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The liveBooks8 platform allows you to swap out images, edit text, and change layout all within the Design view of your website editor. With this tutorial, you’ll be able to swap out images from the design view on your liveBooks8 dashboard quickly and easily.

1. From the main dashboard view, click the design view.
2. Select the page you wish to change images on.
3. Move the mouse over the image you wish to swap out and click the change image icon.

4. You will be prompted to pick the replacement image from the image library.

5. Choose the image you want and click add images.

6. View your changes and click publish!

If you have any questions while publishing your site, we urge you to contact our Support team at support@livebooks.com!

One of the greatest challenges new photographers face is learning to bridle their excitement to show everyone, everything they shoot. The difference between a good photographer and a great one is not what they shoot, but what they choose to show the world. Learning to edit your work is paramount to being a great photographer.

In the last century, there was a buffer between the amateur photographer and the rest of the world: the science of photography itself and the cost of production and distribution. Expensive labs, chemical heavy darkrooms, and the complexity of publishing one’s work made it difficult to publicize. Those who were willing to make the effort and spend the money did so very carefully, with assistance from industry professionals to insure their work was well received. These hurdles to publication slowed photographers down and forced them to reflect on their work before displaying it to the public at large.

Today, you don’t have to go through a gatekeeper to have access to the world. With the advent of Facebook, blogs and Instagram, the public is only a click away from seeing your latest shot. A photographer can snap a shot, alter it in Snap Seed and post it to the world in a matter of 60 seconds, for free, without any oversight, second opinions or editorial review.

And the world will act as your editor by following and un-following your feeds. Now you (the photographer) need to learn how to be a photo editor. You can do it, you have the skills, but you now need the discipline to be your own harshest critic and to accept nothing but the best, even when it hurts to hit the delete key.

After all, photography is the art of selection. When you are out in the field photographing, you have an infinite number of frame options available to you, and with your photographer hat on, you choose the location, the angle, the moment and even the exposure settings for each image you capture. When you get back to the Lightroom, you now have a smaller number of frame options available, but it is still the same act of selection that occupies your attention. The only difference is that the decisions you make in the computer can be contemplated over and are not as permanent as missing the shot in the field. If a photographer approaches the act of selecting in the computer the same way she approaches selecting at the camera (with confidence), the act of selection will be far less intimidating and much more fruitful.

I offer a few suggestions for being a better photo editor:

Comparative Review:

First, photographers select in the field by reviewing options in comparison to one another. In the old days, we used to make our selections in the darkroom using a contact sheet with 15-36 images being compared to one another at the same time. Reviewing images one at a time will never yield quick or informed selection decisions. The art of efficient, accurate and quality selection begins with this comparative review principle: we make better decisions when we see our options in comparison to each other.

Positive Selection:

Second, photographers in the field take an infinite number of options and select images from that infinite set. When options are placed before you in comparison, one option will catch your eye and that is the option you will explore. Back in the studio, the selection process is hindered when photographers scrutinize every possible image. Instead, determine what you are looking for (i.e. children in action, brides dressing, politicians lying, etc) and set those images in front of you. As you compare them to each other on the screen or in print, let the great images jump out and grab you. Those that do not are unworthy of your attention.

Kill Your Darlings

Third, you must be willing to “kill your darlings.” Too many photographers keep too many images because it cost them time and money to produce. But if the image is not impressive, it should not be shown. Your goal as a self-editor is to promote your great work and, like the gatekeepers of the 20th century, deny entry to the rest. Shakespeare’s character Polonious reminded his son that “brevity is the soul of wit,” and I am reminding you now, that brevity is the soul of a potent portfolio. Protect your brand by protecting your portfolio.

Don’t just think of your portfolio as the book you show your clients, or a website for potential clients. Your portfolio is anything and everything you put out into the public’s eye. This includes your printed products, magazine publications and advertisements, your Facebook pages, blogs, image galleries and Instagrams. This is where you make your impression on the public, which is why it is so important to be more critical of your own work.

Seek Out Private Critiques:

Fourth, find someone you trust to review your work on a regular basis. This could be another photographer, a mentor, your print lab, a portfolio review session at a trade show, a camera club or even a password protected web forum.  You don’t want a “yes” man to butter you up, but an honest and harsh critique. The public will be more than happy to critique your work, but getting that critique means that you have to show the world your mediocre work. Henri Cartier-Bresson said “showing your contact sheets is like taking your pants off in public.” Don’t take your pants off in public – it’s not good for your brand!

The world knows that you are putting your best foot forward. So, when you share images that are merely good, you are telling your potential clients that this is the best you’ve got. If you are not willing to reject the good that is mixed in with the great, you will be seen as mediocre at best.  If you won’t judge your own work harshly, the world will.

Jared Platt is a professional wedding and lifestyle photographer. He has lectured at major trade shows, photo conferences and universities on photography and workflow. Currently, Jared is traveling the USA and Canada teaching photography and post production workflow.

I signed up with my very first company that offered an “archive hosting” service five years ago. At that time, my idea of what that meant was vague at best. Would they sell my pictures or just provide storage and display? Would the web system be user friendly? Would I need to buy a complicated manual? Did I need to hire an assistant for this?

