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Hi!
With my business I originally wanted to use thumb drives to give my clients their photos, but I have hit a snag with that plan. As I have been getting more families that are farther away than just five minutes into town I have realized that is not the best way to do it.
What are some good ways to give people their photos online? I don’t want to email them as I have always had trouble with file size and only being able to send like 5 photos at a time if I’m lucky. 🙂 Is Dropbox a good option or would they have to have their own account to get to the photos. Is there a way I could do it from my website etc.?
I’m pretty lost at this point so any help would be awesome!
The client does not have to have a Dropbox account to access the pictures, even though Dropbox might try to convince them that they do. 🙂
If you had a regular webhost you could probably come up with a way to deliver them that way, but I don’t think Weebly will work for that… 🙁
I normally deliver by Dropbox, but sometimes I use box.com. I make a folder for each project and share the folder. The advantage of box.com is that if you send as a link they are less pushy about trying to get people to sign up with an account, and therefore it is less confusing to the average user. Of course sharing as a link also means that they can forward the link to all their friends and they can download the photos, too.
Another thing to consider is what file size you want to deliver. Full resolution at 95% jpg is really nice, but most people really don’t need that much. Being in real estate photography, my clients only need about 2000px wide, and I use tinyjpg.com to compress them. They even have an option to save directly to your Dropbox. The final files are about half as many MB after compression and very little difference in quality is visible.
As @buddingphotographer said, the ideal is to have a way to deliver from your website. That way you have full control and can add options such as ordering prints, password protecting, pay before downloading, etc.
- This reply was modified 55 years, 2 months ago by .
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@elianafranzenburg If you don’t mind me asking, what particular trouble are you having with thumb drives? I’m not sure that I could help you, but I always use thumb drives, and they work beautifully! I got 5 for a really good price (I could probably locate the link if you’re interested) and I think it’s a bit more practical and about the same price if not less than paying for an online portfolio like Zenfolio. The photographer we had for the longest time before I started taking our pictures used Zenfolio. If you’re making a lot of money, it’s a good option, but since I don’t have a regular flow of money I can pretty much depend on from photography – at all 😀 😀 – I’ve found it’s much better for me to have flash drives lying around that I can use when I need them, instead of paying a monthly fee for a service I may or may not use. That’s my opinion on flash drives – I really like them, and if you can make them work, I think it would be a very good option. As far as online portfolios, I can’t say anything because I have no experience. 😀
@kina I don’t want to use flash drives anymore because I’m starting to have clients that live farther away. Before all the people lived just about 5 minutes away and they were in a area that my family went at least once a week.
Really the flash drives are the easiest way to deliver photos but not when they live like 30-40 minutes away especially since I don’t have my license quite yet.I am going to get a pack of five from amazon.com just to have because I really do like them better than anything digital.
@elianafranzenburg Yup! I totally know where you’re coming from! I don’t have my drivers license yet either which makes photography a hill I have to climb. I send my flash drives through mail though. If you stick it in bubble wrap and put it in a regular-sized envelope with a nice personal letter with 3 dollars worth of stamps on it, they’ll send it. I think that’s just because of the thickness of the package though. If you didn’t bubble-wrap it, it may only be 1 stamp. Also, if you put it in a big yellow package envelope thingie that’s already bubble wrapped or even it’s not bubble wrapped, I think because the packaging is bigger and the thickness isn’t noticed as much, you can just do one or two stamps that way. I’m not a U.S. Postal service expert at all, but I’ve done all of those things. I think a flash drive costs less than $5. Even if you spent $8 sending your photos to your client but it was special and worked well, I really think it’s worth it. I saw that you charge $80 for a session of 6 or less. Spending $8 on your client to make sure that they have a good experience and get their photos in a good format is only 1/10th of what they’re paying you, (or less if there’s more than 6 people 😀 ) and it will pay off in the long run if you have happy clients!
Hey @elianafranzenburg, sorry I’m a bit late replying to this, but just within the past few weeks I set up an account with Pixieset – it’s free for up to 3G storage. It’s working well for me so far.
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