When we shot on film we didn’t have much of a backup strategy. Amateur photographers would get the prints back from the lab, and store the negatives with the prints, the more hardworking of us putting at least some of the prints in albums. We didn’t keep extra copies of the images (except the dupes we’d send to family), and probably didn’t offer much protection beyond some envelopes and a cardboard box.

But now we’re shooting digital we have many more options on how to preserve and protect our valuable files. Here’s my approach, which I use both for client work and for my own projects.

The basic idea is that I never have only one copy of anything, and the multiple copies are in multiple locations. That way I’m protected against drive failure, my own stupidity (deleting files I don’t want to), and physical catastrophe (fire, flood, theft, and the like.

Even though file sizes keep getting bigger, the cost of external storage is so low now – 500GB for $70 or so here in the US – there’s no excuse for not backing up your stuff.

1) Get the image off the card as quickly as possible

In some ways, the most vulnerable time for your images is as soon as you’ve shot them. Memory cards are pretty reliable, but not as dependable as hard drives, and with a very few exceptions, cameras don’t create automatic duplicates of the images on multiple cards. So get them onto a computer as quickly as possible.

2) Backup the images before you do anything else

It’s tempting to start sorting and adjusting the images immediately, but try and get into the habit of creating a backup of the originals before you do anything else.

I use Apple Aperture which has a straightforward backup system using Vaults which makes this easy (I’ll not go into details here, but for those familiar with Aperture, I use managed not referenced Masters, with a number of different libraries for different types of work). However you do it, make sure you’ve got safe copies of your original files.

Even though programs like Aperture and Adobe Lightroom don’t make changes to the original files as you make adjustments, duplicating the originals gives you some peace of mind. This backup should be on a different drive from the first version – having two copies of your images on the same failed drive won’t do you much good.

3) Offsite backup

Keeping your backup drive next to your computer is convenient, but if you’re robbed or the house burns down, then you’ve lost both copies. It can be a pain, but it’s crucial that at least one of your backups is offsite. You could maybe swap drives with a friend for safe keeping.

I keep one of my backup drives in the office, with the other at home (and the main drive containing my libraries travelling with my laptop.)

That way even when I’m working on files and two of the drives are together (at home or at work), there’s always a third in another location.

4) Drobos and RAID arrays

As well as individual hard drives, there are options using mirrored drives, where the same information is automatically written to two drives. Therefore if one drive fails, you can continue working as if it never happened.

A Drobo is an easy to use system that does much the same thing as a traditional RAID 1 array (which can be trickier to use). One of my Vaults is on a Drobo in the office, so the same information is actually stored on four drives (1 main, 1 portable vault, and another vault mirrored on 2 drives on the Drobo).

But you should never have all your information just on a Drobo or RAID 1 array – you’re more protected from disk failure with such a system, but no more protected against someone walking away with the whole device.

5) A note on drives

For photograph and other backups, I’ve used a bunch of drives over the years. And yes, they do fail. The only drives that have failed on me, however, have been ones from LaCie. Maybe that’s just coincidence.

For external portable drives I mainly use ones from Otherworld Computing. For what’s it worth, when I did my Aperture 2 training course the instructor (who also worked with video a lot, so was storing a ridiculous amount of data) recommended Seagate or Hitachi drives, and didn’t have many good things to say about Western Digital.

6) Online options

As physical disk space has become very cheap, so the options for online storage have increased. Services like Dropbox, JungleDisk or Mozy allow you to store your images in the cloud.

Photography-specific services like Smugmug, Photoshelter (or even a Pro Flickr account) offer safe storage with lots of extra useful features such as web-accessible galleries.

Upload time for lots of files will be slow, and your backup is only safe as long as the company stays in business. For these reasons I wouldn’t use it for my only backup, but it’s a handy belt and braces approach.

