What is the best photo blogging platform?

November 2, 2010 11:26 AM

What is the best photo blogging platform? Free or paid.

I'd like to start a photo blog--please recommend the current best platform! I like clean, minimal layouts, and if it has a way of incorporating an 'order prints' interface, that would be fantastic. I laid out a tentative design on blogger, but there has to be a better way! I can edit html directly, so clunky posting interface isn't a problem. Does 'blogger' have a photo-blog template?

posted by lemonade to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (8 answers total)

I'd be tempted to go down the route of using Wordpress with a template designed specifically for photoblogging, like photofolio or sharpfolio. There are lots and lots of good ones. A few more here.
posted by le morte de bea arthur at 11:29 AM on November 2, 2010

I'm actually setting up something like this right now in Textpattern. With the built-in custom fields, open-ended PHP-less templating, and neat little plugins it's easy to integrate print-ordering and all sorts of cool stuff.

There's a guy who uses Textpattern for general photo blogging as well as ecommerce (buying stock photography).

There's a learning curve with the software, but I love it so far.
posted by circular at 11:49 AM on November 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

Lots of people seems to use Tumblr for photo blogging.

Some examples: A list of sites, Lucas Ridley, Awesome Photography, Samuel Christopher.

I don't know about ordering prints, but the Awesome Photography site seems to be a showcase for some service that is designed for people who want to make serious money from their online photo presence.
posted by philipy at 11:59 AM on November 2, 2010

I would also recommend Tumblr.

Two that I like:

playing with fire
show me pictures
posted by morganannie at 12:12 PM on November 2, 2010

Do you want to host it yourself or do you need hosting? WordPress.com (the host it for you flavor) is sure to have some themes that will be good for photoblogging. I just don't know what since I use the self hosted one.

Pixel Post is really good too. It's made specifically to be a photoblog, so there isn't any of the tweaking to make the concept work that you'd have with anything else.
posted by theichibun at 12:23 PM on November 2, 2010

I went with Wordpress hosted at an ISP recently. My vision is more of a "blog-with-photos" than a photoblog (if THAT makes sense!). I found the WP-Flickr plug-in that lets me use Flickr as kind of an extension of my blogging platform, which is great since I wanted to establish a Flickr presence, as well. Since I know CSS pretty well, I went with the WP-Framework theme, which is a minimal layout with a couple of different page types that will be easy to restyle using my personal aesthetic.

THAT said, there were a bunch of themes available that were specifically for photoblogs, with great gallery pages and the like. I don't recall the names off the top of my head, but the Theme Gallery for WordPress is really easy to navigate.
posted by OneMonkeysUncle at 12:56 PM on November 2, 2010

For any site with the word blog in its description, and many other uses, I think it's hard to go wrong with wordpress.
posted by snofoam at 3:23 PM on November 2, 2010

Here's one more theme to check out. The author has also made a plugin to handle portfolio chores if you want to roll your own html.
posted by conrad53 at 5:34 PM on November 2, 2010