Photo Hosting

[Andy]

I tried out http://ImageShack.US which has unlimited bandwidth and stuff for free. I just found that some of my images can't be thumbnailed and result in full size and link to their home page if clicked. Anyway, it seems quite good for a free service.

Here's one of my images:


I seem to be OK with night shots now. I just need to get a horizontal image 

[TexasLady]

Andy, when I tried to get Image Shack several times this year, it always said it was full and gave me other sites to try out.   

I will try it again.

BTW, My Chicago grands are being raised right.....



Already good at and serious about computer.

[12noon]

When posting photos on here, what size would be best ?
I don't want to post massive photos, but at the same time don't want to post little ones that don't show much detail. What would be the best maximum width and a maximum height of pixels ?

BTW www.imagecave.com looks good for free photo hosting.

[SensoVision]

That's all depend from the picture, and what kind of details it have, generally I try to use resolution around 640x480 and less if picture permit, also I try to keep it's size about 50-100 kb if possible.
Regarding hostings I can't advice you much since never tried them.
But some of my friends are using services from this site: http://photobucket.com/ which allows to use hosted images on other sites.

[Andy]

image shack is still working for the photos I posted. Actually, my own hosting provider seems to have enough bandwidth now so I probably don't need to use these free services. They even support video steaming so I hope to try this out soon. I have a back log of pictures to post. I will go away and do this now... 

[Manu]

I use imageshack most of the times. I have not experienced any major problems with their free service. Used http://xs.to as well.

[TexasLady]

I just used Andy's link below and was able to join Image Shack w/o any problem.    They welcomed me as a "guest of Webmaster Forum".    How about that?   In the process of logging in now.   

Photobucket has been my free imaging hosting service for a long time, but they have recently made numerous changes (upgrades?) to their service and it has been giving me trouble.    So glad to make a change or at least have a backup. 

Now I just have to figure out how to make it work!   

[Andy]

I am planning to self-host hundreds of my own photos. I am not sure how it will work out but at least I hope to fund it via sales of a DVD containing all the original photos in un-edited form.

I plan to do a mass batch conversion of all the photos to resize them and compress them to a medium jpeg compression level using my camera's Canon Utilities. I will do this in the next few days.

My thinking is to scale the photos by a factor of 6 in pixel resolution to go from 3072x2304 pixel size to 512x384 pixels then selecting the medium JPEG compression whatever that means. I don't know whether anyone else tried hosting 100's of pictures before? Is this the way to go?

The site where they will be hosted is at: http://www.geishawalk.com/ So far I just have the home page set up and the blog script installed. I'll post again once some more pictures are uploaded.

[SensoVision]

I don't know whether anyone else tried hosting 100's of pictures before?

I'm going to do same thing as you do and believe that it's depend from how many traffic you going to get simultaneously and what software you'll choose. If it's written well and hosting could handle this amount of visitors at same time than there should be no problem... Also as a first thing you need to prevent hotlinking(it's drain up bandwidth even if you don't host a lot of photos, I know this by myself as few of my photos were used in blogs and homepages). And you probably need to prevent retrieving photos directly, so people could get access to photographs only via site's menu...

[Andy]

Interesting points Sensovision.

It is a good idea to let Google spider your images since that will bring traffic to your site but I think it is worth blocking direct hot-linking from forums etc. I think that allowing hot-linking is good for your site if you can stand the bandwidth hit. But I don't think I could unless there was a lot of revenue being made. YouTube allows hot-linking of video 

Today I categorised my images. I haven't counted them but I have about 1.2GB of data for the DVD. The next step is to make a mirror of the images in a smaller size and resolution for the web. Then I will select which images I will have online.

Currently I am thinking to group images into keyword-related blog posts rather than a photo-album approach e.g Coy Carp Pictures, Pictures of a Caterpillar etc. I think this will get the most traffic to the site. To get traffic, I will be using keywords in the image names and alt tags. So this will make the process of adding the pictures to the site very time consuming but ultimately effective I think.

To handle hotlinking I guess I will use some .htaccess rules to divert direct requests for images to some other page. But one tip I have is to not combat hotlinking initially so you can redirect links later 

When do you think you will start building your photo site Senso? Are you going to host high resolution pictures online or provide the full-res pictures on CD/DVD?

[SensoVision]

It is a good idea to let Google spider your images since that will bring traffic to your site but I think it is worth blocking direct hot-linking from forums etc. I think that allowing hot-linking is good for your site if you can stand the bandwidth hit. But I don't think I could unless there was a lot of revenue being made. YouTube allows hot-linking of video  Shocked

I've got some nice amount of visitors from Google finding my images and asking for permission to use them on sites, brochures, posters and even one book about radio waves in French and English(I should get a copy of it soon)
And all this with gallery which is never intended for any serious use except of showing photos to my friends and telling about what's happening in my city, pictures don't even have descriptions.
Regarding hotlinking it's a real problem but from other side folks send you visitors as each photograph have watermarked domain in the corner... So I'm leaving hotlinks until I move to new hosting with new gallery, after this I'll block hotlinking and redirect folks to message to contact me about using of my images, probably I'll allow to some of them who don't have a space to host image to continue hotlinking.

Today I categorised my images. I haven't counted them but I have about 1.2GB of data for the DVD. The next step is to make a mirror of the images in a smaller size and resolution for the web. Then I will select which images I will have online.

I was thinking about selling my images like this as well but after consideration I decide that they not good enough for this, maybe there are few shots worth watching but in overall I shot too many bad photos so it would be wasting of time and money of my visitors, I decide to let people buy picture if they like it and leave CD/DVD idea for future if anyone would ask me about it first.

