Website recomendations

[rui fernandes]

I have a Flickr account, made a great journey there with one of the greatest photo communities, made many friends too. Also excelent and very friendly as a hosting site. Priceless! So I feel like staying there forever!

Now the problem is, living in a mix between a community and a portfolio, what a confusion! I'm starting to feel very tired and confused with my work flow/show... also it doesn't make sense to give a link to my portfolio and providing/showing all the fuzz that goes with the community activity, sometimes a little stupid/naïve/childish/justforfun... not wise to keep this way... :roll:

Also I have a strong concern about file protection, and I don't feel safe in Flickr. It's so friendly and atractive to so many third party "business" that anything may happen until detection/correction...

I don't have the skills/knowledge/time/patiente to build my own page. I've seen many great pages amoung much more not so interesting. The problem is to have a page "tuned" with the kind of personal work exhibited...

So far I'm pleased with the look and service at Zenfolio. But I haven't made the move yet, just because I don't want to try everything in the market (again, no time or patiente, sorry). Also I cannot try every single website searching for protection flaws, and I'm not skilled for it too. I know that the best protection is to not publish at all, but I feel that we can have a good compromise between sharing and protecting, not exactly what we can find in many websites.

So my question is, if someone has any good experience with an website, I'd appreciate the info. Or bad too, it may be helpful to prevent some "damages" ;-)

Thanks in advance!

 

[socket]

I'm using pbase, which seems have a very simple and old-fashioned interface. I looked briefly at flickr, photobucket and hosted some files on imageshack a while ago, but they seem a bit less convenient to view pictures in. The disadvantage is that pbase is a subscription site (about $25 US a year for a base subscription IIRC).

I briefly looked at Zenfolio the other day, but its interface, although powerful, seems a bit sophisticated (busy?) for my taste.

You can set passwords on your galleries but I don't bother. I'm not posting polished, high-end images here: just snaps for the most part, for myself, family and friends to look at. Over the years, I've collected a whole cupboard of photos (from film) that I never look at. It's just not convenient. So in the digital age, I want to be able to view my photos anytime (at home, work, England or here in Canada) and I can do that when they are on the web. Every so often, I change the wallpaper on my desktop from my gallery.

The reason I decided to post, however, is not to say how much I like pbase. It's just to mention that sometimes I use the random picture feature to generate pages of random pictures. It seems to me (and I may be wrong), that some of the pictures displayed are in passworded galleries. If true, that's definitely a hole in their security.

 

[rui fernandes]

Hi Socket, and thanks!

I never remember Pbase! Why I don't know!

Anyway, against all my previous concerns, I made a move today. I agree with you about Zenfolio's interface, but I like the costumization possibilities.

So I started to "build" my portfolio there. You can check it, altough it's still at the beginning and I'll make some changes for sure ;-)
http://ruifernandes.zenfolio.com/

Have a nice weekend!

 

[waloszek]

Hi Rui,
I do not know, which computer platform you are using.If you are using a Mac, you might consider using RapidWeaver as a Web tool. I have to admit that it is not very flexible if you are used to coding HTML, but it is fairly easy to create simple image galleries. However, you would also need a provider, which costs some money (I am using strato.de in Germany with BasicWeb (or similar...) for my home page, which provides me with 1 GB of Web space -- which is not enough, actually...).
Best regards, Gerd
PS: RapidWeaver Website: http://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/

 

[odklizec]

Rui, I was on pBase but switched to Flickr because of much better (live) community. But it's not ideal either. I don't like the fact all newly uploaded photos are automatically added to front page without an option to make them available only via sets.

Gerd, interesting point about RapidWeaver. I'm just evaluating it as an easy and rapid template-driven web tool. Another good option seems to be Sandvox. But the more I think about feature set of both apps, RapidWeaver seems win for me?

 

[waloszek]

>> Gerd, interesting point about RapidWeaver. I'm just evaluating it as an easy and rapid template-driven web tool. Another good option seems to be Sandvox. But the more I think about feature set of both apps, RapidWeaver seems win for me?

RapidWeaver might be a good and simple solution for you. But as I have a "dreamweaver history" -- not proficient, but at least basic -- I feel too much constrained in Rapid Weaver. I bought RW and considered switching to it, because my Dreamweaver MX does no longer run on Snow Leopard (and there is no hope that it ever will...), but I cannot even import my old HTML pages... Therefore, I installed a Dreamweaver Windows version that I use in my company on my Parallels Desktop Windows XP installation. Now, I feel rescued -- at least a little...

Best regards, Gerd

 

[rui fernandes]

Thanks Gerd, I'm on a PC...

So far so good, Zenfolio seems quite what I was looking for... I haven't had the time for exploring the goodies of the top accounts, especially the Zenfolio's watermark that it's removed when buying a print, and all the business solutions, but I'm very pleased with the interface and general look.

Now I must find some time to give a closer look and delete some photos. That's the most difficult, when we are so close with our work we loose some "perception" :roll:

 

[uKrris]

Rui,

Thanks for getting this subject going; some very useful info here for someone like me