Automating photo sharing with Macula
There are many things to love about photography, from exciting photo trips to doing post-processing magic and admiring your results. And of course, exposure! Getting appreciation and feedback always feels great. Like in any endeavor, we tend to gravitate towards things that excite us and have a hard time doing bits we don’t like. For some (me included), publishing photos — be it to a portfolio or social media — can feel like a boring chore.
With Macula, you can focus on the things you love about photography and still enjoy the benefits and appreciation that comes with sharing images. It’s like having your cake and eating it too! Let’s see how.
Macula public folders to the rescue
Macula has a lot of tools to ease a photographer’s life. One of them is public folders. This is a special kind of folder that automatically publishes all files you drop inside, creating a shareable link for each of them and making them visible on your Macula profile. Let’s quickly walk through the process.
Step 1. Create a public folder
First of all, you need a folder. Go to Files and click on the Create folder button, then give it a name. It can be anything, but to make things easier, let’s call it something like “Portfolio,” so it stands out easily and its purpose is clear.
Now open the new folder and hit the Make public switch. If you go back to Files, you will see that it has a check signifying that it was successfully published.
Step 2. Drop the files in
Now pick some of the photos you have lying around and upload them to this folder. Once they finish loading, they will be published automatically.
One unusual column you may notice is the one called Transformations. Furthermore, if you click the number, you will be taken to a completely different screen! What is all that supposed to mean?
Macula works in such a way that your original photos always remain untouched. Instead, it creates copies with changes (resizing, compressing, etc.) applied to them. These copies are called transformations.
Transformations is a powerful concept. They allow things like generating thumbnails, reformatting images on the fly, and more. Check our Intro to image transformations to learn more.
Step 3: Check your public profile
Now time to admire the results of our work! Click the profile icon in the top right corner and select Public profile. All of the published files will be here, neatly split into photos, videos, and others, along with your bio and social links.
Make the most of your public profile by filling in a relevant bio and adding links to your active social profiles so visitors can connect with you through your preferred channels. You can do that by clicking the profile icon and selecting Settings.
Pro tip!
Turn any image uploaded to Macula into your profile picture! Just click on the three dots button and choose Set as avatar.
More than that, each published file has its own individual SEO-optimized web page with useful information and quick links to your profiles, as well as copyright metadata (read about it below). These individual web pages can be easily shared on social networks or forums and embedded into blogs and websites.
Going beyond
This is so easy it’s almost underwhelming! But don’t let yourself be deceived! It’s just the tip of the iceberg and Macula has much more to offer. Let’s quickly walk through a few of the things you can do to boost your productivity further.
Editing and on-the-fly transformations
Macula has a simple but powerful image editing engine. Open any image and click + New transformation. From there you can apply different transformations, like cropping, reformatting, resizing and so on. Once you’re done, click See Preview to apply the changes, and then Save transformation.
Now, if you go back to the transformations list, you will see a new one appear. Click Publish and you’ll get to the publishing menu. From there you can set the license and enable on-the-fly transformations before publishing.
What about on-the-fly transformations? How are they different from what we’ve done just now? On-the-fly transformations make the image editable after it was shared by adding special parameters to its address, such as ?blur to make it blurry.
Read more about on-the-fly transformations in our documentation
Copyright and metadata
Taking care of relevant metadata and copyright details for each image can be a hassle, especially when working through large batches of files. Some image editing programs have the ability to manually edit and assign metadata fields for each file, but why go through such a pain? Do nothing yourself! Embrace the lazy efficient way!
In addition to the metadata already present in the file, when you publish it, Macula automatically generates a copyright statement based on your profile information and embeds it into both the original file and its transformations. This makes it easy for both people and search engines.
As a nice bonus, all images published with Macula get a Google Images Licensable badge automatically. Read more about it in our blog post.
…and more!
Macula is packed with features to make you more productive, letting you share and grow on your terms without compromising copyright and attribution. And even more features are in the works as you read this paragraph!
Read more about the exciting features Macula has in store in our big walkthrough post, dig even deeper by exploring our rich documentation, or jump straight into action with a free, no-trial, no-BS account.
