FTP to PhotoShelter + Live from PhotoPlus Expo

You might have already seen the hubbub around our PhotoShelter Personal Archive 2.0 release. It’s hard to believe that you could upload images, set up e-commerce, price images, and set up a digital storefront website in under five minutes.

You might have also heard about our offer to Digital Railroad users who are concerned about their business continuity.

Well, we have one more trick up our sleeve for the PhotoPlus Expo 2008.

When we were discussing how to move over Digital Railroad users, we realized that we needed a way for those users to FTP images into their PhotoShelter account to avoid the dreaded re-upload. So our developers created a mechanism to handle in-bound FTP with all the security precautions that you would expect from PhotoShelter.

Then the developers figured that this ability would be great for any event shooter or photojournalist who was working a live event and perhaps needed to move images very quickly to their photo editors or end clients. They also figured that a small agency might want to be able to have multiple photographers upload images directly into their account. The same might be true of a wedding photographer who hires a second shooter, and wants that person to upload images without giving them full access to their account.

So instead of having a very rigid system of FTP access, our developers created a system whereby you could create multiple users who are allowed to FTP into your account. You can activate them or deactivate them at will to prevent someone from “spamming” you and overwhelming your storage quota.

As if that wasn’t enough, the developers said that it was a pain in the butt to upload these live images into the archive, and then have to take another step to move them into a gallery. So they created a way to FTP directly into a gallery. Think about this. Now, an individual photographer can act as their own wire service. You could create a gallery in advance, set up high-resolution download permissions, and invite select users. As images are being uploaded from an event, these users could review the images as thumbnails and screen res images, and pull down the high-res images that they want. They wouldn’t have to wait for all the high-res images to be transmitted to their site before reviewing them.

We think this is pretty cool.

How cool? Well, after the engineers mentioned this to me, I called up Mark Suban from Nikon Professional Services. He met Grover at the Javitz Center yesterday and handed him a Nikon Wireless Transmitter WT-4. Grover got back to the office and we hooked it up to my Nikon D3. Sam set up the camera to FTP to my PhotoShelter account, and we are using our new embedded galleries below, so you can see a live feed of images we’re shooting at the PhotoPlus Expo. We are wirelessly transmitting from my camera to the PhotoShelter FTP site, which is automatically putting it into a gallery, which is embedded in this blog entry.

This feature will be available to all Standard and Pro account holders starting next week. So get ready to start changing the game. (and a total shout out to our tech staff.)

Don’t forget, we have some discounts available till the end of the month for the Personal Archive:
Current customers upgrade here.
New customers join here.


One last thing. We’ve partnered up with a bunch of our friends to create an “Around the World” game at the PhotoPlus. We have a punch card with five of our favorite companies, and all you have to do is to go to each booth, have your card punched, drop the completed card off at the PhotoShelter booth, and you’re entered in our raffle. The prizes?

– Adorama: Induro MC24 Carbon Fiber  Monopod
– Livebooks: $800 credit towards any liveBooks site
– ThinkTank: Urban Disguise 60
– Popular Photography Mentor Series: 4-day domestic series photo trek
– X-Rite: Colormunki all-in-one calibrator.

So let us punch you.

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This article was written by

Allen Murabayashi is the co-founder of PhotoShelter.

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