[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 437, entitled streamlining photo sales with ShutterPress. It was published on Thursday, the 18th of September, 2025. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and before we join Olly Bowman from ShutterPress, a few bits of housekeeping.
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Okay. What have we got for you today? Well, as I said at the top of the show, we're having a chat with Olly Bowman from ShutterPress.
If you take photographs and you would like to be able to sell them online, perhaps that's a bit of a side gig, perhaps you've got a client that would like to be able to do that. ShutterPress is a brand new plugin by Olly, which helps you to do that.
There's a few different plugins in the marketplace, which already do that, but Olly feels that he's bringing some new features to the table which makes his plugin stand out.
So during the podcast, we get to know Olly a little bit, find out about why he built the plugin. What problems is he trying to solve? How does ShutterPress work differently? What are the practical benefits that photographers or possibly agencies implementing this for photographers may gain. What are the uses beyond photography? This is quite curious, because there certainly are some of them. How can you protect the images? How does it integrate with WooCommerce? Because really that's what it does. How does it compare to other SaaS offerings and a whole lot more?
And I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast by Ollie Bowman. Hello Ollie.
[00:04:53] Olly Bowman: Hello.
[00:04:54] Nathan Wrigley: Nice to speak to you. This is our first encounter. We've, we've never met before at a Word camp or online or anything. Ollie has a, I'm gonna say brand new, but I have no idea. You can tell us whether it's brand new in a moment.
He's got a new product called Shutter Press, which is gonna be of interest, especially if you are a photographer. before we get into the plugin and how it works and all that, Ollie, do you just wanna give us your little potted bio? Tell us who you are, what you've been doing in the more recent past, and how the heck you've ended up on a WordPress podcast.
[00:05:23] Olly Bowman: yeah, my name's Ollie. I'm basically, I am a photographer stroke WordPress developer now. I've been a professional photographer for a few years, and I'm based in Shaman in the French Alps. and I've been. Use various other plugins to try and sell my prints on my website. And then recently I just thought there's better ways of doing this and have worked on a plugin that does exactly what I wanted it to do in the way I think it should work for photographers.
[00:06:03] Nathan Wrigley: Nice. So eating your own dog food. Gotta say If you've never been to Shamini dear listener, there's no shortage of things to photograph. that's for sure. You'll, open the door every day and it's oh, it's like your perfect scenery every single day. Are you into that kind of photo?
Photo? Do you do everything? Do you do like gigs for other people and, I don't know, maybe you do bands and concerts as well as nature and
all
[00:06:29] Olly Bowman: Mo most of what I do is, sports, to be honest. So skiing, mountain biking, climbing, Then, and weddings as well actually, and engagements. People love getting engaged up
in the
mountains, so
I'm
[00:06:45] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,
[00:06:46] Olly Bowman: behind rocks or trees and jumping out and then, snapping their photos and the
moment happens.
[00:06:53] Nathan Wrigley: a nice pivot. Anyway, so you're a photographer. You decided that you wanted to sell things, and I'm guessing that you went through the whole gamut of WordPress solutions that claimed to do what it was that you needed to do, but found them lacking. so let's begin there.
So first of all, dear listener, if you wanna pause the podcast head to Ollie's site. It's called Shutter press.io. So the plugin is called Shutter Press, but shutter press.io, no hyphens, no underscores, anything like that. S-H-U-T-T-E-R-P-R-E-S-S do io go and have a poke around and then come back and click the play button again.
so what does it do differently? Let's begin there. what does it do that all the other ones do not do?
[00:07:36] Olly Bowman: when I was built, when I was trying to sell stuff on my site before, there's, there's ver there's various issues and there's all these plugins out there and they all say, oh yeah, we're designed by photographers and we're built for photographers. and nothing I ever used actually seemed to me like a way of photographer would, would use a, plugin.
So like the, main, issue that I always had, and I was cobbling stuff together and it never really worked. And different gallery plugins is that. They either, work with WooCommerce, I, in a weird kind of way. And they basically, if you, so as a photographer, if I go out and I shoot 200 photos at an event, see, and I want to sell those photos to people who've been to that event, I'll upload them, I'll put 'em in a gallery and the majority of plugins that say they work with WooCommerce require you to then create a product for every single.
