Sell prints, downloads through Fotomoto

Updated 5 years ago

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.

Fotomoto Settings panel

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.

Fotomoto Settings panel

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.

Fotomoto settings

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.

  1. Click on the little triangle on Upload and choose Upload / Manage.
  2. Click Connect
  3. Once connected go to your album’s folder and add a new folder for the originals with the "new folder" icon.
  4. Now drag and drop the original images from the Input folder onto the new folder.

Create originals 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:

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:

Create new user

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.

  1. Create New Profile
  2. 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.
  3. Click Test Connection to make sure Fotomoto can reach the folder
  4. In the Filename Lookup Pattern use simply FILENAME.EXT, as jAlbum is using the same names in albums as the original files were named.

fotomoto-auto-pickup

Now you are ready to sell. Spread the word to get your album noticed!

Here is my final album:

Sample album

Please note, these are not professional-quality photographs, however you can buy them if you like. :)

Your feedback is welcome!

Laza

Sign in to post
Add your comment
Post comment
Laca Molnar

Laca Molnar 3 years ago

@harvsh: The option is always there under Settings / Tiger / Lightbox / Buttons. However, signing up with Fotomoto is unavoidable - otherwise, the integration won't work.

harvsh

harvsh 3 years ago

I am using Tiger Exhibition skin. There is no Fotomoto setting. Will it show up if I sign up for FotoMoto?

Laca Molnar

Laca Molnar 11 years ago

In 2013 Fotomoto went through an acquisition (by BayPhoto) and their plans has changed a bit. The auto pickup (offering download link for digital goods) is not part of their Free plan anymore, like I stated in my post. Read more about their new plan structure here: http://www.fotomoto.com/home/pricing

kaya

kaya 11 years ago

This is funny: when posting an URL, the forum software adds spaces into it! So please remove the space before "cart.html" of the link below. Thanks!

kaya

kaya 11 years ago

Hi folks, it's just to let you know that the new LightFlow version (3.8.6) has an option to integrate Fotomoto's shopping cart as well.
Here are the steps how it works, which are almost the same as in Turtle:
http://kaya.jalbum.net/LightFlow/v3/cart.html

Laca Molnar

Laca Molnar 11 years ago

jAlbum is not prepared for Fotomoto's special needs. I'd not include the originals in the album. It's better to store them completely separated. Usually just a drag and drop with an FTP client. No need to reproduce the same structure either as long as the file names are unique. (As far as I know)

dgrd1701

dgrd1701 11 years ago

One other question on this... does Fotomoto need to have the originals all at the root levels of the "originals" directory, or does it need them in the appropriate sub-directory, following the original gallery/album structure? or does it matter?

dgrd1701

dgrd1701 11 years ago

Am I missing something? Is there a simpler was to do this? The "have-it-your-way" link only gives general information and still doesn't provide the answer. I sure like to see jAlbum handle originals better in a future version, like put them all in a single directory instead of mixed in with the slides, thumbs, index.html, folderimage.jpg, etc.

dgrd1701

dgrd1701 11 years ago

I get that the originals need to be made available to Fotomoto but not accessible in an unprotected directory, but is there a way to get jAlbum to put all the originals in one location that I can copy to my website so Fotomoto can get them? I have over 1000 images in my gallery that are coming from many directory locations. Manually copying all 1000 of these images into one directory would take forever.

I tried several choices and it looks like the only way it works is to "copy originals" AND "link to originals via scaled images". This copies the originals to the output directories where I can separate them and upload to a server directory for Fotomoto. Then I will have to re-build the gallery again to remove the originals before uploading the gallery. There are extra files and subdirctories inside these originals directories, so sorting is still required. This is NOT and automated process.

Comments limited to 1000 characters so will continue in next post...

Laca Molnar

Laca Molnar 11 years ago

Hi, Input directory can be different based on the model you chose. If you use "Copy", then all the originals are copied to the "Input" directory. (They are not necessarily the "originals", but those jAlbum use as input images.) In the case "Link" each and every image can come from a different directory. To find the image jAlbum using as input right click the thumbnail and choose "Show in filesystem". In the case of "Use folder" the album is built back into the folder the images come from. "Input directory" shows this folder. See more in this blog post: http://jalbum.net/blog/entry/have-it-your-way

If you don't include the originals in the album (you shouldn't), you still have to introduce the originals to Fotomoto some way, otherwise it cannot sell them. This is what this article is about. Just upload those high resolution images anywhere on your server (you can even password-protect), and show Fotomoto this folder through their "Auto pickup files" panel.

dgrd1701

dgrd1701 11 years ago

I don't know where to find the originals to copy since I'm using scaled down versions. First of all there is no "Input directory" listed, only Image, Output, Program, Skin, and Config directories under Tools / Open directories. The output directory is the scaled-down images and thumbs only folders under "album". The input directory contains the slide.html and image.jpg files for slides and thumbs. The final uploaded output seems to contain the images from output directory but with the html slides from the image directory.

So how do I copy the 1000+ images from my original collection which have only been copied in low res format to the output folders? Maybe it's under Album / Pages "Link to ...something...". Which setting do I need there? I must have to copy the originals somehow or I get the scaled down version. But your instructions say not to include the originals. Would be please clarify this?

Thank you.

Laca Molnar

Laca Molnar 12 years ago

No, the watermark is only applied to the downsized images in the album, but the originals never touched. Once you specify the source for the originals in your Fotomoto settings panel, Fotomoto will use the images from there.

Fostography

Fostography 12 years ago

I'm wondering if the watermark (under the images tab in turtle) with also end up being printed/downloaded/emailed ?

Laca Molnar

Laca Molnar 12 years ago

I have updated the sample album with Turtle 4.0.4 now so you can check out.

Laca Molnar

Laca Molnar 12 years ago

Hi Robin,
Unfortunately there was a bug in Turtle 4.0.2, which I fixed now. The updated skin (4.0.4) will be available on Monday.
Laza