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Hey all!
This is my first original form post, so hi!
People often ask to see my photos, and I know I have photos to show them. Unfortunately, I don’t have a website or anything to direct them to where I can showcase my work.
Does anyone have any suggestions of a good hosting website?I’d mainly like:
Place to Showcase Photos!—I need to have a place where my landscape pictures can see some light. They aren’t seeing much in my hard drive.
Ease of Use—no fiddling around with HTML, having to resize every image in a webpage, or having to create a new WordPress post for each photo. A photo should take less than 30 seconds to get to the website.
A Place to Post a Bio or Business Contact Information—I’d like to maybe put myself out there. Maybe take photos for clients or sell my existing photos. This brings me to my next point.
A Way for Client to Download hosted Photos for a fee—Understandably, not every site will allow this—and most will want a cut. I’m not looking to sell stock imagery, but I want a place where I can just throw all my photos up from a portrait shoot and let my client choose which ones they want to download.
ideally FREE—If I’m making money on my pics, it’s not a huge deal. Currently, I’m not making a lot of money on my pics. So… I can’t justify a lot of business expenses.I understand I probably will have to split some of these between two seperate sites… but if there happens to be an all-in-one option, let me know!
Or just let me know which is popular amongst you all.Thanks,
LoganAttachments:
A suggestion would be to try http://www.flickr.com*** They offer 1 TB of free photo hosting, and take care of all the behind-the-scenes work for you. I have not used it very much, but I did try it for a sort of “digital album” for a wedding that I shot. After uploading all the photos, I discovered that flickr inserts ads in between every couple of photos when people view them. 🙁 Thankfully, I found out about a site called http://www.fluidr.com that gives you a nice alternative way to view your flickr photos. You don’t have to re-upload the photos, just view them at fluidr.com instead of flickr.com. See for example this photo at both location:
http://www.fluidr.com/photos/133846807@N06/27230531983/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/133846807@N06/27230531983I much prefer the “look” that fluidr gives, besides the fact that it doesn’t show ads!
That being said, you do not have a whole lot of options if you’re not willing to pay for them. 🙂 I currently host our website http://www.acornacrespuppies.com with https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/. I just checked our billing stats, and we pay ~$3-4 per month ($0.12-0.13 per day) to host the site. That is fairly cheap hosting for a WordPress site. (We only get 10-20 visits per day to the site). A quick online search shows that $7.99/month is a fairly common “cheap” price for most hosting providers.
***I do not whole-heartedly recommend flickr because it doesn’t meet all of your requirements, plus the fact that it hosts billions of other photos, many of which are indecent/inappropriate.
You’re welcome! With regards to Instagram, your guess is as good as mine. I have no experience with it. 🙂
Hey @loganlamar, Great question!
There are quite a few ways you could showcase your photos online. I’ve worked extensively with WordPress as a developer and I’ve found there are some great and easy ways to show your photos on a WordPress site and also provide a place to post a bio or business contact information.
WordPress is (in my opinion 😀 ) really easy to use.1. You can set up a free website on WordPress.com. One thing about this option is that your website url has to end with .wordpress.com (Example: loganlamar.wordpress.com) With WordPress.com you can create some very nice and professional galleries for showcasing your photos
2. Use WordPress.org on your own domain. In my opinion, the best way to do this is to buy a domain and hosting plan from a provider such as Bluehost, Hostgator, etc. (You can also host your own domain with WordPress.com) With WordPress.org, you can install gallery plugins that aren’t available with WordPress.com
If you use WordPress.org, you can provide a way for clients to download your photos for a fee. I’ve worked with a popular WordPress plugin called WooCommerce which can be used to sell physical or digital products (such as photo downloads).
Easy Digital Downloads is also a great plugin that I’ve used for downloads on a WordPress site.
For either of these options you’ll need to set up a payment gateway, such as PayPal or Stripe to charge money for the downloads.I hope this isn’t too confusing lol! If you have any more questions, feel free to ask. 🙂
Never heard of Fluidr before! That looks really good. When it comes to free, Flickr and Facebook are the two places that come to mind first, from my experience.
Instagram is a good place to share photos. It’s great for sending folks who want to see your work. It’s not a good portfolio option though. It’s built for mobile devices. Though your account can be accessed on a desktop, that’s about it. I use it to share little stories and direct folks to my blog (https://www.instagram.com/lenspirationphoto/).
WordPress may be a little more than you need. It’s designed to host entire websites. Lenspiration.com is built by WordPress. I would be curious to know how Joseph Camuso easily shares pictures using it, because I have not found a good way to host a portfolio through WordPress yet.
It might be better to stick with a program designed specifically for the purpose of a portfolio, like Squarespace or Weebly (or Wix?). Here’s a list I found that you could research: https://petapixel.com/2016/10/18/13-popular-photography-portfolio-sites-ranked-best-frustrating/
If you’re a Lightroom user, I believe they have some options you could look into, under the Web module, but I’m not familiar with how this works very well.
I currently use Zenfolio for hosting my portfolio. Usually, if you’re making money through it, you have to pay for it. Here’s my referral code if you want to get a small discount when signing up: http://www.zenfolio.com/?refcode=lenspiration It’s geared toward photographers specifically.
Hey, thanks everybody (specifically @buddingphotographer, @joseph, and @jamesstaddon)!
Decided to go with Instagram—it gets my photos out, and people can “subscribe” like they do to my YouTube channels—though I’ll probably refer back to this discussion if I decide to get a more serious setup.
Thanks for your help!Glad you came to a decision. When you set up your account, let me know and I’ll be the first to follow you! 🙂
Sorry, @jamesstaddon, my mom already beat you to it. 🙂
My username is loganklamar, but it’s a private account, so send your request and I’ll buzz you in. I’m already following you.
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