Since launching, the way to create a gallery on Galeryst has been to use an album on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Lightroom has great photo management capabilities, works great across devices, and has a robust API that Galeryst uses. I have been using it to organize my 30 years of artwork. Today we are excited to announce another option for gallerists to use to generate galleries: direct image uploads from your computer, phone, or tablet. This enables any person across the globe to create their free gallery on Galeryst without a Lightroom subscription! Subscribers can continue to use both Lightroom and file uploads to create as many galleries as their plan allows.
Creating new galleries from the Galeryst Home page
When you click the Create a free gallery button on the home page or the Create a gallery button on the My Galleries page you will see a new option to create a new gallery from image files.
Creating new galleries from the My Galleries page
This will open a new user experience to let you upload artworks, order them, add details to artworks, and create a gallery. This will create a gallery with the default parameters that will create a great looking gallery in seconds. You can do this from your phone, tablet, or computer.
Interface to upload images to create a gallery
Creating a gallery from images
Once the gallery has been generated, you will likely want to then customize it as well to change the materials, add cards, maps, and other properties, but you can also manage your uploaded assets as well:
In the updated Assets tab you can easily do a variety of things:
add new artworks
replace the file for existing artworks
remove artworks
reorder artworks with drag and drop
move artworks between wings
modify the properties of artworks
specify that an artwork is the gallery or wing cover thumbnail image
Once done with your customizations, press the Update gallery button to regenerate your gallery with the updated information.
We expect that this new functionality will make it much easier for anyone from almost any device create beautiful galleries from their images and we are so excited for this next phase of Galeryst!
By far, the topic that in tech that is getting the most attention and gathering the most excitement is artificial intelligence (AI) and in AI the field that is sparking the most creative interest in Generative AI (GenAI). We have been thinking of how to apply GenAI to Galeryst for a while now and have come up with a couple of features that we are releasing today: Generative Materials and Generative Galleries.
Generative Materials
Using the Azure OpenAI Dall-E foundational model, artists can now create material textures for their gallery floor, walls, panels, and ceilings. A new materials tab will now show up when customizing a gallery where artists can use prompts to create material textures that can then be used in foyers and wings. The textures will be unique for the artist and can be used across all of their galleries.
UI for forging new materials
Now, when updated the gallery looks like this with the Mexican tile put on the floor:
Gallery wing with “Mexican tile” floor material
We encourage all artists to give this a try and forge some great new materials to enhance your galleries.
Generative Galleries
Taking the generative concept a bit further, we now have an experimental feature to generate entire galleries from a journey and a few parameters using OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Dall-E. This concept is based on how I have been keeping a visual journal of my travels throughout the years where, you specify a year, an artistic style and some locations, and a journey and corresponding gallery is generated with artwork from those locations. Please give this a try and join in the discussion about it. This is just the starting point. Take a look at a gallery generated of Copenhagen, Aarhus, Stockholm, and Helsinki in red pencil. As an artist who has been to all of these places and sketched them, it makes me smile. Give it a try and start a discussion here – I’m sure there are lots of opinion on AI-generated artwork and lots of room for improvement at making this experiment even better.
Northern Europe art expedition AI-generated gallery.
Just the Beginning
So much is happening every day with generative AI that it is hard to keep up but at Galeryst, we want to use it to enhance the gallery experience across many axes, from discovery to creation to visiting. We are working on even more functionality to enhance the gallery experience with AI: stay tuned! Generative AI is the transformational technology of the day, and it is important for all of us to understand its power, how to use it, and where it should (and shouldn’t) be used. All creative people need to understand how it will impact their world as the new saying goes, “your job will not be replaced by AI but by someone who knows how to use AI better than you.”
The gallery tour with the interactive tour guide and the playback controls
We have just added new functionality to Galeryst to enable artists to create narrated walk-through tours of their galleries. Here is a walk-through of the feature. To create a tour, an artist opens their gallery and the tour authoring pane and then picks tour stop locations in their gallery. The time between locations and the duration at each location can be easily configured. You can drag and drop the tour stops in the vertical timeline to reorder them.
Add tour stops by moving around your gallery and pressing the Add tour stop button.
Once tour stop locations are set, add an audio file to synchronize with the tour which is an animated flow from stop to stop. Galeryst subscribers can upload the audio file so that visitors can hear the audio playback when they visit the gallery. You can use any screen recording tool to record a video of the tour, or you can embed the tour as an iframe in another website. An interactive tour guide is automatically generated and can be used to easily move between artworks in the tour by clicking on the stops in the guide.
Show the tour guide as a separate window – and see products as well.
All public tours will be shown on the Gallery Tours page so visitors can easily find your tour.
