How many photos for a website?

[brian steinberger]

I'm re-doing my website and realize I have waaaay too many photos on there, hundreds. I also have a lot of galleries, 13 to be exact. I certainly want to trim all this down but I'm not sure how. I've looked at a lot of other analog photographers websites and just a few galleries with fewer than 20 photos on each seems common. How much is too much? I'm having a very hard time picking less than 200 of my favorite photos!

 

[RobC]

The more the better as far as I'm concerned unless they're all of a similar ilk.

 

[gzinsel]

Let me remind you of something. We live in a disposable culture. Let me ask you this. . . Do you want to fight that? or go with the flow? If you want a person, who visits your website , to consume and throw away, and say "oH! those are nice" and move onto the next web site and do the same thing. BY all means put it all up.
On the other hand, to create the atmosphere of "i am titillated, and yes I want more" You only show a few ( 3-5). And you need to BUILD VALUE AND INTRIGUE!!!!!
as example, , , , , just saying'. . . . . .
If you whore it out on the first date for FREE, you ask. . . why will he come back? But if I don't whore it out on the first date, he might not come back, seeing its too much work involved? I see the catch 22. your damned if you do and damed if don't.

But i look it as a resume, you DO NOT put everything on there. There will be other "times" for more in depth analysis and conversation.

 

[brian steinberger]

Interesting thoughts! Thanks!

 

[RobC]

what's the point of a photography website? If its to sell images online then no one is going to buy what they haven't seen.
On the other hand, if the point of the website is to encourage people to visit an exhibition then only show a sample of the upcoming exhibtion. But that doesn't mean the rest of the website should be removed.

And again on the other hand, one window in the side of a wooden shack looks much the same as another window in the side of a wooden shack.

 

[brian steinberger]

And again on the other hand, one window in the side of a wooden shack looks much the same as another window in the side of a wooden shack.

This is a problem I've run into. I could easily have an entire gallery titled "doors and windows" but it would get old real quick. I think I'd prefer to separate galleries by location and let a collection of photos do the speaking to describe that location.

 

[TheFlyingCamera]

I would err on the side of careful editing. I'd much rather look at a website with four or five carefully curated galleries with less than a dozen images each than a veritable visual vomitorium with so much imagery that it all blends together. I'd also rather look at a site that changes content with reasonable frequency so it stays fresh, but I can still see old favorites if I go back. It means more work on your part up front with the editing and on the back end with the maintenance - you have to keep re-editing and updating the site so the content stays fresh.

 

[brian steinberger]

I'm sorry but I don't know what a Tumblr is. Please explain?

 

[ParkerSmithPhoto]

veritable visual vomitorium

Wow, way to alliteratively describe the Instagram culture in three words!

Most photographer's websites I visit, I can tell in about four pictures if it's worth my time to look deeper. Probably 95% don't make the cut. You can bet most art buyers and photo editors do likewise.

 

[blansky]

I always have too many on mine but I'm not selling anything, it's just more of a brochure.

My feeling is people can look at a few or a lot depending on what they feel like.

The problem a few years ago was the time as site took to load which pissed off everyone if they had to wait.

That is rarely the issue anymore.

So my feeling is have the site well defined and catagorized, make it easy to navigate, and put up what you want.

 

[RobC]

I always have too many on mine but I'm not selling anything, it's just more of a brochure.

My feeling is people can look at a few or a lot depending on what they feel like.

The problem a few years ago was the time as site took to load which pissed off everyone if they had to wait.

That is rarely the issue anymore.

So my feeling is have the site well defined and catagorized, make it easy to navigate, and put up what you want.

I agree that with a well designed menu and navigation you can have hundreds or even thousands of images in website without it being a problem for anyone.

Unfortunately having taken a look at his site, its written in flash which won't work on Macs, IPads or Iphones unless they happen to have loaded a plugin for it and worse than that it loads every image in whole portfolio as soon as you go into it. That is real bad even these days as a lot of people use wifi which isn't always fast at all. Also all his images are too small in pixel dimensions for the the very high definition monitors which are being used today.
I had a look at a new Apple 5K wide monitor the other day. A 600 pixel image even across only a third of that will be stretched to oblivion and if you make em big enough for todays desktop monitors downloading them all like his site does would take an age.

Keep it simple, use plain html5 and don't preload everything. Spend your time on good navigation/category design.

 

[RobC]

The owner of the largformatphotography.info has only got 36,000 images in his personal site terragalleria.com so I think you have a way to go yet before you have too many.

 

[winger]

As an inveterate websurfer, please don't use flash. I like to click on what I want to see, not get barraged with slideshows. I can watch flash stuff on my Mac, but it needs to get updated so frequently in order to work that I just dislike it (no program that's written right should need to be updated every other week).
There's no magic number, but I tend to stop looking further if I see a few that look the same. I prefer accurately titled galleries, not existentialist ones, but that's me. 10-15 per gallery is what I strive for in mine (but mine is WAY overdue for an overhaul).
I've seen some websites with 20 photos that looked overloaded and others with 10 galleries of 20 photos each that I still wanted more. So I don't think there's a hard and fast number.