Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Back a few months ago I was on a hunt to find a better site to host my digital photos and let me share them with others. I have used a couple of sites for years:

Imagestation.com is a site started by Sony that I subscribed to because it was free and because my first digital camera back in 2000 was a Sony. Doing research later I found it to be one of the most sophisticated sites at the time and probably the most likely to stay in business during what turned out to be the begging of the dot bomb (dot com crash).

Pbase.com is a hopegrown site developed by one person that was initially free. Other than the difference between an individual owning the site vs. a massive corporation, a few others were as follows: Imagestation offers prints and unlimited downloads, Pbase offers a Bulletin Board system, and is more geared towards professionals, with display of exif info, incredible flexibility in display, etc. Pbase was initially free, but eventually started charging a fee.

So for a long time I was actually storing my photos on both of these sites. I would upload the original image to Imagestation because I got unlimited storage, so it was a sort of extra backup scheme. Then I would upload a 640×480 or 800×600 reduced image to Pbase. The other thing that Imagestation has going for it is that you can create a list of people, even by importing your address book from Outlook or other application, so that you can quickly send out mass invites to see a new album. I would sometimes use this feature, but eventually Imagestation made it so that you had to register on their site in order to look at images, and some of my friends just did not want to do this.

I got married in October of 2003 and my wife has a side business in photography which I have been starting to contribute to at least in a minor way. She did not host her photos anywhere and I really felt like the double work I was doing posting my shots to two separate sites was wasting time. Furthermore we wanted a site where we could also upload all our wedding shots so that the guests at our wedding could look at them and even order prints if they so chose.

So I started doing an exhaustive search. I started with a great resource that lets you compare different sites based on a bunch of different criteria. Some of the information is not very complete and it’s really hard to get a handle on exactly how a site is going to work until you actually go to it and try using it. So I started subscribing to many of these sites, posting some sample images, editing, deleting, changing the display properties, and so forth. Other than wanting to have prints as an option, other things I looked for were display flexibility (different resolutions, customizability of the layout, password protection, hierarchical structure of albums within folders, ease of moving images around, deleting, etc), how stable the company looked, how responsive they are to customers, whether they are geared to professionals, and many others.

I created a big spreadsheet which I unfortunately don’t have anymore, and after starting with probably 30 sites (after eliminating some almost immediately because they didn’t have some basic feature or just looked really amateurish, nascent, or scammish), I finally got it down to 5 sites. These sites were Clubphoto.com, Printroom.com, Fotki.com, Fototime.com, and Smugmug.com. All of these sites have different strengths and weaknesses in their interface, features, etc. I was having a hard time paring it down from here, so I figured this was a good point to actually compare the print quality. We ordered about 6 or 7 prints (the same ones) from each of these sites and compared them. My wife, who has a much better eye for these things than myself, picked Smugmug as having the most realistic color reproduction. So after a little further looking to make sure there weren’t any serious deficits, we took the plunge and went for one of their professional level subscriptions.

Boy, am I glad that we made that decision! They have been nothing but a pleasure to work with. Admittedly we have not ordered any other prints, nor have any of our wedding guests as far as we know, but otherwise, I have gotten extremely fast responses to any of my questions, suggestions, or an occasional spotting of a typo or other minor bug. Smugmug is run by a whole family. Chris MacAskill, his wife, sons, daughter, daughter in law, etc., created and manage the site. They do it with the pride and attention that shines through. They are extremely responsive to customers’ suggestions, going so far as to change their printing partner based on feedback from customers. It’s actually a bit funny that they did this, since we had based our decision off of their old printing partner, which happened to be the Clubphoto! Luckily, though, their new partner is the same lab as used by Printroom.com, EZprints, and this came in a close second to Clubphoto when we were comparing them. The apparent advantage of EZprints is that they provide proofs and ICC profiles, which are invaluable for photographers wanting to really make sure the end product matches what they see on their screen as closely as possible. They even wrote up a very thorough explanation of why they switched Ezprints. In other words, they really base their decisions on feedback from customers and totally keep those customers in the loop at every stage of the process! Since we’ve joined they’ve made some fairly significant additions to the features on the site (watermarking and the ability to customize your print prices just to name a couple) and you really get the impression that they are constantly working on new ones. They have also been active responding to questions posted in the forums on dpreview.com, where more and more photographers are repeating the good reviews I’m giving them here.

I definitely would recommend that you at least include them as one of the photo sharing/hosting sites that you look at when doing your own comparisons. Everyone has different requirements and priorities so they may not be the perfect host for everyone, but they will be for many. Here’s a link to my own galleries on the site – just note that none of these images are edited in any way. One of the things that is on my very long list of things to do is to get more skilled at Photoshop so that I can start editing my images in a competent way! If you do end up signing up for an account, I would just ask that you give my “coupon code” in the referral field. Of course it’s completely up to you, but it will at least give you $5 off the membership if you decide to go with them, and it will also compensate me for taking the time to write all this out ($10), lol! My coupon code is KBtZHuH46Crcw. Whichever host you end up with, good luck, and send me a link!