Who on G+ Uses PhotoShelter, and Why Did You Choose It Over SmugMug or ZenFolio?

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• "As I work on a blog migration to WordPress to integrate G+ posts"

  i'm curious about this part of what you wrote. why wordpress as opposed to blogger?

• Sorry i m new one on G+.

• mmg

• If you have any questions about integrating a WP blog with PhotoShelter, please let me know. I can point you to many examples where people have done exactly that.

  Also, I am unaware of any other option where you can sell prints, personal-use downloads, and offer fotoQuote-powered rights-managed and royalty-free image licenses all from a single point of sale.

• Thanks +Grover Sanschagrin, there's a nice write-up on +Johan Peijnenburg's blog which should get me most of the way through the process.  That fotoQuote-powered pricing did strike me as a unique and powerful feature.  The SEO advantages of eliminating Flash from galleries is a big plus as well, not to mention the deep portfolio of various types of business advice.  I searched on SmugMug for something similar today, in case I had missed something new, and I ran across an article which essentially said "you're responsible for your own marketing".  Well, of course I am, but collecting and presenting a few best practices will help photographers do their marketing, and even other things being equal (which it seems they are not), I'd rather work with the platform and partner which seems far more engaged in and committed to my success.

  I hope to implement a trial site as time permits in the next 2-4 weeks.  Unfortunately Graph Paper Press doesn't have their free template available at the moment, so I may put off the trial temporarily until I can put all the pieces together.

• Good question +meg dunn.  I've been using Blogger for years, implemented widgets to show friends and customers recent photo posts on Flickr, a link to G+ and Facebook, and so on.  That was great... as far as it went.

  These days people are far more active on sites like G+ so blogs are often getting neglected a bit, but blogs still have an advantage for more complicated posts with multiple images and clean, hyper-linked text.  So when I heard that I could auto-import G+ posts into a blog about a year ago, I was definitely interested... one place I could send everyone to, with a consolidated view of both photo-level posts and more in-depth story-level articles.  I figured that Google would get around to implementing that for their own G+ and Blogger platform.  A year later, I still haven't seen it.  Did Google underestimate the potential G+ might have to reinvigorate the market demand for other Google products?  Perhaps, but after missing the blog-G+ integration boat for a year, I decided not to wait any longer for something which for all I know may never come.

  I'm slowly learning my way around Wordpress.  I couldn't install the necessary widgets on the free version available on Wordpress.org, so I bought a 3 year hosting package on BlueHost, where I can customize features with free widgets and inexpensive templates to my heart's content.  I've imported my Blogger posts, and I tried a G+ post import as well.  It all worked well, but I'm re-installing Blogger in a different directory (long story I'll tell when I get through it and it works the way I want it to).

  Getting access to PhotoShelter's features through templates like the ones made by Graph Paper Press could be a big plus.  There's a lot of potential I'd like to talk about... after I have actually done it.  I'm not fond of the typical "feature list review" type articles which people try to pass off as product reviews, so I try not to talk much about products until I actually use them.  There's no substitute for long term usage of a product to know how it'll work in daily use.

  I'll be tied up a bit during the next couple of weeks with family and the holidays (and probably another trip to Death Valley), but I'll provide updates periodically as I get deeper into the Web site design, blog transition and G+ integration, and photo gallery integration.

• +Jeff Sullivan I am with PhotoDeck   http://clarkcrenshaw.photodeck.com/
  I use Blogger but I believe you can migrate wordpress themes. I have mine designed so the blog is just a part of the web site. I also like the way I can price my images for print sales or licensing. I'm not sure if it uses fotoQuote but is is very much like what you see at Getty.

• Thanks for the explanation, +Jeff Sullivan. I've just started using Blogger again (after having left for Multiply back in 2004), but a friend of mine moved from Multiply to Wordpress. I've used Wordpress.com, but got hit with a lot of spam and gave it up. (I've heard other folks don't have that problem. I don't know what made me so special.) 

  So now I'm curious to know why you'd want to import G+ to your blog rather than the other way around. I'm only asking about stuff like this because I'm always wondering if there's a feature out there that I'd want to use and just don't understand or know about yet. Right now I post to Blogger and then share to G+. Blogger makes it pretty easy to do that. What's the advantage of going the other way around? Do comments get imported as well?

• +Jeff Sullivan I'm on Photoshelter as well. I was on Zenfolio for a couple of years and switched about 6 months ago. I have a separate Wordpress blog I've had for my photography for a few years. My goal this year is to integrate my Photoshelter site with it.

• Good luck with the integration +Jeff Sullivan. If you run into something just let me know. By now I know every Worpress/PhotoShelter trick there is ;)