Notes from my talk at the Twin Cities SMUG on Pro Workflow with SmugMugPro

This is a links list for the talk I gave at the Twin Cities SMUG in August about using Photo Hosting by SmugMugPro to sell photos.

Photo by Josh Hackney

Important caveat: we're going to talk about the tools SmugMug Pro gives you, how you employ those tools is going to be unique to your business model/market.

Full notes about what I spoke on after the break.



Here's the outline I talked from, with some of the key points we went over highlighted.

1. create gallery - do this BEFORE you shoot so that you have the url to give folks AT the event! Be sure to pick a category and nicename that are easy to remember if you're not going to be giving out printed material with the url they can take away.
2. set protection and prices - do this BEFORE you upload images! If you don't then there is a window where your images are not protected or priced.
1. prices without protection is pointless! - if the image can be displayed on the browser, it can be stolen. It's as simple as that. RCP to keep the honest people honest, limit maximum viewing size to keep the online proofs from being able to print at big sizes and turn on watemarking of display sizes to discourage theft.
2. portfolio pricing - safety net, always set one.
1. Do not use the price lists to do temporary things like 10% off specials, use coupons for that instead!
2. avoid image level pricing through the use of smart galleries to control what print sizes are available
3. use multiple gallery tooling to clear pricing across all galleries and consolidate on portfolio pricing.
3. upload
1. proof vs final  - that wiki page talkes about this in great detail.
2. res & quality - samples - we talked about this a little bit, but not as much as I wanted since this is when the live demo stuttered on us. The key things here is to decide how to build your workflow, if you have a large volume of images to work with, you might be better off uploading smaller squished images and turning on proof delay. The caveat here is digital downloads... if you're using them there is no proof delay, but you can contact the customers and tell them to re-download the images if you've used proof delay to improve and replace them.
3. several uploaders to choose from, find the one that works for your workflow (or two, a backup is always handy!)
1. lightroom plugin - sync services
2. aperture plugin
3. web
1. old faithful - works EVERYWHERE.
2. drag n drop
3. html 5 beta - dgrin - the new hawtness
4. MacDaddy - native mac application from SmugMug
5. S*E - native 3rd party Windows application from trusted partner
4. customer buys
5. proof delay
1. replace image - do not recrop the image!! keep the original aspect ratio or else you break customers that ordered more than one aspect ratio or crop from the same image.
2. fix crop - just in case they trimmed grandma-s forehead off, but if it looks intentional, maybe call or email the customer... can always upsell some photoshop work to airbrush out the despised family member.
6. profit - we didn't get into this very far due to time, but lots of data available in the sales history and the associated spreadsheets that you can slice/dice to get insights into your sales.