7) Backing up finished files

This is something I’m not great at. One of the joys of using Aperture or Lightroom is that you don’t have multiple files that represent each photograph in different stages of editing. So there’s no fighting your way through nested folders to look for the original file, the square crop, the black and white, the cross-processed one or the lo-res web version. You can have all these versions, but there’s only ever one file, with sets saved in the program’s database with the settings for all the different versions.

That means the finished files don’t really exist until I export and send them to someone. Often I’ll not even keep those files because I figure I already have them in my (super backed-up) library.

But if every Macintosh computer in the world disappeared overnight, taking every copy of Aperture with it, I’d be in trouble (see where your thoughts can end up when you start thinking about backup options). What I should do is output TIFF or high-res JPG versions of all the files I’ve adjusted.

Burning these to DVD (or dumping them on another hard drive) would ensure that I wouldn’t have to recreate all those adjustments that took me so long.

Conclusion

These are by no means the only way to store your stuff safely, and I’m sure there are other things I could and should be doing. But this is my backup strategy, and it’s one that allows me to sleep at night. Not sure what I should do with all the film prints and negs we still have kicking around, though.

If you’ve any comments or suggestions, feel free to share them below.

Sometimes the younger generation seem to get a handle on all this more quickly

As a photographer, Apple Aperture consultant and web designer for photographers, I spend a lot of time helping other pros.

Recently three episodes have shown me how drastically the photography business is changing, and what range of skills are required to run a successful photography business.

Episode 1 – “WordPress is hard”

I’d just finished a site for a client and had carried out a training session on how to use WordPress to keep the site up to date. The next day I got a call from the flustered photog who had spent the afternoon trying to add one article. ‘This is much harder than I thought it was going to be,’ he explained.

I have some sympathy – for people who’ve never spent any time around a website before, the admin panel and functionality of a content management system takes a little getting used to. But part of his difficulty was that he lacked even basic web skills such as knowing how to copy a link from the address bar of a browser and paste it in somewhere else. This lack of familiarity with what are for many everyday habits made everything else much harder.

If you run a large studio where you can employ someone to do website updates for you, maybe that’s not such a big deal. But if you’re a single-person operation like so many photographers this lack of comfort with the internet is a big handicap.

Episode 2 – “I don’t want to spend more time in front of the computer”

Another week, another training session for a photography client. This time we were talking through the functionality that Photoshelter offers, and its system of Archives and Galleries. As I explained how to upload images I could see I was losing the guy. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’ve been thinking that maybe I’ll make a change to something completely different. I don’t want to spend any more time in front of a computer.’

It wasn’t just the prospect of uploading images that made him think of a career change – he admitted being ambivalent about the website project as a whole in the face of declining stock income, so I asked him what he thought he’d be doing instead.

‘More teaching, workshops, you know’. This isn’t a bad idea but it too will probably require web skills and a commitment to be an active participant online. In the same way as you won’t escape book-keeping by opening another business, you won’t escape the computer by moving from being a shooter to a teacher.

Episode 3 – “This sort of thing is just not my thing”

Later in the week I got a call from another photographer I’d done a small amount of web work and some Aperture consulting for. The photog’s Aperture library had been on his computer’s hard drive, and he was running out of room. And he didn’t have it backed up. I’d moved the library to an external drive, set up another drive as a backup vault for him and talked him through the pros and cons of off-site and online backup strategies.

But that was a while ago and now he was having some more trouble. Turned out he had unearthed an earlier version of Aperture on his machine I hadn’t know about and had created a new library in the old version of the application and his photos were split across the old new library and the new old library.

‘This sort of thing is just not my thing’, explained the photographer. Again, if he had someone in the office to worry about this, maybe this would be OK, but he doesn’t, so it’s not. Being able to find your work instantly, and being comfortable that it’s securely backed up is crucial, whether it’s your thing or not.

The Architects analogy

My wife is an architect, and when she went to architecture school, they all still drew their sets of plans by hand. But early in her professional career, AutoCAD arrived and even though she’d not learned it in college, she knew she had to jump into this because this was now what architects needed to do.

