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.
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:
Press the Camera button on the bottom bar while browsing your own gallery to take an image directly from your gallery.
When customizing your gallery, subscribers can choose an image do upload from their system on the details page.
(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.
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.
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.
Customize the gallery, select the Details page
Press Choose file button to select an image
Press the Update cover button
I’m looking forward to seeing how artists use this!
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.
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.
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.
Room layout options
Gallery Visitor Analytics
Now we are showing the visitors and visitors for your gallery
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.
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.
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.
