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PhotoShelter Friended Facebook

Posted by: Allen Murabayashi Posted date: October 28, 2009 | 14 Comments

First the obvious: a lot of people use Facebook. Over 300 million people use the service, and it’s become the most popular social network. Irrespective about how you feel about Facebook, it’s impact is undeniable, and it’s ability to act as a marketing tool is becoming increasingly clear.

The business implication became clear to me last year when I posted an album of portraits, and then a “friend” hired me to photograph him. Posting images on Facebook is a way to passively market yourself to a qualified audience for free.

(I know, the terms and conditions are worrisome, but more on that in a second)

So I’m pleased to announce our new “Post to Facebook” feature that we released today. You might say to yourself, “well, duh!” And I would nod my head in agreement. It’s an obvious piece of functionality. But we’ve done it slightly differently than other implementations that I’ve seen.

From your PhotoShelter gallery, you can click the “send to social networks” link, and then use “Facebook Connect” to link your accounts. Then you have two options:

Post to your Wall: For those of you who don’t want to upload content to Facebook because of concerns over their T&C, you can post a link to your Wall with a message. Facebook will display a preview of a few images with a link back to your website. Here’s what a wall post looks like:
Upload Images: Alternately, you can actually upload images to Facebook from your gallery. We’ll create a new album with the same name as your PS Gallery, then upload the images. After the upload is complete, you get a chance to review the images and set the album permissions before posting them to your “Photos” tab. Just remember that Facebook has a 200 image limit per album.

Pretty nifty, huh? It’s a great time saver, and a cool way to go social.

Stay tuned, we have more cool features up our sleeves….

About the author

Allen Murabayashi
Allen is CEO and co-founder of PhotoShelter. He is a regular contributor to the PhotoShelter blog, and he flosses daily.

14 Comments

Darren Abate 10-28-2009

Neat. So what is Photoshelter’s professional opinion about the facebook terms and conditions? Is it really something to lose sleep over? What if we watermark our photos before uploading them, would that prevent them from “using” them in any way? Darren

Paul Smith 10-28-2009

Very useful, personally I’d only use the “Post to your wall” feature as I don’t want to upload my photos to Facebook. BUT, this has the same problem as the slideshow feature – it should be possible to select which three images are used in the post. At the moment it just selects the first three images in the gallery. Also, how about the ability to post to a Facebook Page rather than to our personal profile? Cheers, Paul Smith Featureflash.com

Jim Merrill 10-28-2009

I already tried it. Works like a charm. Posted a link to a gallery which opened up in my customized website. Great feature! Jim http://jmtfoto.com

Fredrik Naumann 10-28-2009

Nice. As many wishes seem to come true eventually with Photoshelter: could we have something along those lines with Twitter, please?

Jim Merrill 10-29-2009

About thinking about it, I’m going to have to agree with Paul about having the ability to post to a Facebook page, or the ability to choose between a page and personal profile. -jim http://jmtfoto.com

Guido Van Damme 10-29-2009

Doesn’t work :-( I’m on Mac, tried Safari, Firefox and Opera…

Craig Mitchelldyer 10-29-2009

This is very cool. It would also be cool to have a widget to allow our clients to post images from a gallery we send them to their personal facebook pages. “click here to add this photo to facebook” or something like that. Is that possible?

Anne Schmitt 10-29-2009

The uploader for sending galleries to Facebook keeps crashing. You ask us to report it to you but don’t tell us where to do it. I use a Mac running snow leopard… if that helps. But I have only managed to get 3 sets uploaded out of maybe 12 tries.

Allen Murabayashi 10-29-2009

@guido @anne the facebook servers can respond slowly during peak hours of the day, so make sure that you give it a little time to initiate the connections and uploads (particularly if you have lots of images). we’ll look into some more.

Steven St. John 10-29-2009

This is a great step forward, and I would love it if this worked for lightstalkers too.

AC Schmitt 10-29-2009

Thanks Guido. I thought that might be a server issue. But it is nice to be able to transfer from PhotoShelter to Facebook and have the watermark. Its increased my visibility considerably.

Brian Espinosa Photography & Design 11-2-2009

I agree… the ability to post to a Facebook Page in addition to just a Facebook profile is VERY important here. Currently I have my Facebook Page subscribed to the RSS feed for my gallery, which will publish EVERY SINGLE image that I have added to my gallery to my Facebook Page wall. This is quickly becoming annoying to fans of my page as I go through all of my past catalog and start to upload it to my PhotoShelter archive. PLEASE add the ability to post to Pages in addition to profiles ASAP.

Brian Espinosa Photography & Design 11-5-2009

One small improvement I noticed that could be made to the “Upload Images” portion of this feature is an html link in the image caption that would link back to the image within the gallery. For now I have had to go back through and copy in the link to the gallery on my page. Any url in the caption is automatically parsed my Facebook as a hyperlink. If you wanted to be extra fancy, you could put a checkbox underneath your “Upload Images” button that lets you specify to include a link to the gallery on each image, each image separately within the gallery or no link at all. You could even put a box that lets users type some sort of text that would be inserted before each link like “To see larger versions:” or “Prints, postcards and other items are available here:”

Jenifer 10-5-2010

Works great! I love how it gives the option of posting to either your personal page or fan page. One thing I would tweak though, is making it possible to upload certain photos, not a whole gallery. If this is possible, I didn’t see it…

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