Professional Photographers Making Money using Gallery
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richshumaker
Joined: 2004-05-11
Posts: 8 |
Posted: Tue, 2004-05-11 14:29
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I wanted to know if anyone has been able to use Gallery with any professional print programs. I have checked the forum and found several very old threads with no conclusion. It sounded like you could hack the donation code for shutterfly. But that is not something I would like to do. I would like to have both a donation for the software and also additional money for myself. So this is even more complicated. Thanks in advance for the help. Rich Shumaker |
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Posts: 5
I want to do this too. Any info?
Posts: 8
I have not gotten the information from the different vendors that Gallery currently supports.
I did not check with Fotokasten as they are a German based company and I am in the US. I will post up what I learn as soon as I get the information.
On a similar note I was thinking about it last night and the fees they charge professionals is not very much per year if you are printing a lot.(99.00 to 200.00) I will not be printing much. I also have several sites with several different projects that would all have money going in several directions. I would be willing to donate the fee for the first year(99.00) to this project.
Would any other semi professionals or professionals pay or donate to have this ability??
If so what would you donate or pay?
Rich Shumaker
Posts: 5
I totally would. I beleive it's fair. What I don't think is fair is that I put up over 3000 of my photos and all the money making goes to the print vendor and Gallery. As great as Gallery is, I think the wealth should be shared - especially when the digital rights to the photos are mine.
No disrespect to Gallery. In fact, this is exactly what open source should be. I firmly beleive in Gallery making money for the hard work they've done, but beyond personal use, the software is just a hobby for me if I can't make money on it.
At this point, I am not super incented to send people to the print vendors if I stand to make no money at all. It would be great if Gallery can come up with a solution that allows the sharing of the proceeds. OR even allows us to add a couple of cents to the print price so we get to keep those. Whatever Gallery and the print vendor have in arrangement, they still get to keep.
For example, If you think about it, if a photo cost $0.49 cents and Gallery gets to keep $0.018, There could be a way for us to charge $0.51 and we keep $0.02. This way, gallery's deal with Shutterfly is still kosher.
Posts: 48
I would use that feature if Photobox was an option
Posts: 8
I just did a search on Photobox.
Please let us know which one. What is the URL. For anyone that is interested in this concept let me know what companies you like. I am contacting every company and asking them about this issue(affiliate programs for pro photographers)
As I have stated we only need one company to work with us as semi pro's or pros. By work with us I am talking about a NO FEE startup. With the option to get reduced cost prints with a FEE.
I would like a multi affiliate split. X to One person or Group. Y to another. Maybe even Z to a third.
With a realistic payout of 50 dollars minimum. 250 seems a bit steep.
I know this may not sound like it makes sense but imagine the extra income potential and all they need to do is set up the affiliate program. The company does no other programming. Because Gallery is done.
Then they print and distribute the same way they already were.
I am baffled that no company has stepped up to this opportunity to make money. Seems like a no brainer to me.
Rich Shumaker
Posts: 48
http://www.photobox.co.uk
Posts: 20
If you are interested in Photobox, let me know. I am a reference site for them (www.jerseyevents.com) and know them well. I have already talked to them in the past about this and they offered me a free account for Gallery if someone was willing to integrate photobox as an option. This would allow us to set a small profit to go back to the gallery developers. Alternatively if you have your own ID you could use this and set your own prices.
Jon
Posts: 8
Thanks for the URL.
jashby is Photobox only in the UK?
Jonday if you could find out what the average joe's fee would be that would be great. You are special to them and they are giving you a deal. I am the average guy and they might not make the same deal.
It seems that Shutterfly did something similar with Gallery. They gave the gallery creators a free account. Which is great for them. But leaves the rest of us out in the cold. They want us to pay some fee. I don't know what it is yet but I am looking into it.
I am looking for a US based company for me. But international compaies will help get additional distribution.
Thanks for the help everyone. I will work on this some more today tomorrow this weekend and next week.
I will post any new information I have.
Also I will post the list of companies I have found and contacted as well as what they told me.
Rich Shumaker
Posts: 48
I think so, Also I am interested in photobox, but first I must solve the MYSQL instability.
Posts: 8
I contacted DotPhoto today. www.dotphoto.com
They will let me know Monday if they are interested at all in going forward on this type of pro photo service using Gallery(Allowing us to charge our price and use Gallery as the DB and they print and fulfill and send us checks). Once they give me an answer I will let you know. If they say they are interested in a project like this I will give them the email I have from the other thread for the dev team of Gallery. So they can talk to you one on one. Since I have little or no programming experience this would be the next logical step. If they say No I will post that as well. We only need one to say yes.