If your gallery has a public tour, visitors can start it from the Tours button on the gallery toolbar.
Toolbar showing the tours button
We are excited to see the tours that our artists create, and we look forward to featuring the first ones created!
Galeryst now has the ability for anyone with a gallery on the site to create printable products that can be sold to visitors in the Galeryst Shop. Partnering with Printify, Galeryst enables you to easily create a variety of made-to-order drop-shipped products. Currently 86 products ranging from framed posters to giclée art prints to greeting cards are all available to make products from your artwork. You can create products for some of the artworks in your gallery or all of them. You can also determine what kind of profit margin that you want to earn when visitors buy your products and your products will have their own section in the Galeryst Shop.
Creating Products
The new page to create products from artworks.
Start on the Create Products page where you pick the gallery, artworks, products, listing details, and profit margins. You can see the details for each of the products. You will also need to configure a payout account so we can share profits with you. Galeryst partners with Stripe to enable the payout accounts in all locations supported by Stripe. Like a physical gallery, Galeryst splits the revenue with the artists, with a percentage determined by the artist’s subscription plan.
The markup modeler UI so artists can adjust the markup for their products and see the split based on their subscription.
Once you create the products, they will appear in the Galeryst shop in your category section. You can also see the products on the Galeryst Products page.
The products page where an artist can see all of the products created from their artwork.
Once visitors start ordering, you can track their orders on the Orders page. You can update or remove your products at any time and the Galeryst team will share revenue with artists on a monthly basis.
Product Listings
Once you have created products, they will start appearing in your galleries. On your gallery page, a new Products section will display below the foyer gallery image.
An updated gallery page with the new Products section
Clicking on the product image in the Piece column navigates the visitor to the artwork in the gallery with a card to the right of it for each of the products available for it. clicking on the card takes the visitor directly to the product page to buy it.
An artwork in a gallery with a product card on the right
Clicking on the product link takes a visitor directly to the product page where they can buy the product.
A product listing in the Galeryst shop.
Galeryst Changes
The biggest change to Galeryst to enable products is the new navigation menu with the Shop category. You will find other changes across the site to support products and the ability for artists to easily earn revenue from their artwork from a global audience.
The new Shop menu on Galeryst
What’s next?
We are excited to see what products you create on Galeryst. We started Galeryst with a simple mission to enable any artist to create a beautiful gallery to share their art with the world. Let’s see what you can do with it!
Since launching Galeryst two years ago, one of the most interesting use cases has been for educational purposes. I have seen schools, colleges, and educational institutions at all levels creating galleries to share lessons, student artwork, and present projects. The most inspiring aspect for me, has been how primary and secondary schools across the globe have found and taken advantage of Galeryst.
Many students, teachers, and schools have created unlisted galleries and have provided links to their communities, but others have made their work public so the whole world can see the talent of their students. Here are a few:
AP Art students at The International School of the Port of Spain
Primary 6-JC Wing of the Jakarta Nanyang School Artventures 2002 gallery
The Jakarta Nanyang School in Indonesia created a gallery for their students, JNY Artventure 2022.
Mount Compass Area School Art Exhibition 2023
Most recently the Mount Compass Area School in Australia created a school art exhibition.
The benefits of using Galeryst here for education are easy to see:
An affordable way to exhibit the artwork, giving every piece the space it deserves.
It is accessible from phones, tablets, computers, and VR Headsets in any modern web browser – nothing to install.
Navigating a gallery is similar to playing a 3D computer game, so students of all ages will likely be familiar with the experience. You can even navigate around a gallery with a game controller.
It blends technology with creativity in a way that is approachable to students of all ages – and their audience.
It gives a school a way to exhibit artwork to its extended community of family and friends across the world.
Though you can share links to galleries across the web and social networks, Galeryst does not rely on any social networks or advertising companies for revenue or user profile management.
One of the technologies behind Galeryst is Babylon.js – a toolkit for writing 3D code for websites and games. Galeryst procedurally generates the code to build galleries based on the size of your albums in Lightroom. If your school wants to learn more about this interesting mix of art and coding, please reach out to me and I can help you design a STEAM curriculum around 3D coding with artwork. If you want to experiment with a code sample of what builds the foyer in Galeryst, take a look here.
BabylonJS Playground with the TypeScript code for the Galeryst Foyer.
Anyone can create a free gallery today with Galeryst – and you can do that using a free 7-day trial of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Give it a try today and make a place in the metaverse with your student’s artwork!
Create a Gallery for your school today and let your students show off their work to a worldwide audience.
