Flickr Pro or what?

Drez

Long story short, I've taken up photography as a kind of hobby. I have access to a Canon Rebel XSi and usually shoot in the highest non-RAW resolution.

A few friends have asked me to do shoots for them but I promised them that I would upload the albums for them and then they could download them and we could go over them together, selecting the best ones and photoshopping whatever needs to be stricken from the record, so to speak.

I know I can find other services for the downloading but, but from what I understand, Flickr Pro (which costs moolah) lets you upload the original sized photos.

What I'd like to know, if anyone has an experience with Flickr Pro, is this:

a) Can you have completely private/password protected albums alongside public albums? I'm talking albums that aren't even visible to people without the link or a Flickr login.

b) Is Flickr Pro worth the money?

And regardless of your answers to the above, I'm interested in any alternate suggestions anyone has. Ideally I would like to have a central point to store all my images and then only publish a few. I'm not interested in a blog site (not yet anyway) or any of those photographer/model portfolio flash sites. Those sites are pretty, but I find the navigation off-putting.

embrik

You have a lot of options, but I'm going to answer your second question first - to me, it is worth the money. But, not in the manner you're exploring. I use Flickr to be a member of a photography community to share my work and get critiques, as well as view other work. Also, I use it to arrange meetups of like-minded people to go on photowalks, etc. For me, Flickr is a great community and a living portfolio.

To your first question - you can set up sets/collections and change their visibility to allow friends, family, etc to view. That generally means that the people who you'd want to allow viewing have to have a Flickr account.

For what you're describing, I use Google and Zenfolio. If you buy space for your Google account, you can share a ton of full-res photos, and protect each album by email. Basically, access control happens by an email address (such as GMail). You can also have unpublished albums which aren't publicly searchable, but can be accessed if you know the full URL.

Zenfolio allows the most and best control over album privacy, and also allows for original uploads. You can even control whether users are allowed to download the originals. You can password protect albums and even create "friendly" URLs for sharing. Zenfolio has several pricing packages depending on what you want out of it.

I know there are more options than these, but these three are the ones I have experience with.

Drez

Thanks, embrik! Zenfolio looks pretty cool, I'm going to try their trial at least. And I understand what you mean about Flickr.

I appreciate it!

Dark Moon

I'm a fan of SmugMug for online album proofing. With a bit of html and CSS knowledge you can also customize your site to look pretty damn fine, in addition to unlimited storage and built in watermarking options. Private albums, password protected albums, even print ordering through the site if you're in NA and like the print shop they use.