Meet Lattice: A New Photo Project from PhotoShelter

Today, we’re launching the first phase of a special new project from our team here at PhotoShelter. It’s called Lattice. With Lattice, our mission is simple — to connect people with the photos they love and the creators behind those photos.

The background…

Over nearly a decade, we’ve cultivated a community of more than 80,000 professional photographers who rely on PhotoShelter to store, display, share and sell their work. Across this community, we now host 200 million images. We believe this to be the world’s largest pool of images captured by professional photographers.

But, looking out across the community and the incredible imagery uploaded to PhotoShelter every day, we still felt something was missing. We wanted to create a way to help our photographers better attract and engage a larger audience, and specifically, people who care about our photographers’ content. I’m talking about picture professionals working on projects, as well as photo consumers with a passion for images of very specific subject matters that can be found across our community.

Enter Lattice: a visually stunning way to discover and curate photography by PhotoShelter photographers. In one place, Lattice achieves a number of very important goals:

1) Lattice gives PhotoShelter a new way to gather and showcase our members’ amazing photography.

2) Lattice creates a destination where people who love photography can find, curate and buy powerful images to suit any theme, project or passion.

3) Lattice enables our photographers to directly present fresh, undiscovered imagery to a targeted audience of curators and followers.

Lattice is a creative experience. It’s uniquely collaborative and super useful. It’s also a ton of fun.

How Lattice works…

With Lattice, visitors to PhotoShelter can find and save publicly searchable images from our community. We call this curating a Lattice board. In this first phase, curation will be by invitation only.

PhotoShelter photographers can then suggest additional images that may be a strong fit for any board. We call this contributing to the board’s stream. The curator can review the stream and decide to promote images from the stream to the board.

All the while, any Lattice visitor can follow boards they like to get regular alerts when new work is added. To me, this creates a perfect loop between the content consumer and our photographers. From a Lattice board, anyone may also directly visit each photographer’s website, contact the photographer, or purchase their photography.

To enjoy Lattice right now…

We’ll be rolling out Lattice in phases, starting with the release of boards and streams as a new way to showcase PhotoShelter members’ incredible imagery. Our staff and invited curators will be building new boards regularly. Check out the dozens of boards our team has created, and follow your favorites. PhotoShelter photographers may instantly begin adding images to streams too. If you’ve got the bug to curate a board, request an invitation here.

What’s coming next…

Starting now, we’ll be watching how visitors and photographers interact with the content, and gathering feedback. This will soon be joined by new, powerful search capabilities and more robust features, as well as opening up curation more broadly.

Building Lattice has been a thrill for our team. It’s a delight to unveil it today.

Andrew & the PhotoShelter Team