After much research, consultation and deliberation I have finally adopted PhotoShelter Personal Archive to house my stock image collection. Currently I have over 100 photos in my PS archive mainly in the area of women's fitness and travel. In the coming weeks I will be adding more photos, as well as setting up the e-commerce functionality that is available. This will allow me to sell licensing and prints through the site with little or no hands-on involvement.
It took me a long time to choose a partner in this endeavor. Digital Railroad was also an option, as was building my own, but PhotoShelter made me an offer I couldn't refuse: $124 a year for 10GB of storage, including the e-commerce set up option. For the price of ~ $10 a month I can't even host my own site with that many high resolution images. I'm no web programmer, so a pre-built system was really my only option, as I don't have the funds to hire the talent needed to build me a custom site.
So why did it take me so long to make up my mind? My main concerns were that I wouldn't be able to utilize the SEO techniques that I have recently incorporated into my portfolio website. I am consistently placing in the top 10 in Google searches for my images, especially in the area of women's sports and fitness. I didn't want to lose those hits and contacts with buyers. As a result I am trying a hybrid model; one that uses the hits that lead to my web site as a launching point to my PhotoShelter archive.
Another reason I chose to go with a conglomerate image site, is that all current marketing research points to social networking sites as the place where people make connections in their field. I am hoping to get new clients by moving to PhotoShelter and keep existing ones by maintaining my portfolio web site. Hopefully a healthy cross-pollination of clients will occur.
