New Photo Sharing/Hosting Services

[dryicerx]

So what photo sharing/hosting service do you use? And what do you love/hate about them?

For the new stuff:
For the past few months, I've been working on a start-up that's a photo sharing/hosting service except our goal is allow unlimited storage and we have a magical way of very efficiently getting the user's entire photo collection to the cloud/servers very quickly, and provide a whole lot of automagical organizational features (this is our strong point). Instead of competing, our service complements Flickr/Facebook and other social platforms (where we act as the storage/central location to instantaneously push photo albums from). Our main aim is the consumer market more than the pro's, but all you pro's can use it equally to host galleries as well :)

We have yet to go public, so I can't disclose most of the feature, but I am open to anyone if you have suggestions/comments regarding photo sharing/hosting services.


Is there any feature that you wished Photo Sharing/Hosting websites offered?


-J

[Dobick]

If I had to ask for one feature that would make everything awesome for me -- give me a site/service that has the ability to read the xml sidecar file from lightroom or bridge etc., so that I can quickly upload a change should one be needed. Give me the need to only upload the raw file and the sidecar, and make the side car as replaceable as needed. Or even better, give me the ability to make changes onsite (such as an online version of lightroom) to raws that are stored online.

I want to store my entire library online, and have a randomly generated "portfolio" for presentation from all acceptable works that I choose.

Tons of things, that I am positive you will not be able to deliver, but I anxiously look forward to hearing where this develops

[lancemoreland]

You left off pbase.

[David Whatley]

I love flickr, but which that I had the option to pull the URL a little eaiser. Its a pain now. Go to the image, do all sizes, select the one I want to link to, and then I have the code. If you do several for a post, it is a real pain.
DW

[ka5txl]

I first started using picassa but got rid of it as it seemed to "take control" of how all my photo's were working on my laptop. But I'm using smugmug and I'm pretty satisfied with it for now.

[hotshot38]

I use mainly Picasa and Photobucket. Picasa mainly for it's ease of uploading multiple photos which are automatically resized on the fly. Photobucket for easy linking and embeding photos elsewhere.

Not surprised to see Flickr leading the pole. I personally have an acct which I rarely use....probably haven't touched it in a year or more. The biggest pain I find with flickr is not my photos, but others. When someone posts a link to their flickr photo, or album, it's easy to see that one photo, but I find it slow and awkward to navigate to other photos from the same photographer. Compared to Picasa albums that are laid out in a lightboard fashion and a one button, full-screen slideshow. Easily shared by copying and pasting the URL from the browser.

-Sean

[AllenAyres]

I use smugmug for my client galleries, but host the rest myself. I may put a few favorites up on flickr and some family snaphots on picasa, but want the ones I show potential clients on my own server.

AllenAyres added 14 Minutes and 52 Seconds later...Double Post Merged Below

Oh, for suggestions... smugmug does a decent job of integrating the look and feel of your main site and making it look like it is actually hosted at your site ( clients.bellafotografica.com ) but it's a pain to get setup correctly. And has to be updated separately when changes are made to the main site.

- Have an option to link to header/footer/headerinsert/css files or use the same from an existing wordpress blog, etc.
- Are you offering printing? If so, let us print at whichever lab we want (I prefer WHCC). I have to explain every time that I'm using a different lab depending on whether they order directly from the gallery or through me.


IMO, if you are aiming a service at photographers, I'd look more to higher-end products like pictage and pick-pic and see what they're offering. The others are good but are watered down more for the casual photographer and I'm not sure if we need another "me-too" service. If you could capture a couple higher-end features at a decent price you may be able to leap-frog a few people. If you could include a feature or 2 from Pro-Select, that would be amazing... (A chrome-less slideshow so the images could be projected on the wall would be a decent idea).

[epoh]

I use Flickr & Smugmug. Flickr is for personal stuff and previews of sessions with watermarks.

The annoying things about flickr is no automated watermark process like smugmug, the stripping of exif info when it resizes pictures and difficulty browsing through the massive amount of photos i have on there.

