Website so ware
If you are looking to create a website for your photography, then the solution may be right under your nose. Richard Sibley sees what Adobe Portfolio has to o er
Social media does a good job of allowing us to share our images, but a dedicated website still serves as a better place to keep a portfolio of your images. I was looking to update my own website, when I realised that as an Adobe Creative Cloud user, I was able to create one for free using Adobe Portfolio.
If you subscribe to the Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan (around £10 a month) or the whole Creative Cloud package (around £50 a month) then you have online access to Adobe Portfolio! If you shoot stock photography you can also sign up as a contributor to Adobe Stock and also get free access to Adobe Portfolio, so it is worth signing up and submitting a few images for that alone. In fact, it was when signing up to be a contributor at Adobe Stock that I realised I had free access to Adobe Portfolio, at just the time I was about to update my website. Not only would it allow me to create a website, but because it integrates with Lightroom, it also enabled me to quickly get my Collections of images online with a few clicks.
How it works
Adobe Portfolio is based entirely online; there is no software to download; simply go to www.portfolio.adobe.com, sign in to your Adobe account and if you have a Creative Cloud subscription, or qualify from being an Adobe Stock contributor, you will be able to get started creating your site.
In use the online creation system is similar to using any other online website service, such as Squarespace. As Adobe Portfolio is aimed at artists wanting to create portfolio websites, there are some limitations on what it can do, which I cover in ‘What Can’t it Do?’ over the page. However, there are some big bene ts, such as the aforementioned Lightroom catalog integration.
Getting started
Once you have logged in you can start designing your site. Each site is based around a number of pre-designed templates, which you can customise to some degree. Currently there are 12 different template themes to choose from, and you can also create a single Welcome page to greet people to your site.
All of the template themes look contemporary and offer a quick way to get started. Each theme offers a different website and page layout, for example some themes will have the menu at the top or side, whilst some will have a button to
press to access the menu. On some themes the page title will be at the top of the page, on others it will be off to one side above the menu. The choice of theme will also decide how the images in your portfolio are displayed: how big should the images be, and should there be space between them?
Once you have found a theme that ts your style you can create a page. You can tweak the default theme settings by doing things such as changing some of the colours, spacing, sizes and fonts. Speaking of fonts, you have access to the Adobe Font library, so can chose from a huge number to nd exactly what you need. This is especially useful if you already have branding elsewhere that utilises Adobe fonts.
It is worth noting at this point that each theme features responsive design so your Portfolio will adapt to the size of the screen whether you are viewing it on a huge desktop monitor or small smartphone screen.
Lightroom integration
When trying out Adobe Portfolio I was expecting a simple way to choose the images I wanted to use and then add them in to a Portfolio page. What I wasn’t anticipating was Lightroom integration that made it so easy to create portfolio webpages with merely a couple of clicks.
Whether you are using Lightroom CC or Lightroom Classic the premise is straightforward: create Albums/Collections in Lightroom for each section of your portfolio. For example, I can add all of my best landscapes to a ‘Landscape’ collection. If I am doing this in Lightroom CC I don’t need to do anything else, however with Lightroom Classic you need to make sure this Collection is also ‘synced’ so that it can be accessed online. If you have Adobe Lightroom on your smartphone you can even create these Albums/Collections on the move.
Once the Album/Collection is created go to ‘Integrations’ in Adobe Portfolio and then you select the Album/Collection and choose to add it to your Portfolio; Adobe Portfolio takes care of accessing the images and creating the page and the layout. Once it has nished you can of course access the created gallery page and change the order that the images are shown in, or delete any images that you may have added by mistake.
If you have added a title to the metadata of any of your images, then Portfolio adds these as the Caption, which can be seen if you move the cursor over the image.
The real exibility comes when you need to make changes to the Collection. If you add or remove images, or even change the caption for an image, in Lightroom, you can simply go to ‘Reset From Lightroom’ on the gallery page in Portfolio. Any changes such as new images or titles will now be added. It makes it very simple to keep your portfolio easily updated and managed, and it is great for ongoing projects you may be working on.
Advanced features
Whilst Adobe can create your website and give it its own web address (for example, mine is richsibley.myportfolio.com), it is also possible to import your own. The instructions are very clear and using my domain name provider I was able to go into my settings and direct my domain, richardsibleyphotography.co.uk, so that it was linked to my Adobe Portfolio website.
Each Portfolio website can be linked to Google Analytics by simply inserting a Google Analytics tracking code. I’m not going to go into all the ne detail on how to do this, but I found that the Adobe support pages which explain how to do this were extremely helpful, even for the least website-savvy person. There is also support for various website search optimisation features, such meta descriptions and keywords.
You can create passwords for access to certain pages of the website, which makes it useful for showing work to customers, or just for sharing pages in progress for feedback. And, of course, you can add icons and links on every page so that people can quickly access your social media accounts, such as your Instagram or Facebook pages.
If you prefer a more traditional means of people getting in touch with you, then in just a few clicks you can create a custom Contact page. Any messages typed here are forwarded to an email address of your choice.
Overall, there is a ton of these smaller advanced features so that you can tweak your Portfolio site to make it your own and use it for personal or professional use.
Beyond photos
Adding things other than photos and text can be done by using embedded iFrame code. This may sound complicated but is surprisingly simple. You simply select to ‘Embed’ a new item on a page and then cut and paste an iFrame embed code into the code box. You can nd iFrame codes on most major platforms, such as YouTube, so you can add whichever videos you like to a page.
There is a catch – not all iFrame codes are accepted. This is presumably because Adobe wants to make sure that any codes are not a security risk and ensure they’ll also play nicely with the Adobe Portfolio code.
Thankfully you can paste iFrame codes from Adobe Spark, Facebook, Giphy, Google Maps, Scribd, Google Docs, Soundcloud, Spotify, Vimeo and YouTube. I also requested that iFrame embed codes from a number of other sites (to allow me to embed a podcast) were added. It seems the development team is listening to feedback and adding the ability to add iFrame embed codes from other sites.
Conclusions
There are so many ways that photographers can create great-looking portfolio websites: some simple and free of charge, whilst more bespoke solutions can cost hundreds of pounds each year. For the majority of us, a simple portfolio site is all we need, and with this in mind Adobe Portfolio provides a great solution that can have you creating a fully functional website within a couple of hours.
For me the Lightroom integration makes it a real game-changer for being able to keep each of the different projects in your portfolio quickly updated. In fact, the whole solution is very simple to use.
There are constraints, that more advanced users may nd frustrating, but there is enough customisation to keep most users happy – and also to make your site look different enough from everybody else’s who use Adobe Portfolio.
If you already subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud Photography or Full plan then you can use Portfolio at no cost, so I would urge you to give it a try as there is nothing to lose, but a few hours of your time.