Software Review: Lightbox Photo™ Gallery Software From Lightbox Photo™, Part 3

This is the third in a three-part review about Lightbox Photo™ Gallery Software from Lightbox Photo™. I have broken this down into three parts because of the overall encompassing nature of this product and to try to work it down into a single review would do the product an injustice. The three areas I will cover are an overview of the software and to look at what it takes to install and setup of the Lightbox Photo™, what are the existing features of the product, and what are new features of the latest version of the software. In this one I will look at the new features of Lightbox Photo™ Gallery Software.

Lightbox Photo™ is very feature rich. So rich in fact that there is no way to go into all that it can do. What I want to do instead is look at some of the functionalities that make it worth having. If you want to see everything, there is a feature list online. While not all of the features are available in every version, these are all in the enterprise edition.

• Media utilities let you edit your media from within the gallery admin area. With this feature, you can perform many editing functions on your media such as renaming, moving deleting, cropping, rotating, resizing, as well as image adjustments like brightness, and contrast.

• POP3 media gives you a new, more convenient way to add media to your database. It also allows your contributors to upload images to the gallery directly from their mobile phones (assuming they have a camera on their phones). Then, after capturing their image they can send the image to the preset e-mail address that is set up to check the mail, download the attached media, and add them to the gallery.

• Credit system gives you a new convenient method of purchase for you customers. The administrator can set credit amounts for each media item and then your customer can purchase the media via pre-purchased credits instead of a credit card at checkout time.

• Product options allows you to add accessories to your product such as matting or frames as an add-on to your product sale. Using this feature, you can create as many product options as you need and Lightbox Photo™ will display them in the gallery for customers to purchase.

• Product subscriptions can require your customer to subscribe to your gallery before purchasing products or instant download of media. These can be duration subscriptions that last for a period of time, or credit subscriptions that last until the credits are used up.

• Product packages enable you to put together groups of media or a CD of images and sell them for a set price.

• Multi-language selector gives you the ability to offer your users additional languages to select from. This feature allows them to change the site language on the fly.

• Lightbox SEO make possible the optimization of the dynamic content of your Lightbox Photo™ system allowing search engines to crawl your site more effectively and therefore add more content to their databases

• Virtual image assignment gives the admin the ability to assign the same media to multiple categories from one physical media file.

• Quick media preview can view media and its properties by moving their cursor over the media thumbnail providing a convenient way to preview Lightbox Photo™ media information. This can optionally be enabled or disabled by each customer.

• Smarty Template engine gives the administrator even more gallery customization flexibility than ever before. By using a series of templates and CSS it is possible to customize the look and feel of your gallery as much as you need.

Lightbox Photo™ Gallery can be used out of the box as a sandalone Web site, or integrated into an existing site. As I said earlier, there are three versions and each of those versions can come as branded or un-branded. The un-branded version gives you the ability to remove any reference to Lightbox Photo™ from the site. With the branded, you must keep the "Powered by Lightbox Photo™ Gallery Software" at the bottom of the page. The Standard edition is $399, the Professional is $599, and the Enterprise is $999 with the unbranded versions going for an addtional $100.

Lightbox Photo™ Software Gallery is fully customizable, but for that you will have to have some programming abilities (or find someone who has these skills). If you don't, the company has an offer to do it for you for a reasonable price. If you want to check out how others have customized their site, check out the galleries.

All in all I found Lightbox Photo™ to be very feature rich and easy to work with. It was a breeze to set up, and just as easy to get around in.  If you want to set up your own gallery or stock photo site, then I highly recommend that you check out Lightbox Photo™. With the right version, it can get your business started off right.