SlickPic is one of the most exciting products I’ve seen for photographers. It’s been around for over 12 years now — I’m late to the party! — and it does just about everything you need. This review of SlickPic will have two parts: In part one, we’ll be taking a look at Photo Galleries.
SlickPic combines a bunch of tools into one easy-to-use, designed-for-photographers solution. Portfolio gallery? Check. Beautiful website? Check. Delivering photos to clients? Check. All the privacy and sharing controls you could ever dream of? Check. It truly can be the one purchase you make as a photographer to get yourself online, promote your offerings to clients, and deliver and sell your work.
It combines professional portfolio (driven by Albums, similar to Adobe Portfolio) and client delivery gallery (similar to ShootProof, Pixieset, SmugMug, etc). Portfolio Websites is the other major feature (drag and drop style such as Squarespace, Wix, etc), with the option to upgrade to done-for-you design.
It’s also a photo/product sales platform, includes photo sharing social media (like 500px or Flickr), allows you to set up a Blog (with or without a website) and provides a photo editing service! I mean, it’d probably be quicker for me to review what they don’t do.
A bit of housekeeping about this review of SlickPic
In Part One of this review of SlickPic I’m going to go through the Organizer and Gallery features of SlickPic. SlickPic’s plans all include Photo Galleries (albeit with some features restricted to plans above the entry level Basic plan). Pro and above plans also include Portfolio Websites. Organizer is the powerful backend that powers it all.
The features I’ll discuss here are included in the Classic plan and above unless otherwise specified. Check out the pricing here for the features included at each price point. And keep an eye out for Part Two of this review, where I’ll dive into Portfolio Websites, Blog and selling features.
Also, SlickPic is offering a special price for Photofocus readers: A 50% discount for the life of the account on the Bespoke Classic plan for passionate photographers. Yes, you read that right: 50% off for the life of the account!
OK, now that we’re oriented, let’s get started and take a look at everything in here.
Pros
- All-in-one solution designed for photographers
- Intuitive and easy to learn
- Powerful privacy and sharing tools for photo Albums
- Unique features you can’t get elsewhere, such as instant watermarking and group uploading
- Plugins to integrate with your workflow in other apps
- Photo storage and cloud backup included
Cons
- Does not have print lab integration
- Limited social following feature
SlickPic user experience
SlickPic is a web-based service and has a modern, intuitive design. When you first sign up, the onboarding process walks you through getting started. You can immediately choose to dive into DIY setup or begin a Bespoke order.
When you choose Bespoke, SlickPic’s dedicated team of designers will create your site for you according to your specifications. The options are straightforward: SlickPic wants to make your photos stand out on your site and guides you through recommendations to make this happen. I’ll look at the Portfolio Websites side of SlickPic more in part two of this review.
Your SlickPic account has two main public-facing parts: Your Gallery, and your website (included in Pro plans and above). You get your own SlickPic subdomain for your gallery (i.e. https://jemmapollari.slickpic.com/) and it shows your public Photo Albums (more on how these Albums got here later), in a social media style dashboard with follow stats. If you’re going down the DIY route (even if just to get started), SlickPic suggests starting with your Gallery, and that’s what I’m focusing on here.
Your website, on the other hand, defaults to a URL like https://jemmapollari.slickpic.pro/ and this you can put your own custom domain on. For example, I used https://pollari.cc for my domain. (For the techno-minded, the custom URL becomes an alias for the site.) Pro plans and above include Websites. More on this coming in review of SlickPic, part two.
Using SlickPic Photo Galleries
Every feature of SlickPic is a complete photography solution in itself. Website, client galleries, blog, selling: It’s all there. In this review of SlickPic I’ll give an overview of what the Organizer, Gallery and some of the side features can do.
Using Organizer for uploading and organizing photos
The Organizer is the first stop for your photos: The powerful backend. Here you upload, organize and prepare photos for use in your public-facing Gallery or your website. Photos upload into Albums, which can be public, unlisted or private. Albums can be nested (like a folder structure) for thorough organization.
Familiar tools like Collections, Quick Collection and Featured are other ways to bring your best photos to your audience. A private Notepad in each Album gives you a place to add detail only you can see. The order of photos and albums in Organizer carries over to Gallery and your website (Pro plan and above), so you only need to organize once.
My Gallery in SlickPic: Instant portfolio, client delivery portal and more
The Gallery is your public-facing portal that shows all your photo Albums. You can toggle between Owner View and Visitor View with a button on the page cover. Visitors will only see Albums you have set to public. You can also set Albums to private (not visible in your Gallery and can’t be shared) or unlisted (not visible in Gallery but can be shared by those with the link).
The Gallery is populated via the Organizer. Once you mark photos as Featured (using the star icon on photos in Organizer), you will have a Featured tab to showcase your best images from any Album in your Organizer. Another tab you can enable in your Gallery is the Blog: I’ll discuss this more in part two of this review.
You can use your Gallery as an instant portfolio (Featured is a great way to capitalize on this), a client delivery portal, a teaching tool, a competition portal — the sky is the limit. Gallery comes with proofing mode for clients, allows toggling between views (HD/SD, light/dark, etc), provides a contact button for logged in users, and all the share options you’d expect (plus one you wouldn’t: QR code for your Gallery, generated for you!).