Some people her age and older jumped with her, but others didn’t. So now they need to pay people to work on their sets for them, and they never learned even how to make changes themselves. They’re at a tremendous disadvantage.

For photographers, people thought that moving from film to digital was the big shift that pro photographers would have to adjust to in their careers – the equivalent of the architects’ move from drawing on paper to AutoCAD. And it was a major change.

But in some ways it was just a different way of doing the same stuff – getting the image from your camera to the client. The market the client and photographer were in hadn’t changed that much, nor had the way the photographer connected with the client.

What you need to know now

But I think the biggest change the pro photographer will face is just becoming apparent now. The market – stock, editorial, commercial, wedding – is changing drastically. Some sectors in decline, like the newspaper business, but they’re all being recreated in unpredictable and exciting ways. Much of the communication, marketing and day to day work across all markets is now online – which requires a new set of skills.

Running a photography business has always been about a lot more than being a good photographer – and all the clients I’ve mentioned here are way better photographers than I’ll ever be – but now the list of skills required is different.

Here’s a partial list the biggest gaps I see in my completely unscientific experience of working with a range of photographers over the last few years:

• solid grasp of digital workflow, including captioning and keywording, backup strategies and the pros and cons of different file formats and sizes
• knowledge of monitor calibration issues and color profiles
• moderate internet skills (everything from using search engines effectively to email and discussion board etiquette)
• ability to update your own website with text and images (including an ability to write clearly)
• moderate social media skills (you don’t have to be tweeting ten times a day, but you should be able to asses which social media platforms could help you and how you could start using them)
• a good grasp of how your particular markets are changing, and how you can adjust

Dane Sanders, in his valuable book Fast Track Photographer, describes a Grumpiness scale, which outlines how likely a pro is to look at a list like the one above and complain that ‘It wasn’t like that in my day. All these kids coming in, stealing our work. Why can’t I just take pictures.’ (or words to that effect). I think that attitude is obviously a problem, but I think the bigger problem is skills gap among some photographers.

To their credit, the first two photgraphers I’ve talked about here manfully got over their initial discomfort with WordPress and Photoshelter and have been making changes to their sites themselves. And the good news is that there are plenty of resources available for people like them who want to learn some of the other required skills.

But if you’re an established pro or a newcomer to the industry and you don’t at least make an effort with this stuff, you’re going to struggle.

We were up at Embudo Station the weekend before last, savouring the good weather and autumnal scenery.

Being down by the river is also a pleasure in largely dry New Mexico, but being there when the leaves were golden was an added pleasure.

The place has recently changed hands, but the food in the restaurant was good, and the coffee shop a welcome addition since I was there last.

Definitely worth a stop if you’re on your way from Santa Fe to Taos.

I’m delighted to announce the launch of our latest website – it’s for Jeff Henig, an American travel photographer based in Japan, who specializes in shooting cultural and religious festivals across Asia. You can check it out at www.jeffhenig.com.

The challenge

When Jeff first contacted me, he had a blog in one location, a Flash-based portfolio online somewhere else, and a Photoshelter site for his stock archive. He was doing a good job keeping them all up to date, but each had a different look and feel, and navigating between them was confusing for visitors.

He was looking to integrate all three parts of his web presence under one design and navigation system to present a more polished and professional image, and make things easier for potential stock buyers or photo editors. As he says,

“I wanted to create seamless navigation and a consistent look between my Photoshleter site, my Blog and also explore ideas on a better Portfolio page.  I was looking for a web designer who could fix what was wrong with my current site.  The navigation wasn’t right and it wasn’t interactive enough for me.  When I saw David’s personal web site a light bulb went off.  I knew he could help. “

His design brief was wisely to go big with his bold images, and also to include a more involving way of showing his Portfolio than just thumbnails.

He also wanted to be able to update his blog, portfolio and archive as easily as possible.

Another potential issue was that he was in Tokyo, and I was in Santa Fe, New Mexico, so we needed a good plan if we were going to work together.

