Currently, viewing Photoshelter sites on mobile works, but that’s about all we can say. It’s definitely not well optimized, not a terrific experience, and this has to be a major concern for us as customers as we all know that mobile traffic is increasing very steadily, and it’s critical to provide a good experience for photo buyers who are definitely using phones and especially iPads to view images. I’d suggest taking a look at both SlideshowPro and Zenfolio, both of whom provide a superior experience to what Photoshelter currently offers.

Second, I’m interested in whether there will be a mobile app in the near future, or at least an API that other developers could build apps with. We are using Photoshelter to store our best work – it would be very nice to have the ability to pull these images from the cloud to our phones and iPads and cache them locally. Currently, there are a lot of pretty good portfolio apps that allow downloading from Dropbox, but that necessitates having copies of all of the photos uploaded to Dropbox when we already have them in Photoshelter. Again, take a look at Zenfolio’s iPhone and iPad apps which allow this functionality, and a lot more.

I’m honestly a little bummed that Photoshelter has not done more with mobile. I’m glad to hear that this will be an area of focus. Don’t miss the boat the way Flickr did.

You’ve got a big job ahead, and so I wish you the best of luck. I look forward to seeing where the platform is going!