PicFair websites - any experience?

lindsay

lindsay

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Lindsay
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I bought a domain a few years ago (Pennell.photography) and put up a "holding" couple of pages, but since the current hosting company are planning to remove the free web hosting package I have in mid-January, I've been weighing up options. I looked at Squarespace, which is good, but as I'm not looking for any e-commerce capability and have limited stuff to post at present, I think it costs too much for me at present. Likewise some of the other often mentioned options. I already use Flickr but mainly for just hosting stuff to post here. I had a fresh look at Picfair, and it looks like they are offering a good package for £45/year, which works out cheaper than any alternatives I've looked at, so I'm collecting together what I want to put on a site and am planning to sign up to that, at least for a year or two.

Does anyone have any experience with PicFair websites?
 
I'm having distinct doubts about PicFair now, following further play with their site. The options for layout are severely limited and at present I find this very unacceptable. I'll give it a bit more effort but it's looking like a No. I might have to accept that you get what you pay for.
 
Mainly it's a vanity site, in the sense of a website that I can point friends and others to, to show what I've done photographically. I don't have any commercial aspirations, and doubt any of my images would sell anyway (although I have had a tiny amount of interest on shutterstock). I was using the url of a Flickr album, but wanted an actual website to sit under the domain I bought a while back.
 
Looks like there is a free trial option, no mention of trial expiry that I could see ... might give you a feel for it?
 
Adamcski said:
Could be that if / when the free trial ends they will offer you an upgrade at reduced cost (I find this happens a lot, especially if you let something lapse for a week or two and just hang back whilst they email you).
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Possibly but Free is shown as a (limited) 'Plan' option.
 
I've been playing with the free version, uploaded some images to it (https://lindsayp.picfair.com) (excuse the cr@p images) which is how I've concluded the limitations of it. The Plus (paid-for) version allows you more functionality but doesn't appear to offer more layout options
 
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One of the limitations of the free version...

Store not published
This Picfair Store has not been published. If you are the owner of this store, please log in to Picfair to publish your store.
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Indeed @gramps , I wasn't sure if it would work when I included the url but that certainly explains a major difference between free and Plus.
 

PICFAIR LIMITED overview - Find and update company information - GOV.UK

PICFAIR LIMITED - Free company information from Companies House including registered office address, filing history, accounts, annual return, officers, charges, business activity
find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk

uk.linkedin.com

Picfair | LinkedIn

Picfair | 1,568 followers on LinkedIn. A beautifully simple way to sell your images, used by over 500,000 photographers worldwide. | A beautifully simple way to sell your images, used by over 500,000 photographers worldwide.
uk.linkedin.com uk.linkedin.com

 
droj said:
The review here seems fairly sage to me ...

chriswright.photography

Is Picfair worth the money? - Chris Wright Photography

Is Picfair worth the money? Well, this is what you get with the subscription...
chriswright.photography
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This last paragraph section is perhaps most 'telling'

"I will be closing my Picfair account at the end of 2023. I do sell prints, but the pricepoint in online marketplaces is way lower than is viable. My experience has been that people will buy high end prints directly from me, if I arrange the printing and framing personally. Again, it’s only my experience but my feeling is that people will buy a personalised service much more readily and for more money than they will an anonymous print through an online marketplace.

Selling prints or downloads for small change is not worth anyone’s time and it seems to me that the online marketplace model implemented by PicFair and competitors simply drives the price ever downwards."
 
Interesting links @droj, and I agree with the reviewer if selling was a thing I were interested in. OTOH he does say you can set your own prices, so if no-one wants to buy at the right price viaPicFair nothing is lost.
 
lindsay said:
so if no-one wants to buy at the right price viaPicFair nothing is lost.
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Except your sub! Though they're advertising a 50% off tempter, but who can say if will repeat?

As a comparison, dependent on the functions wanted, my current Flickr sub equates to £3.25 a month
 
As you can see from my signature I use the free* webspace that comes with the Adobe subscription, it works fine.


*obviously its part of the subscription, not free and only available to Adobe subscribers
 
I wasn't able to decide on the Adobe option - although I have pre-loaded subscriptions for about 2.5 years so it is really a no-brainer isn't it? I'll play with that and dump the PicFair trial.
 
I've just started looking at using the Adobe web gallery. It might do the trick although it doesn't give you the facility to create a nice website - so I'm still looking for a hosting option that will do what I want. I might just bite the bullet, pay for web hosting and hand-craft it. However checking out Adobe made me realise that my LR catalogue is a mess, so I am going to have to tidy up my folders on the computer and re-generate a new catalogue I think, dumping the real crud. I might use Bridge to do the tidying up though...
 
As a further update: I am playing with an Adobe gallery, but to publish it I still need to host it somewhere. So I took advantage of an offer Zenfolio were doing until yesterday of a reduced price for their websites, and am building something there instead. So far the only problem is with the web redirect from the domain I own to the zenfolio site.
 
lindsay said:
...So far the only problem is with the web redirect from the domain I own to the zenfolio site.
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Resolved quickly by the original domain host, so www.pennell.photography now goes to my Zenfolio site. It's still very much work in progress, but it's a start.
 
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