The solution

The plan we came up with used several elements:

• WordPress for the site homepage, blog and About sections
• Photoshelter for the searchable archive
• Evrium’s Fluid Galleries for the Portfolio section

Each had to be brought together under a single design and consistent navigation, to present the best experience for the user.

We loosely based the design on a Photoshelter theme, but customized it drastically, creating a custom banner (that shows a different image each time a new page loads), changing the background colors and adding a shadow box around the main content area.

We also adjusted the typography size and colors to match his logo.

The WordPress side of the site offers 3 main page templates – a homepage that shows a large main image, some introductory text and the titles of the latest blog entries (updated automatically). The About section features a 2-column design, making it easy for Jeff to add more pages to this section if he needs to, as the sublevel navigation adjusts on the fly.

Jeff wanted the blog’s content area to be as wide as possible, as he would be posting lots of photographs. We designed it so he could include photos up to 870 pixels wide, placing a utility area at the bottom of the page to give access to monthly and category archives.

With a few tweaks to the CSS, the Photoshelter galleries fitted in seamlessly for the Gallery/Stock section. You can browse the collections and galleries, as well as search for particular topics while the layout and navigation is exactly the same as the rest of the site. Unless you were paying attention to the address  bar, you’d never know you were actually on the Photoshelter site.

Incorporating Fluid Galleries

Choosing Fluid Galleries for the Portfolio section gave Jeff the flash he was looking for in this section (pun intended), while also making it easy for him to update the galleries.

The system instals on your own server and gives you an admin panel to create and update galleries (and choose some navigation and design options). The galleries themselves are then output to Flash, creating a smooth scrolling look.

The problem is that out of the box, there was no easy to link the portfolio section with the rest of the site. We could pop it up in a new window, but we didn’t like that idea, so I took a look at the code Fluid Galleries produces, and worked out how we could embed a logo and navigation bar above the Flash area to integrate it better into the rest of the site.

Now when you’re done with the Portfolio you can easily get to any other section without having to close windows or go via the homepage. I’ve seen a lot of Fluid Galleries portfolios, but not one that works so cleanly with the rest of the photographer’s site.

Long Distance Relationship?

Oh, and the working with someone in Tokyo bit? No problem. A few Skype calls pinned down the requirements and the plan (although talking to someone in the evening for me while it was lunchtime tomorrow for him took some getting used to).

For sending files and comments and questions back and forth we used the superb Basecamp system. I use it with my local clients too, as it keeps everything project-related in one place, but it’s even more valuable when someone’s across the world.

Result

Jeff’s new site brings all the elements together, makes it easy for him to blog, adjust his portfolio or update his Photoshelter archive. And it’s a custom design that creates the impression he wants across all his web content.

Jeff’s summary of things:

“I was very pleased with the redesign of my web site.  The end result was a fresh, clean and professional looking web site. David was very professional and a pleasure to work with.  I’d highly recommend him and would use him again for further design tweaks.”

Visit the site: www.jeffhenig.com

• Drop me a line or give me a call  (+1 505 577-8990) if you’d like a chat about what I could do for your photography website.

Alan was looking for a site to showcase his great work, his workshops and his tech-related blog. He explains, ” I had very little ability to make updates and changes to my old site, and besides needing a new look, I desperately needed a site that I could manage almost entirely by myself, with no working knowledge of code and HTML, and no special, expensive software.”

Enter WordPress and Photoshelter. We chose the Crisp Photoshelter theme as the basis for the design, but tweaked a number of elements to create the templates that would work across both the text (WordPress-driven) and image-heavy (Photoshelter-driven) parts of the site.

First up was adjusting the navigation to include all the sections that Alan wanted – Workshops, Shop and Blog, as well as the usual About and Contact info.Then we darkened the overall background (which meant changing the shadow around the main content area), added a grey background to the thumbnails and single image display, and created a dark border to set off the gorgeous black and white images. Subtle tweaks, but ones I think work well.

