Setting up a multi-photographer agency
The advanced proofing, delivery and e-commerce features are available to photo agencies and collectives in the same way as for individual photographers.
In this section, we focus on how to use PhotoDeck's multi-user features in the context of multiple photographers or contributors uploading images and video clips to a single agency account. Access to these features requires a subscription plan that includes them.
Contributors / photographers and their access rights
Access to a PhotoDeck account can be given to team members. Each contributing photographer should therefore be added as a team member to be able to access the agency account with his/her own PhotoDeck credentials.
Each team member has a set of personal user rights, as defined by the account holder, that can allow him/her for example to publish images to the agency website(s), manage orders and clients, access the website(s) administrative features, etc...
By default, an account has a single media library. A media library is like a virtual hard disk, it is the repository where files are uploaded (and from there, optionally published to a website). The team member access rights settings include rights on the media library, and it is for example possible to restrict actions to seeing the files in the media library and to uploading new files, but without allowing deletion.
The team member's rights on a media library apply to all the media library's files. In the case of agencies and collectives with independent photographers, it can be beneficial to have a stronger segregation between the files from different photographers. In this case, a new media library can be created for each photographer, so that a photographer can only see his own files, while still having full access on them. Files from multiple media libraries can be published onto the same website and into the same gallery.
Media from different libraries can be published on the same galleries. The colored tag indicates what library each media belongs to.
Please refer to the documentation on team members and to the documentation on multiple media libraries for further details!
Sales reporting
If you sell or license files via your PhotoDeck website, the order history's CSV export includes for each ordered file the name of its media library, as well as its Author and Copyright metadata, in addition to its price. This can be used to easily allocate sales to photographers or contributors.
How to setup an agency or collective account
- As the account holder, upload initial images / videos to the default media library, and build the agency website. The website's gallery structure should be set up to best serve navigation for your customers and not reflect your internal organization. If you have been using PhotoDeck as a single photographer until now, this step is most likely complete.
- Determine if you need full segregation between the different photographers' content, or if simply giving them access to the same media library is enough.
- Create a test photographer's credentials by adding a new team member (My Dashboard / My team): use a different email address than the one you use as main PhotoDeck login. If photographers will have their own media library, create a new test library for your test photographer at the same time.
- Log in to PhotoDeck with a different browser using the test photographer credentials and verify the photographer's access rights in practice. For example, upload a new image from that account and try publishing it to the website.
- You can now add actual team members and create new media libraries for them if required!