Photo Gallery Website

Regular visitors to my site may have noticed that I've removed all my photo galleries and slide shows from pages hosted on this site. Most of the images I had posted here had been around several years, and the process of updating pages and adding new photos was slow and time consuming. I've been doing a lot more photography in the last year or so, and the number of images that I want to post has become overwhelming.

To help with organizing all these photos and to make them easier for visitors to view, I've set up a pro account on Smug Mug, a photo hosting site that provides plenty of options for displaying and distributing photos. I get occasional requests from visitors who want to either purchase a print or the rights to use an image in a publication or online. With the Smug Mug account, this is all set up to be automated and purchases can be made through the site by the visitor. Options include many sizes of prints as well as electronic downloads. The images displayed on the account are protected by a watermark and are disabled from "right click" downloading. Once purchased, however, the the watermark is removed.

Example image: A small private schooner docked in Back Bay, Biloxi. For more images in this gallery, click here.

Another cool thing about hosting photos on Smug Mug is that I can upload them there just one time, and still use them in my various blogs and on the pages of my website by simply embedding an html source code that links back to them. This way they don't take up space anywhere else and the same watermark is carried to the other sites. Smug Mug galleries can also be set up for various levels of accessibility. Each gallery can be customized so that photos are visible to all visitors or just to the ones you give a password to. These options are useful to pro photographers who work with portraits and wedding for example, as all the photos can be available for selection by the customer, but not visible to anyone else.

It will take me months to get all the images I have to post in my galleries edited and online, and of course like all my websites, it will be an ongoing process for years to come. If you have a need to upload lots of photos for a similar purpose, I can highly recommend SmugMug based on my limited experience with it so far. To see all the galleries I've set up on my account so far, go to http://photography.scottbwilliams.com/