Photo hosting services, hosted image quality ?

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Chip

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I'm using Sony Image Station, which works, but they display a rather low image quality vs. what I see on the originals and printed photos ordered from their site. Plus they don't organize multiple albums well.

PoisonIvy uses Shutterbook, which I'm looking at. Any other suggestions ?

I'm not at the point of maintaining my own site, I still need time to hike. ;)
thanks
 
Lots of folks here use WebShots, which allows full sized images. It's had some uptime problems as of late, but it's still a good free service.

-dave-
 
I subscribe to photobucket and pbase. Both are pay sites (approx $25 / year, so not very expensive). Image delivery / bandwidth / download times seem to be good. Pbase offers 300MB of disk space. Photobucket's is 1Gb with a 1MB/picture max. Photobucket offers FTP access to upload your photos, pbase does not appear to do that.

My beef with both of them is they don't quite offer me the features I'm looking for. (I want to create an album/website/etc. offline, then upload it. Photobucket really has no album-creation features, it's just a pure photo hosting site. Pbase has OK album-creation features, but it's clumsy & time-consuming & I can't quite think of the word I'm looking for, but it's too much work to maintain your captions / organization easily.) I'm probably going to drop photobucket altogether, I'll keep pbase until I can find a better alternative.

edit: I looked at smugmug, I was turned off by the fact that the only way you could try their service is if you pay them first, then if you don't like it you can get a refund within 30 days... so I never did. Otherwise they look like a competitive site.

Has anyone tried flickr.com?
 
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David Metsky said:
Lots of folks here use WebShots, which allows full sized images. It's had some uptime problems as of late, but it's still a good free service.

-dave-

FWIW, I had problems with WebShots a month ago but, lately it's bbeen working pretty well (knock wood). It's free and has some good features. I like it. :)
 
arghman said:
I subscribe to photobucket and pbase. Both are pay sites (approx $25 / year, so not very expensive).
Is paying for Photobucket something new? I have two accounts with them which I started for free. I don't think they have some of the paid features, but the service has worked fine for things I do, like linking pictures on forums.
 
For what it's worth, I started out with a Webshots account. All the ads there started driving me nuts so I ended up going to Shutterbook, which is promising no ads ever on the album pages. It also offers free storage -- I think of 1,000 photos... (I joined during its "beta" phase so I'm fuzzy on the post-beta details.) You need to pay to store more than that or for storage of high-res pictures. Overall, it's definitely a site I'd recommend.

- Ivy
 
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I have a couple of webshots accounts, 240 photos on each, you can have one per email address and yahoo/hotmail are free. ;)

I have tried flickr before but I think the free one has a 10mb limit which for us prolific hikers and shutterbugs, will fill up in no time flat, so I never even bothered. Ofoto/kodak is free and unlimited but they limit resolution.

I had a free account with picturetrail.com too but got annoyed by their HTML upload interface which was sketchy at best.

Jay
 
test


ok, I am definitely going to dump my photobucket account & move to flickr.
If they add a few more features I may dump pbase as well... (pbase seems to have better visual control & use of screen space than flickr)

I go by the "cheap but not free" approach; if there's something that is decent quality that's inexpensive I'll buy it. There are a number of sites costing approx. $20-$30 / year that probably fit the bill for most people here, if you are looking for something better than the free sites.

I haven't seen any free photo hosting sites that meet my standards, they all seem to be slow or ad-ridden, or they require you to use Flash to view them, etc. etc.

edit:
cbcbd said:
Is paying for Photobucket something new? I have two accounts with them which I started for free. I don't think they have some of the paid features, but the service has worked fine for things I do, like linking pictures on forums.
I signed up for their paid subscriber option in January, their free service thing (50MB space, 512K per picture limit, ads, etc.) wasn't quite enough for me & I'm willing to pay a little bit. Though in retrospect their services are kind of limited compared to the other cheap-but-not-free services.
 
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I had webshots for awhile, but opted at running my own website instead. It's only about $20 more a year (I use netfirms). Obviously, it requires a little web-building know how, but it's not hard at all to learn and plus it's a lot of fun. Plus, you have total creative freedom in presenting your photos and other information. I understand it's a little bit more of a time commitment, but I still don't know why more people don't do it. :D
 
Shutterfly

My wife and I have been big fans of Shutterfly.com for about three years now. They are also a source for buying prints - so because of this they allow you unlimited stoarage. Their print prices are very reasonalbe and they do a great job with larger prints, as long as your resolution is high enough (I have some real nice 11 x 14s) and special products (like mugs and calendars.) I beleiver when you pre pay the prints come out to about 19 cents each...you can have as many albums and images as you like on the site.
 
poison ivy said:
For what it's worth, I started out with a Webshots account. All the ads there started driving me nuts ...- Ivy

I get a kick out of all those Victoria Secrets banners :eek: :eek:

I get good printed photos from Sony's Image Station and they have the mugs and t-shirts, etc.
My main problem is the viewable quality of the photos in albums on their site.

I emailed Shutterbook to sign up for the free account and didn't hear from them. I may have to pay, which I don't mind, as the image quality seems good.
 
poison ivy said:
For what it's worth, I started out with a Webshots account. All the ads there started driving me nuts so I ended up going to Shutterbook, which is promising no ads ever on the album pages. It also offers free storage -- I think of 1,000 photos... (I joined during its "beta" phase so I'm fuzzy on the post-beta details.) You need to pay to store more than that or for storage of high-res pictures. Overall, it's definitely a site I'd recommend.

- Ivy

I just checked out shutterbook, the image quality is much better than webshots. The slideshow option is much better as well, not all the glitches that webshots has.

i took a few pics on my trek to maiden's cliff and beyond today and put them on shutter. The pics are much better than webshots would have been.
 
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I've been happy with pbase for photo viewing/storing. I typically get prints from photoworks. I recently ordered a photobook from Shutterfly and was happy with the results.
 
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