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Photography Portfolio on Tumblr

N

nuwomb

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 3, 2008
311
0
Hey Guys and Girls,

I have been considering the use of tumblr for my photography portfolio.

I wondered what you all think of that?

Tumblr is an outstanding community and makes it DEAD SIMPLE to get great stuff linked and re-blogged. This is a wildly viral way to spread and I think it can become way bigger than it on just another page of your website.

It feels like it would be a great place to display and increase the chances of people seeing your work.

With Tumblr you can use your own domain - which could be a simple subdomain like portfolio.yoursite.com. It can basically look like it's not even tumblr but still benefit from the great community.

I wondered if anyone has been doing this or decided against it.

What do you think?
 
I actually recently moved my portfolio over to a Tumblr powered site and it really is nice. The trick is finding the right theme, the one I have is one of the commercial ones so it cost me a bit of money but it's specifically designed to be a photo portfolio.

I've got a link to it in my signature if you want to look, it's the first link.
 
You rock! 1. cuz you replied! heh and 2. because you showed me that you've already made the jump.

I believe one of those types of themes is necessary and I was looking at the TumFolio theme by WooThemes. I'm a WooThemes lover for all my wordpress websites so why not!

You site looks great! it's simple and adding the images to tumblr is just a breeze.

Anything else youve noticed? are you watching the traffic at all?

emorydunn said:
I actually recently moved my portfolio over to a Tumblr powered site and it really is nice. The trick is finding the right theme, the one I have is one of the commercial ones so it cost me a bit of money but it's specifically designed to be a photo portfolio.

I've got a link to it in my signature if you want to look, it's the first link.
Click to expand...
 
The ease of use with tumblr is awesome. I recently started my own. It took me about an hour to figure how to use my own domain but after that it was smooth sailing. I'm working on learning some html and that so i can theme it myself more to my liking, but I found a couple out there that i liked until my skills are on par. Not sure if you ever do real shooting with your phone, but there are a number of apps for Android, and iPhone to make posting, maintaining, and even browsing from your cellular even easier and more pleasureable than in the browser.

If you do sign up let me know, I will follow you. Love your work. :)
 
I used to use Blogger to display my photos, not as a portfolio, but as photoblog. Then I came about Tumblr and moved over because I liked their interface, the fact that more of my friends were on it and would more likely be lead to viewing my blog, and because there was a nifty iPhone app for on-the-go posting.

Then I realized that I couldn't set up my posts in the same way I would on blogger. On blogger I would place a photo, add some commentary, place another photo, more commentary, etc. on a single post. And I found that on Tumblr if you want to use the "Share photos" feature, you can only display all of the pictures in a lump at the top of the post as a slideshow, so I'm not able to blog about them in a linear order. I can upload the links individually I believe using HTML and without using their uploaded, but I found that my photos get resized to the page and are displayed with a funky aspect ratio, and I'm not sure how to keep their dimensions before having to resize each individual photo beforehand.
 
nuwomb, the biggest thing, as I mentioned, is finding the right theme since not all will work as a portfolio. As for analytics you just reminded me that I never actually got around to putting in my Google Analytics code, thanks.
 
emorydunn said:
nuwomb, the biggest thing, as I mentioned, is finding the right theme since not all will work as a portfolio. As for analytics you just reminded me that I never actually got around to putting in my Google Analytics code, thanks.
Click to expand...
^^ Is your site live yet? I can load the front page, but nothing comes up when I click on the "Portfolio" hot spot. Same in Safari and Firefox.

Dale
 
Designer Dale said:
^^ Is your site live yet? I can load the front page, but nothing comes up when I click on the "Portfolio" hot spot. Same in Safari and Firefox.

Dale
Click to expand...

I only have IE8 here at work, but his site looks fine. When the page loads do you not see the four 'albums' right under where it says Portfolio?
 
NeGRit0 said:
I only have IE8 here at work, but his site looks fine. When the page loads do you not see the four 'albums' right under where it says Portfolio?
Click to expand...
^^ No. I just get a grey page with writing. It looks like the screenshot. It's fully loaded.

Dale
 

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My site should be running just fine. I just checked it in all of the browsers I have access to (Chrome, Safari, and Firefox) and it looks good.

Designer Dale, can you try clearing your cache? That might help.
 
Designer Dale said:
Just cleared my cache and then reset Safari. I have the same results in both of my browsers.

Dale
Click to expand...

That's really weird. I'll do some poking around and see if I can find out what's going on.

EDIT: I just removed the Google Analytics code, that's the only thing I can think of that might be messing with loading the page.
This would be the largest problem with having a Tumblr site/ portfolio: if something goes wrong there aren't a lot of options to fix it since you don't have access to the code.
 
Error on my side. Something in my filter software was blocking the images. I shut it off and everything loads fine. I have Content Barrier X.

Dale
 
Designer Dale said:
^^ Yes. I usually get a blocked page warning and can add an exception, but for some reason it just fails to load the photos. The other galleries I have looked at load fine. It's odd.

dale
Click to expand...

Very odd, but back to the topic at hand.

Personally I love using Tumblr as a portfolio. But just do your research and see if it fits what you need it to do. The real trick is knowing whether one of the pre-made themes will work or if you're going to want to make your own. But the good news is that if you change theme you won't have to do any content recreation.
 
M-5 said:
I used to use Blogger to display my photos, not as a portfolio, but as photoblog. Then I came about Tumblr and moved over because I liked their interface, the fact that more of my friends were on it and would more likely be lead to viewing my blog, and because there was a nifty iPhone app for on-the-go posting.

Then I realized that I couldn't set up my posts in the same way I would on blogger. On blogger I would place a photo, add some commentary, place another photo, more commentary, etc. on a single post. And I found that on Tumblr if you want to use the "Share photos" feature, you can only display all of the pictures in a lump at the top of the post as a slideshow, so I'm not able to blog about them in a linear order. I can upload the links individually I believe using HTML and without using their uploaded, but I found that my photos get resized to the page and are displayed with a funky aspect ratio, and I'm not sure how to keep their dimensions before having to resize each individual photo beforehand.
Click to expand...

i agree with the latter. if i wanted to upload multiple photos, they'd be grouped into a slideshow. i didn't really like this. but then again i don't have a problem uploading photos one by one into separate posts, which is what i'm currently doing for my wordpress. so i may go back to tumblr and see how i prefer it over wordpress. but wordpress is fine enough for me. who knows. maybe i'll prefer tumblr. we shall see, we shall see.
 
my other problem w/ tumblr is that my uploaded photo can't be aligned in the center. at least for the theme that i really like for it's simplicity, i can't aligned my vertical photos in the center. i'm a bit picky like that. it's off balance!
 
Photography Portfolio

Hello.......

I highly recommend the book "Photo portfolio success," by John Kaplan. It can definitely answer all your questions and more. I've read the book three times now it's so informative. The book will tell you everything you need to know about choosing your photographs, basic placements of the photographs, etc. Pretty much anything presentation related.

Here's some tips in case you don't purchase the book:
1.Choose only your absolute best photographs.
2.Categorize them according to subject.
3.Your portfolio should only be one subject. Example: Nature. Then take a variety of photographs consisting of nature.
 
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