Photography portfolio website suggestions?

May 14, 2012 7:04 PM

I need a photography portfolio website for myself. I already maintain smugmug and flickr sites, but these are mainly used for works in progress and special projects. Not final collections. I want something that is simple, elegant and easy to manage, supporting three or four galleries with limited numbers of images and an about page. I've looked into Joomla with Joom:Gallery and it all seems too much, overkill and means I'd have to become a web gal again. Should I bite the bullet and learn Joomla or another CMS, hire a designer or is there a service that "keeps it simple" and without their own branding?
posted by michswiss to media & arts (15 answers total)

I like indexhibit, which is a very simple portfolio-oriented CMS system. Also, it's donation-ware. And I strongly suggest you donate.

Here's a good example.
posted by Mercaptan at 7:12 PM on May 14, 2012 [3 favorites]

I've heard good things about photoshelter, but it's not cheap. Or what about a separate smugmug pro account with your own domain name? On their pro accounts, you can completely disable the smugmug branding I think.
posted by jhs at 7:20 PM on May 14, 2012

This is a project that Wordpress would be perfect for. there are many many free photography portfolio themes to choose from, and their media management would make this project a breeze.
posted by softlord at 7:45 PM on May 14, 2012 [2 favorites]

If you are willing to do just a little bit of web stuff, a self-hosted Wordpress installation using a quality gallery plugin would do the trick. It would be a few hours on the front end to get it all set up the way you want, but after that it would be dead simple to add additional galleries and pages.
posted by trivia genius at 7:48 PM on May 14, 2012

2nding indexhibit! so easy to use; i really dig it.
posted by raihan_ at 8:17 PM on May 14, 2012

(for anyone else that may be looking, Stacey bills itself as an easier alternative to indexhibit... i'll be testing it out myself and will hopefully remember to check-in with this thread w/ my findings)
posted by raihan_ at 8:19 PM on May 14, 2012

Are you looking for free? If not then I am happy with these guys: http://www.qufoto.com/prices The price is right for me for basic slide portfolios. Not very user friendly when uploading and such but it does the trick for me.
posted by WickedPissah at 9:08 PM on May 14, 2012

I think squarespace would be a good choice for this. It's beautiful and simple to use, and there's a free trial so you can check it out first. 4ormat is also pretty cool. I discovered it through the Bonnie Tsang's portfolio if you want to see an example of it in action.
posted by logic vs love at 9:43 PM on May 14, 2012

I went the wordpress route with my photography website. I just wanted something I could totally control and had a supportive community and I enjoy tinkering with php and css and have been doing that for a while.

If you want you can send me a memail and I can recommend a couple of great wordpress templates that I used as a foundation and I can show you the tinkering I did for my own.
posted by phaedon at 11:16 PM on May 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

A couple of photographer friends recommended Zenfolio, but I have no idea if that's what you're looking for.
posted by Red Loop at 3:07 AM on May 15, 2012 [1 favorite]

Squarespace could help.

I personally find the admin for WordPress a lot more friendly than the Joomla interface. There are hundreds (thousands?) of photography portfolio themes for WordPress, and most webhosts have one click installs. Plenty of Flickr plugins exist too.
posted by backwards guitar at 3:25 AM on May 15, 2012

If you were my client, I'd set you up with self-hosted WordPress & the nggallery plugin to handle the phto albums.
posted by belladonna at 6:04 AM on May 15, 2012

Deviant Art?
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 6:49 AM on May 15, 2012

Hey guys, plan one is to give Wordpress a try. The backup plan is to look into Squarespace. Thanks for the suggestions.
posted by michswiss at 12:16 AM on May 18, 2012

I think that Wordpress would be your best bet, it is far more easier to manage than joomla and Drupal. You can go with the option of custom theme development, buy a cheap Wordpress theme or find a free one. Here is an example of a portfolio theme.

http://themeforest.net/item/alive-creative-wordpress-theme/1275902

http://www.indexhibit.org/ is good but you probably need someone to theme it for you.
posted by perpetual_dream at 12:29 AM on May 18, 2012