Online gallery, slideshow and album proofing

[emirpli]

I just published an online proofing solution for photographers and I would love to hear what professionals like you think about it.

Here is a quick description:
Gallery Director Pro is an online gallery, slideshow, shopping cart, album proofing and order tracking system. No monthly fees, no commissions, use any lab you want.

URL: Gallery Director:: online proofing for photographers

Any feedback would be AWESOME.

Thanks!

[Jyeast]

Is Paypal the only check out option? Can you use other credit card merchant options? What other payment options do they have?

John

[emirpli]

Originally Posted by Jyeast

Is Paypal the only check out option? Can you use other credit card merchant options? What other payment options do they have?

John

Even though the payments are processed through PayPal, the client buying photos doesn't have to have a PayPal account. On the PayPal checkout page the client is presented with an option to pay with a PayPal account or use a credit card (Visa, MasterCard, Discover, AMEX etc.)

[DougAxford]

I had a quick look and I think you need to have a better 'features' explanation. I would want to know exactly how I can customize the album & page & cart. We've been using 'ShowIt' and so far reasonably happy but we'll be growing out of it soon. For example: I want to be have the software automatically resize the show to the max size of the users screen. I know this is available elsewhere and it's awesome (I almost never use that word but when I saw it used first, it's the only word for it).

For our sale, we've integrated 'ShowIt' with Breeze and it's workable but not perfect. Personally, I prefer to have a row of images across the top that customers can click and the image selected fills the screen with a cart. Our biggest problem right now is having 21 different products available that can be bought with each image. My phone is going crazy each day because 21 is not nearly enough. I can't see how to achieve this with your product. The pop up would take the whole screen. Any suggestions.

Also, we have had HUGE success with a countdown clock on our galleries. It vividly shows exactly when the gallery expires and we just have to get the code right so that a 'too late - call us' page comes up automatically when it expires. Is that something you can offer?

Paypal has been great for us and I'm beginning to figure out how to modify it as required. We have had a few problems such as one today where the customer's home address was not the same as his confirmed Paypal address. Paypal would not let him checkout but I knew the customer was visiting his family, so it was OK. Apart from our customers not seeing the Mastercard/Visa options as easily as they should be, Paypal has got my business. 3.9% is higher than we pay but well worth it.

Last, I'm not real clear on whether your pricing structure is the same as 'ShowIt'. If it is, that's fair. Some companies are charging that price for single usage. We have nearly a hundred separate galleries in use right now and I assume I only pay for one.

I'd like to hear more but more importantly, see more examples in use and get a demo.

Doug

Added, forgot to mention. I use Firefox but very few of my customers do. It sounded like it may not be optimized for IE. I'd want to check on how many of them have whatever version of Java is needed.

[emirpli]

Doug,
Thanks for the great feedback!

The demo is available at http://demo.gallerydirectorpro.com/

When you find some time (and I know that can be challenging) feel free to log in to the demo, create some galleries or upload a small ShowIt gallery to see how Gallery Director (GD) handles ShowIt.

At this point dimensions of the galleries can be set to whatever you want and GD doesn't resize the galleries to fit the user screen. I'd like to see an application that does that. I would be also interested to see at what dimensions the photos would need to be uploaded so they don't look pixelated when viewed at high resolutions. But like you said, it would be an awesome feature.

21 is a lot of products. I think I know how I could solve that, but I would need to test it first. Sometimes these things work great (in my head) theoretically, but end up being more challenging in practice. I'll need to get back to you on this.

When you say "we just have to get the code right", what code or should I say programming language are you referring to? GD allows you to set number of days the gallery should stay up, and if the client tries to access the gallery after it has expired "Gallery not found" message is displayed. This is a default message and can be changed to whatever you'd like.

PayPal has been great for me as well. There are some small annoyances, but I am sure you can find those annoyances with any payment processor.

GD is priced at $299 one time fee. You can host as many galleries as you want. You don't have to have ShowIt to have slideshows, but if you have it, GD can use it.

So far GD has been tested in FireFox, IE6 and 7 and the latest Safari. I just like FireFox and that's why I promote it on the website.

Again, go the demo is available at http://demo.gallerydirectorpro.com. Also check the User Guide (PDF Download). It's short.

Emir

[DougAxford]

I didn't see the option for creating demos until I looked the second time.

I couldn't get changes in settings to stay when I tried. Maybe I'm doing something wrong.

I'll PM you with link to an 'awesome' site sample.

Doug

[emirpli]

Got your PM. Thanks!

I disabled "Settings" form in the Demo. At first I had the function enabled, but somebody changed the login information and nobody could log in. There should be a message on the settings page that says "This form has been disabled in demo". Enabling some fields and disabling others may look like the program is not working, so I disabled the whole form. I hope this makes sense.

Thanks for checking the demo!

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