Adobe Portfolio

My photography website had been hosted with Photoshelter for a number of years, but decided to leave late last year due to a combination of having scaled down my photography business and a big price increase - mostly related to the $ to £ exchange rate after the brexit vote.

I looked at various options, mainly similar to Photoshelter, but realised that I didn’t need something as powerful and that Portfolio was included in my Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan. My choice was confirmed when I learned that it played well with Lightroom online albums - which I use to sync some of my Lightroom catalog to my iPhone.

The set up was really easy, with 8 layouts to choose from - I chose “Lukas” which was introduced as “ideal for photographers”. It also helped that the colour scheme was what I had in mind. I was then able to tweak the contextual settings to link my social media accounts, set the header etc. The trickier bits were selecting the photos for the portfolios - my previous website hadn’t been updated for a few years, so wanted to freshen it up. Even more difficult was writing the “About me” section, we brits aren’t too good at that sort of thing.

The only problem I discovered during the process is that the templates all seem to be designed around landscape images, the problem being that I also wanted to include some portrait images. In the end I tweaked my image selections to ensure I had an even number of portrait images in each of my portfolios and paired them up in Photoshop to make landscape images comprised of 2 portrait images.

With the content populated, all I had to do was tweak some more settings to finalise to look. Then point my domain name at it. My previous portfolio used a CNAME record, however Adobe need an A record, their instructions are for www., but it also works for subdomains, such as photo. in my case.

Other than the issue with portrait images, I was really impressed with Adobe Portfolio, the process of setting up the portfolios, the navigation and other pages was really quick and easy. I’m pleased with the result, and most importantly it is saving me a decent amount of money each month!