Alan’s Portfolio is set up as one Collection, so he can continue to add as many galleries to it as he needs to. The searchable Archive is another Collection.

The Blog is set up as a WordPress blog, with the other sections of the site created as WordPress pages. So Alan can easily update both the text and images, while the whole site looks like one clean, consistent whole.

And he’s happy with the result: “David Moore listened to and heard my website needs, was responsive to my questions, and was all-around a complete pleasure to work with.”

Alan’s site: www.alanrossphotography.com.

Especially when there are services like LiveBooks, APhotoFolio, and software like Evrium’s Fluid Gallery to help. There are even plug-ins for WordPress that promise to knock out a gallery site in no time. And sites like Photoshelter or Smugmug will even handle print sales for you.

The problem is, as Juan Pons so accurately pointed out in his good post recently, that none of the options right now offer all the functionality photographers need to display, market, manage and sell their images effectively. Especially in an arena where search engine optimization and social media are so important.

I’m going to look at the current state of play with Photoshelter, as it’s the service I’m most familiar with, and which seems to me to offer the best framework for building a fully comprehensive photographer’s site. I’ll also make suggestions for how it could improve further.

Whoops, you’ve forgotten the text

A lot of photographers’ sites have some portfolio galleries, a biography, and a contact page. Indeed, many of the off-the-shelf services offer a site structure exactly like this.

Which is fine, but it severely limits your opportunity to add more text pages.

So many photographers have to add a gerry-built link to their blog, which is hosted somewhere else and crucially has different navigation and look and feel from the rest of their site. It never works that well, creating a disjointed experience for the visitor, and giving the photographer extra admin panels to negotiate.

As far as I know there’s no good photo-focused system that handles blogs very well. Photoshelter, like other services, lets you add a link in the navigation of their predesigned themes, but it doesn’t integrate it fully into the site or help you get the same look and feel.

So blogs matter and the combination WordPress/Photoshelter sites I build incorporate them solidly into the basic site. But WordPress also lets you add as many text pages as you like that aren’t part of your blog. This can be a list of magazines you’ve been published in, information on workshops you offer, your favourite recipes . . . anything you like.

A brand new site I’m just finishing for a client, Charles Mann, shows this perfectly. Charles is a Santa Fe-based photographer who does a lot of garden photography. He also writes articles and gives talks. So we used a blog for his News section, but he also wanted a section for his Articles. Enter WordPress Pages – each article gets its own page, making it easy for Charles to update the articles himself. And of course we’re incorporated slideshows from his Photoshelter galleries into the articles.

(Currently only the Portfolio part of his site is driven by Photoshelter, but as Charles uploads more galleries into collections, it’ll be no bother to add an Archive section to the main navigation.)

Portfolio sections aren’t Archives

It’s Photoshelter’s manual customization options that have let me bolt on the WordPress features in these sites, but the current templating system does have some limitations.

Some of these are small but annoying – like not being able to add links to gallery or photography descriptions. So when Charles has a whole collection of Japanese images, he won’t easily be able to link to it from images in the garden gallery of his portfolio. I don’t want to use the F word, but Flickr lets you add links in photo descriptions (and comments – another area where PS is lacking).

Some drawbacks are more major. A key one is that you can currently only create one set of templates for gallery and image displays. This means (as you can see from my site) that your portfolio has to look exactly the same as your archive, even though they serve different functions.

It’s not the organization that’s the problem – you can slice and dice your galleries, featured galleries, sub-featured galleries and collections to your heart’s content – it’s that everything has to look the same.

I understand and agree with the arguments that everything should be a clean and fast-loading as possible, and that potential visitors just want to see the images, but i still think those visitors might want the thumbnails in the Portfolio section to be larger than those in the deeper archive, for example. Currently you can’t do that with Photoshelter.

So being able to create and assign different template designs to different galleries or collections would be great.

Asset Management and Social Media

Juan nailed a lot of these requirements,, so I’m not going to go into them in detail, but there are a couple of gaps here for the photographer looking to have a clean workflow that goes from memory card, through your site and on to social media destinations.

