FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Digitial Camera & online galleries & putting picts on CD questions
Old Sep 4, 2006 | 12:32 pm
  #12  
mikey1003
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Originally Posted by CPRich
I have found that most free services are worth what you pay for them. Just yesterday there was a thread on dpreview.com where a new photographer wanted comments on a few shots. There were several "I can't see it", "I can see it", "try this", "try this" back and forths. Finally came the inevitable - "go here to see it", requiring me to sign up for an account to see the pix. Ack!!

The majority of photographers on dpreview - who are obsessive about photography as we are about FF - use either smugmug.com or pbase.com. The choice comes down to how you use it.

Pbase has unlimted bandwidth but restricted storage. Smugmug has unlimted storage and restricted bandwidth. I find it much easier to just upload my full resolution pictures, letting SM downsample them for the 5 available sizes. I have about 3GB of picture stored (also served as a nice 4th level backup, after my HD, USB HD in my safe and DVD's off site) in their geographically redundant storage locations. The same storage would cost me about $180/yr on Pbase. I get 6GB of bandwidth per month and, even with heavy participation in photo forums, I've never used over 2GB. In fact, in the 2 years I've been participating, I've seen the "exceeded bandwidth" message from 1 member, 1 time, and that was back when the limit was 4GB/month.

The SendToSmugmug application makes uploading as easy as right-clicking on the folder containing your pictures. Or you can set up as many multi-level, password protected, public/private, watermarked, visually-themed, Google-mapped subdivisions as you would like.

Of course there are many free sites - flikr is probably the most popular, plus photobucket, webshots, etc., etc. The pay ones offer free or money-back trials, so read through the features and figure out which couple suit you best. Then give them a try. My spreadsheet from 2 years ago had at least 20 options listed, which I narrowed down to 5 to try. I'm sure there are many more options now.

For more reading, try these:
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/re...ssage=19682595
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/re...ssage=19645564
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/re...ssage=19383089

A quick pass through these shows zenfolio moving into a solid third choice.


If you like SM, G171UaFcXSOjA gets you $5 off (full disclose - yes, I get an account credit for this, but I have enough credits to last me until 2015
29 of the 31 referrals who have tried SM have stuck with it - I think that says something...

http://richs.smugmug.com/gallery/579469
I agree, pbase is great.. One drawback to any online sharing sites is that anyone can "steal" your images.

There have been many discussions on dpreview about peoples images showing up on other sites or in print.

So, either watermark your images and/or copyright them..Preferably both
http://www.pbase.com/
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