Author: Michael Scherotter

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Artist Spotlight: David Schneider

David Schneider, a photographer in Albuquerque, New Mexico has started to use Galeryst to exhibit his photography of nature, adventure, history and journeys to augment his existing site Fringe Photograpy. I really love the variety of subjects that he has captured with an eye on storytelling as a key component.

Gone Fishing by David Schneider

I focus on the light, beauty, mystery, and magic of the world around us. Our world is filled with extraordinary beauty if we know where to look and take the time to do so. I apply the impactful maxim “the mark of a good archer is knowing when not to shoot the arrow” to my photography and am careful about what I photograph. From small vignettes to soaring vistas, I bring passion and joy to each moment.

But there is more than the photograph itself, and I write a short story for each one. Sometimes fanciful and sometimes factual, these stories add a unique dimension, and each one brings its photograph to life.

This collection represents my favorite pieces. Some are from my earlier work, and some are recent. Galeryst is the perfect format for this and allows me to achieve my vision. I hope you enjoy exploring it as much as I enjoyed creating it for you.

David Schneider
Throne’s Gallery by David Schneider

When you visit his Fringe Photography gallery on Galeryst, clicking on the card next to each piece will bring you to a page on his website where you can buy the photograph choosing a framing option and size.

Fringe Photography Gallery on Galeryst

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Using Artwork for Gallery Covers

We just added a new feature which enables gallery exhibitors on Galeryst to use any of their artworks as the cover image for their gallery. There are now three different ways to set the cover image for your gallery:

  1. Press the Camera button on the bottom bar while browsing your own gallery to take an image directly from your gallery.
  2. When customizing your gallery, subscribers can choose an image do upload from their system on the details page.
  3. (New) When customizing your gallery, on the Assets tab, select the row for the artwork and press the Set gallery cover button to use a specific asset in the gallery.

Here is a short demo of how to set the gallery cover from an asset.

Setting the gallery cover from an artwork

Update your gallery cover today!

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Customizing Gallery Foyer Signage

We’ve just added a new feature requested by a photographer who wanted a logo on the signage in his gallery foyer. I was able to do this with using the same customization method for gallery cards, by providing an editor for the Babylon JS GUI XML that I use to define the text for the title and description. In the sample below, I inserted this XML to put the “Your Logo” image hosted on the imgur.com free image hosting site. Subscribers could put their logo, an image of themselves, or any other images hosted on imgur.com to personalize their gallery foyer.

<Image width="800px" height="250px" source="https://i.imgur.com/pISp53o.png" horizontalAlignment="Control.HORIZONTAL_ALIGNMENT_LEFT"/>

This customization is now available as a Foyer Title tab when you customize a gallery.

Give it a try and make your foyer even more unique.

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Gallery Cover Images

Based on an artist suggestion, we just added a new feature to enable Galeryst subscribers (Artist, Curator, or Museum plan) to upload a custom image used for the gallery cover.

  1. Customize the gallery, select the Details page
  2. Press Choose file button to select an image
  3. Press the Update cover button

I’m looking forward to seeing how artists use this!

Keep the suggestions coming!

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Gallery Navigation Update

We’ve been getting feedback from users that navigating the gallery with a mouse/keyboard/touch pad is not great, so I’ve been working to improve it and we’d love to see how you like it.

Now when you open a gallery 3D view in the foyer or a wing and click in the gallery view, the mouse cursor is hidden, and the mouse directly controls the camera rotation without having to click and drag. This is now using a browser feature called “pointer locking.” When moving around, a small white circle appears in the center of the screen which you can use to point and click on artwork to move you to stand in front of it. As before you can use the cursor keys or W|A|S|D keys to move forward, backwards, left and right and the mouse wheel to move forward and backwards. You can press Esc at any time to get the cursor back and interact with any of the UI. This is similar to 3D games like Minecraft.

moving around a gallery with mouse and keyboard.
Navigation

You may need to refresh the gallery page once (F5) to load the new code. Please give it a try and post any feedback to the Github Issues site for Galeryst.

