Filip Molcan

Photoshelter? Flickr? Smugmug? Twitter? Facebook? The best blog for photographers? What to choose for a photographer’s internet presentation? For a long time I struggled with how to solve photos presentation and backuping of my photos. Photos publishing, get your photos criticized from your fans to provide close-ups for print or download and keep things running, and look good and performs all the functions, it is not entirely easy.

I like criticism, so I like my pictures to publish and track views on them, check out comments etc. I am paranoid toward the backing up, so it backs up, backs up and backs up. I tried a number of photographic services and portals, and finally I chose – I’ll try to share with you my experiences.

Your Website

Most photographers want to present their work on the internet. A web site that will look nice and meet all current standards search engines optimization is relatively large or breaking work – or not very cheap matter.

Custom Website

For a long time I did the site myself, which made me tired. Then later in 2009 thought, I realized that I spent more time with irrelevant things and less shooting photos itself. My old website was not bad, but not brilliant, to update it once in a while, because it was quite laborious.

Flickr

I tried to use Flickr for photo presentation – inexpensive service (the lowest option even for free), containing a variety of functions, nice environment, the possibility of creating communities, sending photos, etc. In my point of view, an ideal place for sharing photos, posting to different groups, establishing relationships with other photographers from the world. Has the same disadvantages as all online photo galleries – we will see the critics only if you have a pile of friends and spend hours online every day, and so it is more praise than criticism itself, something that would bring the author – comments like “nice”, “super photo, “I love”, etc. will not help in improving your work. The advantage of Flickr is that it used by a lot of people all around the world.

Flickr is an interesting community service which I still use, but the benefit is not huge. I use it to determine interest in some photos – for experiments, etc. You know, sometimes you do not like pictures and people just like it would be and vice versa.

Photoshelter.com

Overseas knows the service very much and most of the US photographers also use it. For photographers from Europe this service a number of advantages and disadvantages. Among the disadvantages are mainly focus on foreign countries and the high price for their services. Few weeks I passed Photoshelter quietly pacing, trying to demo, test what they can function and still I did not want to spend for this service $ 30 per month.

Finally, I could not resist, and so far I have not regretted a moment. Through Photoshelter I have a few minutes looking up a well-established website www.filipmolcan.com running on my own domain. A statement “several minutes” really exaggerating – choose a theme, choose which photos to show on the website, fill out a few simple forms and the site is ready.

To get the registration directory for The Photoshelter Photographers Directory and your photos are (if you want) included in the search engine with a huge number of photographs, which widely used abroad (buying photos, searching for photographers …).

The list of photographers itself is serving abroad as a business tool to find your customers. In our lands still unusable.

Photoshelter can also backup your pictures (in my tariff it is 35 gigabytes space) – in JPG and RAW. Plugins are available for various photo editors (Lightroom, Aperture…), then upload photos directly from your favorite software, or via the convenient interface service itself.

A few years ago I lost hundreds of family photos – I just failed backups. It was not in any way artistically successful images, but the family photos that humans often have even greater value. The photos I came from and since I suffer from “backupmania” – backs up to the second disk on my computer, then to a network drive once in a while the blu-ray discs and now I finally calm – even on servers Photoshelter – that is, outside our house.

Despite Photoshelter images can also be sold, providing its customers to download or print.

Photoshelter solved most of my concerns with the presentation of pictures on the web:

• Profi web site – design, customization, SEO optimization
• Creation, presentation and sharing of photos and galleries
• Backup photos
• Photo Sales
• Printing photos
• Customer Section – Download photos for customers
• Further, what is uncomfortable at Photoshelter – the price

Your blog

Instead of Flickr, I wanted a place where I can publish my new pictures, news and information about exhibitions. In this case, I chose open-source blogging software Wordpress, which can either break in to your server (or hosting) and hosted free of charge directly to Wordpress.com.

Create a blog was the matter of a few hours – to find a suitable subject, set how you want the site looked like and begin implementation of content. It is important that each page is sufficiently connected with each other and then just not forget to write something on the web . But it works for your if you knows what is PHP, SQL or FTP.

If you do not want to bother with any settings and installation, use one of the freely available services such as Blogspot by Google and others. It also works well, although not as “sexy” as an advanced systems.

Twitter

Blog can also extend the Twitter account for short news items. I found that this form of communication between photographers much more popular than Facebook, which I use for purely personal news items.

Facebook

Try to make your site on Facebook. People can be your fans, you can share your photos, new etc. Facebook fan site is a great place how to inform about your projects. You can also connect your Facebook account with Twitter account.

Finally

This article describes in particular my personal impressions and address my specific needs. Diging up all my photo e-space it took me a few days wit filling the content, uploading photos. I present these experiences for those who also search for similar services and also addresses your presentation online.

And finally, how it all looks like now:

My website: http://www.filipmolcan.com

Photoblog: http://blog.filipmolcan.com

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/fipa

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/filipmolcan

I’ll be glad when they are willing to share their experiences with the presentation of photos – they use the service, how they work, what problems did you have, etc.

This article was originally written for NikonClub Czech Republic in Czech language.