moolyn, re your quesetion about pbase.com , you can organize your subgalleries in all kinds of ways.

You can go directly, say, to www.pbase.com/andrys/bagnoregio which is only about visiting that city or use the feature that pbase has at the top that lets us link to "sibling" subgalleries like www.pbase.com/andrys/montepulciano to make it easier for others to know they're there. That is just an option, and by default, that ugly set of other-album-links within a set is not there, but I like its ease for people browsing cities in the same region.

So, looking at the top of the city pages, you'll see links to the other sibling galleries, for other cities.

The overall album for the Italy trip is at www.pbase.com/andrys/italy and above that is my main page which you've been to already. That home page will lead people to other country galleries or other topics altogether. A real potpourri in my case and some have found it a bit disorienting :-)

You can do their 30-day free trial, by the way, to see if it's worth doing. There are limitations to the free-trial period, such as not being able to post a direct link to a pbase image of yours to another site, but that's not much of a limitation.

- Andrys
PS -- Unlike what happens with smugmug and zenfolio, we are not rewarded for new memberships; some of us are just enthusiastic about the features.

Tom and Andrys, thanks so much for patiently answering my questions and once again sharing your photos and expertise. After looking at more of your galleries I'm starting to think that I like pbase so much not just because of the clean unfettered setup but because of the wondeful, inspirimg photos you both have shared!

I guess the answer to my question is that you can give a link to a specific gallery or album but that people then have unrestricted access to the rest of your photos. As a visitor I like this but as a host I'm not so sure.

moolyn,
No, I think you may have missed the details in my response to robjame on
Date: 07/22/2007, 06:29 pm

It explains how you can make galleries accessible or inaccessible.

And I think I mentioned you do not have to give people those links on top.
They're just an option.

HOWEVER, if you have a non-public gallery you shouldn't use the sibling-links feature as that will show the gallery because 'non-public' rather than 'password-protected' allows you to give friends the specific link and they can access it but no one else can see it.

Password-protected means no one can access it without a password.

And then there are non-public images, which no one but you can see, even if they have the link.

The level of password protection keeps people out of the galleries on a deeper level.

moolyn, I should also explain that I have a lot of non-public galleries and a few password-protected ones, but they're not seen, so it's not evident. Having access to one area doesn't give visitors access to everything (thank God).

Since you're travel-oriented, have you tried trekearth.com ? I think that's the one Clifton is on? Beautiful site, but I discovered it after I chose pbase.

- Andrys

moolyn - another add-on. (Apologies. I wish we could just edit with an edit alert to the reader.

I wrote pbase to ask for clarification of their Terms of Service and got a reply that they have added a section at
http://www.pbase.com/help/tos#ip_rights

I didn't read the language carefully when you first wrote so I don't know what is changed there or when.

They respond to customers if we email [email protected] or [email protected] rather than on the forums, usually. Anyway, I hope that helps!

- Andrys

I guess I am expecting too much from one site.
I think I am also confused about size, resolution and picture quality.
I was hoping to find a place to store, display and share my photos and I may have to revise what I am going to be able to get.
<<800x600, to fit 1024x768 screens that have browser and other program info and to keep loading time down>> AND to protect your larger version of your photos from being stolen.>>
So you can't (don't) upload your 2mb picture and with only 500mb of space you would only have room for 250 of these if you did. So you don't use PBase for storage.?
What is the mb of a typical 800x600 photo?
At this size the pics are only suitable for internet display - not printing.?

<<AND to protect your larger version of your photos from being stolen.>>

What does this really mean?

Thanks again in advance.

Andrys, I read your response to robjame earlier but obviously didn’t absorb the details about making galleries accessible or inaccessible as it wasn’t my concern at the time. Good to know this as sharing everything with everyone would have doomed pbase for me. Thanks!

Who is the Clifton you mentioned a couple of times? Did I miss something else?

I checked out trekearth.com but still prefer the look of pbase. I’m actually interested in pbase mostly for series photos and portraits and just the best of my travel photos so don’t need a specific travel site.

Thanks for sending the terms of service section! I found something very similar before but this version has more to it, including an intellectual property rights section and providing a specific TOS email address. I’ll run it past my girl toedtoes and send another email as I haven’t received a response to my earlier emails. I don’t want to invest the amount of time I know it will require even to try it out until I hear back. I‘m sure it will be fine as you and so many other experienced photographers use it but I’d feel better making sure my rights are protected before committing. Their summarization is pretty positive anyway.

Last week I sent a batch of photos taken in Scotland recently via kodkgallery.com to an uncle who told me that he printed copies on the weekend until he ran out of ink! It hadn’t occurred to me before that people would actually want prints of my photos so this made me feel really good.

Robjame - about the bit in regards to protecting "your larger version of your photos from being stolen"...

