benchodroff.com

Yep, I want to make a buck off my photos.

I want to stop offering my high resolution pictures for free. I want to watermark the low resolution images and provide the “add to cart” feature, but make users go through a Paypal payment system before they can download the items as a zip. This new paypal payment module will check to see if there is a listed price for the photo in a custom field, otherwise it will charge a standard price – maybe $3.

PHP Gallery2 has a user contributed Paypal Checkout cart – but it is not set up in the way I need it. This module offers the ability to add photos to the checkout cart and purchase them through paypal. Unfortunately, I then have to physically email file to the customer since the module was set up to handle physical prints, rather than digital downloads. I’d rather have the user download the original copies (and perhaps a copy of my fair use license text file) in a zip file. This saves both of us time.

There is a zip download module that is included with the default installation. I just wish someone would insert a license agreement module and paypal payment module in front of the zip download. This paypal payment module could use the Custom Fields module to set custom prices for pictures or, optionally, use a default price if no price is given for the photo.

The other option is to ditch Gallery2. I’m toying with this idea mostly because there are existing open source E-Commerce sites that can do what I am talking about with no modules. The downside is I would have to import the photos into this new system. An upside to that downside is it will force me to narrow the number of photos and create a much easier to browse selection of finer quality photos. A downside to that upside to the downside is that I have no time to do this.