Smugmug is great for my sales side of things. The only annoying thing for me is that since I upgraded to CS4 I can no longer publish photos straight to smugmug via Bridge.

[dryicerx]

Originally Posted by Dobick

If I had to ask for one feature that would make everything awesome for me -- give me a site/service that has the ability to read the xml sidecar file from lightroom or bridge etc., so that I can quickly upload a change should one be needed. Give me the need to only upload the raw file and the sidecar, and make the side car as replaceable as needed. Or even better, give me the ability to make changes onsite (such as an online version of lightroom) to raws that are stored online.

I want to store my entire library online, and have a randomly generated "portfolio" for presentation from all acceptable works that I choose.

Tons of things, that I am positive you will not be able to deliver, but I anxiously look forward to hearing where this develops

heh, RAW is definitely something I'd like to integrate online as well, but the editing on-the-fly online is quite tricky. I have a proof of concept online RAW processor (based off dcraw) but the thing hogs CPU time like nobody's business, so won't make it to our service (yet) unfortunately, but I just poped the priority on that a bit up :)

Originally Posted by David Whatley

I love flickr, but which that I had the option to pull the URL a little eaiser. Its a pain now. Go to the image, do all sizes, select the one I want to link to, and then I have the code. If you do several for a post, it is a real pain.
DW

You mean have a text area you can simply copy-paste in to forums or direct links to the photos?

Originally Posted by ka5txl

I first started using picassa but got rid of it as it seemed to "take control" of how all my photo's were working on my laptop. But I'm using smugmug and I'm pretty satisfied with it for now.

no kidding, that's one thing I don't like about photo/music organizers, moving my stuff around. Our sync app does not touch your photos are all (simply monitors them and uploads immediately upon new additions/modifications) private and hidden by default of course.

Originally Posted by AllenAyres

- Have an option to link to header/footer/headerinsert/css files or use the same from an existing wordpress blog, etc.
- Are you offering printing? If so, let us print at whichever lab we want (I prefer WHCC). I have to explain every time that I'm using a different lab depending on whether they order directly from the gallery or through me.


IMO, if you are aiming a service at photographers, I'd look more to higher-end products like pictage and pick-pic and see what they're offering. The others are good but are watered down more for the casual photographer and I'm not sure if we need another "me-too" service. If you could capture a couple higher-end features at a decent price you may be able to leap-frog a few people. If you could include a feature or 2 from Pro-Select, that would be amazing... (A chrome-less slideshow so the images could be projected on the wall would be a decent idea).

For the basic/free we don't allow CSS, but definitely for the premium services to customize any way they want (we have a widget type layout).

Printing is still a todo on my list, I'll keep that in mind.

At the moment, our target is the regular consumer rather than the prosumer/pro. This is because lot of regular folks have thousands of photos collecting dust on their home computer without doing anything (that's our primary problem we are trying to solve).

Looks like a lot of love for the uber-fullscreen slideshows, consider that feature done :)

Originally Posted by epoh

I use Flickr & Smugmug. Flickr is for personal stuff and previews of sessions with watermarks.

The annoying things about flickr is no automated watermark process like smugmug, the stripping of exif info when it resizes pictures and difficulty browsing through the massive amount of photos i have on there.

Smugmug is great for my sales side of things. The only annoying thing for me is that since I upgraded to CS4 I can no longer publish photos straight to smugmug via Bridge.

Watermarks probably won't make it to our initial release, we are trying to not touch the photos as much as possible (straight to client computer -> storage), but I'll pop the priority on watermarks as well. Thanks.

[angiem357]

I started using Photobucket because it was easy and free. In the beginning, it was just a place to host photos I wanted to post to my blog. I like that I can make my images private so they don't show up in searches, but they will show up through a link. It's a pretty convenient service, considering the pricing! LOL! I wanted to upgrade to ZenFolio or SmugMug, I just haven't gotten around to it.

[S-Man]

Smugmug and I love it.