What is the best online photo site?

[unicycle6869]

So I'm finally getting around to putting all of my pictures online so friends and family can see them. Especially now that I've moved. I've done some research and have narrowed it down to these three: smugmug, kodak adobe easyshare, and picasa online. But I have a few questions that I couldnt' figure out but hopefully someone here might know the answers.

Smugmug:
-Right now it's at $40/year for the cheapest. Can they raise that every year? Or will that be set in stone for the rest of my life? I'd hate to use it and then in a few years they bump it up a lot. This is my biggest concern.
-Do you know what happens if say I forget or don't have the money to pay when it's due, will they delete all my photo's or will they save them and then when I do have money and re-join I'll have all my pics again?

Adobe:
-Will it always be free or will you have to pay sometime in the future?
-What are the drawbacks of this verses smugmug?

My last question is about captions. I want to write captions for all my pictures and would love them to be connected to the picture. I read this on picasa: "Write captions that stay with the picture. Picasa makes captions the way journalists do – using the IPTC standard. That means your captions are saved within their pictures and stay with them, whether you export as a web page or make a CD presentation. Picasa captions are fully editable and searchable, and you choose whether to display them or not." Do you know if either smugmug or adobe does this? I think picasa sounds like a good one, but they only have 1gb free and 7gb for $25/year but I know I'll need more than that. And $100/year for 25gb is too much for me.

If anyone has the extra time to answer some of these, it'll help make my decision a lot easier. Thanks!

[TheObieOne3226]

gallery.unicyclist.com


/thread

[JJtheunicycle]

Montana (Hahahahahaha, anyone one get it?)

[johnfoss]

Obie hasn't shopped around. The gallery here is free. After that it loses lots of ground. There's much to be said for free, but the gallery here is always slow to load, sometimes won't load at all, sometimes down, sometimes impossible to work with. Don't get me wrong, the price can't be beat and I really appreciate Gilby making such a huge resource available to people to share their unicycle stuff in one place.

That said, I put a lot into my pictures, and have more needs when posting/displaying them. I started with Ofoto, which is now called the Kodak Gallery. I guess it's also called Adobe by some (I assume that's what Jamey meant). :) Ofoto was free, with unlimited storage. I haven't paid as much to their system recently, but in the past they only required that you made at least one print order a year to keep your account alive. Their prints are excellent and very fast to arrive, at least to me less than 100 miles from where I think they're printed (Oakland). I still use the Kodak Gallery for some print orders.

But Kodak's display system is very limited. Photos are shown small and very low-res (this may be a plus if you're worried about unauthorized usage. It's also very hard to link directly to albums, and I don't think it's possible at all to link to specific pictures.

Also I have to give the Kodak Gallery props for choosing me as the grand prize winner in their Share Your Summer Shots photo contest in 2005. This was the winning picture (http://unicycling.smugmug.com/gallery/214466#8808448), and it earned Jacquie and me a week in Cozumel and $5K. Highly recommended, even before I won their contest.

Smugmug:
There's something to be said for "owning" your account. When you pay for something, you get a better assurance of something in return. Or, in Smugmug's words, "they (free sites) have to pay for the service *somehow*." Often this is with ads, lack of support, and requirements to spend money to keep your pictures alive.

I have a Pro level account ($100/year), which allows me to set my own price on prints for sale, decide what sizes to display my images, add watermarks, customize the look of album pages, put my own banner messages at the top if I wish, and many other things. Including very good, responsive support. I have yet to play with the interface much, and am using many of the default settings for looks. But if you notice, you can't right-click-download my pictures, and the full-size versions are not available to view. This is me protecting my copyright so they don't show up on just anyone's web site or elsewhere. Occasionally I sell some for commercial use.

Smugmug also offers stuff like really high-level professional prints, on fancy paper, canvas, etc. and just about any print size you can think of, as well as photos on gift items. They don't do the albums like Kodak (and other sites) though. Or the greeting cards some of you may have seen from me. I use Kodak for those. There are other sites doing those as well.

Please use this link (http://www.smugmug.com/?referrer=MEXFYNkahp6qk) if you want to sign up at Smugmug. You save money and I get a bit knocked off my annual fee.

Answers for Jamey:
- Can Smugmug raise their price every year? That's up to them of course. But they have to stay competitive with the other photo sites out there. As long as they're better, they're worth a little more but not too much!
- Do they keep your pictures if you don't pay? I wouldn't, at least after whatever I chose as a grace period. Probably at least a month for renewals. http://www.smugmug.com/help/acctbills
- Will Kodak always be free? That's up to them. If they find they're losing money they will have to make changes. However, they are one of the original photo sharing sites (though they are more print-buying oriented), and survived the dot-com bust, so they're pretty solid.
- Drawbacks of Kodak over Smugmug? Less control over accounts, and otherwise the stuff mentioned above.

It looks like Picasa (which doesn't run on Macs) can read the IPTC captions in your JPEGs. Smugmug reads the IPTC keywords, which you can see listed under my pictures. Those are very cool, because you can use them to do searches. Eventually I hope to update all my older albums with keywords. I haven't looked into what other IPTC stuff Smugmug reads. It may include the caption/abstract field, but I don't use it. I should look into this... You should really look into keywords though, those are more useful as data tools than captions.

[johnfoss]

Looks like Smugmug can do the captions as well as keywords! It took me a while to dig this up, but now I'm going to have to try it.

http://smugmug.jot.com/WikiHome/Pros/AddingKeywordsToMetadata

I add keywords (and copyright, location, people and other data) to my images in my image-management software. I use iView MediaPro, which works for Windows and Mac. Unfortunately this company was purchased by Microsoft, and I don't know what they're going to do with it. It's a little dated compared to Aperture and Lightroom.

Anyway there are plenty of programs out there you can use to add IPTC data to your images. I have to be careful in iView, as the initial adding of data just adds it to the database, not the photo file. You have to do a separate command for all that data to be copied into the image files. Fortunately this can be done in bulk!

[unicycle6869]

gallery.unicyclist.com


/thread

I have 18 GB of pictures I want to put online, so I don't think the gallery here is the best. It would probably take me a couple months!

Thanks John for the info! Still trying to decide...I'm 50/50 right now.

[johnfoss]

Do what I did. Try both, and keep the one you like.

My original plan has been to move everything over to Smugmug, but now I'm thinking I'll reorganize all the pictures before I do this. Currently I have them broken down by dates and events. But sometimes I go to the same places over and over. Same trails, more pictures of Las Vegas, etc. Maybe I'll divide them up by subject and add to them as I take more pictures. And subtract the old ones when better ones come along!

[unicycle6869]

Do what I did. Try both, and keep the one you like.

My original plan has been to move everything over to Smugmug, but now I'm thinking I'll reorganize all the pictures before I do this. Currently I have them broken down by dates and events. But sometimes I go to the same places over and over. Same trails, more pictures of Las Vegas, etc. Maybe I'll divide them up by subject and add to them as I take more pictures. And subtract the old ones when better ones come along!

Thats a great idea John! Smugmug has a free 14 day trial and kodak is free, so I think I'll play around with both of them and see which one I prefer and stick with that one. Luckily all my pictures are organized, I just need to add keywords and captions!

[thefish]

www.deviantart.com

Its more for art, but it is completely free and very fun.

[JJtheunicycle]

Montana (Hahahahahaha, anyone one get it?)
no one understood? it says (please state below)....ha? Its not very funny but worse since I had to explain it..I'll leave this thread alone now...