BetterPhoto Q&A
Category: New Answers

What's your digital routine? (BIG question)

So, I'd be very interested in your opinions on what "routine" would work best for someone like me, who wants to share photos (for viewing AND printing/ordering) with friends from afar. Although I do have personal webspace available in which I've uploaded photos (web-optimized resolution) for friends and fellow photo buffs, I can't keep up with the resulting e-mails that I then receive in which people want to obtain prints of particular photos. I'm hesitant to store big high-res photo files (2 MB+) on my web server, but want to make it easy for me to be able to upload sets of photos and then let people do what they want (view the photos, select one or more of the photos for high-res printing, ordering prints, etc).

I know that some of the "big sites" like Yahoo Photos and MSN Photos provide some of these services, along with specialty sites like Shutterfly and OFoto. But I'd be very interested to hear your experiences/ recommendations.

I'm very comfortable with doing my own image "tweaking" and manipulation on my own workstation, before sharing photos...I only mention that to emphasize that I don't need a web service that offers me those kind of tools...I plan on uploading "finished" photos, and then letting my family/friends have at 'em.

In summary, here's a standard "routine" that would be typical for me...I probably do the following routine a couple of times per month.

1) I go somewhere with my camera and shoot a bunch of pictures (lets say 50 shots).

2) I return home, load my pictures on my computer, make changes and tweaks in Photoshop, and end up with 35-40 nice photos.

3) At this stage, I've got 35-40 "keeper" photos staring at me from a folder on my computer. Of those photos, I've got 30 that I want to put online and share with friends (and each friend might then want a nice print of 4 or 5 of the photos). And obviously I want to keep an archived version of those photos (highest rez) on my local machine, for my own personal use.

SO, step #3 above is where I'm really looking for your guidance. What methods, websites, etc have you found useful for sharing photos online with friends who frequently want high-quality prints? And for my own personal archiving, I only recently started playing around with Microsoft Digital Image Suite, which has some simple tools for archiving photos (by keyword, "rating," etc) and seems to have merits as an archival tool.

WHEW, sorry for the big message (and the big convoluted question)! Thanks in advance for your comments and guidance.

~jason

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March 27, 2004

I have tried Sony's ImageStation.com, Ofoto, and Fotika; each of which have unlimited storage options (some with a fee). ImageStation is, I think, $7/yr while Fotika is $30/yr. So far I have 2GB worth of photos on Fotika and feel it is the most functional overall for storing and sharing photos online. Plus you can access your photos many different ways. I usually use FTP because I can upload different batches of photos to different albums while I sleep instead of doing one album at a time or sorting them later. I just can't figure out how they can offer unlimitted webspace and in fact, I was so curious about it I called Fotika and told them how much space I was using. They just said, "Yep, it's unlimitted." As for printing, I just ordered my first batch from them today so I can't yet comment on quality. I have ordered prints from Ofoto though and they were very good.

Hope this helps answer helps at least part of your question.

Ben

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July 18, 2004

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July 18, 2004

hth

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July 18, 2004