Anyone hosting your own stock gallery?

If so, what sort of gallery software are you using?

Ideally, I'd like a system that would allow for:
-- easy search for users on site
-- Discovery by search engines, web crawlers, etc
-- immediate download of images for one time use
-- a selection of three different resolutions
-- contact for licensing for other than one time use

I'd also like pop-up watermarking that leaves the images unblemished until you hover over it with the mouse, but that isn't a show stopper


I'm sure I'm missing something, so I'm all ears for suggestions. I'd prefer to host my own rather than go with a stock service at this point though.

<tt>Hello Jim,

Not exactly a stock photo web site, but my own web site with photo galleries, which I host on my own computer (a linux machine in my basement) is at:
http://www.clarkvision.com

My galleries are build by linux shell scripts which I wrote.

http://www.clarkvision.com/galleries

It is crude but effective, at least for my purposes for the moment. The key word database is a set of simple text files with image name and a list of key words. If I want to add a key word, I simply enter it next to the images and run a command that builds a gallery, like "sunset"
http://www.clarkvision.com/galleries/gallery.sunset

The pages are static html so are found by search engines. For example, go to google images and search for: Hawaiian sunset and (at least for me) I see two of my images on page one, including the first image. (This by the way is a reflection
of how many people have linked to the image.)

My biggest problem now is I am getting so much traffic (more than a million hits per month) I need a faster pipe to my house, but can't get it.

Roger</tt>

Thanks Roger,
Looks like it works out real nice for you.

Too bad I don't have the skills at the moment to build something like that.

Here is what I purchased.

http://www.lightboxphoto.com

I haven't put it online yet but I have been pretty happy with it over all. Easy to use and you can customize it to your needs. Frans Lanitng uses it for his in-house stock management. I purchased the top end version that includes a rights-management calculator that allow clients to input the specifics of their usage requirements and then it will kick out a price. It allows clients to purchase directly online. In hindsight I probably wouldn't have purchased it and would have gone with the option just below. In order for the rights-management calculator to work you have to input all the different variables with a price and it just became to difficult to figure it all out (for me anyway :) ) Also, if a client doesn't like the price they may just go and look elsewhere as opposed to talking with me personally. Just my two cents.

Thanks Nathan.

Can you turn off the rights calculator? There are a few other features in th enterprise edition that would be nice to have.

I think so, although i haven't tried it myself...they give you free technical support for a year. I would email them and ask before you buy. They have always responded to my questions very quickly.

Nate