Today archive hosting companies typically provide storage space, online galleries, search and client features, a user-friendly back-end management system, FTP, downloading, and hundreds of other functions that are incredibly useful if properly understood. All of this is usually bundled into a package that might cost roughly USD 50 per month. For a photographer like me, who is constantly moving, I find the service indispensable.

Today the main player in this game seems to be Photoshelter. After transferring my archive to their servers a year ago, I can say with some level of confidence that they provide a superior service, strong customer support, and a huge variety of functions (without trying to do too much, the most important thing in my opinion).

So how exactly do I manage my own archive? When I complete shoots for newspapers, magazines, and corporate clients, I upload the images to my archive, so that I can FTP the images to clients, share the work with friends and family using public light-boxes, display work to potential new clients, and allow regular clients to search for stock images to license. That might sound like a lot of work — and it is. But make no mistake, this hard work pays dividends.

I particularly find the online archive a useful tool when working on longer-term stories or projects, because as work is completed it can be uploaded and shared for client or peer review. For example I recently photographed the construction of one of Shanghai’s tallest buildings. The building owners wanted to see a monthly edit from my shoots, a progress report, as we went. During the more than two years the project lasted, I was able to bring them up to speed with new imagery, as well as service the download needs of their staff in Shanghai and Japan. My archive created a seamless delivery system — no more burning disks, no more Fedex. The online, hosted, and managed archive is here to stay.

A close friend of mine challenged my position on archive hosting by insisting that my agency should take care of all that “back-end” work for me. A lovely idea, but full-service agencies are pretty much a thing of the past. (In my experience anyway; if I’m missing some full-service agencies still out there, please let me know.) The new trend seems to be the fully functioning, independent photographer who manages his or her own pictures.

Although my photographic work is represented by Corbis, they are far from a full-service agency. They don’t have an assignment division and rely on photographers to upload on their own. They don’t scan film, they don’t do captioning and key-wording, and they edit as they see fit. This is all actually a good thing, because it allows them to focus on the most important part of the process, selling my images.

Of course, that means a lot of the work agencies used to do is now the photographer’s responsibility. While that may be a negative for some, it’s a positive for me, because I get to control the quality, layout, and organization of my own work, and then share it anyway I like. It allows me to have a closer relationship with my editors and — for a young photographer like me who sometimes feels overwhelmed with a rapidly changing industry — this offers a very rare sense of control. Plus I can link to my archive just about everywhere, post public light-boxes online using social media, and fully integrate my Photoshelter archive with my liveBooks website, in the hope that editors and image buyers can find what they are looking for with ease.

On a final note, in my particular situation, having an archive based in the U.S. is a crucial part of my business plan. Because I live behind The Great Fire Wall of China, FTP-ing work out of the country is a nightmare, so it’s best that I only have to do it once. Once I upload to my archive, it’s an easy click of the button to share work with multiple clients. Plus I never have to worry about missing a deadline because it takes 14 minutes to upload one image to a server outside of China!

Rebecca Norris Webb, Havana, Cuba, 2007

Alex Webb, Havana, Cuba, 2001

MIKI JOHNSON: What initially drew you both to Cuba? It has been photographed so much already…did you try to approach it in a new way that you hadn’t seen before?

ALEX WEBB: Like many projects, this one began somewhat serendipitously. We certainly did not plan it. I first went in to Cuba 1993 for Life magazine, and Rebecca traveled there around the same time separately. We were both intrigued by the island, but somehow didn’t manage to return until 2000, when we visited together to teach a workshop.

Returning to the country inspired both of us, and we embarked on two separate projects: my exploration of the streets of Cuba and Rebecca’s discovery of unique and sometimes mysterious collections of animals there –– from tiny zoos and pigeon societies to hand-painted natural history displays and quirky personal menageries. It was only eight years later, in 2008, that we hit upon the notion of putting our two very distinct bodies of work together to create a multi-layered portrait of Cuba.

Alex Webb, Cienfuegos, Cuba, 2007

Rebecca Norris Webb, Havana, Cuba, 2008

MJ: How many trips to Cuba did you take while making photos for this book, and what places and parts of the culture were you specifically trying to capture?

AW: We made 11 trips to Cuba. Besides our first trips that we took separately, we made six trips together from 2000 to 2005 and then four long trips in 2007 and 2008, when I was fortunate enough to have a Guggenheim Fellowship to continue photographing the island. I initially called my project Esperando because in Spanish the term means both “waiting” and “hoping,” a title that starts to get at my impression of the streets of Cuba.

REBECCA NORRIS WEBB: I originally called my project Three Rooms after the following quote by a Habanero whom I met, a gentle and soft-spoken man who raises cockatiels, love birds, and parakeets: “I have three rooms in my house –– two are for my birds, and one is for my wife and me.”

For the past decade, I’ve been exploring the complicated relationship between people and the natural world. In the 25 cities I visited for my first book The Glass Between Us, I never witnessed anything quite like what I’ve seen on “the violet isle,” a little known nickname for Cuba inspired by the rich color of its soil. Nearly 700 miles across, Cuba is easily the largest island in the Caribbean and has its own endemic species, including the world’s smallest bat and the world’s smallest bird. Alex and I traveled nearly the entire length of the island in pursuit of our separate obsessions.

MJ: Why did it appeal to you to combine your two bodies of work into one book about Cuba? How are the images grouped in the book? More »