I’d like to be able to upload an image once, and choose to post it to my site, to Flickr, to Twitter and other places without having to resize and re-upload to various places. And to easily post images into my blog, again without resizing or duplication of effort. Currently I’m in the bizarre situation of running my half site using Photoshelter, but I’m uploading images to Flickr so I can embed them into my blog in the way that I’d like.

This is the sort of thing that makes it hard for jobbing photographers to get a handle on using the web quickly and easily. You either have to be inordinately web-savvy, or have a staff to help you with this sort of thing (or both, like Chase Jarvis).

So upload once, use everywhere (and track it).

We don’t want much, just everything

Because Photoshelter make so much of the heavy lifting easy – uploading from Aperture or Lightroom, organizing, selling rights and prints, offering private and semi-private access, and customizable templates – it’s easier to think of adding some missing features to their product than to think about starting from scratch.

But this list would really help:

• allow linking in gallery and image descriptions
• full-featured CMS for blogging and adding extra text pages
• customizable navigation bar to add those custom pages/blogs you’ve created
• support for multiple templates for galleries and images so you can have a portfolio that’s different from your archive
• options for uploading images from your PS account to Flickr, Twitter, Facebook . . .
• video upload and display capabilities (for all the folks with their new 5D Mk2s)

It doesn’t seem an impossible list by any means, and most of these elements are available already in one place or other.

Also, I’m no programmer but I know my way around WordPress, and if I can hack things together to create some of this functionality, then I’m sure the smart people at Photoshelter can do it. Hell, they’re probably already working on all of this and more.

But for right now, this seems like the new features that would offer the most to the largest number of people.

It’s in the Marketing/Promo category on their examples page.

When I’m not taking pictures, I’m a web designer, and I adapted one of their templates and integrated it with WordPress to make it easy to update the photo and text sides of the site, while giving it all a consistent look and feel (more details on how I did it in my earlier blog post).

Photoshelter has 40,000 photographers using the service, and they chose around 25 sites as examples, so it’s quite an honour.I’m currently working on sites for three other photographers which will follow this approach (with different look and feels that match the individual photographers, of course).

Built for work, not just show

It’s a combination that works well, creating a site that’s easy to update, attractive, and crucially built for work not just for show. The stock licensing and photo printing features that Photoshelter offer mean your site can actually generate income for you, as well as acting as a promotional tool.

So thanks to Photoshelter for the kudos, and if you’re a photographer interested in how this might work for you, get in touch.

The problem is that photographers’ sites often need to combine both excellent photo handling and display, and also good handling of text-based pages.

Some photographers’ site solutions (especially Flash-based ones such as Evrium) don’t let you have more than the most basic amount of information about you – say 1 page of a bio, and 1 page of contact information.

But photographers might want to have a blog, details on the type of work they do, articles they’ve written . . . all kinds of stuff. This helps them differentiate themselves and do well in search engine listings.

But they also want great galleries, slideshows and if possible, the ability to sell prints or license their work right away.Here’s where the combination of Photoshelter and WordPress is a real winner – Photoshelter handles the images side brilliantly – from slick portfolios to full-on searchable and buyable archives – but it doesn’t do the text stuff so well – we’re back to the one About Page and a Contact form.

But a blogging tool like WordPress handles as much text-based content as you could throw at it. So it’s as easy to update the blog or other pages as it is to update the images. And with Photoshelter’s customization options, that’s what you can do.

Here’s my experience of the process, based on the work I’ve done on my own site (this one): http:/www.clearingthevision.com/ . It’s still a work in progress, but I’ll outline how I did it, in case it’ll help other people.

I should repeat here that I’m a web developer by trade, so while this wasn’t a fiendishly difficult project for me, I’ve spent years creating custom WordPress-powered sites and generally messing with CSS and HTML, so YMMV.

