Building Galeryst

Over the past couple months, I have been busy working on a passion project - creating a way to exhibit my 30 years of artwork which is primarily bound in journals. Along the way I discovered that other artists who have collections would find this useful as well and started building a website called Galeryst. I'm going to explain the WHY, HOW, WHEN, and WHAT, so you can understand my motivation, how I built it, and when you can try it out.

I have been taking a sabbatical from my work as a technical program manager at Microsoft which has enabled me to focus on this full time. As I was starting to experiment with the technology of using BabylonJS to generate an art gallery, I did a freelancing project adding the interactive navigation to a model to make an online art exhibit for the artist Hebru Brantley. That project helped me realize the power of the medium - the ability to exhibit artwork in a gallery when in-person galleries and exhibits were inaccessible to many because of the pandemic. My architecture education at Arizona and UCLA gave me the ability to think and design in three dimensions - and my passion has always been for crafting creative tools and design tools. What if I could combine my love of architecture, my understanding of software development, my collection of artwork, and inspire others to be more creative in the process? What if I could enable any artist to create a beautiful gallery to share their artwork with the world? That was my mission. As Simon Sinek would say, that became my WHY.

Galeryst Technology Stack

For the HOW, here is what I used to build the site:

• Adobe ID - for authentication and authorization
• Adobe Lightroom API - for catalogs of artwork with rich metadata
• Adobe Creative Cloud Libraries API - for other assets the artist has
• Adobe Fonts - to make the site's style unique
• Adobe Spectrum CSS - to provide a design language, framework, and starting point for the site
• Adobe XD - to iterate on design ideas with our small team
• Adobe Sign - to get NDAs signed by beta testers
• Microsoft Azure App Service - to run the service
• Microsoft Azure Storage - to store content
• Microsoft Azure App Insights - to monitor and understand performance, reliability and user journeys
• Microsoft Azure Cognitive Search - to provide searching capabilities
• Microsoft Cognitive Services Custom Decision Service - to order results for users.
• Microsoft Visual Studio Code - primary tool to build the site
• Babylon.JS - to build 3D gallery models and interactivity
• Pug.js - an easy to use templating framework
• Stripe - for commerce
• Node.JS - site framework
• I18n - globalization and localization
• Microsoft TypeScript - for sane JavaScript code
• Microsoft Office API - to enable business scenarios
• GitHub: source code control, work item tracking, project, support, discussions.
• Microsoft Teams - project management and beta test user interaction.

Updated October 16, 2021

• Microsoft Bing Maps - add location information to artwork in galleries and provide a map for visitors
• Microsoft Office API - New Microsoft Excel Add-in for Galeryst published allowing users to add links and descriptive text to artwork.
• Microsoft Cognitive Services - generate basic image descriptions for assistive technology allowing visually impaired to browse galleries.
• Microsoft Bing Search to provide searching of the help content on the site.
• Microsoft Azure functions to run the compute-intensive gallery creation code separately from the node web server - allowing scalability.

Galeryst Beta Testing

We have just started taking applications to beta test Galeryst and are looking for existing Adobe Photoshop Lightroom users who want to try it out. If you are interested, go to https://galeryst.com, sign in with your Adobe ID (you can get one for free), and fill out a short application. If you're not a Lightroom user yet, you can try it with a 7-day free trial.

Galeryst

Enable any artist to create a beautiful gallery to share their art with the world.

Update 14 December 2021:

Galeryst went live across the globe, generating 3D virtual galleries from Adobe Photoshop Lightroom albums. press release.