Photo
where
Yeah, exactly. Yeah,
yeah. exactly.
So,
as you can imagine, your product library grows in, in incredibly quickly. So you end up with this massive database of products, the majority of which you are never gonna sell. You might send that library to people and a handful of those will be sold.
So it just seems wasted overhead in your database and just unnecessary. So the way I've set it up is you create a, gallery of all the photos from an event or from, whatever, a wedding, and then you create products in WooCommerce and you assign them to that gallery. So I would create a product that is maybe, four by six print, and then another product that is an eight by 10 print.
And then I'll put that into a group of products, which is prints, and then I'll assign that group to my gallery. And then every single, photo in that gallery has a little cart icon. You can click on it, cart pops up, and you can choose what you want for that photo out of those options.
And you've created two products for all your, photos.
[00:09:58] Nathan Wrigley: let me read that back to you and see if I've understood it correctly. 'cause you, are living and breathing this and I don't do photography, I don't do much WooCommerce, so I guess it's important that I understand what's going on. So you are in an industry where in an hour you might create.
3, 4, 500 products, especially a wedding. I happened to have been at a wedding recently where I was given the job of, here, hold the camera, start pressing. I think I did about six or 700 in a, in the space of a couple of hours. The point being, it, ramps up. And if you've gotta do every single one of those as a WooCommerce product, that's a lot.
So you are, saying that your product will bind those all together, wrap them up in one thing, and then the difference is that you sell. In this case you were describing, you would then sell the size of the print as the thing that you buy. So you say, I want the four by six and I want this one, And thereby it's a whole lot easier 'cause everything's just much more streamlined. Have I got that
[00:10:57] Olly Bowman: Yeah, exactly. So you're creating two, two template products that you assign to every photo instead of a single product for every single
photo.
[00:11:10] Nathan Wrigley: but then you can cherry pick the, individual prints that you want. So I want this picture and this one. and leave the 197 other ones, unused. that's how it works. So you'd put three things in the cart and you'd say, I want it of this size. Okay. That again, is that about
right?
[00:11:26] Olly Bowman: from the front end. It looks no different to. How WooCommerce would normally work. So if you, would click on a photo, you'd get options of different print sizes, quantities, and then add to cart button. So you would add a four by six print. You want, oh, I'll have two of those. 'cause I want one from a friend.
Add to the cart. And then when you go to the cart, it looks, the same, it looks no different. So you have the thumbnail of the photo you've bought, and it says Print for four by six. Quantity two. And then, so every single, every photo you, you would buy has its own thumbnail in the cart and its own item.
And then you can change quantities and delete them individually. So it looks like you've got, a hundred odd products in there. And, but, you, have two. So then the advantage is if you want to change the specifications of that product, or you, want to change the price, you only have to change that in one place.
If you've got 500 photos as products in your WooCommerce database and you change the price of your four by six print, or a canvas or a digital download, you then have to go through with the other plugins. You would have to go through every single product. And change that price in every single one, or have something that does that as a, batch for you.
Whereas with mine, you would literally change it in one place. And then that's it for, everything.
[00:12:57] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so just again, just figuring out what's going on. So you, as the photographer you are making, the way the person buys it, that's the product. So it's a four by six, it's a 12 by nine, or a digital download or whatever.
That's the bit that you configure and I guess your UVP is. If you're a photographer, it's quicker on the backend to manage and set up. that, is the promise. If you're a photographer, you've got less to deal with. If you wanna change things, there's less editing to make and what have you.
[00:13:30] Olly Bowman: Exactly it. It speeds up the whole process. It makes everything very simple. You can add and remove products to galleries. You can have different products on different galleries. So for example, you may have weddings where you sell products at a different price to a sporting event. or a different quality of products.
So you can assign that different products to different galleries. And it's really quick and it's really easy. So you're not assigning
[00:13:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:13:55] Olly Bowman: products to the same products to every gallery. You can break it down into smaller galleries. So each gallery can have its own products. You're not, you don't,
[00:14:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, sorry. Go on.
