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chris
Jan 30, 2009, 5:00 PM
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First off, if this is one of those commonly-asked-of-budha-not-again questions, could you just give me a couple of search terms that would help me find those threads? Thanks.
If that's not the case, then my question is:
I'm a very amateur photographer who sometimes gets lucky with a point and shoot camera and gets a few good images. I'm currently storing most of my photos for public viewing on Picasa, but I'm wondering if Flickr or some other online provider is a better service. I'll probably remain with free services unless I start generating enough income to justify Pro providers.
Thanks for any advice.
Cheers
Chris
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chanceboarder
Jan 30, 2009, 5:12 PM
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I used to store all of mine on Picasa to share with friends and stuff and finally gave it up for Flickr. I paid the $25 for the pro account on Flickr and have been very pleased with it. Depends on what you want to do with it. If you're just sharing with friends and family Picasa is great and does just fine.
I went to Flickr because I'm trying to get more into getting some of my work sold and wanted to display it to a wider audience. So I'm using Flickr as a jumping off point for people to view my main website as well as get feedback from people as to what they like and don't like.
Jason
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chris
Jan 30, 2009, 7:23 PM
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Thanks Chance,
OK - a weird question - but my favorites photographers are using Pbase or privately hosting their sites using Lightboard. And I really like how the dark/black backgrounds make the photos stand out. Can you change the Flickr background (I surfed around and couldn't find an example).
Cheers
Chris
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chanceboarder
Jan 30, 2009, 7:28 PM
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chris wrote: Thanks Chance, OK - a weird question - but my favorites photographers are using Pbase or privately hosting their sites using Lightboard. And I really like how the dark/black backgrounds make the photos stand out. Can you change the Flickr background (I surfed around and couldn't find an example). Cheers Chris
Jason
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kriso9tails
Jan 30, 2009, 7:32 PM
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I guess the question is, what are the main things you want to get out of hosting your photos somewhere?
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chris
Jan 30, 2009, 9:21 PM
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I'm looking for something like this http://www.patituccistock.com/. And I'm willing to loose a little in features so that I can save my money.
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blondgecko
Moderator
Jan 30, 2009, 10:07 PM
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I'm a big fan of SmugMug, myself.
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pico23
Jan 30, 2009, 11:16 PM
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I've got a smugmug pro account for image sales for events mostly, but I mainly for display/sharing I use flickr. I also have a picasa album which holds all my images for my blog template, and a photbucket for ebay, and nonsense photos.
The picacas one was just me being cheap. My web server only allows me 150MB of storage and 5GB of traffic a year. Of course stuff coming in from other places doesn't have any impact on these #s.
Smugmug is fine, but I'm switching to Zenfolio when my account is up in April. It's $50 cheaper for the pro account, they use MPIX, and they don't take a cut of my image sales.
For fine art sales the cut doesn't hit me much, but for event photos, I need to markup quite a bit to make a decent profit, and it then hurts volume.
Flickr though is great, and I use the Flock web browser which integrates flickr, photobucket, and picasa uploaders and also allows me to view media streams. For instance I can favorite chanceboarder, and when ever he post new stuiff to flickr it will show on my media bar. I can also browse streams without going to flickr.
Overall, Flickr seems to be the best for me for sharing photos, and use as an online photo album.
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guangzhou
Jan 31, 2009, 12:27 AM
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pico23 wrote: I've got a smugmug pro account for image sales for events mostly, but I mainly for display/sharing I use flickr. I also have a picasa album which holds all my images for my blog template, and a photbucket for ebay, and nonsense photos. The picacas one was just me being cheap. My web server only allows me 150MB of storage and 5GB of traffic a year. Of course stuff coming in from other places doesn't have any impact on these #s. Smugmug is fine, but I'm switching to Zenfolio when my account is up in April. It's $50 cheaper for the pro account, they use MPIX, and they don't take a cut of my image sales. For fine art sales the cut doesn't hit me much, but for event photos, I need to markup quite a bit to make a decent profit, and it then hurts volume. Flickr though is great, and I use the Flock web browser which integrates flickr, photobucket, and picasa uploaders and also allows me to view media streams. For instance I can favorite chanceboarder, and when ever he post new stuiff to flickr it will show on my media bar. I can also browse streams without going to flickr. Overall, Flickr seems to be the best for me for sharing photos, and use as an online photo album.
i'VE BEEN TOYING BACK AND FORTH WITH ZEN AND SMUGMUG FOR MY SITE TOO.
I do like the PMIX prints.
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pico23
Jan 31, 2009, 3:03 AM
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Having not used Zen yet, I can say if it works as well as smugmug, and is cheaper and uses MPIX (although you can choose your printer I think), it should be a better service.
But I'll let you know in the spring!
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guangzhou
Jan 31, 2009, 11:38 PM
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Those zen allow the complete website, or do you create awebsite and link the zen portfolio. Another-words, on smugmug, I would use the website template, does zen have this?
I looked at their site, but I don't see any sample websites.
I do like Mpix, hard to go wrong with them.
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pico23
Feb 1, 2009, 1:14 AM
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guangzhou wrote: Those zen allow the complete website, or do you create awebsite and link the zen portfolio. Another-words, on smugmug, I would use the website template, does zen have this? I looked at their site, but I don't see any sample websites. I do like Mpix, hard to go wrong with them.
Smugmug and Zen seem to be identical in setup without having looked to closely. I believe they host the site, but you can use your own domain, aka templates. On smugmug, i used my own domain, which i actually just switched from Yahoo to godaddy for 3 years for $6.
Yahoo was $1.99 the first year, $10 the second, and this year they wanted to charge me $40. Since I pay $40 for 5GB and 150MB of storage on my www.mountainvisionsphotography.com (which currently just redirects to my blog after I decided to redesign the site) I found this interesting because I was using Yahoo purely for domain parking/redirect so I needed nothing from them. Go daddy gave me exactly what I needed for a lot less!
So my 2 domains cost me about $42 total for the year.
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