A Late Bloomer...

Being a late bloomer, and one of those “contented underachievers”, I was slow to warm up to many of the free photo sharing sites. I use three now, and only one is truly free but it does limit your upload to 10 photos a day http://www.jpgmag.com/; more on them later.

Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/zorba47/ being the most popular and largest, is indeed free. However, I learned that free only goes so far as 100 megabytes a month. With modern cameras, and large files, that doesn’t go too far; moreover, if one does want to upload more than the monthly limit (which I did), one must pay for a “Pro” account ($24.95 per year). A pittance, compared to some, but still not free. Although, you do get to have the cool “Pro” title at the top of your Flickr page. I thought that alone was worth the cost?

Other sites range in, storage space, cost, and service but my overriding concern, at the time, was copyright safety and security of my images. Therefore, I opted for a smaller, and in my opinion, a more secure, photo sharing and storage site recommended by a fellow photographer. The site is called SmugMug http://spero.smugmug.com/ . Moreover, the name alone suited me well. In addition, their handling of my pictures, customer service, and security are excellent in my view. The cost is tiered and ranges from about $40.00 to over $100 annually for their Pro accounts. The Pro account includes your own dedicated web site and the ability to sell your photos on line to your customers without one having to do any of the processing other than posting your images and setting the cost to the customer. And no, I am not on their payroll, I just think they are a quality outfit.


The JPG Magazine site http://www.jpgmag.com/people/sperot47 was, at one time, a hardcopy magazine. Unfortunately, given the poor economy and their lack of sales, the choice was to go under or post an online version, which they now do. All of the photos and articles in their magazine (and now in their on line version) are shot and written by their members. The members, as in other photo sharing sites, provide feedback to their fellow contributors as well as keeping track of the number of views, favorites, etc. In addition, one can promote oneself too. You can buy “spotlights” for $1.00 each and JPG will highlight your photos in their photo banners, splash pages, and the like. They also have members vote for their favorite shots in their theme contests. The vote tally helps them determine what shots to use for the online magazine, a good choice for a totally free site.

I like the entire set of sites I mentioned but do wonder if I am truly doing any good with my self promotion or is this just self adoration with all of my uploading. However, if I give up, I suppose I’ll never find out…