Photo hosting (cheap and cheerful)?

phil-t

phil-t

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I'm looking at cheap and cheerful photohosting solutions.

I've got a load of family photos' and weddings that I want to share with friends/family in a slightly more controlled way then a free public hosting service.

It's just for private use, and my simple requirements are

1. Password protection of albums
2. Reasonable upload/storage limits (3Gb would be nice)
3. Be able to have clean nice interface (i.e. customisable album pages/front page)
3. Under £20 a year?

I might be missing out on using Flikr/Google+ since I think they don't support the password protection (for public use, i.e. people without flikr/google accounts) and being 'clean' and not customisable to something 'simple'.. or am I misunderstanding their capabilities?

The others I've looked at (or used)
1. Pbase - Was OK at the time, still have some images hosted on their, but their renewal pricing ($23 per 1Gb per year) is pretty expensive IMO, and it's not looking any slicker these days, so I've counted that out.
2. Fotki - Was OK, is a bit cluttered by default, although unlimited uploads for $25 a year isn't too bad, but I can't access my albums in work (obviously just occasional access during coffee breaks;)) due to the Proxy/Firewall, This would be my fallback, but I don't like paying and having a messy site that confuses the more elderly members of the family ;)
3. Zenfolio - Seems OK, very clean, a bit stingy on 2GB for £25 for the first year, and not sure about the whole $1 = £1 thing (But I see it will let me pay in $ ???) I've created a trial account to check it out further.

What others am I missing?
 
I was going to mention pbase until I read your post in detail
 
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I have a photobox gallery as suggested above. Not too bad to look at, not that custmisable but you can password protect the galleries and they will watermark as well which does not end up on any prints. Also you can use the site for direct printing through photobox (reasonable quality prints at sensibkle prices) which may be of interest. HAve a look at mine through the link in my sig.

Alternativley you could look at having your own website. Unlimited hosting do a fixed package for £2.75/month with a free domain name - http://www.unlimitedwebhosting.co.uk/hosting.php

When I get sorted I will probably go for this as they look quite good and seem to get good reviews.

Hope this helps :thinking:

Nick
 
I use Smugmug, it is more expensive than you would like at $40 per year, but I can give you a $5 discount code if you would like.

However:

* The layout is fairly customisable (the better spec options allow full customisation and your own URL without the .smugmug bit)
* the URL is your username.smugmug.com
* You can password protect albums, hide albums from public view, hide albums from search engines - to give you an idea, I created a password protected hidden album for some photos of a family christening I went to. I gave it an identifiable name (baby's name), searched for it on Google, Yahoo and MSN using my Smugmug username, the albums unique name and the unique name of the gallery it was in, and nothing came up. I know it can be found, but you would have to be pretty persistent to find it.
* unlimited storage of Jpg, Gif, Png files
* you can set the viewing size of each image uploaded (so can upload original size files upto 50Mb, but limit the viewing size to say Small)
* if your original photo is 50mb or less, and you upload the original Jpeg / Gif / Png, it gives you the option of owner download, so it can be used as a partial online backup. (I wouldn't say fully used as a backup as it doesn't allow for storage of Raw files, but you can store these in the SmugVault at extra cost)
* It was (think it still is) part of Amazons Cloud space, so you shouldn't lose your files anytime soon.

Overall I really like it. My homepage is a little bit messy, but it works for me - I have generic gallery categories, such as family, travel, wildlife, landscape, then have albums within these. I have found the Support to be great - reasonably fast at replying to e-mails (within a couple of hours typically), they also have a forum which isn't dedicated to Smugmug users, but does have sections dedicated to problems and queries (dgrin.com)

I hope that helps somewhat
 
Thanks for all the great information!

The webhosting is a very good idea I'd not even thought about (And I'm a software developer who dabbles in that kind of thing from time to time!).

Photobucket does also look good, it's moderately customisable, but does have a slight image size limitation for user download (I have 24MP JPEGs), but I can possibly work around that, I'm trialling the free account at the moment!

And I also like Zenfolio, I'm also trialling that, there is no image size limit, but it's a bit tight on storage, although it has the 'cleanest/easiest' client view...

Now just Smugmug to check out and I should be able to weigh them all up!

:)
 
ii know its an old post but which one did you go with in the im about to do the same so any input would be great cheers
 
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