When do you think you will start building your photo site Senso?

shame on me, I've promised it to friend for more than year and even now when I got good hosting with plenty bandwidth and space, gallery script almost finished(it's already working except few key features which are must have in my opinion but wouldn't take much programming time anyway), and even images selected for online uploading I still have some problems(diploma) preventing me from doing final step
I already afraid to name any dates so I'll name two months June-July.

[Andy]

Thanks for confirming that you can get traffic and contacts from simply hosting images.

I saw some of your photos before of flowers and insects and they were very good. Your idea of individual buying opportunities per photo is something I never considered. That would involve micro-payments I guess (an area I need to look into). A CD can be sold profitably online for just a few $ so you may want to reconsider. If some publisher needs a picture of something, they have to buy it or spend say 1 hour out of the office to take the photo so I don't see why they wouldn't pay a few $ for a compilation of good photos. My photos took me over 1 year to take so it would truely be a bargain price whatever I charged. Some involved climbing mountains!

Not all my photos are great but for the web, the required quality is quite low e.g. 100dpi or less. Much less than photo quality. I did some calculations today and think most people are only seeing 59dpi on 17" 800x600 monitors. Hopefully this makes some sense: dpi = sqrt( 800^2 + 600^2) /17 Also, pictures on web pages are normally much smaller than the whole page so the quality is not really a concern. More like the subject matter is most important. For printed media it is a different situation though where photographic quality is important for glossy magazines and posters etc.

I'm looking forward to the launch of your site and your script 

[SensoVision]

Thanks for confirming that you can get traffic and contacts from simply hosting images.

as you know I have them uploaded just in directories and people find them through search engines mostly and contact me via form on main site. it's very unfriendly way IMHO as they don't even know that this form exist if get from search engine directly to picture... I think that if make process more user friendly more people would ask for permissions.

That would involve micro-payments I guess (an area I need to look into). A CD can be sold profitably online for just a few $ so you may want to reconsider. If some publisher needs a picture of something, they have to buy it or spend say 1 hour out of the office to take the photo so I don't see why they wouldn't pay a few $ for a compilation of good photos. My photos took me over 1 year to take so it would truely be a bargain price whatever I charged. Some involved climbing mountains!

Here is big problem IMHO, publisher as any other person is low on time if do job properly, so in my opinion they wouldn't be interested in ordering CD, waiting for it, later reviewing and choosing pictures. I believe that CD could be ordered by enthusiasts who for example would be interested in seeing Japan by your eyes. I believe that it's more likely that company interested in picture would buy royalty free rights for particular photo rather than choosing CD even if it's cost cheaper...
I believe that to sell CDs successfully you need to be well known photographer and have some really stunning photos on your site but with lower resolution just like it done on webshots. Also you may give people time access to full sized pictures just like webshots doing, I believe that giving a way to choose from pictures may be more interesting to designers... but with for last solution you need to have wide collection so someone could choose from.

Also if your primary target is selling photos, I'd advice storing only particular type of photographs which doesn't tied to any particular place and people and could be used over and over for different illustrations. Also don't upload those photos you're not sure about, only best ones would work.

I'm looking forward to the launch of your site and your script  Grin

thanks! I'm looking forward for it's launch too Maybe I'll cut one day from diploma program and start uploading it finally.

BTW have you considered about price for CDs?

[Andy]

I will sell a DVD containing 681 photos (the majority of these will be 3072x2304 pixel resolution) and the price is likely to be $17.95 plus postage. I am going to use http://www.kunaki.com to handle all the duplication, shipping and fulfillment. I am amazed at how low cost their service is. They only charge $1.60 per DVD and $3 to take care of everything else. Also, they send you a copy of your disc free of charge! All I need to do is upload my data, design the cover graphics, advertise a link to my sales page and bank cheques. Check out their gallery to see the professional quality of the discs. If you think I am charging too much or too little, please comment with your justification.

So it will be harder to offer downloads of files than a physically shipped DVD.

To start with I will market the DVD and host a selection of the best photos. Also I will have a sample full resolution photo.

Later I can implement a shopping cart for individual photos. How much would you charge for individual photos? What would the licencing terms be? I would probably use PayPal who charge 2.9% + $0.30 USD per transaction. I have no idea how to value individual photos. It seems like the income potential of photo collections on DVDs will be low but it is a good learning curve to go through. Later I can sell video tutorials on stuff to do with webmaster topics for example.

Update:
I finalized my DVD photo collection, wrote a license agreement and readme file. Then I downloaded the Kunami software to produce a dvd. I selected one of their stock disc/cover designs featuring some mountains that are similar to some of my photos. Now I am uploading the data. It seems like it will take a long time for all the data to upload (they have an upload manager to ensure that the data does eventually get uploaded) but I hope to post a snapshot of what the DVD in it's case looks like soon. Kind of exciting publishing my first DVD 

Hmm it is going to take about 10 hours to upload the data!

This is the license agreement I crafted after getting some ideas from web sites:

"me" grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable and non-assignable right to use images on this DVD in your own projects or those you develop as a service to clients. For example in web pages, logos, leaflets and brochures. The images must only be used in conjunction with other content such as text and other graphics.

You are not permitted to resell the images or give the images away. For example, you are not allowed to offer them as downloads, make image galleries with them or include them in other photo collections.

Images may be invisibly watermarked for tracking purposes.

Do you like that last sentence? 

Here is the product link where you can order my DVD: http://kunaki.com/Sales.asp?PID=PX00ZJO62R

I have started adding many, nice example photos with commentry in various categories to my website. These categories mirror the categories of the photos on the DVD. Even if you have no professional interest in purchasing my DVD I think you will enjoy browsing the photos: http://www.geishawalk.com/ They are 36x smaller and lower quality than the originals but still look good online I think e.g.

[Andy]

I would just like to mention that i updated my site with many nice pictures from my collection and you can see an example in my last post.