We have been working on new functionality in Galeryst that enables anyone to host live gallery shows in the metaverse for the galleries on Galeryst. The host and the guests can move around the gallery for the show as they are represented by 3D avatars. The host can guide the guests around the gallery highlighting artworks and can even open a shared whiteboard in front of an artwork to explain it. All of this functionality is possible with a new Microsoft Teams app that we are currently beta testing.
Dinosaur and avatar (on right) in a virtual gallery.
If you are interested in testing this as a guest or as an artist, please sign up today for a 45-minute test meeting on Microsoft Teams. You can participate in a variety of ways:
From a PC or Mac using the Microsoft Teams desktop app
From an Android or iOS device using the Microsoft Teams app in the iOS app store or Google Play store
Galeryst generate 3D virtual galleries from Adobe Photoshop Lightroom albums enabling any artist to create a beautiful gallery to share their artwork with the world. Create your free gallery today on Galeryst.com.
The various visualizations of public galleries on Galeryst
Almost every artist who has a gallery wants to know who visits it and what artwork that the visitors find most interesting. If a gallery is virtual, like it is on Galeryst, an artist also would want to know where in the world the visitors are coming from. That is now possible on Galeryst! We’ve been working on a new analytics page on Galeryst that shows data about public galleries and artwork shared in them. For Galeryst subscribers, we are also showing visitor traffic and their engagement with the artwork in their galleries. Note, that there are many more non-public galleries on Galeryst that we do not share information about on the analytics page.
All the public galleries on Galeryst
For the data visualization, we are using a tool called SandDance created by Microsoft Research and released through the Microsoft Garage, Microsoft’s small-scale innovation group. It is now available as an open-source component here. We chose SandDance because it offers a poetic 3D visualization with animation that went well with the 3D nature of Galeryst. SandDance invites users to explore the data visually in a fun way.
All the artwork in public galleries arranged by latitude and longitude
Visitor Analytics
When a visitor enters a gallery, moves around, and clicks on artwork, that stream of data is recorded anonymously by Microsoft Application Insights. That data is then represented in a 3D column chart where the x axis is the date, the size of a block is the amount of time spent, and the color is the number of artwork touches (interactions). Clicking on a block shows detail about a the timeline of a visitor session on the rigth, wings entered, and artwork touched.
Column chart of gallery visitors
The fun of SandDance is that users can easily switch between 8 different chart types and see the same data in different ways. The same visitor data in a grid chart below.
Grid chart of visitors to the gallery “2020-2022”
To get started with Galeryst analytics, sign in with your Adobe ID on Galeryst and you can see the Galleries, Artworks, and Content Labels data visualizations. If you are a paid subscriber at any level, you can see other charts with analytics for your galleries, your artwork and your visitors for all of your galleries or specific ones.
For users and subscribers, to see the Galeryst analytics and analytics for your galleries, go to the My Galleries page, and click on the menu button for any gallery and you should see a new Analytics in the user menu in the upper right:
Analytics option in user menu
Exploring Data
Exploring the data in Galeryst can be fun and insightful. If you explore the Content labels chart as shown below, you can see that artworks that have been label by AI as “colorful” got more interactions on average than many other types of content over the past week.
Content labels chart
The SandDance control is meant to be used for data exploration so you can easily change which parameters are shown on which axis, how color is used, what color scheme is used, and how the sizes of cubes are determined, to name a few parameters. We invite you to play with the data, experiment and find a visualization that’s insightful for you. It’s very easy for us to add another visualization so please reach out if you have created a useful one that you’d like to share. We are looking into adding capabilities to enable users to save chart options as well.
The various data properties that can be used to drive the charts
Our goal in launching Galeryst was to enable any artist to create a beautiful gallery to share their artwork with the world. Now those artists can see what part of the world is appreciating their work. We invite you to create a gallery (anyone can create one for free), share it with the world, and explore the analytics that come from it. With the various subscription plans, you can create a gallery with an Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 7-day free trial, try out Galeryst for with a 1-month Artist plan, and see who comes to see your artwork!
Galeryst Analytics Walk-through
Customization Update 1/27/2023
Enabling saving user customized charts was easier to do than I thought. Now Galeryst user can save any chart configuration as a custom chart. Artists can modify any of the parameters (chart type, column mapping, color schemes, etc.) and press the save button next to the source selector to save a custom chart. If you modify the chart, press the save button again to save updates to it.
New Save button to create customized analytics charts
We are excited to announce a new feature on Galeryst to enable people who create galleries to add sculptures to their galleries. This is a feature enabled for users who subscribe to artist, curator, or museum plan and will allow them to add .GLB 3D model files stored in the Adobe Creative Cloud Libraries to specific locations in gallery layouts.