[00:14:06] Olly Bowman: you don't, have to sell the same products on every single
[00:14:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. What was curious about that is in my head, I'm imagining this scenario where you have been to a wedding and you've got 200 pictures, and I was imagining you would come back, upload those 200 pictures, and then assign the six by four print, the digital download. Let's go with those two options, and then the next time you did a wedding.
You would do that whole process again, but I think I've just understood that you don't need to do that. You can just assign those new wedding photos for the different wedding to the six by four print and the digital download. You can just keep reassigning those products to whatever you then in the future, upload.
[00:14:46] Olly Bowman: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:14:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. So that's a real time saver over o over the long run of a year or something, if you're doing multiple weddings or whatever shoots that you're doing, those products you pre, you could preset up based upon, I don't know, the relationship that you have with a, somebody that prints things out or what have you.
I got it. Okay. I think I've captured that just for the non photographers out there, me included. what kind of things do you guys get up to? What? What do you do in your daily life? weddings is an obvious one. We get that. We've all been there, done that, but what kind of other things do you, can you possibly sell as a photographer?
Apart from wedding photos? I'm sure there's a lot,
not being a
photographer, I don't really know.
[00:15:26] Olly Bowman: so it allows lots of different options. So I could sell, Prints. So let's say, I'm a landscape photographer and I've got a whole bunch of nice landscape shots and I want to sell those. So I, I can put all those in a gallery and I sell them as a nice big framed print for your wall, or a canvas or a metal print in various sizes.
And I set my price and then, I've got all those products. And then let's say in six months time, I need to put my price up, I just go to the five. Template products I've set up and changed the price. Or I could be an event photographer. Let's say I shoot a running race and I am trying to get pictures of every participant.
So then I'll go in and I'll upload all those and then I would sell that as a digital download. So people who've been in the event can then go in, they can look at the gallery and they'll go, oh yeah, I want, I'll have a digital copy of that one and I'll have a print. weddings, I don't tend to sell digital downloads, but I would put products in as prints and framed prints and that kind of thing.
So with all the different combinations of how you can do that, and you can add any product you want. You're not limited to prints. If you want to make a t-shirt with someone's face on, you can add t-shirts, you could add mugs, anything. it's not limited.
The products aren't limited to in any way as to what you
can add in there.
[00:17:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, be curious actually, just to think about this potentially in the future, pivot. For you, it feels obviously you've aligned it to photography, especially with the name Shotter Press. It has that photo feel to it, but it feels like what you've built has wider possibilities. Because in this case, whatever it is, the photo could be anything at all.
It's just there's a whole bulk of them that you wanna upload at once. So feels to me as if it, with a bit of re-engineering, you could probably spin this product out as something unrelated to photography. But the, work that you've done on the backend to speed the process up might well. Be useful to other people having applied?
No thought to that. I can't think of anything off the top of my head, but it's, there's, I think there's probably some, there's some possibility to, to spin something else off in a sort of slightly
different yeah, I totally agree. It doesn't just have to be photography. someone, someone who's bought the plugin recently is they're an artist, so they've got 200 art prints that they're selling, so exactly the same thing, but, and, their feedback is that this is suddenly made, selling 200 prints, 200 different prints that they've created.
[00:18:17] Olly Bowman: So much quicker and easier than what, they were doing before.
[00:18:21] Nathan Wrigley: So I guess your plugin kind of leans into the visual side of things. So obviously if we were selling to. Stuff like, I don't know, sneakers or trainers on WooCommerce or VAEs or whatever it may be. You know, you might have a couple of images, but it's not really the point. You are, I guess, more into galleries and displaying the fine quality or your prints, but equally.
I presume there's some job that you've gotta do to protect that. 'cause I, I, nobody cares if they're selling trainers whether or not that picture is downloaded and viewed elsewhere. But I'm guessing in your situation, given that the image is the thing that you are trying to sell, you want to go to great lengths to make sure that that can't just be pilfered off the website, right click, you know, copies, download image or what have you.
What do you do to, To make sure that nobody can get access to, you know, the prints that you've taken of the wedding and what have you, just by browsing around in the, in the HTML or right clicking.
