Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Photo Sharing Site Spam

Chuck,

I will be totally honest with you -- I am pretty happy with the photosites that I use right now.  Both support communities and drive print sales.

I use Pro.Pictage and Pro.SmugMug.  All total my clients spend in excess of $2,000 / month on these two sites combined.

Why do I love them so much?
  • FTP Upload.  My average wedding take is 10GB and I need a robust, scalable highly-batched upload system and the automated FTP system I have created supports my needs very well.
  • Album Design Service.  Pictage's free album design services provide me and my clients an invaluable feature above and beyond standard print ordering.
  • LightRoom Integration.  I will not / cannot take the time to apply tags outside of LightRoom.  My workflow is not flexible and I will not change it for any reason other than my own.  Therefore, I need a solution that fully integrates with my toolset for tagging images -- Pictage and SmugMug both support Adobe LightRoom integration.
Why do I hate them so much?
  • Expensive.  Pictage is $100 a month flat rate fee before you even buy anything.  That means I have to sell a lot to break even.
  • Slow Turn Around.  While free album designs are great, waiting 5 weeks to see the printed product arrive at the studio is a PITA.
  • Stupid User Interfaces.  Pictage's user interface is horrible.  I mean, unforgivably terrible.
Hope that helps :)

- Cory

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