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Artist-Driven Enhancements

We’ve been getting lots of feedback from artists who have started exhibiting their work on Galeryst and have been hard at work making it better. Artists have been creating issues on the GitHib portal, both bugs and feature requests, and we’ve been working hard to fix and improve Galeryst based on this feedback. If you have an idea or have a problem with Galeryst, please create an issue of the Github portal! Here are a few new items to notice:

Additional room layouts

Two new room layouts have been added (– and –|), we improved the icon for each layout icon to add outer walls, and showed the total number of artworks for the layout including the exterior walls.

image
Room layout options

Gallery Visitor Analytics

Now we are showing the visitors and visitors for your gallery

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visitor analytics

Gallery Title in Foyer

We fixed some issue with the gallery title and wing labels where they weren’t being displayed or the text was cut off.

Deleted Assets in Lightroom

When you deleted an asset in Lightroom from an album it was still showing up in the gallery. That is fixed now.

Improved Loading Time of Pages

We’ve been doing lots of work to decrease the loading time of pages across the site.

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Gallery Discovery with the Artwork Map

As an urban sketcher for more than thirty years, one of the amazing experiences I have had time and again is to show someone from a particular place how I have appreciated and captured it with the artwork in my journals. This is one of the big reasons why I added locations and mapping to Galeryst. When you go to the map page on Galeryst, you see pushpins for all the artwork that gallery creators have shared, added location information to, and opted in to adding a map to their gallery.

Artwork Map on Galeryst.com

If you photographs already have location metadata information on them, then that’s great, as you can now edit latitude and longitude directly in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. If you don’t know, or don’t want to share the exact location, you can enter partial information like the city, state, or even just the country, and Galeryst will try to find an accurate location based on what you’ve entered.

Entering location information in Lightroom

In Galeryst, all you have to do is to customize your gallery, make sure it’s public, and check the option to Display map of artwork locations on the Details tab and generate your gallery.

Once the gallery has been updated, you can see your artwork appear in the Artwork map, and as a map alongside your artwork for gallery visitors, kept in sync with the artwork that is clicked on in the gallery. Visitors can open/close the map with the map button Map button on the information bar.

Gallery with artwork map on the right.

Enhance your gallery with a location information today and share your appreciation of places. Experience the same kinds of wonderful connections I’ve had with people by being able to show how I’ve used my artistry to connect with them. When people first go to the map page on Galeryst, they often go to their hometown. Surprise them with an image from your gallery.

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Gallery Navigation Updates

Since launch, we’ve gotten some great feedback about navigating galleries and we’ve made some improvements to Galeryst based on that feedback.

Option to Invert Rotation

We want to make Galeryst easy to navigate for users coming from a wide variety of background on any sort of device and what we found is that some users found the touch and mouse navigation unintuitive – and reversed. What we saw is that people who were used to navigating around 3D games didn’t have problems but for those people who were new to 3D navigation, it seemed backwards. To fix this, we added an option to invert the rotation.

Video demonstrating how to invert the rotation in the gallery.
Steps to invert the rotation.

Mouse Wheel Moving

If your mouse or trackpad supports mouse wheel events, you can now move forward and backwards in a gallery by using the mouse wheel.

Minimizing Information Bar

On mobile devices, we now minimize the information bar by default, showing only a single visibility button.

Back to Gallery Button

When a visitor clicks on an artwork in the gallery, the visitor’s position and direction animates to stand the user right in front of the artwork. Clicking a second time makes that artwork full-screen. Some users where pressing the 3D view close (X) button in the upper right to leave the full-screen view which took them back to the gallery page. Now a new Back to gallery button is shown when viewing artwork full-screen that takes the visitor back to browsing the gallery. When in the full-screen view the visitor can use PgUp and PgDown to view the artworks in order.

Previous and Next buttons

When viewing a gallery on a mobile device there are previous and next buttons on the left and right ends of the information bar in a gallery. Now the buttons are visible when on desktops and tablets as well. These buttons will go through all of the artwork in your gallery in the order that you have arranged them in Lightroom. You can also use the PgUp and PgDown keys to do the same.

Feedback

If you don’t see these new user experience improvements, open the settings dialog by pressing the settings gear in the gallery view bottom bar, and press the Reload Gallery button in the settings dialog- as an old version of the code may still be in your browser.

Please post any feature suggestions or bugs that you find in Galeryst on our GitHub issues site.