PSM Quest - Photography Studio Management Software Business Tips

Welcome to the PSM Photo Studio Management Software demo studio site. Here we have built some website pages within our site to demonstrate a few more cost effective ways to host your photography studio online.  In addition to  trying to keep the costs of photography studio software to a minimum we include many of the features you would get paying anywhere from $29 to $200 per month.

Our approach is to maintain design flexibility and host our Photo Studio with our own Domain name. We have done this with both this site and our Studio Site for $4.00 a month, unlimited storage, bandwidth and a free domain name.  A note on storage; even with thousands of images, your image uploads should never be larger than 800x600. This provides the best display online and but still maintains a good loading speed.

The main tools in use here are:

• Cost effective Webhosting!  

  • If you need it these guys rock, $48 a year domain name included!

• Joomla Content Management System

  • A free open source product that allows you to build and manage your web sites online without any additional software. This site was designed with Joomla. If you are in the market for a web-hosting service many of them offer Joomla as a free automated add on. In other words to install it on your site you would just log into your work area and after a couple clicks it is installed. If this is something you are interested in and try we strongly recommend installing all of the sample data to help you learn how it works, just amazing stuff here!

• Jalbum

  • A free photography web gallery building software program, simply the best around. Very easy to use making the management of online photography galleries effortless. It is down loadable and has many different skins (templates) to format with. All of the work is done on your computer, previewed and then uploaded via an internally built FTP program, smooth fast and just as professional looking as anything on the web.

• Google Calendar with Tungle Free Online Booking!

  • A great free resource and all PSM Quest versions have built in Calendars and automated calendar export interfaces to upload into Google and or Outlook. Schedule management is a breeze and accessible via the web and down-loadable to your mobile device.

  • We have two Examples both also using the free Tungle Program to allow online Scheduling by your clients.  Google feeds Tungle and any event you have scheduled will show up as Busy time in the Tungle App.  When the customer sets up an appointment it is the automatically added to the Google Calendar and sends you a notification.

Click here to see how simple it was for us to set up this awesome free online booking tool!

Gallery Display Management Templates - Online Proofing and ordering $0 to $3 per month!

There are a bunch of online services for photographers to set up a site and sell images/associated products and the prices are just as diverse. If you are interested in more flexibility in cost, design and printing services these may be of interest.  The biggest benefit we have realized moving away from a canned package was the additional flexibility we had in printing services, we use a mix of labs, not just one that provide both the best prices and quality.

• Our first photo gallery was set up using the jalbum software gallery management skin LightFlow and was embedded into our site here using the Joomla Content Management System with an iframe function. Iframe is basically a page hosted within a page.
• Our second photo gallery was also set up using the jalbum software gallery management skin LightFlow and is a pop up link to the actual album hosted in another folder on this site. This method works well when your site does not support iframes, such as a Flash Designed site like my own.