BF2S Forums Photo Sharing Sites… Which To Use?

The smattering of discontent online over the negative aspects of Flickr (copyright theft, lack of response to criticism, random account deletions, Yahoo’s limited support…) seems to be growing into a groundswell of negative public opinion, with many closing Flickr accounts and publicly castigating Flickr all over social media.

Personally, I think that Flickr continues to serve the same purpose it always has – to provide a free photo sharing service and encourage community. The criticisms that have been levelled at it aren’t entirely unreasonable – when years may have been devoted to interacting with others on a site, accidentally deleting – not suspending – an account with no backup systems in place is pretty poor form. but at the same time, there is only so much a free service can be expected to do. To be blunt, anyone who depends solely on Flickr to provide a portfolio service, or who considers it a backup locker, or expects images posted online to not get stolen, is foolish. Spread yourself around, and if you’re bothered by copyright infringement upload only small size, watermarked, 72dpi, uncalibrated images which are mostly useless for anything except looking at.

How might you go about spreading yourself around? Well, that’s what I want to look at. What are the other options to Flickr, or what might you want to use as well as Flickr? For the most part (and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong), but realistically, there are only a handful of photo sharing sites out there that provide services acceptable to photographers.

I just tested Google’s Picasa, and if you’re worried about photo theft, it won’t work for you. While you can disable print ordering and downloading in your photo settings, Google haven’t implemented any method of preventing right clicking or saving images. Nor does it have a particularly nice UI for presenting your work. People have also been wary about the rights that Google demands for hosting your images too, and if your releases/contracts give you limited rights to the photos you take, you might want to read the fine print.

500px (anyone know how this is pronounced? I say “500 pix”) seems to be a big contender for the ex-professional-Flickr-users, due to its pleasant, more modern interface and heavy emphasis on the highest quality images. It retains some of the social aspect of Flickr, but doesn’t dive right into being a social medium with groups and such. It seems to me to be more directed at professional or semi-professional photographers who want to show their portfolio work, but retain some of the interactivity of Flickr within individual images. It’s an intimidating site to use, however, when the mentality and voting system ensures that the quality of the artwork on display is sky-high. Personally I consider it an “as-well-as” site, rather than an “instead-of” site. It contains your absolute best photos, whereas Flickr can hold the slightly sub-par and experimental stuff due to its social learning setup. I haven’t uploaded anything to my 500px yet. I’m still trying to determine what’s worthy of uploading there! Selling via Fotomoto is also possible with 500px, with a pretty satisfactory – and customisable- profit margin. Right clicking is disabled, and I can’t see any method of enabling it for the Creative Commons people. Obviously, images can probably still be taken with some code digging, but your images are more safe than elsewhere.

PurePhoto is a site that seems to have come around somewhat recently, popular with the more “artistic” photographers. Self portraits and textures abound, but there is certainly a fair quantity of straight photography. Similar to 500px, the emphasis is more on quality than Flickr, but on PurePhoto this seems to be interpreted more as “artistic merit” than pure technical skill. It’s a mixed bag, really, and certainly worth a look. Right clicking is also disabled, and selling is possible too. The sales system is more rigid than on 500px, however, and if you want to set your own prices or offer different aspect ratios than straight 3:2, it gets more complex. The social aspect is higher, with comments and groups available, so it’s perhaps more of a Flickr alternative than 500px.

What can be said about SmugMug that hasn’t been said a million times before? Reasonable pricing, extremely customisable, fantastic customer service, and nice to look at. All of this comes at a price, admittedly, but for the array of services offered, I don’t think the price tiers are unreasonable. I’ll be using SmugMug about as soon as I can afford a Pro account! SmugMug also offer an option (“SmugVault“)of unlimited uploads of original RAW files stored in secure Amazon S3 cloud servers, paid for through your Amazon account, for just $1+14¢ per GB per month. So if you have 10GB of TIFFs, PSDs, or RAWs worth backing up, that’s just $2.40/month! You can try any SmugMug account free for 14 days, no card information required.

Zenfolio is probably Smugmug’s biggest competitor in the pro photography space. It seems to be a little cheaper than SmugMug for the most part, but the Premium Business account is $250/yr versus SmugMug Pro’s $150/yr, and doesn’t seem to offer anything over and above SmugMug Pro. I have little knowledge of this particular site, but the features it offers mean that if you’re looking for paid, professional image hosting, Zenfolio should be on your list as well as SmugMug. There’s no reason not to try, either, since they also offer a 14-day free trial with no card information required.

The last option I’ve heard talk about is PhotoShelter, which sells itself as a professional image hosting service. The prices range from $10/month (ie. $120/year) for the most basic of services to a whopping $50/mo ($600/year! Still $550 if paid annually). It doesn’t offer unlimited storage either, maxing out at 100GB. Trying a plan is $1 for the 14 days, which seems off-putting to me when its two main competitors I can try for free with no financial information required, I don’t know about anyone else. When the most basic plan is the same yearly price as SmugMug Pro with one of the 20% off offer codes floating around the internet, offers no customisation, and I have to give them my card details and pay a dollar just to try it out, I’m pretty unconvinced that I’ll be taking a further look at them. However, someone reading this might have a PhotoShelter account. If so, what makes it so attractive for you over SmugMug and Zenfolio?

That’s all the realistic options that I’ve found or heard about online after some whittling-down research. Hope this helps someone! If anyone has another option, or has an opinion on anything mentioned above, please tell us about it in the comments.

~Rob