[00:19:17] Olly Bowman: So there's various ways of protecting, the work you upload. So the galleries can be password protected. and that's something I do for wedding clients. So they have a password that only allows them to view it. And it's, and so there's two ways of doing that actually in the plugin.
You can either do it as a, just a password and you don't need anything else. And it's a very simple password. It's not particularly high tech security system. It is literally just to prevent. Access to the, front end of the or the other way you can do it is if you've got a gallery of images that you would like to be even more secure.
You can create a user account and whoever views the gallery has to have, has to be logged in as, a user to view the gallery. so it's protected that way. you can also watermark. All your images. So, that's an option. You can do text or, image watermarks. They're laid over the top and when you create all the watermarks, it creates a backup of the original image.
so you can change them at, any point or remove them. And it just restores that from the, backup that was created.
[00:20:34] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, I think piece was the one that I was imagining would be the, the most effective, you know, if it's freely available on the internet, but you don't want people to buy your picture of Mont Blanc or whatever without, you know, without paying for it. I guess having the watermark right across the,
[00:20:48] Olly Bowman: Yeah, totally.
[00:20:49] Nathan Wrigley: the, the face of the, the mountain is fairly effective.
with the wedding one. That strikes me as a sort of unique case in that I might wanna just get the whole lot. Because it's my wedding. You know, I've hired you as a photographer, but you know, you, we've got a relationship. You're gonna send me the prints anywhere, but I'd like a downloadable copy. Is there a way to kind of go in and just say, gimme them all?
I don't want to click 1 1 1 1 1 500 times. Can I just get the lot? Yeah. So you can go in there, you can download each image individually or there is a link to, to. download everything in a zip file, and that's either done. You can upload a zip file and store it somewhere else and just add the link, or the plugin will create the zip file for you and, put all the images you've uploaded into one zip file that's, ready to download.
And how does it, how does it, how does it work? Is this your, I mean, I'm pretty sure you said it already, but just to be certain, this is binding on top of the free WooCommerce version. Yeah. So it's using all the core functionality of WooCommerce and you are building on top of that.
[00:21:56] Olly Bowman: Exactly. Yeah. It's very integrated with WooCommerce. You create a, a WooCommerce product, and really all you have to do is you create a standard woo product, commerce product, set the price, and click. click that it's a shutter press product, and then by default it's also removed from the standard, shop page with all the other products. and it doesn't come up in search because if it's not associated to a photo, there's nothing to buy, it doesn't appear anywhere
[00:22:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so you could, you could add this onto a regular WooCommerce shop where you're already selling other things. This doesn't have to be on a dedicated URL, but if you've got, if, if you've set it up correctly, then the photos won't necessarily appear as one product, another product, another product.
okay. So that's quite Yeah.
[00:22:54] Olly Bowman: and, this is why this is so going back to what we were talking about earlier in the other options is there are. There are other options that work in a similar way and sell prints like this, but they have their own, their own custom cart system, so
you can only use that cart to sell the photo products that you've created.
So the reason I wanted this middle ground as well is 'cause by using WooCommerce it opens up other options. So you could sell all sorts of other things on your site if you are a photographer, and you don't have to have a separate, you don't have to have a separate cart. So you could, so for example, if you wanted to do online bookings or.
Have photography events, you could install another plugin that uses WooCommerce as the cart and everything goes through WooCommerce. Whereas if you use one of these other plugins that is just focused on selling photos, if you then want to sell something else, you've then gotta install another cart system.
And then that's, and then I think that gets confusing for your, for the visitors to your Yeah, they can't put everything in one cart. It's like, why is there two cart? It make any sense.
[00:24:17] Nathan Wrigley: that makes sense in the, in the sense of, I don't know, possible upsells or something like that. So I, you're buying one big print. How, how about a frame for that, that kind of thing. you might be able to combine those things in the cart at the same time because it's all going through Woo and not Woo and some other proprietary system.
Okay. That's interesting. Or even, if you are. Even if those things aren't in the same cart, or you are buying them at the same time. So you might be, doing your bookings, booking sessions or selling sessions and someone goes in, I'll go, yeah, I want, next Tuesday, 3:00 PM I'll book that.
