Patrick McMullan Company: Rebuilding a Four-Decade Photo Archive as a Modern Platform
Client: Patrick McMullan Company (PMC), a premier event photography agency and archive Our role: Design and full-stack development Scope: Public website, archive search, commerce and print fulfilment, staff portal, AI tools, SEO
About Patrick McMullan Company
PMC has photographed the events that matter since 1976. Its photographers cover galas, benefits, premieres, gallery openings, and fashion shows across New York, the Hamptons, Los Angeles, and South Florida, and distribute the images worldwide. Every gallery joins an archive of more than forty years and around four million photographs, indexed by person, event, venue, and date.
The Challenge
The archive is the company's great asset, and the old website did not do it justice. Finding a person or an event was slow, buying a print or a download was harder than it should be, and the staff ran the business through an aging admin site. PMC needed a new platform that keeps everything the old one did, makes the archive easy to search and buy from, and gives the desk better tools.
What We Did
- Public website: a home page built around search, event pages with an editorial photo wall, a calendar, popular and throwback galleries, photographers, services, and an about page for the agency
- Archive search: search by name, event, and date with name suggestions and did-you-mean corrections, a full-screen search, and an assistant visitors can ask in plain language
- People: profiles with alternate names, claimable pages, an In Memoriam section, a yearbook, and a "Who Am I?" queue where the public helps identify faces
- Photo tools: lightboxes, sharing, downloads, caption corrections sent to the desk, likes and view counts, and a map that places the photographs on a globe
- Commerce: a price on every image, cart and Stripe checkout, print orders routed to the lab, watermarked downloads, subscriptions, and shipping options
- Publishing: all of the company's books on a shelf with page-turn previews, signed copies, limited editions, and a gift shop
- Staff portal: a content management system at parity with the old admin, for events, galleries, services, site copy, orders, and a print review desk
- AI for the desk: automatic image tags, a face review pipeline, find and replace across captions, and a staff assistant available on every admin page
- Social publishing: posts queued automatically when a gallery is published, including carousels of the top frames
- SEO and performance: structured data, sitemaps, machine-readable pages for AI search, self-hosted fonts, and lighter images
How We Work
The build runs in review cycles with the PMC team. Each call produces a list of objectives, and each list is worked through and closed before the next.
Outcome
PMC has a new platform for patrickmcmullan.com that brings the archive, the shop, the books, and the staff tools into one system, built in under two months from the first commit.
Stack
Next.js, React, Tailwind CSS, Neon Postgres, Vercel Blob storage, Stripe, Claude, and Vercel.
