News: November 2007

New photos

Date posted: Wednesday, November 28, 2007 @ 12:28AM

As mentioned in my previous news update, I've decided to move my photos to a different hosting provider to reduce the burden I currently have managing things myself. While I enjoyed Zenfolio and believe their service will eventually snag my business (note: they introduced custom photo pricing during my evaluation), I ultimately decided upon SmugMug for a number of minor reasons. SmugMug is not perfect but it has the edge over Zenfolio for the time being.

Check out my SmugMug gallery, including most my photos from the 2007 UPA Club Championships.

Photo hosting comparisons

Date posted: Friday, November 2, 2007 @ 2:39AM

I returned from the 2007 UPA Club Championships with a number of photos and this seems like a ripe time to experiment with alternate photo hosting services.

Although I hadn't really considered it an option, I've recently uploaded some photos to Facebook. While I like the ability to tag my friends in the photos, it has some serious limitations: max 60 photos per album, only available to my friends (that's how I like my privacy settings there), and many others. Really though, Facebook is more for snapshots of friends and not hosting my photos. Anyway...

First up on my evaluation list is Flickr. Uploading photos was a breeze using a plug-in that I found. I'm reasonably happy with how Flickr presents the 2007 UPA club championship photos, and I like the view counts and commenting feature (although no one has commented on them yet). I can't put my finger on it, but there's still something that seems missing or otherwise doesn't quite work for me with regards to the organizational features.

Next up is the web version of Google's Picasa. Once again, I've used some of the 2007 UPA club championships photos. Comments seem to be available (with a required Picasa web account), but I cannot find view counts. While their slideshow thing is pretty slick on first glance, I'm not really happy with how things are implemented. The organization seems to be pretty flat with no way to group albums.

Third on my list is Zenfolio which I happened across via advertisements on Strobist. Once again, up go the club championship photos. They seem to have a lot of promise. I really like the organizational aspects of things (folders, collections, etc.). This vendor seems to have a lot of promise, but the current version appears to lack of user commenting and customizable categories -- ultimate isn't listed as a sub category of Sports! What nerve! :)

Finally, I took a look at Smugmug which a few other ultimate photographers use. Their interface for the club championship photos I uploaded as a test is pretty slick. Their commenting ability is also first rate. Their organization and management tools however leave a bit to be desired with respect to user interaction design. There's also no view counts as far as I can see.

Something I didn't mention above, is pricing. Flickr and Picasa have free accounts that I'd probably do just fine with until the number of photos grows large. After that, they both over reasonably priced upgrades on storage. Neither, however, have more professional features I may want to add at some point in the future.

Zenfolio and Smugmug are not free, but offer trial accounts (which is how I evaluated them). The service prices are very different. Zenfolios best service comes at $40/year and allows unlimited storage of photos, access protected albums and custom DNS names for my site. That's pretty reasonable. Smugmug, however, starts at $39.95/year and just gives unlimited storage without the more advanced options on customization coming at up to $149.95/year. In the grand scheme of things, that's still pretty cheap, but $100/year difference could mean the difference between going to another ultimate tournament or not.

Overall, I don't think the more consumer-ish sites (flickr and picasa) will really satisfy me. As far as the paid services, I'm really digging Zenfolio. They're planning on adding comments soon, and when they do, I think that'll be enough for me to commit and send them some money. The advantage Smugmug has, however, is the ability to set your own prices for prints and earn profits from sales. That's not something I'm thinking of doing any time soon, but maybe Zenfolio will have that by the time I feel like turning on the ability for visitors to purchase prints. I'll have to revisit this decision at some other time...