[00:24:52] Olly Bowman: That's X amount. I'll pay that. And that goes through your WooCommerce cart. Or people are buying prints, which also go through your WooCommerce cart. And then you can add vouchers and you can do all these other WooCommerce plugins. I'm not, it doesn't necessarily have to be one person buying the same thing in all the cart, but you only have to manage one payment system and one cart as the owner of the website.
You don't have two carts, so you don't have to connect two payment systems and everything like this for each cart, if that makes
[00:25:27] Nathan Wrigley: I is, it is the case that photographers usually are not using things like WooCommerce. Is there like a whole industry of, I don't know, SAS apps and things like that where people like yourself have often found themselves? so I dunno. You sign up to some photography selling. Thing, which has nothing to do with your website and nothing to do with all the other things that you're selling in your woo cart, is that, is that how it normally does?
You know that people would normally do it? Some kind of middleman, gatekeeping SaaS app.
[00:25:55] Olly Bowman: Yeah, so that's another option. There's a handful of these apps where you, upload all your photos to one of these and they do, the same kind of thing. and they, a lot of them have a basic kind of website. builder as well. So you can create a front end website, but they are very basic.
They don't have blogging or they don't have, any of these other things. You're basically just creating a few pages about you as a photographer. So then you enter the, you then in the whole world of things where you may have a one website that is selling your services as a photographer or an artist, and then another.
Website that you are then sending your clients to, to get their photos after the event. And to me it feels like I want all that on one I don't want to be sending them somewhere else afterwards.
[00:26:50] Nathan Wrigley: That, that is the message of WordPress, isn't It? Is It's extensible. And so you can do all of these on one thing and presumably there's an SEO benefit to that as well. You know, if you've got everything on one domain, you can do the SEO piece correctly and get all of that lined up. how, how do you display this sort of stuff though?
'cause you were talking about how. Perhaps basic, some of these SaaS platforms are, I, I don't know if you as a plugin carry the, the weight of making it so that when I log in and I'm browsing your, I don't know, photography of landscapes or what have you, so that I can see it in a variety of different ways.
You know, a gallery masonry, carousel, what if slider, whatever it may be. Do you do any of that or are you relying on, I don't know, other plugins to handle that kind of thing?
[00:27:34] Olly Bowman: no. So at, yes, but at, its basic, it is a gallery plugin. So it is for showing images on the, front end. So there's various options. You've got a standard, grid, There's a masonry gallery and a justified gallery. you can also paginate them. So if you've got large galleries, you know each page by page.
it also does infinite scroll as well, as you keep scrolling down. and then each, each gallery is a custom, so you can have, each gallery has its own page, so it's got a link that you. Share with people who you wanna see the gallery or, it uses Gutenberg blocks and there's also an element of widget as well.
So you can, display these galleries any, anywhere you want on your website. So, at its most basic, it is a gallery plugin. You can stick a gallery on your homepage, you can turn off all the other options and you've got a gallery of, photos.
[00:28:42] Nathan Wrigley: so if you'd, you weren't interested in selling anything, it's still just, it's a gallery. It'll just demonstrate what you've created and you know, that's maybe where you leave it selling comms later. That's
[00:28:52] Olly Bowman: E Exactly. So the selling isn't, the main point of it really. it's one of the things that the gallery does. you can, you can use it as a gallery without the selling. You can put. If you just want password protected galleries and you don't wanna sell anything, you don't need to sell stuff.
If you just wanna watermark your photos, you can create a gallery with 10 images, watermark them all, stick them on your homepage, and it doesn't do anything else. it's you also don't have to install other gallery plugins. If you want galleries throughout your site, you can, you can just use this one.
Plug in for each gallery and you switch all the other options off, everywhere else you, you show it.
[00:29:39] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's kind of curious. 'cause we're, I don't know, like 25 minutes in or something like that. And I was kind of seeing it as a. That's primarily a woo thing. But, by the sounds of it, you know, woo doesn't have to be a, a central part of anything. If you've just got it, it as a hobby, I don't know, and you want to display last night's fun event that your friends attended, you can just use it for that and go and.
Visit the URL and look there they all are and you can view them in the gallery. Okay. I hadn't really, I hadn't really captured that, but now I, I get it. The, the gallery comes first and then the sales bit is just a, a kind of a, a nice added extra in terms of the gallery and the sales process. If I was to look at that gallery, would I be able to add things to the cart directly from the gallery in, I don't know, multiples at a time?
