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Prepare to compromise (as with everything in life)Sep 09 '01 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line There is no one perfect photo-hosting service. Each service has made certain compromises in terms of usability, etc, and you need to find the one that best matches your priorities.
I've been a fairly active digicam photographer lately, and I've played around with the various different photo-hosting websites. Different ones will appeal to different tastes. Things to consider: 1. How easy is it to upload? All the sites I've seen offer a browser plug-in for uploading. This is convenient--just drag-and-drop your files, and as a bonus, will automatically do things like assign picture names based on file names. I've noticed that some of these (especially Shutterfly) seem to be pretty quick, others (especially Imagestation) slow--the speed seems to be dependent on the software and the server at the other end. You can also do HTTP uploads, which are less convenient. Or you can e-mail images as attachments, although this never seems to be convenient. And Photopoint allows you to upload by FTP--they seem to be the only service that does this. With a very long upload session, there's always the possibility that your connection will drop or your computer will hang. While I've usually been able to recover what's already been uploaded, it isn't always obvious. 2. How is your album presented? This is a pretty important point, since a lot of people will just want to view the photos online. Some services only show relatively small images, trying to get you to order a print. Photopoint and Imagestation both make the full-res image available to people who are browsing. So if a friend wants the original image to make into a desktop, or play with in Photoshop, he doesn't need to pester you to send it to him. You can often pick a background for your albums, although with some services, the only backgrounds available are very gimmicky. Some services give you a fair amount of control in general over how your album is viewed; others make the decisions for you. Some services perversely make it almost impossible for friends to view your online albums. Imagestation is nice because it gives you an easy-to-remember URL (in the form imagestation.com/member/username) that you can tell your friends. Others apparently require that you 'invite' friends via the hosting service (an obvious ploy to harvest e-mail addresses), and don't have a URL you can just send out. Wolf Camera, in addition to this cumbersome approach, also required me to register just to view a friend's album. Imagestation is notable for using very complex Javascript-based pages. This makes some interesting tricks possible, but that complexity can be the downfall of older computers/browsers. 3. How is the shopping cart? I shouldn't even need to mention this--shopping-cart software should be well understood by now--but Imagestation's is so bad that this matter clearly can't be taken for granted. Rather than just clicking "add to cart" when you see a picture you want a print of, you need to assemble all the albums that contain images you want prints of, and then pick from there (and you only get to view tiny thumbnails in this mode). Failing to do it that way clears your cart. Dumb. It's worth it to play around with several different hosting sites and see which one suits you best. Especially since they often let you get some free prints when you sign up. One thing I've been impressed with is the quality of prints in general. Surprisingly, this seems to be one point (based on my spotty experience) you don't need to worry about. Another is pricing: Photopoint (and maybe a few others) are pay sites. Most, though, host images for free and make their money on prints. Pricing for prints seems to be pretty similar in general.  |
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by cr01
