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Sell Media 2.0

Sell Media, our free e-commerce photo cart for WordPress, just received a major overhaul with a huge list of new features. Here is a brief overview of what’s new in version 2.0:

  • New Feature: Galleries. Upload multiple files. See example.
  • New Feature: Importing options (import from Lightroom, etc.).
  • New Feature: Sales stats for each product.
  • New Feature: View counts for each product.
  • New Feature: Dramatically simplified PayPal integration (email required only).
  • New Feature: Gallery navigation.
  • New Feature: Breadcrumb navigation options.
  • New Feature: Layout options. Choose one or two column layouts on single entries.
  • New Feature: Search optimization. Now searches titles, content and keywords and includes exact phrase match for search (“New York”, vs “New” and “York”).
  • New Feature: Lots of new action hooks and filters. See documentation.
  • New Feature: Lightbox notification text.
  • New Feature: Automatic classes for Checkout and Lightbox menu items.
  • New Feature: Upgrade notices for extensions.
  • New Feature: Dashicon integration.
  • Tweak: Theme compatibility fixes, no longer requires template files.
  • Tweak: Improved localization.
  • Tweak: Rewrite of the lightbox feature.
  • Tweak: Updated download methods for accepting $attachment_id.
  • Tweak: Lightbox changes to accomodate $attachment_id.
  • Tweak: Flush permalinks if slug changed on settings.
  • Bugfix: Missing sell_media_image class.
  • Bugfix: Notice fix on system info and payments pages.
  • Bugfix: Adding multiple downloads by accidental multi-clicking fix.
  • Bugfix: Adding prints to cart without selecting price group fix.

Overview of Galleries

Now you can create image galleries by uploading multiple images to the Sell Media product page. A product entry can either be a single image (as it’s been in all versions before 2.0) or it can contain a gallery of images that share the same pricing and other details. This makes Sell Media incredibly versatile for a variety of different use cases like:

  • Event photography: Create a new entry in Sell Media for your event and upload all of the images to that event entry.
  • Wedding photography: Create a new entry for the wedding you just photographed and upload all of the images to that entry.
  • Stock photography: Create a new gallery containing stock images of a specific subject.
  • Client proofing: Each entry can be password protected or marked private. Simply create a new entry, upload some images and add a password. Then, send your client a link to that password-protected page.

By default, the gallery overview page will look similar to this (depending on your theme of course):

wordpress-photo-cart-gallery

Each image in the gallery has it’s own page, which looks like this:

wordpress-photo-cart-gallery-image

New layout settings (Sell Media -> General -> Layout) allow you to quickly change between a one or two column layout. Below is an example of the one column layout with the purchase info displayed below the image.

wordpress-photo-cart-gallery-image-one-col

These new layouts work with any theme.

Adding and editing galleries is easy and intuitive and it blends in with the existing WordPress dashboard experience:

wordpress-photo-cart-admin

Overview of Importing

You can quickly import entire folders of images using our new “import” option. You can either FTP entire folders of images into the import folder or export directly from Adobe Lightroom using one of their free plugins (lookout for our detailed tutorial next week). Here is how it works:

Click the Import Options button on the Sell Media -> Add New page.

wordpress-photo-cart-import-button

If you haven’t done so already, follow the instructions for adding folders to the import directory in Sell Media. Once your images are on your server, select the folder and click Add Files.

wordpress-photo-cart-import-lightroom

After you click the “Add files” button, your images will start to upload into WordPress, extracting metadata, resizing the images to various sizes and most importantly, protecting your original high resolution file. The original high resolution file is what’s used to generate the sizes that your buyers purchase and download. It’s placed in a directory that isn’t accessible the the web, so your original source files are always protected.

Check out this tutorial on how to import directly from Adobe Lightroom into WordPress.

Overview of Sales Stats & View Counts

Sell Media now supports sales stats and view counts for each product. These new stats show up below the images and options on the Sell Media -> Add/Edit New page. This is in addition to the detailed daily, monthly and yearly sales reports that are available on the Sell Media -> Reports page.

wordpress-photo-cart-stats

View counter will start counting once you update to version 2.0.

Overview of Lightbox

We reengineered the lightbox page to accommodate for galleries. While doing so, we optimized the entire user-experience to make navigating to the lightbox even easier for your customers. Here is how is works:

  1. Create a new page called “Lightbox” and add this shortcode to the page: [sell_media_lightbox]
  2. Visit the Sell Media -> Settings -> General -> Lightbox Page and select the lightbox page you created above from the list.
  3. Optionally (but highly recommended) visit the Appearance -> Menus -> Pages and add your Lightbox page to your menu and save.

Your lightbox menu link will show an indicator with the number of items in the lightbox. Lightbox selections are saved in cookies, so your users must have cookies enabled for it to work (99% will).

Now from a customer standpoint, here’s how it works:

  1. Your customer visits your beautiful photo of the Brooklyn Bridge and clicks the “Save” button below the purchase button.
  2. A small little notification pops up with a link to the lightbox.
  3. The lightbox menu indicator increases by one.

wordpress-photo-cart-lightbox

The lightbox page will display all items that users have added to their lightbox.

wordpress-photo-cart-lightbox-page

Theme Integration

We completely reengineered how Sell Media integrates with themes. Our new approach dramatically improves theme compatibility. In the process, we updated all of our themes built specifically for Sell Media.

