Backlight Is a Highly effective Subscription-Free Internet App Built for Photographers

While there are lots of web site builders and publishing providers on-line, few are particularly designed for photographers and professional-quality photograph sharing. That’s the place The Turning Gate’s Backlight 6 is available in.

Backlight 6 permits photographers to create, handle, and customise their on-line photograph galleries, whether or not for an internet site they constructed by Backlight 6 or to create photograph galleries for a special platform.

“Backlight is a self-hosted web application, allowing photographers to craft stunning, versatile websites, and to create and manage photo galleries with incredible ease. Built by photographers, for photographers, Backlight’s images-first philosophy ensures your photographs are the centerpiece of your website,” The Turning Gate explains.

It is value noting right here that The Turning Gate is a staff of simply two very passionate builders, who initially received began collectively engaged on photograph gallery plugins for Lightroom earlier than launching Backlight in 2016. Over the previous almost 10 years, Backlight has amassed a “small but loyal following of photographers.”

At the core of Backlight, and what helps separate it from its competitors, is that “your imagery is Backlight’s raison d’être. Everything in Backlight builds on the inspiration of pictures, with a concentrate on placing folks’s photographs entrance and middle. The customizable galleries, or albums, are quick, responsive, and web optimization and cell pleasant.

Backlight’s built-in designer options quite a few templates designed particularly for showcasing images, and every gives strong personalization choices, together with colours, borders, margins, padding, facet ratio customization, ordering, captions, and far more.

“Backlight is a unique website creation and photo publishing platform, allowing photographers to create, manage and personalize their online photo galleries,” The Turning Gate explains. “Get up and running in minutes with new photo galleries, or with an entire website. Use the built-in designer to personalize the look and functionality of your galleries or website.”

However, with out there add-ons, like procuring cart, shopper response, galleria, and theater, photographers can use Backlight 6 to construct a fully-fledged skilled web site for promoting their work, create extremely tunable slideshows, and even embed movies.

Although Backlight is decidedly a photo-first platform, The Turning Gate is aware of that many photographers wish to embrace textual content as a part of their web site, whether or not that’s by conventional blogs — Backlight works alongside WordPress — or photograph essays. Backlight gives a variety of choices to suit any pictures workflow, from amateurs searching for a strategy to share their photographs on-line, to those that wish to ship a multimedia expertise centered round their pictures, and professionals working a client-facing enterprise.

While Backlight is accessible, it’s not designed to be an entire all-in-one answer for internet hosting pictures web sites. Users will want their very own webhosting service and an FTP shopper. The Turning Gate offers all the mandatory set up and setup documentation, and has a strong community forum with many photographers keen to assist each other create their superb photograph web sites. The set up and setup documentation is strong, however within the occasion a photographer has a query not coated by the docs, the neighborhood might be able to step up.

To make it even simpler to construct a brand new pictures web site, Backlight works alongside Lightroom Classic’s Publish Services. Using the out there Turning Gate writer Lightroom plugin, photographers can rapidly import their Lightroom albums on to their Backlight web site.

Pricing and Availability

The newest model of Backlight, Backlight 6, has one other very welcome characteristic: it’s a one-time buy. No subscription charges right here. Photographers purchase Backlight as soon as and have it endlessly. While main model upgrades incur an improve charge, the developer is adamant that customers don’t essentially must improve to every new model. While there could also be new options they need, they may by no means lose entry to their present options when a brand new model launches. Further, the add-ons might be bought a la carte as wanted, so photographers don’t want to purchase every thing all of sudden.

Backlight 6 is available now for $150. Add-ons for Backlight 6 vary from $25 to $75.

Image credit: Backlight, The Turning Gate