In other words, is there a way for me to, oh, I like that one. Click on it, but continue on in the gallery and say, and that one and that one, but not that one and that one. And then proceed to cart from what I've, what I've checked, if you like, in that gallery.
[00:30:40] Olly Bowman: In a way, yes. at the moment when you click on a photo, it, it appears in a pop-up
[00:30:49] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's typical, it? Yeah. That's
[00:30:51] Olly Bowman: lists all the options, and you choose those options and then add to cart and then the pop-up disappears and you'll still in the gallery. what I do think I'm gonna add is that, option where you can just click and go through each one.
And see the prices and the add to cart
it's a slight difference,
[00:31:15] Nathan Wrigley: I often use, on my phone, I'm not a photographer, but on my phone I often take pictures and I use Google's included photos app. I believe it's just called Google Photos. And very often I wanna send just like six or seven of them and I've taken 50 that day. And it's just this really intuitive, beautiful interface.
You know, you click and hold on the first one and then more and more, more, you know, you pick the ones that you want and then from there you you're onto the next step, which is sharing it. And I always found that to be quite. Quite an intuitive way and just what I was thinking there was imagine I could then click buy for the ones that, that I've just clicked upon.
okay. Let, let's move on slightly so it it, oh,
[00:31:54] Olly Bowman: quickly to add onto that. Yeah. So one of the features of the gallery is, you can like photos as well. if you go through your gallery, there's a little heart and you can select all the ones you like. and then there's a filter at the top. So you click that and it gets rid of all the ones you haven't liked.
And you just see the ones that you've liked, so you couldn't, I guess your suggestion is you would like them all go through and then filter them out and then go through all the ones you've liked and choose how many of
[00:32:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that sounds almost same
[00:32:25] Olly Bowman: like to
[00:32:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And then the ones that I've liked, I would then click one button, which says, I don't know, purchase all or something like that. Yeah, that's kind of Okay. Food for thought. And, that'll keep you busy over the next, over
[00:32:38] Olly Bowman: There, there's, I keep, there's so many things I want add to it. I keep thinking of all different ways, slightly different ways of using it. And, you speak to, different people and they're like, oh yeah, it would be cool if it
[00:32:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I bet. What's really obvious you, like what's so intuitive to you is completely unintuitive to some other photographers. I don't do anything like that. Oh, okay. we'll, we'll try to build that then. I can Well imagine. I am, I, I'm just about to launch a, a plugin in the, in the. Audio space in the, in the WordPress audio space.
And it's fascinating. Everybody that I chat to has a completely different take on what they want to do with audio. And I thought I'd nailed it. And every time I speak to somebody, it's no, no, no. We don't do it that way. Oh, okay. Right. Be begin again. We'll see how that goes. But yeah, yeah, yeah. I can imagine with the, with this though, you, you've described that you're selling prints now.
With the best one in the world. There's probably quite a lot of work to be done on the backend there, so I dunno if you, if you amalgamate or you link to print services. Again, I am totally outta my depth here. I, I don't, I don't, I haven't used a print service for years and years, but I remember in the day.
Packaging up the little reels and sending them off to the print place and they would come back in the mail and so on and so forth. I'm imagining we've moved on since then, but still are there sort of services that you can bind to with the plugin that enable you to, okay, once that cart is pro is processed and the payment's been received, I can send it off and all the postage will be taken care of and sent off to the end customer.
How, how does all that sort of side of things work?
[00:34:16] Olly Bowman: So at the moment it doesn't do that. So at the moment it's down to each individual photographer. When someone buys something and the order comes through in the cart and they see what they bought, it's up to them to process it either send it off to someone else to print, or a lot of photographers print their own stuff and send it out as well.
[00:34:34] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:34:36] Olly Bowman: but definitely something that I am looking at for the future. And I was talking to someone, I was talking to, a potential partner about this last week, is linking to an API that then takes those, takes the orders and prints them and dispatches them direct to the customer. and they print in the UK and they print in Australia and they print in the EU and they print in the us.
