swfraley Posted February 8, 2009 Share Posted February 8, 2009 Photobucket is free. Smugmug costs about $30 a year. Is there something about smugmug that makes it worth paying for? Link to comment
krussell Posted February 9, 2009 Share Posted February 9, 2009 http://www.smugmug.com/photos/photo-sharing-sites-compared/ I'm happy with smugmug. It just works. There are no ads on smugmug. Link to comment
BULLman Posted February 9, 2009 Share Posted February 9, 2009 Flickr is free, too. You can upgrade to a $30 a year account. Unlimited photo upload. You can load larger pics. You can have as many folers as you need. Here is a the Bmw RofTB's photo album. We have almost 2000 pics. I like the way you can store picutes via collections and sets. Link to comment
AdventurePoser Posted February 9, 2009 Share Posted February 9, 2009 Hi Stu, I've been with SmugMug nearly from day one and I like it very much. If you ever have a tech question you can email anytime and get a very speedy answer. I think they are good folks-it's worth the 2 bucks a month it costs... I also used pbase when it was a tiny start up. Now, Pbase is huge. I don't think it's as intuitive as SmugMug is... Cheers, STeve in So CAl Link to comment
DaveTheAffable Posted February 9, 2009 Share Posted February 9, 2009 +1 for Smugmug. It's clean, no advertising, I'm not embarrassed to send friends or family to look at photos or videos there. Free is not bad, just not always better. I'll pay the $3 a month to have a clean website that works, and has GREAT customer support. Link to comment
Lets_Play_Two Posted February 9, 2009 Share Posted February 9, 2009 I started using SmugMug in the fall and have no experience with any other site. I ordered some note cards with my photos on them. I had a problem with one batch and received an almost immediate response to my email. When they could not resolve the problem over the next week, they promptly refunded the money. Made the fee worth it to me. Link to comment
Twisties Posted February 9, 2009 Share Posted February 9, 2009 The free site that I used once had in it's terms and conditions that you granted them rights to use your photos and make derivatives from them. Smugmug treats your photos as yours. To me that's a major difference. Chunky was using a free site when it went belly up and he lost everything. I hope that by paying a fair amount I'll avoid this... but who can say. Someone I know uses Flickr a lot. Just going to his linked galleries I get low resolution and stodgy non-intuitive performance. I think if I set up an account things would improve, but I don't care to. Dave Farrow, Azkomet uses Zenfolio. I think he had some issues figuring out how to make it work for us here on BMWST, but now that he's figured all that out, it provides a very satisfactory result. You can use Smugmug to archive your original work... they back up to Amazon and it's as secure as it gets. I don't use these services to store original resolution shots however, simply because upload time is too long. I pre-process and upload what I want to display. I think all of them will accept full resolution and let you pick pre-formatted (down sampled) output for various purposes. I really can't stand some of this output. Facebook for example seriously limits what you can see. My mom sends me stuff from Picasa and it's awful. The disadvantage of Smugmug is that it is sometimes slow. Customer support by email is prompt and helpful. Link to comment
ElevenFifty Posted February 10, 2009 Share Posted February 10, 2009 Picasa ... free from Google - great at editing, indexing, displaying your pics and has an 'upload' component. 1Gb (maybe 2) of online storage and then you pay for more space. Link to comment
RiceToy Posted February 11, 2009 Share Posted February 11, 2009 Shutterfly is free and I like all the things you can do with the content like make websites. See my site (which is neglected - sorry) to see an example. To my knowledge there is no storage limit and uploads are fast and easy. They are in the business of selling printing products, so expect those types of offers, but there are no non-Shutterfly ads. Besides all the built-in features, another cool part is that (with your permission) others (like family members, etc.) can order prints from your photos - which makes sharing across the country or the world extremely easy. Also, it is free for them to download and print themselves if so desired. I signed-up for the free website features, which allow you to easily setup forums, blogs, calendars, journals, embed videos, all kinds of stuff that would otherwise cost money to host. Meanwhile the rights management is flexible and easy to setup - which is an awesome feature. All this being completely free makes for a great value, but don't mistake it for a place to archive - if they go under, you'll very likely lose everything (you would with a pay-storage outfit too). Link to comment
Yammer Posted February 11, 2009 Share Posted February 11, 2009 I've got to back ElevenFifty on Picasa, it is a great free Google product for doing what ElevenFifty stated. I've used the online albums to share pics and it works very well. If that is not enough then you can upgrade the storage for cheap. The last update v3 allows even further editing capabilities to touch up prints and has a wicked cool picture viewer that you can make default on your pc....and I actually like the screensaver it has. What can't Google do these days....? Link to comment
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