PhotoShelter’s Beam: Product Updates and Improvements

PhotoShelter’s Beam: Product Updates and Improvements

Since we released our Beam platform back in July, we’ve been pushing out new features, fixing bugs, and making improvements more quickly than ever before.

We began a public changelog to keep you in the loop on everything we’ve been doing, both public-facing and behind the scenes — we hope you’ve been checking it out! This month we introduced a few new tools and options we wanted to make sure you were aware of, all of them sourced directly from the feedback you’ve been sending us (keep it coming!):

New Template: Sonnet

You’ve probably heard about our newest Beam template, Sonnet, by now. But in case you haven’t, you can check out a great example site here. Designed for storytelling, Sonnet gives off a journalistic feel, and beautifully shows off your work with full-bleed presentations, gallery captions, and multiple portfolio viewing options. Also take a look at this interview with travel photographer Quinn Ryan Mattingly who is perfectly using Sonnet to showcase his portfolio.

Quinn Ryan Mattingly's homepage

Quinn Ryan Mattingly’s homepage

Focal Point

Focal Point is a tool that will afford you more control over how your full-bleed images are cropped in Beam portfolios. It provides you with an easy way to select a featured image’s “center of focus” (around which any cropping will be oriented), thereby solving the issue of less-than-optimal crops for full-bleed images (e.g. the loss of essential edge detail, heads being chopped off, etc.). Marquee, Promenade, and Sonnet users — this one is for you! You can find more information on how to use it in the Beam FAQ under “Editing your images”.

Focal Point selection within the Site Builder

Focal Point selection within the Site Builder

Portfolio Image Viewer Options

Now in place for the Marquee, Shuffle, and Promenade templates, our new image viewer options allow you to customize what your site visitors can and can’t see — or how they should see it — when viewing a single image inside of your portfolio. You may choose whether or not image info displays by default, hide social share options, and even rename the link that leads people to the “archive” side of your site to view more information. Want to make it totally clear your images are available for sale before visitors hit your archive? Now you can!

Options to choose from in Single Image View

Options to choose from in Single Image View

Changes to Featured Work Tabs in Marquee

Many Marquee users, particularly those with longer portfolio gallery titles, will be happy to learn we’ve increased the width of the featured work tabs on the Marquee homepage. We’ve also increased the “pop-out width” so it’s easier for site visitors to tell which gallery they are looking at upon hover. This should help with truncated gallery names and make the initial site experience simpler for your clients!

Marquee's improvements on navigation

Marquee’s improvements on navigation

Be sure to take a peek at the changelog to see what else we’ve been up to.

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This article was written by

Marketing associate at PhotoShelter

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