Search Titles, Content and Keywords

Any keywords that you apply to your images before uploading into Sell Media are automatically extracted and saved. It’s been that way since version 1.0. While your customers could search for keywords, they had to search using a different search field. We didn’t like that, so we change it.

The new search in Sell Media 2.0 is incredible smart: It searches the titles of your products, the content of your products and the keywords assigned to any of the product images. Yep!

Update Notifications

If you’re using an old outdated extension, we’ll kindly scold you with a small little admin notice until you update. Install the GPP Plugin Updates plugin to receive automatic updates to all of your extensions.

Updated Extensions

All of our extensions have been updated to work with the new features in Sell Media 2.0. You can snag them all at once by purchasing the Business Bundle.

Beginner and Developer Friendly

We dramatically simplified the steps required for PayPal integration. Now all you have to do is plug in your PayPal email address and boom, your ready to sell.

If you want to tweak Sell Media to your liking and are good at following technical instructions, you’ll be happy to know that we’ve almost doubled the number of available hooks and filters. These hooks and filters are how all of our extensions tweak Sell Media to add functionality.

So if you want to build the next big extension using Sell Media, feel free to read the developer documentation.

Where do we go from here?

Do you have a killer idea for Sell Media? Please share it in the comments below.

 

20 responses to “Sell Media 2.0”

  1. Carlos Avatar
    Carlos

    Does the photos in the website (front end) keep the EXIF information and Color Profile of the original?

    1. Graph Paper Press Avatar

      EXIF, yes. We extract the information when you upload your photos. Each keyword automatically creates it’s own archive page, like this one for the keyword “Fashion”:

      http://demo.graphpaperpress.com/stock-photography/keywords/fashion-2/

      All images that are uploaded to the web should be saved as sRGB, not Adobe RGB. See this for a more detailed explanation why:

      https://fstoppers.com/pictures/adobergb-vs-srgb-3167

  2. Joeri Jacobs Avatar
    Joeri Jacobs

    Hi,

    Is it possible for other contributors to upload their images via the frontend of the website?

    1. Graph Paper Press Avatar

      Not the front end, but you can can create “contributors” and give them login capabilities and allow them to upload from the wp-admin panel. We also have our contributors extension: https://graphpaperpress.com/plugins/sell-media-commissions/

  3. Jay Avatar
    Jay

    Does this work with multi-site?

    1. Graph Paper Press Avatar

      Everything works on network installs except per-site file protection. The file upload paths on network installs are different, which complicates file protection.

  4. Josh Sisk Avatar

    are there hooks for having prints ordered then automatically delivered via AdoramaPix, etc? Like Photoshelter offers.

  5. Kevin Novak Avatar
    Kevin Novak

    Does this only work with GPP themes?

    1. Graph Paper Press Avatar

      No, it works with all themes.

      1. Kevin Novak Avatar
        Kevin Novak

        Awesome. Thanks!

  6. John Avatar
    John

    What I want to know is, can I attach a document (such as a photo release or a transcript) to a particular image?

    1. Graph Paper Press Avatar

      You can assign usage licenses, but you cannot currently attached release forms. If that’s something you’d like to see added, please add your suggestion to our issue tracker: https://github.com/graphpaperpress/Sell-Media/issues

  7. Scott Thomas Avatar
    Scott Thomas

    I have 3 sizes of video at different price points. They are arranged in 3 different price groups. Can I alter the price of every sell media product in a price group in one go? eg. all HD videos decrease by $10 but all web size decrease by $5

  8. tonyfarley Avatar

    Is there a way to sell videos with this theme?

    1. Graph Paper Press Avatar

      Yes, you can sell video files. You can sell pretty much any file that you upload into WordPress. Just make sure to:
      1. Upload the high resolution video file
      2. Take a framegrab of the video and use it as the Featured Image for the post.
      3. Embed a clip of the video in the post content area so users can preview the video they’re purchasing.
      4. Don’t use price groups (they are solely for photos, which can be resized based on user purchase). Just assign a single price for each video file.

  9. Arnfinn Nilsen Avatar
    Arnfinn Nilsen

    I have followed SellMedia for a very long time, but haven’t jumped on board for the simple reason that it only integrates with MailChimp. Based on earlier replies you don’t intend to open for any other autoresponders. I beg you to reconcider this.

    Every other WordPress plugin or product I have that doesn’t directly support a certain autoresponder at least has the option to paste in your autoresponder’s form code. SellMedia has certainly matured in many ways, so why not allow the user to paste in the formcode of his selected autoresponder? I have my lists in Active Campaign and EmailCloudX and I don’t want to migrate them to MailChimp. SellMedia seems to be the best over all solution for selling my images, but the autoresponder part of it is still lacking and too limiting for my use.

    If you can get your fingers out and do this little bit of coding you will have a paying customer… 🙂

    1. Graph Paper Press Avatar

      Can you reach out to use so we can discuss further: support@graphpaperpress.com

  10. dev design Avatar
    dev design

    When user select print options then he show images in various frames and select one frame , he go to checkout after that a mail go to admin for send a framming photo to the user.
    There are hooks for these options.

  11. Sam Avatar
    Sam

    Hi, apologies if I’m missing something but two questions: 1) how do you offer the entire gallery for sale at one price? 2) how do you get the gallery name to show when you hover over the featured image (it currently says ‘view gallery’ on all of them)? I’m running the Snaps theme. Many thanks!

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