Galeryst Makes Virtual 3D Galleries from Lightroom Albums for Free
Galeryst.com enables Adobe Lightroom users to create 3D virtual online art galleries to share their art. There are paid tiers, but photographers can make an 80-photo digital gallery for free.
Galeryst says that photography or art collections that have been organized and curated in Lightroom can be used to create and customize 3D art galleries that can be viewed on desktops, notebooks, tablets, phones, and even virtual reality headsets. The company says the goal of its product is to help photographers curate, share, and sell art online.
“At Galeryst we want to enable any artist to create a beautiful 3D virtual gallery online to share their artwork with the world. With a global pandemic shutting down in-person art galleries and exhibits for much of the world, I saw an opportunity,” Galeryst’s founder Michael Scherotter says.
“Seeing the growing interest in the metaverse and sharing art collections online, I wanted to find a way to recreate the art gallery experience online, not only for my work, but for artists everywhere.”
Scherotter, who is by day a technical program manager at Microsoft, describes the platform as a passion project that originally stemmed from his desire to exhibit his personal 30-year collection of artwork which he says was primarily bound in journals. He decided to use his sabbatical to work on a solution and landed on what is now Galeryst as an answer that was particularly timely due to the pandemic.
Scherotter has published a breakdown of all the pieces of software he used to build the site on LinkedIn, which ranges from Adobe products through Microsoft and GitHub. Since its launch, Scherotter has added support for Bing Maps, allowed users to publish links and descriptions through Microsoft Office, added support to assist the visually impaired, and has better prepared the site for scalability thanks to integration with Microsoft Azure.
The company says that any artist can create a single gallery for free (up to two wings in a gallery and up to 80 art pieces) and subscription plans are also offered that allow artists or organizations to create more and larger galleries with additional options to link artwork to external sites. Paid plans start as low as $4 a month for access to up to five galleries and 5,760 artworks and can go as high as $217 per year for up to 30 galleries and 96,480 individual pieces. A full breakdown of all four pricing tiers can be found on Galeryst.com.
