Backlight 6

Backlight is a self-hosted web application, allowing photographers to craft stunning, versatile websites, and to create and manage photo galleries with incredible ease. Built by photographers, for photographers, Backlight's images-first philosophy ensures your photographs are the centerpiece of your website.

Our quick install gets your galleries up and running in minutes, then use Backlight's flexible designer to personalize your site's appearance and behavior. Publish blogs, essays and pages using Markdown syntax, blending text with dynamic photo presentations -- inline slideshows, responsive image grids, split-image comparisons, and more.

Do you have an existing website? Backlight can co-exist with other popular content management systems if you only want to use its galleries.

Publish photo galleries using Backlight's web interface, or use the optional Lightroom Classic plugin to create and manage your galleries via Lr's Publish Services.

Going beyond galleries, tell your stories, post news and updates, or present images inline with text using essays and blogs.

Backlight's may features include ...

Albums & album sets

An album is a collection of photos.

An album set is a collection of other collections. It can contain albums or essays, or you can nest album sets within album sets to infinite depth.

Essays & blogs

A feature unique to Backlight, essays are a novel means to meld photography and storytelling, allowing your stories to endure alongside albums, liberated from the tyranny of the chronological feed that would otherwise see them buried over time.

An essay combines photos and text, allowing you to display images within stories. A variety of image presentation types are available within essays, including responsive grids that open into slideshows, inline photo carousels, split-image comparisons, full-width single images, and more. Essays are evergreen, and can be organized into album sets.

A blog post is a lot like an essay, but resides within a blog.

A blog is a (tyrannical, ) chronological feed of blog posts.

Backlight allows you to create as many individual blog feeds as you like. You can also nest blog posts within other blog posts, creating a hierarchy of blogs.

Essays and blogs (and pages!) support Markdown syntax, and you may use HTML if you want to. For more information on Backlight's essay features, see our documentation.

Pages

Fill out your website with as many standalone pages as you need: an About page, a Contact page, etc. Our "essay anywhere" philosophy allows you to utilize the same presentation features available to essays and blogs, and to author content using Markdown or HTML. You can also create and embed contact forms on your pages.

Access control

Albums, essays and sets can be published as public, protected, or private.

Public items are visible to everyone.

Protected items require a shared password for access.

Private items require a client login, and for that client to have been granted access to the specific content.

Additionally, public albums may include protected items. For example, an album with 20 photos might contain 10 publicly visible photos, and 10 additional photos made visible only after entering a passcode.

Upgrades and support

Pay once, then use Backlight without recurring fees or subscriptions. Minor version updates are free.

Major version upgrades are paid, but optional. We offer discounted upgrades from earlier Backlight versions.

Backlight is actively supported via our support forum.

Coding optional

No code required to create a website with Backlight.

However, if you want to code, Backlight includes a JSON API for querying albums, and an extensibility framework dubbed "PHPlugins", allowing you to build out new functionality using PHP.

So much more ...

• Fully responsive, fantastic on desktop screens and on mobile devices including phones and tablets.
• SEO optimized.
• Watermark images on upload.
• No themes! Backlight's built-in designer lets you customize just about everything, including site and gallery colors, layout, behavior and features. Add your logo, write copy, and upload images. Express yourself, and make your website your own.
• Baked from the finest ingredients, Backlight's recipe calls for standards-compliant HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript to work on all devices, in all modern browsers, now and forever. Backlight has near perfect Lighthouse scores.
• Optional add-ons offer shopping cart support, client select and interactivity features, and more.

And there's still more! There's so much to explore in Backlight, and new features being added with every update! Our news feed, documentation, demonstration videos, and support forum can all be found on our website, also built on Backlight.

Requirements

Backlight runs in all modern browsers.

System

• An FTP client (free options are available)
• For the optional Publish Services plugin for Lightroom, a Mac or Windows PC, running Lightroom Classic.
• Add-ons require Backlight.

Hosting

In general, any place you can run WordPress, you can run Backlight. Specifically, Backlight calls for:

• Linux OS
• Apache server
• PHP 5.6 or newer
• SQLite and PDO modules enabled

Backlight is not standalone software. The Backlight web-application should be deployed to a local or remote web server adhering to the above requirements; for online use, a domain name and standard web hosting are required. Hosted website services such as those provided by Framer, Squarespace, etc. are not "standard" web hosting and will not run Backlight.

Background

Backlight is developed by The Turning Gate. We are two independent developers, and have been creating software for photographers since 2007, beginning with photo gallery plugins for Lightroom. The first version of Backlight was released in 2016. Over the years, we have cultivated a small but loyal following of photographers, some of whom have been publishing with us for more than a decade. We hope you will join our growing family.