FLICKR

I am totally upset about how my shots look loaded to flickr.... The last shot looked nothing like it does in my system... very disappointing... I hope PBase gives me a different experience!

Flickr adds sharpening and God only knows what else so their images have a certain "look." I've deleted most of mine and chose not to purchase another "Pro" account from them. Smugmug is my primary hosting site now.

I use PBASE and I love the site as a site for displaying photographs although I do not use it as a host for POTN. I use photobucket and have for about a year now and I have never had any issues.....very stable... easy to use to the point where I bought a 1 year subscription ( no space limits). As long as you size for the web in PS and keep the long side at 800 then Photobucket works perfectly.

I just cannot seem to get any of the sites to retain the same look as I have?

According to Consumer Reports the top on line photofinisher is the top-rated Kodak EasyShare Gallery. However, FLICKR was not compared. Here are the results

Liza, what happens to your pics when you don't renew? Are all the folders except for the 3 free ones deleted?

Please have at look at www.mygraphix.com Its for hotlinking to forums like this.
Hands off file treatment. What you upload is what you get. Limit 1mb size on individual file as I recall.

Free too.

No, they don't delete them. They're retained by Flickr until you pay for a pro account again. I wasn't comfortable with them having access to that many of my images, so I deleted all but 175 of them. They're too free with everyone else's images. Recently, Flickr made any image with the "self portrait" tag available to Pace McGill Gallery in NYC for a computerized "exhibit." They failed to tell any of the people involved, however, and I just happened to stumble onto the fact that they did this. There's a big controversy on Flickr Central about them doing it. Most of the Flickrites are amateurs who are flattered by someone giving them attention, "all rights reserved" be damned. They don't understand, nor do they care about copyright. It's all about who gets the most views and the most attention. I and a few of the others who object are pariahs, because we don't "share." To them, "sharing" means allowing our photos to be blogged or otherwise used without our knowledge or permission. It's ridiculous, and I'm getting to the point that I don't know if I'll even continue with the free account, which is all but dormant now.

I have never had a Flickr account and those images that I do view over there, the screen is so busy that the image gets lost in it. I'm ok with Pbase but was considering a change. After hearing what you have to say about them Liza, I certainly will strike them off the list. Thanks.

Pbase gives you a nice clean display and generally they look very close to what I uploaded. They just aren't keeping up with the times, they have slowed down, don't repsond to the customer needs. In time, I can see them disappearing if they don't change their ways.

Like others, I've remained loyal to PBase despite its many, many problems. I think it survives - even thrives - for several reasons:

- possibly the best online collection of photos and photographers in the world
- its original mission is to display, not sell, photos, so its user customizable pages and views are not cluttered with junk
- it is a photo hosting, not social networking site, although it does have a loyal group of contributors who argue endlessly on its forum
- it has a slim set of features, but they are really terrific and useful - oriented to the site's primary mission of helping you display and monitor the viewing of your photos
- the site is usually up and fast loading, although historically there have been notable periods of instability

Things are changing, most notably a soon to be implemented photo selling plan. Hopefully, that won't detract from my primary enjoyment of PBase - a place that allows you to enjoy some of the best photography anywhere.

BTW - PBase has the highest google PageRank of the popular photosharing sites - which, if I understand the basis of the rank, means it is linked to more often than the others.

Wow, Liza, that's appalling!!! Thank you so much for clueing me in

I am a pro flickr member and i never knew any of what has been said on this thread, i always thought that it was my software that resulted in a change in image contrast.
I use it as a hosting site purely for convenience, my laptop is quite old and too unstable to run photoshop, so it is the only way i can resize my images for posting on forums.
The whole copyright issue is appauling though, i never knew about the portrait incident.
I must confess that the view ticker is somewhat exciting, but you hit the nail on the head stating that it is for people new to photography, maybe soon i will grow out of it.
After reading this thread i will certainly think twice about uploading my best work.
Thank you for informing me, A.

I used to use smugmug but although their customer service was excellent, I didn't much care for the site. In the end I ceased using them and am going to redevelop my website as a photo site without sales.

Tried a couple of different hosting sites (flicr, pbase, smugmug, fotopic, shutterfly to name a few) and now I'm sticking to Smugmug. I was very happy with fotopic - till they introduced a total storage limit.

Smugmug does pretty well on all dimensions that are important to me. It still trails pbase in terms of the quality of snaps and a more mature (or professional) user forum like pbase. But otherwise, works ok.

Umm I believe the agreement on flickr was that your images are hosted forever. When you pro account expires then you just can't upload insane amounts of photos until you get a new pro account.

Are you sure about that?