Best way for clients to add photos

General Web Design
1

I’m building a new site for a local motorcycle service & repair shop. They have two requests that I haven’t really done before - I’m thinking a CMS is what I need, but I’m hoping I don’t have to spring (or make them spring) for a $100 license.

  1. A photo page where they have the ability to upload photos / captions
  2. A “Trading Post” page where customers can post things they’d like to sell or trade
2

I think they should use a conventional Forum like this one for the Trading Post and set the owner as the moderator. I did this with a Yacht Club web site once and they use a forum which I styled as much as I could to match the main site. I would be very disappointed if a motorbike repair business would not have have some serious ongoing moderating to be done and forums are a good way to do this.

As for the Photo Page then something like inStacks Gallery3 set to read the images from a remote folder is about as perfect as you can get. That folder could be updated by something like unstacks Repository, S4S DropCMS or even FTP if they can manage that, depending on exactly what they want.

I don’t see any need to use a CMS as you will only make work for yourself.

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3

I think having a real simple

  • upload/delete dialog for images
  • with image preview
  • thumbnail generation
  • where you are able to define the sort order
  • and captions
  • with username / password protection

Would be something really good to have e.g. for Gallery 4. Just thinking…

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4

Good thinking, Jannis.

What’s the timetable for Gallery 4? (just kidding… 😜)

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5

First I have to finish 3-5 other products…

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6

I set up a Vanilla forum years ago - and could do so again. But, can someone point me towards directions on a forum like this one?

Thanks for the recommendations for the photo page. I wasn’t aware of stacks like Repository - that could be just the ticket (the owners of the bike shop do not want anything to do with FTPing).

7

I use Cloudinary for clients to add photos.

  • The free plan is more than enough for most small websites,
  • they just copy the “link” and embed it wherever they would like the image to appear
  • Cloudinary also serves the images in the best format needed for the end user (it is a media CDN) even generating webp for Android devices
  • and for galleries, you can use any stack (like Gallery3 or Stacks4Stacks ProGallery) that allows for “warehousing”, and set the path to a Cloudinary folder, and the client can just add, and subtract photos from it
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8

Do you know about their privacy facts? Like if they comply to EU GDPR?

9

Cloudinary’s offices are in Europe, and according to this blog post and to this PDF, they are GDPR compliant

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