If you are a pro photographer use smugmug
With all the excitement about how people can protect their photographs, if you want to be a professional photographer and maybe make some money off your works, as well as have control over your photographs, then you really need to do one or two of two things. All respects to every professional photographer out there, but realistically, flickr is not your answer. This is a cut and paste steal my stuff generation, that is the fact of life right now.
The key thing to do is get a service that knows how to handle professional photographers, services like smugmug (which we have used for over 2 years now) gives someone a lot of control over their photographs.
Stay away from free dump sites like flickr if you want to avoid future issues and commotion.
The second, get a blog, highlight your pictures there, one’s you don’t mind loosing, or ones that tie into the security mechanisms that smugmug provides. You can always work out ways to link back to protected pictures, there are people who will help you do this.
The optional, use Getty images or some other service that caters to professional photographer. That is if you don’t mind paying fees upon fees and so forth. But at least you leave the protection and enforcement to them, you have little to work out or worry about.
Things not to do – use flickr or other public service free systems that can not provide watermarking, password protected galleries, or otherwise.
Yes you can do all the things on smugmug that you can do on flickr, smugmug costs 99 dollars a year for a professional account, they also can handle all the money transactions that you would ever want to have handled from print to digital delivery of media.
Here is what makes smugmug cool (these are screen caps from our account).
Stats, we are all stats hounds, and want to know what pictures are popular, this one gives it to you.
Statistics can even go into detail by gallery so you can see how well each one is doing.
When it comes to setting up what someone who visits can do with your work, this is where it gets important.
You can set up by gallery, which security settings you want to use, and what you want people to be able to do with your pictures. You can even watermark them on the fly with the big words “PROOF” across them if you do not use your own logo. You can also right click save as protect them so that they cannot be right clicked, downloaded, and used in ways that you do not specifically authorize.
If you really want to go with your own look and feel, you can completely rewrite the generic smugmug page with all your own cool stuff.
If you want to have a great experience, and work with your fans, this is the best way to approach protecting your photographs, and keeping them from being used unless you say that they can be freely shared, then stay away from flickr and other free services, spring for the 99 dollars a year, and have some fun with it.
[…] we advocated that if you are a professional photographer, you need to dump Flickr in favor of Smugmug or Getty […]