Announcing a New Chapter for Imagely

We're excited to share some big news: Imagely has a new owner and leader! 

Nathan Singh, a seasoned investor, and entrepreneur with deep knowledge of the WordPress gallery plugin market is taking the helm. 

Imagely will continue to have the same great team and the same goal of being the standard for photographers on WordPress. But we'll be even better positioned for success. 

Below, we'd like to review the news and talk a bit more about what will change (and what won't) in the coming months. 

Introducing Nathan Singh

First, though, we'd like to introduce Nathan to our community. Nathan is a seasoned investor and entrepreneur with a long track record of success. He’s also a genuinely nice person and one who cares about Imagely’s mission and our industry.

He has a technical background as a software engineer at Boeing. He went on to found and build multiple successful companies outside of WordPress, including Inkless Ideas (acquired in 2014) and OrdersIn (acquired in 2017). 

More importantly, two years ago, he set his sights on the WordPress space and acquired Envira Gallery, one of the most popular gallery plugins after NextGEN Gallery. He's had great success at Envira, building out the product and growing the company. 

His experience at Envira means that Nathan deeply understands the gallery plugin space for WordPress. It also means that Imagely and Envira Gallery, the two biggest players in our space, are now under a single umbrella with all the additional reach that entails. 

A Review of Where We're Going at Imagely

Imagely's goal today is big but simple: to be the standard, go-to solution for photographer websites and galleries. 

This means not only being the best solution within WordPress, but also helping WordPress win more and more of the photography website market from non-WordPress solutions like SmugMug, ShootProof, or Zenfolio. 

As it stands, WordPress is the most popular website platform in the world, and Imagely creates the most popular photography solutions within WordPress. Both have a huge reach and appeal. We believe that WordPress and Imagely, combined, can easily compete with any other photography website solution in the market today. 

To achieve that, Imagely needs to offer all the features photographers need under one roof - powerful galleries, beautiful themes and website designs, ecommerce and print lab services, and simple turnkey websites. 

We have most of those elements in place already with NextGEN Gallery, NextGEN Pro, and the Imagely themes.  

In the fall, we launched the first-ever automated print service for WordPress.org users. Photographers can now sell prints on WordPress and have those prints automatically shipped to their customers by professional print labs. 

In the coming year, we hope to launch our new turnkey website service for photographers - a WordPress.com for photographers. The Imagely Sites platform, as it will be called, is already in beta. Photographers will be able to create an account at Imagely and get an instant, beautiful WordPress website with all the functionality they need. 

So What's Changing?

Nathan believes strongly in the same mission for Imagely. Our mission is what made him interested in Imagely in the first place. 

That means, with Nathan at the helm, we'll be pursuing the same product roadmap in the coming year. 

We'll also have the same great team in place that you've come to know and love here at Imagely. 

We also want to reassure our existing users and customers that we won’t be changing anything significant for now with respect to memberships, accounts, or pricing. 

So what is changing? 

We'll simply be better positioned for success by adding Nathan's own experience, expertise, and resources, to the other advantages that Imagely already has in place. 

A Thanks to Our Community

As we start this next chapter, we want to take the opportunity to express a deep thanks to the Imagely and NextGEN Gallery communities. 

All of us love the work we do here, and we love the community. 

Ultimately, it's you who make it possible to do what we do. You've supported us in our journey over the years, including all the ups and the periodic downs. 

We're genuinely excited to start this next chapter with you, to keep moving forward, and to build a truly outstanding product and future together.

The full press release is available here