Posting pictures on the internet

elven

If you want to put your pictures online so that you can share them with friends, family and most importantly, us lot on boards, you'll need some sort of image hosting.

There are 3-ish main options:

1. Set up your own website
2. Start a blog with a free blog host
3. Use an image hosting site

Setting up your own website can be done fairly cheaply and easily, depending on whether you want to spend money or time on it, use a template, or have web developing skills already. It's outside the scope of this how-to, but some things to consider:

• Use a flash template with a built in management console, Fajitas is using bludomain
• Design a basic HTML site and plug in some Lightroom galleries, like Leinsterman

Setting up a blog is easy, with Blogger or Wordpress, and they have templates ready to use and their own tools for posting images to your blog. If you then go on to buy a domain name of your own, you can link your blog in quite easily. The lovely Fenster also provided us with a Photo-friendly Wordpress theme, if you want to be a bit fancy about it.

Using an image hosting site is probably the easiest of all, the most popular contenders round here being:

• flickr
• pix.ie
• photobucket

Flickr is obviously the big guy, worldwide famous and integrated into tons of other sites and services like moo.com, bighugelabs and more (but I can't be bothered thinking of them right now) and has a limited free account, and a extended pro account which'll cost you $24.95 a year - flickr FAQs here. Some people have had issues signing up with the postcode thing, which has been discussed here.

Pix.ie is fairly new, and Marcus can be found answering lots of questions and resolving bug issues here, there's tons to read through but there's a load of info in that thread. The site is developing at a huge rate and having someone local who is paying attention to the community's requests is a great thing

Photobucket is another option although it's not hugely popular round here, and personally I find the ads quite intrusive. I think it's possibly the quickest to sign up for - but watch out for them resizing your images on upload! They do provide a slideshow thingy that you can put on a blog though.

So, now you have your images online, put a link in your sig or start a C&C thread!

challengemaster

My own site (still beta until i get my domain) uses Drupal (drupal.org) - very easy to use/integrate and very user friendly.

Ruu_Old

Thanks, very useful, going to start a photo blog thingy later on and maybe get some new photos uploaded.

Marcus

Elven,

Thanks for the mention! Just thought I'd let you know that we are (as we speak) implementing a blog engine in pix.ie. We hope to have pix.ie's own blog up by Friday and user blogs up by next week. All going well... I'll keep you updated with progress.

Marcus
(pix.ie)

sprinkles

anyone use picassa?

elven

Oops, I forgot about Picasa... I think there are a couple users round here, but not many.

Dragan

I would actually like to mention www.deviantart.com as well. Thats where i host my stuff and have gotten some fantastic feedback on how to improve my work. Good forums and extensive specific chat rooms to find out more about photography.

From what i have seen it is definitely a worthwhile place for those who may just be starting into photography as it is certainly very easy to use and i have gotten great help through it.

TJM

One point you may want to add to this - if using Flickr, do not use the licensed as Creative Commons option unless you know what you are doing. Most users don't seem to realise that the Creative Common licences are in effect irrevocable. This won't be an issue for the majority of hobbyists - but for those who may wish to profit from their images in the future it is critical.

elven

Actually TJM if you wanted to do up a post on rights etc, just guidance and suggestions for that sort of stuff then I could happily add it to the FAQ list...