Choosing Online photo hosting

[stephenb]

I went investigating the various online photo hosting websites this week. I am currently using Picasa by Google, and in most part, it works well. But a friend suggested I consider PBase which is aimed at the photographic community. Then I decided to spread the net a little wider and do some comparisons with other online photo hosts including Flickr and Fotopic.

I did notice that Fotopic has gone offline? Has anyone been affected by this?

I thought I'd gather some opinions from the members on some questions?

1. Do you use an on line photo hosting site? If so, which one?

2. What format do you commonly use when uploading images?

3. What size/dimensions do you commonly use when uploading images or displaying them on websites?

The short list I have put together myself is:

- Picasa
- Flickr
- Fotopic
- PBase
- Photobucket

Any more we can add to the list who are worthwhile?

Regards,
Stephen

[Octane]

Anything which displays your images on a white background and that can't be changed should be immediately turfed from your list.

I use my own site as well as Pbase. SmugMug is excellent also.

I upload JPGs.

I post nothing bigger than 800 pixels on the longest edge. If someone wants to see bigger, they can buy a print.

My astrophotography I now post 25-50% resolution of the original document.

H

[marc4darkskies]

I'm a PBase man. Smugmug is very slick but I prefer to be able to display thumbnails that have titles - Smugmug can't do that. Forget about Flickr as your main site because you can't specify a black background. Haven't tried the others.

I upload full res jpegs because I want folks to experience the image as I intended it to be seen. Besides, much of the viewing pleasure is gained from seeing the detail.

Cheers, Marcus

[stephenb]

I should have also said, like Marcus and H, I have my own site using Weebly.com and I have a very dark (almost black) background for my images. Dark backgrounds for displaying photos was something I learned back when I was dabbling in film photography. It's a very important feature which many don't think about until it's pointed out to them.

In regards to resolution, I make 4 versions of my original (usually RAW format if it's straight off the camera, or TIFF if it's off the scanner) then I created the following variations of the to use: 3000x2000 TIFF, 1500x1000 TIFF, 1200X800 JPG and 900x600 JPG. All are 1.5:1 ratio. The last two resolutions are for posting on websites, forum threads such as IIS etc.

Well so far PBase is on the top of my list. For US$23 per year for 1GB, that's very affordable for me.



Marcus, I use Paint Shop Pro for all my imaging manipulation, ans when creating a JPG version from my hi-res TIFF image, I save it as JPG but with no compression. Is this what you are referring to "full res jpgs"? (I must look at Photoshop elements or Lightroom soon).

[Octane]

What Marcus means is that he posts the full image instead of downsized JPGs.

I also do something similar to you -- I leave the original Photoshop document, and then create 3 smaller JPGs; 640x, 800x and 1280x (for sharing with workmates)

H

[stephenb]

Ah ha, understood :thumbsup:

[marc4darkskies]

Like H said, and to be precise, I don't scale the image down. However, an appropriate amount of Jpeg compression is necessary so the file size is manageable from a download time point of view. Ie: 2 to no more than 4M.

[TrevorW]

Flickr Pro does in fact allow you to view images in a dark background called Lightbox

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mylotian/5597104423/in/photostream

I generally scale the images down so the largest is around 1600 x 1000 and under 500k file size

I use Flickr Pro as well as my own site

did use Pbase originally which wasn't too bad

[Tandum]

The gallery software I use (coppermine) is available at most web hosts. However, the host I just moved to was limited to 1meg uploads in php. I had to figure out how to override those settings in my php.ini file to get the upload size into gear. I don't think I've uploaded anything over 2meg anyway.