As far as companies go they have been the least expensive so far.
They don't charge any fees to Professionals for Gallery's and storage. They make their money on the back end with % fees.
They also have a lower per print cost.
As far as payments go DotPhoto cuts checks every month on the 16th and the minimum accumulated ammount is only 10.00. So you would not have to wait for the end of a quarter and you don't have to accumulate 250.00 like other programs that have been mentioned on this forum.
If you don't need gallery and are looking for a professional print service then you could use them today.
Rich Shumaker
Posts: 20
Photobox is UK based but delivers worldwide. I have customers Europe wide but can't say I have tested their fulfillment beyond Europe.
Photobox have offered a free account for Gallery to set a small markup price.
One of the reasons I did not push this further is that if you want to have your own prices and account, it is quite expensive. The one off set up fee is £250. But you can have multiple pricing schemes within the one account, so I for example use my account to allow various photographers to use my site and charge different prices. Each is treated as a subvendor and is separately tracked.
The print prices are reasonable and the fulfillment quality is superb - very fast, high quality prints, great packaging etc.
I think the £250 is a bit steep, but if we had a Gallery default account then you could set up Gallery to print using Photobox and get great quality prints at good prices. Then you can either pay the £250 and set up your own account, or you could do a hybrid like I am doing and share an account.
Posts: 8
jonday. Thanks for the info. If you think 250 pounds is steep keep reading this post. It is very cool what you are doing by the way. Do your subvendors pay you a fee or does Photobox give you a commision on that? Great idea by the way. Sound very useful for a group of Photographers.
I heard back from Shutterfly today.
Shuttefly info. I talked to Lance and I have his number if anyone needs it.
There are 2 programs.
Program 1 - ProProgram
Uses their servers with their storage. So you would not be using Gallery.
Pricing 99.00 - 199.00 Annually.
It has several good features including not allowing images to be copied so you would not have people printing images themselves.
Also watermarking to protect the images. As well as limiting the prints of images to certain print sizes. I am sure they have a ton of other features I don't know about so if you are interested check their site.
www.Shutterfly.com
I had read in a post that it was 250.00 before they cut a check and it was done quarterly. I also read here that the lead developer had yet to see a check. So I asked about that. The minimum before a check is cut is 50.00 and the checks are sent monthly. BUT the checks are one month behind. So you would get May's check June 30th. They said they would look into no check being sent to Gallery and they hopefully will contact you in that regards. I hope that was all cleared up long ago. As I did read posts from years ago.
I wonder how much business Gallery sends Shutterfly. I asked if they tracked the NonDonation prints and they did not have an answer. The developers here might know if there is a tag sent to Shutterfly that says, "Business provided by Gallery". It would be interesting to know how much business Gallery sends different companies.
Program 2 - Developers Program
The cost for this program is 966.00 and I think it is a one time fee.
They only print from 4 X 6 to 8 X 10 with this program.
But they print to 20 X 30 with their other programs.
I think once you are a developer you could modify(hack) the Gallery code to put in your developer info. Of course Gallery would never get any donations because you would be using the donation code to make money for yourself. I am not a developer so please don't ask me how to do this. I won't know.
Since I want to use Gallery and I don't have a lot of money I think that I will keep looking.
The Pro Program sounds great if you don't want to use Gallery and bring in enough money to justify it.
If you have a company that you want me to contact put up some info about them so I can get in touch with them.
I should hopefully hear back from DotPhoto on Monday.
Have a great weekend everyone.
Rich Shumaker
Posts: 8
I have heard back from PhotoAccess
They do have a program in place. It works with Gallery and you can sign up now.
The cost is $300.00 which is $200 less than the normal fee.
It takes 2 to 3 weeks to set up the account.
Checks are cut every month with a minimum of 100.00 accumulated.
There is a 1.00 per image fee minimum. Please contact the contact below if you have any other specific questions about pricing.
Each album can have it's own pricing for your customers.
If you need a professional system now using Gallery this one is ready for you.
I am considering it right now. But I am going to continue to look to find out even more information. The one time fee is a little higher than I would like but it works now and that goes a long way. No testing or debugging. Also the company has been in business for quite some time and have just been purchased by Seattle Film Works.
If you are interested in this please contact Chad Bridwell at 206-272-9844.
Rich Shumaker
Posts: 13
See my post for new(?) possiblities from DotPhoto.
http://gallery.menalto.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=21152
Posts: 146
Any new info on this? $300 is too much for me.