Showcasing your photos on the web

Today we are going to take a look at hosting your photos online. We can sum up most of these hosting sites into two categories. Category 1 consists of community type galleries like Deviant Art and Flickr. Category 2 is more portfolio orientated like Smugmug and zenfolio. If you opt to get your own website it would most likely fall into the second category.



Chances are that you already have some of your photos uploaded somewhere for easy sharing with family or friends.

A few years back Deviant Art was one of the only decent places to showcase your photos to the world and a massive art community. It was however not ideal to use as a portfolio or to send the link to friends and family. The problem nowadays with Deviant Art is that it has become way too complicated and slow to easily manage your gallery. You do however get the benefit of a huge community that may just stumble upon your latest photo and suggesting it for a Daily Deviation which will almost instantly get you a huge fan base. Your other option is to network yourself like crazy and make a lot of friends which always guarantees you comments. The problem with networking on Deviant Art is that people with really lousy art sometimes have thousands of comments which hide the decent art at the bottom. The other thing with those comments is that people usually just give you a one liner that basically says they like it or don't. You get very little honest and constructive feedback. Don't get me wrong. There are some really nice people with exceptional talent and art on the site but they are few and far between.

To get the most out of Deviant Art you need to buy a subscription which isn't very expensive but the features you get over free members aren't really worth it in my opinion and should actually be free. You can also sell your art on DA with a print account which lets users buy prints, T-shirts and coffee mugs etc.

All in all Deviant art is a nice place to show off your photos to random people if you can live with a few of the quirks.

Flickr is also a community based photo sharing site. The look is a lot cleaner and the site overall is much more streamlined than DA. The up side to Flickr is that you only see photographs and nothing else which some users may actually prefer. There is also the added bonus of the site being completely free. Flickr has skyrocketed in popularity over the past years and will probably continue to do so.


Next up we have smugmug which is one of the best hosting services out there. I use to have a website which quite frankly was a pain to update and maintain and don't even get me started on the problems I had with the designer! Since I switched my website over to smugmug I have never even had to contact support and I must admit that I know almost nothing about making web pages.

The simple fact is that with smugmug you get a free trial period of 14 days and thereafter if you like it you can sign up for one of three packages. Even the cheapest package provides you with excellent value. You can also register a domain name and point it to your smugmug site which you can't do with DA or Flickr. All of their packages allows you to upload as many fotos as you want and you have unlimited bandwidth. Combine that with the excellent statistics pages and you simply have one of the best looking, fastest and easiest to use photography websites. But don't take my word for it. Sign up for the free trial and decide for yourself. Click here to go to the smugmug website and get a $5 discount when you sign up

If you want to get a personalised domain I highly recommend www.GoDaddy.com. They make registering your domain easy and the configuration tools are superb even if you will only ever use them once. I can also vouch for their excellent support team which have helped me on numerous occasions.

In the end you have to decide whether you want to share your photos with family and friends or if you just want random people to be amazed by your talent. I know of quite a few photographers who have a DA account and Flickr as well as their own website and they even post on photography forums.

Happy shooting!