My wife is about to shoot a local little league baseball team is there a easy way to import 200 or 300 photos so the customer can buy then online?

Short answer is yes. Several ways. Is this a 1 time deal, or are you wanting to start a photography web site?

You could use SCCP to create a web site to display and sell your photos.
You could use Visual Lightbox to display your photos and then WFB to collect money through PayPal. Either way does not allow digital downloads. You'd have to get the email then either email or snail mail the photos.

For digital downloads (downloads that take place after paypal payment and are automated) there are several options. Some are free and some are pay. Both work and it's really not to expensive if you you are going to be doing a lot of this. Both will take some work setting up, but once set up it is hands off.

I can give you details if you want them. Pop over to my web site and drop me an email on the Contact page. http://gunsmoke.me

Your wife could also use Flickr as an easy to set up gallery then use a payment system. Flickr galleries are cake to set up on websites, it's only copy and paste, so many ways to go. Of course she would need the photos up on Flickr to begin with, but that wouldn't be a problems.

You can easily do this with SCC Pro. You can't mass import the photos that I know of (maybe a CSV setup or something, but I don't use that much so not sure on that), but bringing them into the cart is extremely easy. It's basically a drag and drop so...

Get the photos scanned or your digital images setup nicely with I would say a size of no larger than 800 x 800 so that it will fit nicely on the screen when they click to see the larger image (nice feature there). Then get the shop started and once you get your theme setup (can use the canned themes, but you may need the SC Designer or Pro to fine tune the looks of it (especially if this is something she will be using on a regular basis).

From there it's setup the basics in the shop itself, won't be much if it's mostly local so the shipping or taxes should be pretty easy to deal with too then. Then setup the Categories, she can do separate categories to divide different teams, and use the sub categories to divide by alphabetical. Set those up simply and then start adding the photos as products. If she has more than one photo of each person on the team then she can offer multiple photos as Optional Fields. If there is only one photo of each team member, then it's really simple, fill out the name and info of the player/person/etc. and a price and pretty much done.

I'm going to assume this is hard photos not digital, so if that's the case then there's not much else to do other than just wait on the orders and send them as she gets the orders. Very simple.

The other great thing about this is if she has multiple things she does this for (other sports, other events, etc.) she can just duplicate this same shop and just alter the specifics for each thing and add the photos in for them. Most of the hard work would be done already by just saving the store as a different name and location on the computer you can create as many shops this way as you like. Upload them to separate locations and you have your entire business at your fingertips.

SCCP and SCDP are excellent tools for something like this, and the only drawback is if any of the sales would be digital. That would mean a manual email back and forth to send links to their products or to send attachments with their purchases or whatever way suits her business. Still a very doable thing. Hope she has good luck with it all!

The one thing I would worry about with this type of thing in general, Photography is my thing and have thought about selling as well, but if the photos are up online, why would people buy? Unless you only have them as thumbnails which defeats the purpose in a way. I know that this might be a pessimistic outlook but it is real.

A few precautions with water marks and minimal image quality will ensure users aren't getting anything usable.

Drag and drop you can only do 5 at a time and 5 total per catagory. How do I import images using a CSV?

No digital downloads, the plain is to after they order I would print and mail to them or they would pickup at my shop.


All images would be water marked to discourge downloading and printing.


All photos will be digital.

The best thing to do is to add at least one image the way you want then export the shop as csv. Now open the csv file in your favorite editor and add the rest coping the format from the others. Then place all the images in the proper location as you see in the existing csv format so SCCP can grab them.

If you are not going to digital download, then I would use visual lightbox to set up a 'watermarked' gallery. You can easily import entire folders into lightbox at one go. Then upload via Direct FTP and put the lightbox on your own web site. Have each photo numbered for reference. Use WFB to create an order form. Users would enter name and email, photo ref number, qty, then at the end the total price. Payment is collected via paypal and you can email them a download link.

Works good, lasts a long time!