Fotopic - the alternative

I joined up to SmugMug last week and it seems to be pretty good so far. It's not free but I think it's a better layout than the likes of Flickr as a personal opinion.

 

Anything's a better layout then flickr! Picasa is a much better layout than Flickr and free for many, many more pictures. I've gone with Flickr because of the social aspects, (the groups mechanism and the wide variety of UK railway groups) in spite of the layout and the lack of facilities to change it.

 

I agree it is a shame. For the last three years I have been contacting Fotopic users to ask permission to display their BR Class 104 images on my group's website in a dedicated gallery, the aim being to get at least one photo of every driving vehicle! I often asked myself if there was any point simply reproducing images available elsewhere on the net, but now they've all vanished from Fotopic I'm quite glad I did!

I have looked for railway images on other sites since the shut-down and have been dissapointed by the number of "no-results" found. It would seem Fotopic (for the moment at least) was unparalleled in terms of sheer volume of railway related content.

For anyone interested i moved my site to Flickr in the end.

 

I've also moved to Flickr, with many new unseen images


44767 George Stephenson by Teenage Steam Photography, on Flickr


Bagnall No.2 by Teenage Steam Photography, on Flickr

For more; http://www.flickr.com/photos/teenagesteamphotography/

Cheers,
Lewis

 

I gone and tried the Picasa webgalleries as my replacement to fotopic, Here are my three galleries I've uploaded so far.
https://picasaweb.google.com/105454327852537837128/DadSBWScans?feat=directlink
https://picasaweb.google.com/105454327852537837128/UClassNo31806PhotoCharter15311?feat=directlink
https://picasaweb.google.com/105454327852537837128/MidHantsSpringGala?feat=directlink

 

I've gone for smugmug - slowly building everything up

http://aligrieve.smugmug.com

regards
Alistair

 

ive made the move to Zenfolio once ya get use to it, its great.

http://owenedwards.zenfolio.com/

having a bit of nightmare, like many retyping up captions for 100's or 1000's photos.
im going to go for once the 14 day free trial is up for the $50 (roughly £31) seems like a good deal, unlimited space etc etc.
Shame Pikfu wasnt up and running seen some of there test accounts look's bit like fotopic but the website is still in its early stages of devpolment.

 

It's now been officially announced

http://www.amateurphotographer.co.u...oing_into_liquidation_update_news_306622.html


Fotopic's owners are going into liquidation

I've moved to Flickr (link in signature)

 

I have decided to go for Smugmug at the moment. I have only uploaded a couple of railway photos. I have put a couple of videos on there as well as you can upload up to 10mins/1GB per video. When viewing it also allows you to pick the quality so if if it runs a bit jerky or takes a while to load due to a slow PC/internet connection you can view in a variety of formats. The upload time is slightly slower than Youtube I have found but seems more reliable.

Link here if anyone wants to compare with Youtube:-

http://neils-photographs.smugmug.com/

Neil.

 

Sorry for the bump but has anyone got their log in for pikfu?

I put in my email address but heard nothing from them, now the page has a log in but no way to contact them. Makes me wonder what was the purpose of putting in my email address....

I'm still awaiting a site to upload my photos too. I'm not impressed with Zenfolio, smugmug's or Picasa's layouts. And my flickr was never intended to upload all my shots too, so i'm pretty stumped with nothing to have as an online gallery.

 

So i take it no one got their log in then...?

 

I haven't recieved anything Kieran, though I think I will stick with Smugmug for now.

I used to use my Fotopic site for uploading around 150-200 pics at a time of my sons footy matches but since moving to Smugmug the parents who view them say that Smugmug is much better as the viewer can decide on viewing size, layout etc rather than what the site owner sets. They also say it loads a lot quicker in general as well.

Neil.

 

I'm looking for an online photo gallery where you can highlight areas of a photo and add an extra caption which appears when you mouse over the area. For example, if you had a busy photo of a steam shed, you could identify individual locos by mousing-over each loco in the photo and a text box would appear with their number. I think this is sometimes referred to as "hover text".

