As I'm going a regular number of theatre gigs I am looking at an online sales system.

I have plenty of webspace, alas without MySQL, and have currently been using Simpleviewer to create galleries of 50 or so photos at a time.

Being able to take an on-line order has appeal so there seems to be various options.

I don't particularly want to use Smugmug or someone like that - mainly because its quicker to FTP up to my own space and they take their own commission. I know they handle the printing side as well...


Various options seem to be...

1) EOS templates - build a gallery using Jalbum, Breezebrowser or Iview media pro and upload. Needs configuring by text file which is a bit tricky, and implementing into a site needs to HTML and CSS skill.
I've got a sort of demo as such HERE (http://www.norwichphoto.co.uk/gallery/)

I've paid for this and have a week to make my mind up and get a refund.

2) JAlbum (Breezebrowser) and a paypal enabled skin. Limited choice of paypal skin and I'm not a coder / HTML / CSS Guru to edit my own
HERE (www.norwichphoto.co.uk/gallery2/index.html)

3) Simplephotos + get someone to add a basic paypal script
HERE (http://www.norwichphoto.co.uk/portfolio/)
Pros: very simple, just ftp a load of photos and dump them into a subfolder. Script automatically generates thumbnails on the fly, and caches them so its quicker for subsequent visitors. Its also not flash based which a lot of people don't like - it even works on my PDA.

Cons: Author sort of gave up in 2005 with development which is a shame and no shopping cart functionality without a clevererer person than I adding it in.

4) A cheap but elegant looking solution from the Scoobynet Photo forum...

I've used Breezebrowser templates and was quite please with the result.
Definitely no guru skills required, lots of trial and error and a good learning experience.

Let me know if you want to take a look at the site or the templates.

I have seen a lot of postives from people using the EOS template. Another option could be ExposureManager - Focus on Sales (http://www.exposuremanager.com) I can't remember but I think your customer would get charged in US dollars, but I can't remember 100%

Darren

Don't know any free ones, but I've been using Photium for my main site, which is dead easy to set up, automatically does thumbnails, disables right-clicking, and has a Paypal function (and no commision). Costs from £7 week though, but that included domain name and email forwarding, which looks more professional.


Contemporary lifestyle portraits and events photography (http://www.bestside.co.uk) for my example

I know a friend of mine uses eos templates after trying all sorts of stuff, and there sites look good