Delivering client photos using Gallery and Organizer
Preparing client galleries for delivery is done in Organizer. Accessed via Album Menu > Customize Album, you can set all the sharing and privacy rules you need for delivery. Limiting downloads, screenshot protection, right-click-save protection, restricting who can comment, password protect, setting time limits, limiting the number of viewers and more.
As well as these global settings for the Album, you can override any specific setting for particular shares. For example, you might have one set of rules for a wedding gallery delivered to clients, and override these to share the photos with other vendors.
Under AlbumMenu > History you can see all the shared links for the Album and disable them if they’re no longer needed.
One of the interesting features here is disappearing versus expiring Albums. SlickPic provides the option to set an Album to “disappear.” This means that after a viewer opens the link, they have a set time (e.g., 15 minutes) to view the Album before it disappears for that viewer. This is a unique addition to the standard feature of expiry dates (which closes the Album to all viewers at a set time and date). You can use this share by share, making it a powerful tool with a range of applications, from competition voting to classroom teaching.
Review of SlickPic instant watermarking feature
SlickPic’s Organizer has a bunch of unique features that you can’t get anywhere else. One of those is instant watermarking. Accessed via Album Menu > Watermark, this tool allows you toggle watermarking on the fly. Changes are instantly applied without every image being re-processed. You can add Borders as part of the watermark too.
To watermark just an individual photo instead of every photo in an Album, click the three-bar icon and select Watermark.
Saving different watermarks as presets adds power to the feature. For example, if you run different brands for different clients, you can have each on a different SlickPic website (Pro plans and above). Add and change watermarks on the fly to match each brand.
Using Group Upload in Organizer and Gallery
Another awesome unique feature of SlickPic is Group Upload. I love this feature, and I can see so many uses for it. Accessed via Album Menu > Group Upload, this enables a public Album that others can upload photos to.
You can set a custom link to the album, generate a QR code and allow upload by email. Also, you can set limits on who can upload and how many photos they can upload, limit it to an end time and more.
First, upload the images, and they appear in the Album in your public-facing Gallery. This would be perfect for teachers. Have students take photos in your workshop, upload instantly, and share with the class for discussion and critique. Running competitions: Require that people login, limit to one photo per person, and set an end date. Competition entries done! And it’s all happening in your branded space.
Social media features of SlickPic Dashboard
As I mentioned earlier, the Gallery has a social media side to it. It’s in the Dashboard that you can see all this activity. You can follow other photographers and vice versa. The main event is The Exhibit: A curated space where fresh photography is put on display.
This side of SlickPic feels under-developed at this stage. Photographs are certainly front and center, but there’s limited scope for finding other users to connect with.
Integrating SlickPic into your workflow with other apps
SlickPic comes with a gallery of plugins to integrate with your workflow. There are plugins for Adobe Lightroom, Bridge and Photoshop, as well as Photo Mechanic by Camera Bits, Apple Aperture and even Windows Gallery. (The last two are legacy plugins.)
These plugins automate publishing your photos from desktop to your SlickPic Organizer. I’ll take a deeper look at this process in a future article, so keep an eye out for that.
Editing photos with SlickPic Photo Edit credits
Finally, before we wrap up this overview of the features, you can even have your photos edited in SlickPic. No, this isn’t AI or machine learning: It’s a team of real-life human photographers who edit your photos for you. From within your account, you can buy photo edit credits and submit your photos in just a few clicks.
SlickPic Photo Galleries performance
Everything in SlickPic feels like, “Oh wow, they’ve made that so easy.” Even technical tasks like assigning a custom domain are automated into just a couple of clicks. It’s intuitive and powerful, and packed with features. There’s no doubling-up of effort. The full integration of Gallery and website Builder (see Part Two of this review!) with the Organizer makes getting your latest work online easy.
As a web-based cloud service, your connection speed will affect your upload speed. Once things are in your Organizer, it’s fast to navigate. Plugins with your existing apps makes it an automatable process you can set to go and walk away.
SlickPic Photo Galleries — Pricing
SlickPic offers two major pricing divisions: Do-It-Yourself versus Done-For-You. At time of writing there are three plans in the Do-It-Yourself range, and two in the Done-For-You.
First of all, the Basic plan starts at $4.95/month, billed annually, and provides your personal ad-free Gallery. The Classic plan adds client gallery features including watermarks, download limits, right-click protection and other tools to give you power over how your photos are distributed. Everything I’ve discussed in this review is included in Classic and above (i.e., the Gallery features, not including website). Pro ($15.95/month, billed annually) or above is what you need to add your Portfolio website to your account.
Next, Done-For-You includes two plans: Bespoke Classic and Bespoke Pro. Both include a designed Portfolio website done-for-you and different levels of cloud storage, up to 4TB for Bespoke Pro. In an online world where it’s hard to find cloud storage over 2TB, this is attractive for established professionals and studios.
As a special deal for Photofocus readers, SlickPic is offering a 50% discount on the Bespoke Classic plan for passionate photographers. With discount the annual plan will be $19.97/month, billed annually. This discount will apply for the life of the account.
Keep an eye out for part two of this review of SlickPic. I’ll take a deep dive into the website Builder, the Blog module, selling your work on SlickPic and more.
+1!! switched from smugmug a year or so ago! couldn’t be happier. Slickpic ahs stellar service and customer support. funny how I missed the proofing tool, thanks for bringing this up will check it out!
That is great to hear that you are loving it after a year of use! I’m definitely keen to explore more of what it can do. Have only just scratched the surface here :)