unpublished: No one but you can see this gallery. Not accessible outside of the Photographer Area.

Read more about gallery visibility.

Sorting/Sequencing Images

The sort order you set in your gallery defines the sequence in which your images will be viewed by your clients. You may sort by the following criteria:

• File Name
• Image Date Added
• Gallery Date Added
• Custom Order

More details on sequencing your images for display.

Gallery Captions

Because the images in a gallery are "copies" of images in your archive, you may create custom captions for these images that are different from the caption stored in the image's IPTC metadata.

What does the customer see?

When you set the visibility of a gallery to public or password, a link will appear in the upper left corner of the screen. Click on it to see the public-facing view of the gallery.

The input boxes next to the links contain the respective URL, which you can cut and paste into an e-mail.

How do I change the display order of a Gallery?

This is potentially useful if you'd like to customize the captions for a particular audience. For example, a caption on a floral image you're sending to a textbook will most likely have a much greater level of detail than a caption you'd use on an image contained in a fine art prints catalog.

You may create/edit gallery captions in batch (from the "Edit Caption" item under the "Batch Actions" menu), or you may edit them individually by entering a gallery, double-clicking on an image to enlarge it, and changing the content in the "Image caption" section under the "General Info" tab.

By default, when a gallery is created we copy over the caption that is stored within an image's metadata, which you may have set in Photoshop or another application or from the Archive area of your PhotoShelter account. However, once an image is in a gallery, any further caption changes made to this image outside of the gallery environment will not propagate through to the caption of the image within that gallery. (For example, if you copy 12 images to a gallery and then change the captions of these 12 images within the archive, the gallery captions will not reflect the more recent changes.)

Setting a Gallery Cover Image

The Gallery Cover Image is used to represent a gallery for public display: The cover image is what's displayed in the public Gallery List or as the top image for a Featured Gallery.

By default, we use the first image in the gallery as the cover image, but you may set any image from the gallery as the cover image without changing its position within the gallery image sequence by using this feature.

To set the cover image for a gallery:

1. Select the desired image from the gallery thumbnails
2. Click "SET COVER IMAGE" under the Batch Actions menu, which appears on the left-hand side of any gallery page (when viewed from the Photographer Area).

Alternatively, if you're viewing images from the gallery one by one, you may click the "SET AS COVER IMAGE" button above the enlarged image.

Batch Actions Overview

The left hand side of every gallery page within the Photographer Area displays a menu of batch actions that can be applied to one or more images within a given gallery.

Available batch actions are as follows:

• Copy to Lightbox: Allows images to be copied from the gallery to an existing or new lightbox.
• Publish to Web Gallery: Copy images from this gallery to another new or existing gallery.
• Remove Images from Gallery: Remove one or more images from a gallery. This does not delete the images from your archive, but any gallery-specific captions associated with these images will be permanently deleted.
• Edit Caption: This will edit your gallery-specific captions in batch. This will not affect any captions stored in the metadata of the images in this gallery. More on gallery-specific captions.
• Price for Sale: Assign pricing profiles to one or more images in this gallery. This will override any previous pricing profiles any selected images may have had.
• Make Publicly Searchable: Make one or more selected images publicly searchable (or designate them as un-searchable).
• Copy to PhotoShelter MU: If you have privileges to copy images to a PhotoShelter Multi-User account, you may use this function to contribute one or more selected images to a given MU organization.
• Delete Gallery: See below.

Inviting People to View a Gallery

You may initiate invites to your gallery from two places: the "Invites" button from your Gallery List or from the "Invite People" link at the top left-hand corner of the gallery display page within the Photographer Area.

When initiating a gallery invite, you may assign hi-res download permission, set an expiration date for viewing the gallery, and write a custom message.

Read more on gallery invites.

Allowing Hi-Res Downloads from a Gallery

One of the premium uses for a gallery is to allow individuals or privileged groups to allow hi-res downloads of a group of images. Download access to gallery images may be assigned in one of two ways:

1. Gallery invite. If download permission is assigned through a gallery invite, your invitees must log into their free PhotoShelter client accounts before they'll be able to download. Even if the gallery is viewable without login (e.g. a public or password-protected gallery), download access does require login to validate the invitee's permission to download.
2. A password-protected gallery. When a gallery's visibility is password-protected, you have the option to add anonymous hi-res download permission to anyone with the password to the gallery. This means that your clients don't have to log in to download — they'll just need to enter a password (that you set and send to them), and they'll be able to download any image in the gallery.

For more all-encompassing hi-res download permissions on a per-user basis, check out our Trusted Client feature that allows you to tag power users with full download access to any of your published work.

More on allowing people to download your images.

Exporting Galleries

We offer the following options for exporting your galleries. Please click on any of the following export options to read more on these options:

• FTP
• Facebook/Flickr/Social
• Virtual Agency
• Partner Sites

All of these export mechanisms are found under the "Export Options" menu on the left-hand side of any gallery page when viewed within the Photographer Area.

Two other options are also listed here:

• Gallery Collection
• Batch Download

Clicking on "Gallery Collection" will trigger the option for you to add this gallery to an existing Gallery Collection (a group of galleries that may be displayed on your website or shared with others in "package" form). A Collection is useful when you want to bundle galleries that are related in some way. For example, if you typically shoot basketball, you might want to group individual game galleries together under a "Basketball" collection to send to an editor. More on Gallery Collections.

The "Batch Download" option allows you to download every image from the gallery to your computer. This function uses the standard Batch Download mechanism and will download images in the same sequence in which they appear in your gallery.

Comments and Ratings

You may see the comment or rating by clicking through to the individual image or by clicking on the comment notification itself.

More on gallery comments and ratings.

Searching for a Gallery

If you have lots of galleries and need to quickly locate one, use the "Search Galleries" button from the top of the Gallery List page. You may search by name or part of a name, and any matching results will be returned in a pop-up window, from which you may click through to the gallery of your choice.

Featured Galleries

Galleries that you set as "Featured," which you may do from this interface, will display with preview images on your public PhotoShelter homepage. Make sure to set at least one featured gallery to give your homepage some life!

Read the full tutorial on Featured Galleries.

Deleting a Gallery

You may delete a gallery from either of three places: the "Delete" button from your Gallery List, from the "Delete Gallery" link from the left-hand "Batch Actions" menu of the gallery display page within the Photographer Area, or from the results page of a gallery search.

After you click the "Delete" function, you will be prompted to confirm your deletion. Deleting a gallery will make it inaccessible to any invitees.

Images contained within a gallery are only copies of your archived images, so removal from a gallery or wholesale deletion of a gallery will not delete the images from your PhotoShelter archive. However, any gallery-specific captions you may have created for the images will be permanently deleted.