WordPress Website PhotoShelter Integration

Update 22 July 2019: By now I have moved all my photographs to purchase online to WordPress. Simply, I was not happy at all with Phottoshelter and their SEO. The reasons:

• Photoshelter indeed does not offer a blog post. You have to open a blog in WordPress or somewhere else. Integrate that into Photoshelter. Which is quite some hassle, as well as, where gets the SEO lost in all that?
• paying monthly or yearly to use their platform. I paid already for my blog hosting in WordPress. So I paid twice.
• Furthermore, they took a commission on my photo sales.
• Their support was not outstanding. In other words, I was often frustrated with quite a few answers.
• Their SEO for the photographs hang far behind beyond… maybe behind Jupiter.
• Telling me to do more social media to get my Photoshelter site found. Hello, my WordPress blog post and pages had more organic search findings and referrals in one day, as any page on Photoshelter in 3-4 weeks.
• And so much more.

At some stage, the BEAM was created in Photoshelter. The emails flew in that the customizable Classic theme I used was not updated anymore. So quite a few photographers out there had the choice, go with the new theme BEAM or jump to a different platform. As it turned out, the BEAM was not quite what I wanted. My friend Peter Delaney (he left as well Photoshelter) was so kind to let me have a look behind the scene of his new theme BEAM. What I have seen made me write this Photoshelter Beam Review.

New fully responsive WordPress website with PhotoShelter integration. Diego Cattaneo has been designing me a fantastic new website. He did all the ‘Alien talk’. Alien talk is for me the “CSS & HTML” stuff. Diego did a wonderful job. He integrated all, really all the little things I was asking for on the website. Not even only that, he did much more. He managed to make also my nature and wildlife PhotoShelter pages fully responsive.

Nope, try the normal PhotoShelter website on your Smartphone. Well, it opens, of course, but you need a magnifier glass to read the text!! Yes, you can expand all writing on your Smartphone screen, but every site!! That is a bit pedantic, IMHO! We both have been digging on the Internet to find any info on how to do the Photoshelter site responsive. There was only little to be found, but that did not work properly. Diego started to be an “Alien Whisperer” behind the scenes and voila it works. Hey, it is working, yeah, check it out on your mobiles. Below more info from the Blog of Diego. A BIG THANK YOU Diego, for the great website design and all your efforts you have put into this.

One more person I have to say a big thank you, to Johan Peijnenburg. He was extremely patient with me. He also has very helpful stuff in his blog, worth checking it out for Photoshelter…etc. not to mention his great photographs. Now I own him 5 Curry Wurschd (German sausages) and I do not know how many beers. No prob, the next Swiss Photowalk should be soon. I hope he can eat 5 Curry Wurschd!

UPDATE July 2014: PhotoShelter offers now the BEAM platform. This theme is responsive, but cannot be integrated with WordPress, yet!

UPDATED December 2014: For Miss Google’s needs, you should speed up your website page speed very much for page ranking. Your website should open within 2 seconds! If your website takes longer than 3 seconds to open most people will click further since our patience on the internet is very limited!

From Diego’s Blog:

I used a Graph Paper Press theme called Albedo as a starting point for the WordPress website PhotoShelter integration. This theme because it’s great for handling photographer portfolio websites, it’s responsive and it’s fully supported by PhotoShelter.

This is a screenshot of a Portfolio page, displayed using GPP Slideshow Plugin with some changes.

All the photographs are protected from being stolen by a transparent “shield” that I’ll discuss in a post soon.

The full website (also the PhotoShelter pages) is responsive. The website figures out what resolution of the device it’s being served on and adjusts itself to the screen. Try to browse it from your smartphone or tablet to see what I mean. The WordPress website Photoshelter integration was successful.

After lots of testing, this was the result of the custom coding to make Photohelter galleries responsive. Indeed, the Classic theme from Photoshelter was not responsive at all.

The outcome of the manual customization of how the photographs looked in Photoshelter. Undoubtedly, all custom coded.

Also, PhotoShelter has an automatic configurator that takes a snapshot of your Graph Paper Press theme and automatically generates a new custom theme for all your PhotoShelter web pages. I tried it but I wasn’t fully satisfied with the result, so I preferred to use the full manual customization. It wasn’t easy, but now I’m pretty happy with the result. The toughest task was adding a responsive layout to PhotoShelter pages, but with some tweaks, they now display nicely also on small devices. Feel free to contact me if you need instructions for your WordPress website Photoshelter integration.

A big thanks to Johan Peijnenburg that wrote a valuable post about Integrating PhotoShelter, WordPress & Graph Paper Press. He as well shared some useful plugins like the Dual Search Widget and the PhotoShelter RSS Gallery Widget.

And of course a special thanks to Anette Mossbacher for giving me the opportunity of learning and experimenting with new things, while designing her website to a WordPress website Photoshelter integration responsive on both sites.