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I use Backlight for my website and absolutely love it. Thank you for creating such a great product.
I participate in many art shows throughout the year. I get a ton of people coming through my booth that have a hard time visualizing what my art would look like on their wall. The classic quote is, "I need to go home and measure my wall first". Or, "should I get one of this size or two of another? What is the best way to fill the space?"
As a result, I have purchased a simple app for my iPad that I bring with me to the show. It is called Picture My Wall. In the app, you are able to upload an image of your wall, take a measurement, then place images on the wall, to scale, to see how they might look. I have used this tool successfully on a number of occasions to help drive sales.
The problem is, this is only for my iPad. They have to use it while at my booth. What I would truly love to have, is an extension to my website that does the same thing. Wouldn't it be great if they could do the same thing on their own time? That is where the Authors of Backlight come in. Could you write something that does what I describe? At a very high level, it would:
(1) Ability to import an image from the person's computer onto the site, so that artist images can be placed on top of it
(2) Ability to set a distance, such that images are placed onto the screen are in the correct proportion
(3) Ability to place multiple images of different sizes
(4) ability to choose standard sizes like 8x10, 20x24, as well as enter a custom size
(5) ability to freely arrange the images on the wall
(6) ability to change out one image on the wall, with another
(7) integrates with images already in your gallery
(8) includes a few stock images of living room wall, bedroom wall, den wall, etc, for folks who don't want to upload a picture of their own wall
(9) has as simple wizard based interface to guide folks through the visualization process.
(10) ability to drop images on the wall without a frame, or with a border and frame.
(11) Utility is disabled when viewing website from mobile device - there is just not enough real estate. Ipad or computer only.
(12) ability to save finished mock-up locally to disk as an image file.
(13) creates a simple link at the top of your website, that takes viewers to the utility. Similar to Gallery, About or Contact
I would be happy to work with you to come up with a detailed requirements document, describe use cases, etc.
NOTE: Many other 2-d artists would LOVE to have this tool. You could "shrink wrap it" into an extra $$$ add-on for Backlight.
Is this something that the authors would be interested doing? Anybody else out there who would want to buy and use this utility?
Thanks,
Jeff
Vancouver, WA
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Hi Jeff, knowing our market - technically inclined photographers who self-host their sites and use Lightroom - this would be a very niche product by the time you further refine the customer base to 2d artists. I doubt very much it would be economically viable.
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Thanks Ben for your initial thoughts.
How about expanding your market to include artists with products that hang on walls? Photographers, painters, print makers, etc. Create a completely separate application that installs on the website host server. You then point it at the folder that contains all your site images, or it indexes them auto-magically. It provides a main file that can be embedded as a link somewhere. Prospective art clients are practically screaming for something like this. It doesn't exist anywhere except on a few high end "buy art on the internet" sites, and even then, with limited functionality.
I inquired with the developer of that ipad app and they weren't interested. I inquired with someone I know who does custom web development and he wasn't interested either. Asking you about it looks to be a third strike against the idea. I must be on to something, or crazy, either one ;-)
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Jeff, I'd like to have a way to show how different sized art looks in an office, living room, and dining room setting. And this is something I'm slowly working on. My plan is to create separate slideshows for each setup and to show images with different sized frames and frame styles. For me, this will be sufficient.
Having an option to do this for a particular image would be very elegant. But providing the customer a way to upload an image would be way too complicated. If a customer is sufficiently interested in a print, I'm happy to make a photoshop montage.
I think that some of the TTG users already created something like this, but I don't remember who.
Daniel Leu | Photography
DanielLeu.com
My digital playground (eg, Backlight tips&tricks): lab.DanielLeu.com
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