Photgraphy Partnership Issue

xxclixxx · October 31, 2008

OK so here's the deal. My friend and I do photography, and we have formed sort of a partnership. We wanted to do RIPhoto.com together, we both upload our photos around Rhode Island and just split the income somehow.

However since there is no way to differenciate which photos are by him and which ones by me, and because I noticed the part in the Smugmug TOS about not sharing accounts (or something to that extent), I thought it'd be best for us each to have our own account.

So the confusion begins! What would be the best way to have RIPhoto.com be the joining of our two sites. Keeping them seperate yet combined. I'm playing with the communities now, but it seems to be more difficult to customize. And it doesn't seem possible for us to have it on it's own domain.

Any input would be awesome! I'm thinking I might have to make RIPhoto it's own site, using the APIs to get the photos from each of our sites, and then have it link to the indiviual photos as buy buttons. Not direct shopping cart integration but as close as it could be. However I don't know if there is a way to use Smugmug's shopping cart javascript directly on another site.

We are still small, but we are starting to gain more interest. So we want to get this figured out quick. For instance we have someone who want's to use some of our photos in a calendar, but it's harder to point to a gallery if it's got two photographers on different sites.. ?

Tim

digismile · October 31, 2008

Why do you need to differentiate between your photos exactly? IF you are splitting the income, split it. It shouldn't matter who took the photo.

I think you really need to have one site. Use some kind of naming convention that distinguishes your photos. Also, it would be very easy to add a keyword that could be used for a custom search. You could have a menu selection to see "tim's photos" and another for shooter #2.

This gives you the separate, but one concept.

jfriend · October 31, 2008

xxclixxx wrote:

OK so here's the deal. My friend and I do photography, and we have formed sort of a partnership. We wanted to do RIPhoto.com together, we both upload our photos around Rhode Island and just split the income somehow.

However since there is no way to differenciate which photos are by him and which ones by me, and because I noticed the part in the Smugmug TOS about not sharing accounts (or something to that extent), I thought it'd be best for us each to have our own account.

So the confusion begins! What would be the best way to have RIPhoto.com be the joining of our two sites. Keeping them seperate yet combined. I'm playing with the communities now, but it seems to be more difficult to customize. And it doesn't seem possible for us to have it on it's own domain.

Any input would be awesome! I'm thinking I might have to make RIPhoto it's own site, using the APIs to get the photos from each of our sites, and then have it link to the indiviual photos as buy buttons. Not direct shopping cart integration but as close as it could be. However I don't know if there is a way to use Smugmug's shopping cart javascript directly on another site.

We are still small, but we are starting to gain more interest. So we want to get this figured out quick. For instance we have someone who want's to use some of our photos in a calendar, but it's harder to point to a gallery if it's got two photographers on different sites.. ?

Tim

It seems that you have the following options:

Just have one site and make an agreement how you will split the profits from sales.
Just have one site and use sales reporting to figure out how to split the profits from sales.
Just use two separate sites and all profits automatically go to the appropriate photographer. You can refer to each other in your customizations and even use a similar look and feel and common root domain, but the two sites would be separate and the viewer would be able to tell they were separate.
Use two separate Smugmug sites so all profits automatically go to the right photographer, but make them look and feel pretty much like one site.

The last option is the most complicated. If you want to do that, you'd have to do a bunch of site customization/javascript hacking to make it work.

You would have to split the sites at the category or sub-category level. In other words, photographerA could have categoryA and photographer B could have categoryB, but it would be a lot of work to have one category with galleries from each photographer in it. To do that, you'd have to do serious customization everytime you added a gallery.

If you're willing split things at the category or sub-category level, then you could make it work by hacking links to point to the galleries on the other site.

Each site could have it's own custom domain. So you could have bob.digismile.com for one account and jack.digismile.com for the other account. They would both appear to be part of digismile.com, but would have separate sub-domains. You'd have to make sure you pick a domain registrar that can do that (that gives you control over sub-domains).

You could use identical customization to have the same look and feel (header/footer/themes/colors) on both sites so they could feel pretty seemless. A customer could order some prints from one half of the site and some from the other half of the site and they'd all go in the same cart and the same order and the same charge (Smugmug already does that today).

So, you could have a structure like this:

SiteA HomePage (master home page for the unified site)
    Category1
         Sub-category A - on siteA
         Sub-category B - links to sub-category on SiteB
         Sub-category C - on SiteA
         Sub-category D - links to sub-category on SiteB
         Sub-category E - links to sub-category on SiteB
    Category2
    Category3
    Category4
    Category5

You would have to write Javascript to hack the links for the sub-categories on SiteB to actually point to siteB, not siteA.