There are folks out there who will take a photo belonging to someone else and sell it as their own. If you post a 2+mb photo to a website, an unscrupulous person can download the file and print the image on coffee mugs, etc. and sell them for a profit without giving you any credit and/or money. They can also take that image and, using Photoshop, etc., use an artistic filter on it and claim it's an original oil painting or sketch. They can do this with smaller files, but are limited with some print options. With large files, they can do anything with that photo that you can do with the original.

By limiting the file size of your uploaded photos, you reduce the quality of the file that someone can obtain for unscrupulous purposes making it harder for them to use it.

Most of these sites have limits of less than 1mb or less than 2mb per image.

In my opinion you're better off storing your own full-size images on an external harddrive, etc. than using an online site.

I have no experience with pbase or other sites, but with the paid Zenfolio site I use, when I upload my full-resolution picture up there, they automatically convert them into 7 smaller sizes for display - from 60x40 thumbnail to 1100x733.

The owner of the page (i.e. ME) can decide whether allow others to download the full-size original.

I just took a look at the added info regarding rights. They're definitely getting closer. They still don't indicate how long their "worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, publish and distribute such content on PBase services for the purpose of displaying and distributing PBase services" is good for.

However, because they don't indicate how long it's good for AND they don't indicate that it's IRREVOCABLE, then they are leaving it open that you can revoke their rights to your photos at any time by cancelling your account with them and removing your photos from their system.

P.S. I didn't doubt pbase in their honesty - I've heard very good things about them - but when it comes to protecting your photos, you can't be too careful. And, the more folks ask for clarification regarding copyright issues, the more businesses will realize that we aren't stupid and aren't willing to give away our potential for nothing.

Robjame, I was a bit confused too about the size of shared photos. Since I filled almost two 2MG cards on my recent trip I wondered how 500MB could be such a wonderful amount of space for sharing before realizing that obviously the photos must be reduced. This makes sense not just for protective reasons as toedtoes points out but most of us probably don’t have high resolution screens anyway unless we link our computers to our plasma televisions.

One camera can’t do everything so why should one site?

I store my original photos on my hard drive backed up every so often on CDs. I recently bought 300GB more internal hard drive for less than $100 and my son installed it for me. That’s the cheapest way, slave labour. But external hard drive is almost as reasonable as well as portable.

Toedtoes, thanks for your comments about the updted pbase TOS! It does sound better than what was posted before, doesn’t it? I emailed them already asking for clarification of exactly how long their "worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, publish and distribute such content on PBase services for the purpose of displaying and distributing PBase services" is good for.

Having my uncle print out my photos made me feel good but it also made me even more wary.

Although pbase still hasn’t responded to my emails asking for clarification, their TOS seems quite acceptable now with the additional section so I decided to register for a trial membership just to see for myself how easy it is to use. I successfully registered and set up a gallery without much difficulty.

Unfortunately, I haven’t made much progress from that point. I can’t upload more than one photo at a time from my hard drive. I can’t find an editing feature to rotate my original photo to upright and I can’t find a way to delete duplicate uploads. Plus I’ve already used most of my trial space with just three photos. So I’ve decided to use kodakgallery, as usual, to share photos to accompany the trip report I’m presently working on.

I haven’t given up on pbase because I’m impressed with the possibilities but, as I suspected, it obviously needs much more time to gain expertise than I have at the moment. I need guidelines to even get started. The pbase site doesn’t seem to offer any so I’m hoping that the users’ forum will provide support so that I can get a better feeling for using pbase during my trial period. I can see that it would work much better for photoshop enhanced photos than my unedited originals.

moolyn,
Just saw your note. Welcome to trying out pbase! My email is andrys1 at yahoo.com so you can email me and I can write you direct how to do the uploads etc as there are two ways to upload more than one at a time, and I'm not sure a Fodor's thread is where we should send details. Also, I'll look for you on the forums. The limit is the same for trial accounts, 500 megs, so something is amiss there. When you write, le me know whether you have a pc or mac.

You don't want to upload unedited originals anywhere, where it would show or display, as it leaves you vulnerable to someone downloading it. But it can be done and with most cameras it would be 2 to 7 megs each. Most of us resize them to 800 pixels on the long side, like 800x600 and those, saved at 90% quality, say, would be 150 to 250k in size.

For pc's the free irfanview utility at irfanview.com is terrific for that and for viewing, as well as minimal editing if you want. When you download irfanview they also want you to download plug-ins also, because these allow you to rotate your photo anyway you like without any loss of detail. If a hosting site does that for you, you'll lose detail. Many other photo editors that rotate a photo for you will also lose detail.

- Andrys

Very useful thread. Thanks to moolyn.

andrys, thanks again for all you help! I'll be in touch.

comfyshoes, I'm glad you found this thread useful. I've learned a lot from the answers to other people's questions too.