1) Basic Approach

I had a WordPress installation on my own server (at www.mysite.com), and used the CNAME functionality to rename my Standard Photoshelter account (you’ll need a Standard or Pro account to give the customization features) to archive.mysite.com.

I then also chose all the settings and layout options I wanted using the admin panels for the Photoshelter theme I was going to base the site on (Induro – the lighter background option). This meant that when I need to mess with the templates, the layout and setting were at least what I wanted for the gallery and other photo-related options.

Then I tweaked one of the Photoshelter Themes (Induro) to be the basic template for both the WordPress and Photoshelter sides of the site. I adjusted the header code on the Photoshelter so the navigation options were consistent across both sides.

2) Handling style sheets

Skinning WordPress to look like the Photoshelter theme and working out where the the style sheets should reside are the two big issues. I copied the source of the pages and the css files from Photoshelter side and used them as the basis for my WordPress design.

I built 2 sample pages locally in Dreamweaver – the site’s homepage, and a basic 2-column subpage design that would work for the blog and the more static pages.

Then I backed those designs into my WordPress install – essentially slicing the header, footer and sidebar up into different .php files, and creating unique templates for the homepage, basic text page, single blog post page, and the first page in the blog section.

When I was done, my new style sheet (containing all the photoshelter code, plus some extra styles just for WordPress) resided in my WordPress install.

It would be great if the only thing you had to change on the Photoshelter side were the main navigation options (and uploading your own logo). However, the Induro theme I liked didn’t have room for all the navigation options I wanted – it butted them up against the logo. (The theme also uses unnecessary tables, which is pretty old-school – it would easily be possible to rewrite the HTML using just CSS for almost all the layout)

So I had to redesign that a little, which meant I had to use the updated styles in my WordPress install for the Photoshelter pages too. This also meant copying the page background image (in my case, the gray to white gradient) over to the images folder on my site.

I also had to copy some of the other smaller images over – ones for Next and Previous arrows, for example.

3) Result

I now have a consistent look and feel for my whole site. Static pages (like the About information) are run as Pages in WordPress, so I can assign parents and sibling relationships if I want more than one page in a section (like the About section, where I have a subpage for my gear). The blog is a straight WordPress blog under the hood, so keeping that updated is very straightforward.

The site homepage is a Page in WordPress with its own template, with the Photoshelter slideshow and the most recent blog posts displayed (and some less frequently-changed information). This means I can update that slideshow very quickly in Photoshelter, and the changes will be reflected on my site homepage, and the names of any new blog posts will be shown here too, keeping the front page fresh.

4) Suggestions for Photoshelter

In addition to removing as many tables as possible from the Photoshelter themes, it would a great help to customizers like myself if the themes had a navigation bar that could run the full width of the page by default (some of them may – I didn’t check all of them before I started).

Since you’re likely to be adding new links (in my case, to my blog, a home link, a contact page and a page on my Aperture consulting), the room to run more nav options across an existing design would mean minimal adjustments to the Photoshelter side of the house.

Copyright issues - I took the Induro template wholesale, and applied it to my WordPress blog, making some adjustments along the way. I’m not technically sure this is what the Photoshelter folks had in mind with their templates, but it’s easier to make the rest of your site look like a PS template than it is to make the PS side of things look like the rest of your site. I hope they’re fine with it, but a note in the customization help to let us know if that’s OK might put some minds at rest.

5) Conclusions

You need to be pretty comfortable messing around with the inside of WordPress templates, but it took me perhaps around six hours to do the first major work involved in merging my Photoshelter site with my WordPress site.

(I already had a custom WordPress install that was set up the way I wanted it – if you were starting from a default template, or wanted to make more substantial changes to the PS themes, it could easily take as long again or more).

Even though I’m not completely finished yet, I’m really happy with the result. It’s scalable, so I can keep adding photographs and blog postings to my heart’s content and the twin systems should cope.

Drop me a line if you have any questions, if you’re planning something similar and I’ll try to help you out.

Of course, if you’d like me to do the heavy lifting for you with a project like this, I’d also be happy to talk to you.