So wherever your customer happens to be, or the website is printed locally, so it's not dispatched from the other
[00:35:19] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. So hopefully a little bit quicker. Yeah. I know that there are, print, so like t-shirt print services that bind to, WooCommerce and things like that. So, you know, you'll order your t-shirt, you'll upload your photo, get put on the t-shirt, and then in the WooCommerce process it, it sends it via an API to that company who from that moment on are basically dealing with it.
Obviously you would be dealing with refunds or, you know, queries about when it's gonna ship and things like that. But that, that seems like a bit of a, a no brainer, I guess, for you to, to build into the future. 'cause that, that's just this perfect, like, that's the modern world, isn't it? You know, you want an API to do the heavy lifting so that you don't have to, I don't know, f finalize that order, figure it all out, send it off to this third party print service.
So yeah, that seems like a,
[00:36:08] Olly Bowman: exactly that seems like a massive. Bonus. I That's definitely, yeah, having an API that then just deals with that whole order, process and shipping and printing automatically is definitely something that is, is on the cards for the, is on the cards for the
[00:36:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Roadmap item. Another roadmap item. You were very kind that you, sent through a bunch of show notes, which was really helpful. Thank you for that. But one of the other items you mentioned was, like remote storage of images, like CDNs or something like that. I, I'm not quite sure where that fits in and, and why that would be necessary.
I guess you're just taking stuff out of the, the WordPress Media Library where perhaps it's not maybe as safe as it could be. I'm not entirely sure. What, what's the CDN bit?
[00:36:53] Olly Bowman: It's, not so much a security issue. It's more to do with a file size issue.
[00:36:58] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,
[00:36:58] Olly Bowman: WordPress is great if you're, if all your images are really small, but if you are se if I'm selling digital downloads of high res photos, they're probably 15, 20 megabytes each. So if you have a lot of those, suddenly eating up a lot of your space.
a and. Shared hosting environments, which most people are
[00:37:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. don't deal with these large images particularly well. they're, focused for dealing with size images, so, in the future, I think it will pro, it will link to a CDN where you will buy, a set amount of storage, a hundred gigabytes or whatever for a fixed price a month.
[00:37:44] Olly Bowman: And the, high resolution images will be. Offloaded to that and then come back via CDN.
[00:37:53] Nathan Wrigley: Right,
go on. Sorry. Apologies.
[00:37:56] Olly Bowman: yeah. So you're not filling up your shared hosting storage with all these huge image files, which that shared hosting isn't designed to do. Really?
[00:38:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I suppose you know, if you are a credible photographer, you're probably using the latest equipment, and I imagine the latest equipment is more than capable of eating up your hard disc space. Pretty rapidly, you know, in the, in the case of a wedding, I dunno, you might get a a thousand images in the space of a day or something.
Each clocking up, clogging up 15 megabytes, 20 megabytes, something like that. It quickly ramps up and, and I guess you could repurpose this for video as well. And then all bets are off. that could be, that could be 500 gigabytes for like. 30 seconds with a video, you know, it really can add up quickly.
And so the idea then here is rather than consuming your WordPress database and using the bandwidth, which your, let's say, affordable hosting company might provide you, this is all being done on the CDN. So you're cutting that. Process out, although you are, you can see it all, from the WordPress website.
The actual files are held somewhere and they, you know, things like Amazon, AWS, Google Cloud, and all the others, wasabi and whatever. Yeah, that's their job. That's what they do. Their, their whole raison dra is to provide immutable storage, you know, totally rock solid, available 24 7, 500 megabytes of photos.
Ha we laugh at your 500 megabytes of photo. So, yeah, that, that also seems like a really credible idea. So there's a couple of roadmap items there. CDN. plus the idea of being able to ship off via an API to to a print service. Have you got any other roadmap items at the moment that you are thinking about?
[00:39:41] Olly Bowman: The only other thing that I'm looking into is ai obviously, like yeah. No conversation WordPress can, can avoid that subject
oh, we'll just throw that in as well. We'll have a bit of ai. Everyone else is doing Probably should. but there's something else I've been looking into. It's probably, it's not high up on the priority list, but, so for example, image recognition of facial recognition.
