With the Fotomoto shopping cart integration you can sell your photos as prints, cards and downloads in a fully customizable, stylish way. While there are lots of photo sites and printing services around, few offer as many options for the seller. Fotomoto offers professional printing of your high resolution images via jAlbum, and will deliver orders directly to your customers. Not only can your visitors buy products, but they can share images over eCards, Facebook or other community sites so you can reach a wider audience quickly.
The following skins support Fotomoto: Photoblogger, Tiger, Projector, Lightflow and Turtle. (what I’m aware of)
1. Sign up with Fotomoto
The first step naturally is signing up with Fotomoto. That’s free.
2. Specify the selling options
With Fotomoto you can fine-tune every little detail to your taste: the prices, the products to sell, the sizes, paper types and more. You can even create coupons.
3. Create and upload the album
After adding the images open the Settings window (F4), and turn on Use Fotomoto
on the Tiger / Lightbox / Info panel
panel. Enter your Store ID
next to it. Copy/paste from here.
In the album it’s better not including the originals, because they are visible to the public. In order to stop visitors downloading the images turn on Right click protection on images
on the Site / Extra
panel. You can also apply a watermark to protect them, see Effects / Text
. Note, this will not affect the final prints.
Now Make the album, adjust settings, and finally Upload when you are satisfied. Note, local albums do not work with Fotomoto, not even the Fotomoto button shows up.
If you are uploading to your own site you’ll have to click on the little triangle on the Upload button, and choose: Upload / Manage. This way you can define a new connection if you haven’t done before.
Once you are logged in create a new folder for the album with the (new folder) icon. Never upload albums to the site root (public_html) unless the album is the site itself.
4. Auto pickup of digital downloads (optional)
(Requires Pro or Pro Plus subscription at Fotomoto)
4.1 Upload the original images
You can give Fotomoto access to your high resolution photos so they can automatically pick them up when needed to fulfill your customer orders. Go to your album’s Input folder (Tools / Open directories / Image directory
), and upload the original images to either your album’s /originals
folder or to a shared folder on your site, e.g. /hires
. The latter has the advantage that you don’t have to notify Fotomoto of each new album, but you’ll have to ensure there are no duplicate files in the albums you use with Fotomoto. Use any FTP or sFTP client or use jAlbum’s built-in FTP client.
- Click on the little triangle on Upload and choose Upload / Manage.
- Click Connect
- Once connected go to your album’s folder and add a new folder for the originals with the "new folder" icon.
- Now drag and drop the original images from the Input folder onto the new folder.
4.2 Password-protect the originals folder on your server
Now your files are ready to share with Fotomoto, but first you might want to make the folder password-protected. Note, this step will not work on jalbum.net, because jalbum.net’s way of protecting folders is different from what Fotomoto can handle. You can use a folder name to store the originals (see above) which is hard to guess instead.
On your site go to the Control Panel:
Choose Password Procect Directories, and navigate to the “originals” folder you’ve created in the previous step. Use the folder icons on the left to change directories, and click the folder name once you are there. That will bring up a window to add permissions to the folder, something like this:
Tick the Password protect this directory box, and create a new user. Make sure you’ve provided a strong password. Click Add/modify authorized user. (Copy the password for later use.)
4.3 Tell Fotomoto where to look for the originals
In order Fotomoto can pick up your originals you will need to give the login credentials on fotomoto.com. It can be managed on the Fotomoto Settings / Auto pickup page.
- Create New Profile
- Fill in Profile Name (anything), Storage type (HTTP), User name (same as above) and Password (paste from above), Host (http://yoursite.com/) and Path (the path to the originals from the site root, e.g.
albums/albumname/originals
With jalbum.net you don’t have to fill in the Username and Password fields, just make sure the Path points to the proper folder. - Click Test Connection to make sure Fotomoto can reach the folder
- In the Filename Lookup Pattern use simply
FILENAME.EXT
, as jAlbum is using the same names in albums as the original files were named.
Now you are ready to sell. Spread the word to get your album noticed!
Here is my final album:
Please note, these are not professional-quality photographs, however you can buy them if you like. :)
Your feedback is welcome!
Laza