There are other variations of how to make this work too, using HTML pages, splitting at the category level, making custom gallery listings, splitting only at the navbar level, etc....

There are lots of drawbacks of not using one site. You will have to do a bunch of hacks to make this work and will have to maintain those hacks as you modify the structure of your site(s). You can't easily each have galleries in the same category/sub-category. You can't search both sites at once without searching all of Smugmug. You can't easily make keyword queries that work only across your two sites.

The only advantage I can see for using two sites is you save some work in figuring out who gets what profits. If you use unique filename roots for each photographer, the sales reporting contains all the info needed to split the profits appropriately.

You probably have to check the Smugmug fine print on both using one site. Common sense would suggest that if you're a legal business partnership operating as one business, it should be no problem, but if you are really two separate businesses, then it might be more complicated. But, I'm not from Smugmug so once you have an idea for how you want to do it, you probably need to check with them to see if it's OK.

NorthernBuck · November 1, 2008

It looks like you're trying to do the exact same thing I'm doing. I have a partner and my brother who all work together under one business name. Together, we are going to cover as much as we can in our local area. We're business partners who work under the same business name so it just makes sense that we use the same site. Its not hard to keep profits separate. After shooting an event you put your files in a folder before you start processing them and put them in order by time picture taken. Then you rename all the files with your initials first, underscore, and the date (with year first, month second and day third). Make a spreadsheet and paste the info and then sort by filename. Do a copy and cut and paste all your pictures on one page and your partners on another. This may not work for you but it works fine for me. I hope this helps.

xxclixxx · November 1, 2008

Well I did the naming thing already, but the problem I found is the terms of use: "Only one individual may access the Service at the same time using the same username and password."

In an email with someone from Smugmug, I was told that one could use the guest password to upload photos to the account. But that's not really reasonable to do.

In any event, I just think it's better to have it seperate so if years from now we decide to go different ways, we'll still have our own photos. Just from the past year of photos to get them removed was quite the chore. We want to do things together but keep the rights to our own photos (so if we brand our partnership well and want to sell the name later on kind of thing).

Anyways I think I'm going to go the most complicated route possible

. I do web development for a living so I've got the server/knowhow to do it, just wanted to check if there was an easy button I wasn't aware of! (really stinks finding the easy button after spending countless hours on something..)

Mohamed.Ghuloom · July 14, 2009

How is business now xxclixxx? You guys are still together or got separated?

Well, here is how I do it, maybe someone finds this beneficial.

First of all it depends on whether your partner is physically accessible or each lives on the other part of the world.
If you guys are family, or living in the same city, so here is how you do it.
1. Every month, get the best photos your partner(s) has taken on a DVD from him. It's up to him if he wants to edit them, or you will.
2. On lightroom, before you import photos, make two different metadatas. One with the caption "Taken by [YourBusinessName] - [YourName]" and one "Taken by [YourBusinessName] - [HisName]". Also add "[Yourname] Photography" and "[HisName] Photography" as keywords for each metadata.
3. When importing the photos, Apply your metadata to your photos and his metadata to his photos.
4. Now all you have to do is to upload the pictures. Animals to animal gallery, landscapes to landscapes gallery, events to events gallery (no matter who's the photographer) just mix them up.
5. Now under each photo on the website it will show the caption u've set with the photo, whether taken by you or him(them). This even helps your pages become more google friendly
6. Not only that, but if anyone searches for [YourName] photography, they'll get ONLY your photos, and vice versa.
7. Now it's even easy to divide the profit. When anybody buys any photo, you guys know who has taken it, so profit goes to him. This creates a kind of challenge for you two, to shoot and work better.

This works greatly for me, some metadata creations, and here we go, I teach a lot of students and post their photos to the website, any profit, they get it.

you can visit some of my galleries to see this in action. Also use the Find section to search for:
Anwar Photography
Komail Photography
Asma Photography

xxclixxx · July 15, 2009

Interesting way of doing it. We ended up deciding to just split into two smugmug sites, and have one main non smugmug site, all 3 have same theme and header. So hopefully to the end user it looks like its the same site.

Another problem I was having was equal exposure. I'm more select than he is with picking which photos are uploaded. I see the photos as reflecting on me, and I want only photos that are of my quality shown. He sees more photos = more opportunity to sell.

So the solution I found was to use the joint domain (riphoto.com) to bring exposure to both sites. It has some photos from both our sites (with a max per location). I'm waiting on Smugmug to make an add to cart button that can be used on external sites, and then it'll be all set. Right now they have to click to view the gallery its in, and then add to cart which is kinda clunky.

Photgraphy Partnership Issue

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