I'm sure I've seen it done in an online photo gallery somewhere. Flickr doesn't seem to do it - has anyone seen anything like this on the photo galleries they've used?

Richard

 

Flickr does it. Just click on the picture and drag out a rectangle. It then asks "are you adding a note or a person?"

 

Brilliant - thanks! Just what I wanted.

Richard

 

I have just found another alternative to Flickr, Zenfolio or Smugmug that might interest you - it's called jalbum (http://jalbum.net) which offers quite professional looking albums like this one (http://jalbum.net/en/browse/user/album/1007566/) which I made as a little trial. There are a variety of different 'skins' or styles to choose from if you want to move to jalbum. It costs 20 euros for 12months and 2gb of storage or 81euros for 12months and 20gb storage. There is a free trial for 30days where you get 2gb of storage and your own bit of webspace. This is cheaper than Flickr - $24.95 although with Flickr you do get unlimited storage, it's also cheaper than Zenfolio which is £25 a year where you also get 2gb but you also get 1 extra GB for each year you stay.
There is also the jalbum application (http://jalbum.net/en/software?ref=footer-h), this is free but you're invited to make a donation via Paypal or credit card to make sure presumably it doesn't go the same way as Fotopic! This is a kind of photo organiser which allows you to make your own album and then upload them onto your own website like mine, totally-transport.co.uk only I haven't worked out how to do that bit yet with Microsoft Office Live Small Business websites yet!

 

Hello, This is my first post.

I went with Railpic which i find to be very good. The only small niggle i have with the site is the level of traffic passing the site(hits)with fotopic getting hits never seemed to be a problem,now every hit is hard fought for.

Anyway have a look and see what you think.

http://www.kevindelaney.railpic.net/

Any comments and help

 

I chose not to display hits on fotopic and the option isn’t available to do so on flickr, but I do look at the statistical information regularly. The main reason for doing so is to assess the level of interest in the various photo sets and individual images. This information enables me to balance my own interests with those of the wider audience. Ultimately, the site is for me but I do want to make it attractive to regular visitors. To do this, I think that there are three ingredients: promote the site, make it easy to find and make it interesting.

Promoting the site involves raising awareness and interest. I stress the latter - it’s not sufficient to say ‘here it is’. A focussed approach is more effective and less likely to get up peoples’ backs than a blatant plug. Look for opportunities to contribute to group discussions, where you can provide links to relevant images. Show an interest in other people’s work and hope that they will reciprocate (this seems to work quite well on flickr). Encourage others to provide links to your site or individual images, and encourage and respond to comments and feedback. Ultimately, the best way of raising awareness and interest is through the personal recommendations of regular visitors.

You can make your site easier to find by purchasing a bespoke web address and linking that to your photo collection, but that’s not something I’m advocating or really understand (the main value seems to be in taking your regular visitors with you should you change photo site provider). More important is to ensure that your images score well in search engines by clear, precise and relevant captions; and especially tags if the site supports them (flickr scores very well in this respect). Also make sure that, when visitors arrive, they can easily explore further (remembering that they may not always be coming in via the front door).

Making it interesting is, of course, largely down to the choice of material; but there are other factors such as the preparation and presentation of that material. These are my views and I apologise if they appear dogmatic (they work for me). Be selective about what to publish, one good view rather than three almost identical iterations of the same subject. Don’t skip the post-camera processing (particularly if you use a DSLR, which are designed to under-expose) but only do what needs to be done. Add a clear and precise caption and as much supporting information as you are able to provide, but don’t cut and paste captions between images (if there’s nothing more to say, the image is probably superfluous). Finally, organise your images in a clear and logical way (in flickr images within sets, and sets within collections).

Hope this is of interest

 

All very constructive:clap2:Thank you will put into practice.