Gallery links?

rt2photo

What are your thoughts or experiences around NOT showing people your galleries on your website?

I have my SmugMug powered website up, with a full screen slideshow showing a selection of what I consider my best or most representative shots. Until recently, I also have a link on the navbar through to my gallery page, where I showed all my galleries and left them open for viewing.

Because I sometimes mix family and personal projects with professional galleries, I removed this link, leaving it showing my slideshow only - but that limits me to an extent.

What are your thoughts around showing your galleries to the public, or what suggestions do you have for a workaround?

Cygnus Studios

rt2photo wrote: »

What are your thoughts around showing your galleries to the public, or what suggestions do you have for a workaround?

This really depends on what you are trying to do with your website. Our main site is strictly for business. We have a few galleries open to the public and the rest remain hidden or password protected.

This works incredibly well for what we do. We can easily direct clients or potential clients to any of the 18,000 + hidden images by a link if we need to.

Personally I don't see any good reason for showing personal images to clients. Put them in a password protected gallery for sharing with friends/family or sharing on forums.

rt2photo

Cygnus Studios wrote: »

This really depends on what you are trying to do with your website. Our main site is strictly for business. We have a few galleries open to the public and the rest remain hidden or password protected.

This works incredibly well for what we do. We can easily direct clients or potential clients to any of the 18,000 + hidden images by a link if we need to.

Personally I don't see any good reason for showing personal images to clients. Put them in a password protected gallery for sharing with friends/family or sharing on forums.

Actually, thats my solution - lock down my *personal* pics - I was thinking I'd have ot lock everything ... Thanks, food for thought

Molotov Everything

For random stuff that only friends and family would want to see I put them in their own subcategory in unlisted galleries and make them nonsearchable by Google. Seems to work just fine

Mark Dickinson

Showyour work selectively, and don't let others see each other galleries, keep em private, but isolate samples to a particular gallery

kathiemt

I keep personal pics to Facebook for family and friends. I don't post them on my website. I have a small number at Flickr but not many.

Allen

rt2photo wrote: »

What are your thoughts or experiences around NOT showing people your galleries on your website?

I have my SmugMug powered website up, with a full screen slideshow showing a selection of what I consider my best or most representative shots. Until recently, I also have a link on the navbar through to my gallery page, where I showed all my galleries and left them open for viewing.

Because I sometimes mix family and personal projects with professional galleries, I removed this link, leaving it showing my slideshow only - but that limits me to an extent.

What are your thoughts around showing your galleries to the public, or what suggestions do you have for a workaround?

One of the problems is with keywords, locking down personal galleries will
remove their KW's from the list, losing a big plus for family galleries.
Vote here http://smu.gs/msVPZU

You could create one page like this for professional categories/galleries and
link to that in your nav instead of "galleries". Leave the "galleries" page
active and just have everyone on the personal side use the /galleries link.