Walk-through of adding a sculpture to a gallery on Galeryst.com
Though there are many 3D file formats, we chose to enable GL Transmission Format Binary ( .glb) files because they contain geometry, lighting, materials, and animations and there are many software tools available today that can be used to create these files. As Adobe has a number of 3D tools their Creative Cloud tool set, they’ve enabled their Creative Cloud to support the .glb format and Galeryst leverages the Adobe ID for authentication as well as the Photoshop Lightroom API and Creative Cloud API for content.
.glb Files
For the dinosaur model above, I took a 3D topographic model that I created with the Topographic app I built a few years ago, loaded it into the Paint 3D app and then inserted a 3D dinosaur from Paint 3D’s model gallery. I then exported it as a .glb file and saved it to a Creative Cloud Library. Most modern 3D applications like or Blender or 3D Builder can generate .glb files and there are lots of models available in the format today.
Adding 3D sculptures to your galleries involves a few steps if you are already a subscriber (if you are not, check out the artist, curator and museum plans here).
Add at least one .glb file to an Adobe Creative Cloud Library (not your Lightroom albums).
Create a new gallery if you don’t have one yet. (There is not an option yet to create a new gallery with sculptures.)
Customize the gallery you have already created and add sculptures to any of the wings in the new Sculptures tab.
In each wing, select layouts that have sculpture locations.
Regenerate the gallery.
Here are the details:
Adding a sculpture
Select a wing in the first column.
Press the + to add a new sculpture.
Select a .GLB file from one of your Creative Cloud Libraries and the model will load on the right next to a person figure to give some scale.
Press the Height button to show a grabbable arrow gizmo to move the sculpture up and down.
Press the Scale/Rotate to show a bounding box gizmo to rotate and scale the sculpture.
You can drag with the mouse or touch to change the orientation of the view and mouse wheel to zoom out.
Update the name and description and check the option to show them in your gallery when a visitor points at it.
The sculptures page when customizing a gallery.
Adding a Layout with Sculpture Locations
On the Wings tab go to the Layouts section in your wing and add a layout that has a red dot on it showing a sculpture location. You can now have multiple different layouts in a gallery wing. Each room in a wing can have up to four sculptures.
The new layout selector showing layouts that have sculptures in them.
Rebuild your Gallery
Rebuild your gallery by pressing the Update Gallery button and when your gallery is updated, you and your visitors should see sculptures in the wings. See the Dinosaurs Gallery.
A dinosaur model in a gallery of dinosaur paintings.
Just the Beginning
This is just the start – please send your feedback and share your galleries with sculptures – we’re so excited to see what this enables!
I could imagine all kinds of uses for this new feature:
Presenting an architectural design for review or a critique like the kind that is held in architecture schools.
Showing a 3D scanned model of the artist welcoming people to the gallery.
Share collections of models you’ve made for as a portfolio surrounded by sketches and renderings of them.
Julie West is a humanitarian, travel art photographer, and owner of a travel company. Julie, lives in Australia near a small village called Tyalgum (tie-al-gum) in Northern NSW, about halfway between the tourist city of Gold Coast and the backpacker haven of Byron Bay. She lives on a small rural (lifestyle) farm in the Tweed Valley which is home to the Nganduwal people of the Bundjalung nation, who are the first nations people and the traditional owners and custodians of the land where she lives.
Grandmother by Julie West
Julie has spent many years travelling through SE Asia and would like others to see the varied lives of the many people and cultures there. Her aim as a photographer, is to show the world that we are all family, and we all have stories to tell. While traveling, she supports local businesses and communities, as well as helping to aid in the education of children in rural areas of Laos. She prefers to experience a place deeply and often, rather than see everything once, skimming the surface, especially when photographing and getting to know her subjects.
School Friends by Julie West
Julie has an upcoming photography exhibition titled ‘Asiatique’ as part of the Murwillumbah ARTS Trail in Australia on the last weekend in May 2022 and this was her impetus to create an online gallery on Galeryst for her many friends and family who live too far away to attend, but wanted to see the exhibition.
I came across Galeryst while searching for software to create my own online space. As an Adobe Lightroom user, I found it easy to create and use this amazing and yet simple program. Michael and his team assisted with a few glitches I had, and my online gallery is now something I am delighted with.
Julie West
It’s clear from viewing her gallery you are seeing something special in her photographs. You go on a trip without ever having to get on a plane. Her images allow an intimate peek into lives of people in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos you may never get with a casual visit.
Julie’s use of the description card in her gallery wing adds another layer of depth and interest as well. She uses each card to share a story or backstory for each image. This allows us to learn about the lives of her subjects and connects us to strangers we would otherwise never know. Her goal of sharing a real world that tourists never see is realized and it is a glimpse into a world that that is moving and beautiful.
