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A big part of my role on PhotoShelter’s client services team is helping our clients make customizations to their sites. This can range from demonstrating how to use our built-in customization tools, to manually tweaking parts of their sites with CSS or HTML. I was recently tapped to assist with a special project. The goal was to create a special menu on a manually-customized site that would automatically populate with the client’s top-level listed collections. Collections, for those unfamiliar with PhotoShelter terminology, are basically groups of photo galleries (similar to folders).

The client in question was NYCity Photo Wire. It’s a nifty photo wire (stream of news images) run by CUNY’s graduate school of journalism. Here’s the end result.

PhotoShelter’s API is well-suited to this task. Since v3 of the API is still being wrapped up, I decided to stick with v2. The API is able to provide a list of all the top level “listed” galleries and collections. I used a for loop to work through the response, and an if statement to make sure I was only seeing the collections, and not galleries.

Each time it finds a collection, it uses jQuery to append a list item to the new navigation menu. The list item consists of the name of the collection, which links to it. Easy as pie!

I had a problem I wanted to solve at work. Sometimes clients will call or write in asking for help, but they can’t remember which email address their account is under. This is a problem because that’s generally how we look up accounts. We can look them up by their site address (which they usually can remember), but that can take a while, and requires a couple extra steps if they’re using a custom domain. Not something you want to deal with while you have someone waiting on the phone!

Screenshot of the Find User Bookmarklet page

I’d recently discovered that the user ID number can be found in the source code of almost any member site. While this number is pretty innocuous, it can be used to perform a search in our administrative back end.

From that, the path was clear. Create a bookmarklet that searches the source code for a user ID and, if found, directs the visitor to their account in our admin site. My department (client services) has found it pretty useful, so I’ve shared it with our prod and development teams too. This is the first time I’ve created a tool that is actively being used by others.

Hooray for updates! Here’s what I’ve done to improve my Login and Print Size creations.

Login

• Now 100% running v3 of the PhotoShelter API
• Able to receive a referral link from my other projects, so that the user is redirected back to the correct page after login

Print Size

• Now 100% running v3 of the PhotoShelter API
• Sends a referral link to the login page
• Clicking on thumbs takes you to that image in the Image Browser

PhotoShelter allows you to auto-fulfill your print sales using our integrated vendors. You see a list of their different print sizes and products, and price them as you see fit. Not every image will be suitable for every print size though. For instance, you couldn’t make a poster-sized print from an entry-level DSLR, at least not without it looking crummy. Therefore it’s important for photographers to figure out in advance what print sizes are suitable for their images.

Most of PhotoShelter’s members are experienced professional photographers already used to considering these sorts of things, but newer photographers may not have had to consider this yet. To add to the confusion, there is a fair amount of misinformation circulating about DPI. There aren’t many objective guides comparing DPI settings, and many photographers don’t realize that the DPI set by their camera/software doesn’t necessarily impact the DPI at which their images are actually printed.

I thought it would be cool if photographers could have a simple, quick way of finding out at which sizes they could/should allow their images to be printed. The math involved is pretty straightforward. More…

I’m working on my next API project and thinking, gee, there has got to be an easier way to read through this JSON data. There’s a plugin for that! This JSON plugin for Firefox marks up the data with some formatting to make it easier to parse.

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