So you can search through a gallery for all the people you
[00:40:13] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah.
Yeah.
[00:40:16] Olly Bowman: Then the other one that I think is really useful is number recognition. So if you do a sporting event and everyone has a number on them,
[00:40:26] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,
[00:40:26] Olly Bowman: runner a bike, you then go into the gallery and you enter your number and the AI image recognition has found all the photos with that number in
[00:40:37] Nathan Wrigley: oh, that's curious.
[00:40:38] Olly Bowman: just see them.
[00:40:40] Nathan Wrigley: So it, so that's a really different take on ai. When you said ai, I, I immediately went to image generation, but that's not what you're
[00:40:47] Olly Bowman: No, it's not particularly groundbreaking ai.
[00:40:50] Nathan Wrigley: No, but no, I think that's really obviously, you know, in things like Google, my photos, the, the facial recognition has been there.
For a while, but that whole thing has been built up over many years of kind of like, okay, this is me, this is my daughter. And, and on it goes and it kind of figures those things out. But the idea of having it in your gallery for your wedding or something like, I don't know. I want to show, I just wanna grab a few pictures of the grandchildren or something like that.
Where's Robert? Ah, there's Robert. But the, the number thing that is so far out of what I was expecting you to say, but if you are a. I don't know if you are by the sideline of a football match and you know, number nine, lean or messy or something is scoring goals left, right, and center to be able to just grab the images that you took with him in.
That's cool. That's really clever.
[00:41:38] Olly Bowman: Yeah. Or, more, to events like cycling events or big running If you imagine you've got a, running event with a thousand runners
[00:41:47] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,
[00:41:48] Olly Bowman: that's a lot of, that's a lot of photos to look through to find your number.
[00:41:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:41:52] Olly Bowman: you just enter, you go, oh, it was number 103, or
[00:41:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. You're at start Yeah.
[00:41:58] Olly Bowman: there's your photo.
[00:41:59] Nathan Wrigley: That's such an interesting idea. Yeah. Okay, so, so there's a whole load of healthy stuff in the development pipeline. I think that's probably all the questions I've got. The endeavor here really is to make the audience aware that you are there. and hopefully we've managed to do that.
So if you are a photographer or you can figure out a clever way of wrangling a gallery plugin. Into the life that you have over on WooCommerce. then here we are. It is called, let me just grab the url. Shutter press.io is the place to go. It's obviously called Shutter Press. Ollie, where can we find you?
If somebody's listening to this and thinks, you know what, I could use that. Where would they, obviously apart from the URL there that I've just given, do you make yourself available online anywhere?
[00:42:42] Olly Bowman: yeah, you can find me on Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn, or my photography website, which is ollie bowman.com. I'm generally just Ollie Bowman on all these I'm fairly, easy to
[00:42:57] Nathan Wrigley: Fairly easy to find. Olly is spelled OLLY, so Olly Bowman, B-O-W-M-A-N. that's great. Yeah. Well, thank you for chatting to me today about that. Hopefully this podcast has surfaced it and made it, more recognized for those people who are listening. Appreciate it. Thanks for joining me today.
[00:43:14] Olly Bowman: Thank you very much for, having me. it's been great chatting to you.
[00:43:19] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I hope that you enjoyed that. Very nice chatting to Olly today. If you've got any commentary on that, please head to wpbuilds.com, go to episode number 437 and leave us a comment there. We would really, really appreciate that. And It would be very nice to hear from you about the content of that. Maybe you've got something to say about ShutterPress. Maybe you could implement it for a client website. Leave us a comment. Remember episode number 437.
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Okay. That really nearly is all that I've got time for. Before I fade in the cheesy music, just to remind you, we will be back next Thursday for a podcast episode. We'll also be back on Monday for the This Week in WordPress show. Hopefully we'll see you there. Come and join us. 2:00 PM uk time wpbuilds.com/live.
And remember at the top of the show I gave you a URL wpbuilds.com/twiw, if you would like to be on that show.
Okay, it's now time for the cheesy music. It will be fading in as we speak, and it will be dreadful, I can promise you that.
All that it remains for me to do is to say stay safe. Have a good week. Bye-bye for now.
