website for selling prints??

[opus]

I thought someone here posted, or told me about, a website where you can upload your photos and set up a "store", and then people can go there and order their own photos without getting you involved in every transaction. The website company does the printing and shipping.

Can anyone give me good recommendation on who to go with?

Thank you!

[Peter_AUS]

http://www.cafepress.com or I think the other that is popular is http://www.smugmug.com

[SunnySideUp]

I just started using www.printroom.com and love it... It cost $90 a year, but if you are taking a lot of shots they have a really cool tool that will make your thumb nails and watermarks without any work. Also if people right click on the photos it gives them a copyright message and wont let them save the photo. You start with 200 MB of space, but you only upload the thumbnails, when someone buys an image you can either have it automatically be uploaded from your machine to them or you can set it up so that you do it manually with their tool. Plus, you can have them do cropping and touch ups if you want.

Shane

[racingpinarello]

The good thing about printroom is that they use ICC color profiles, and if you buy prints larger than 11x14, then they use Pictopia as the printer.

Pictopia has a great Fuji Archive printer which has delivered great prints for me when I have to do mail order.

Loren

[maplegirlie]

I thought someone here posted, or told me about, a website where you can upload your photos and set up a "store", and then people can go there and order their own photos without getting you involved in every transaction. The website company does the printing and shipping.

Can anyone give me good recommendation on who to go with?

Thank you!

I was wondering this same thing and was just about to post a question.

Photo-John wrote a comment in 2004 in a thread called "printroom.com anyone" if you want to do a search and read it in addition to the comments in this thread.

[adina]

Didn't Rick do something similar not that long ago? You may want to pm him if he doesn't chime in here.

Coffee next week?

[lidarman]

as said below, printroom.com where i have mine setup. it's $99/year plus 13% commission + creditcard processing fee to sell.

But I just discovered http://www.smugmug.com/ which actully looks better on the surface so far. I plan on doing a trial with them

EDIT: I just saw the smugmug was already mentioned.

I know someone who used frames to itegrate printroom in his site. www.vastaction.com. I don't know css (but trying to learn it). Right now, I set up my site to link to my printroom site.

www.radshots.com

[jar_e]

Another praise for smugmug. I have a few friends that use it, and enjoy it alot. Nice easy lay out, and easy to make galleries.

[Peter_AUS]

Interesting everyon missed that I mentioned smugmug in my post above, I think people don't read my posts that well if at all.

[jar_e]

Interesting everyon missed that I mentioned smugmug in my post above, I think people don't read my posts that well if at all.

Peter,

I did read it I was just giving it another praise

[opus]

Peter, I read and looked at everything you mentioned. I decided that Cafepress would not meet my needs, but that smugmug was exactly what I was looking for. Unfortunately, I haven't done two things yet:

1) decide to actually set up an account with smugmug, and
2) come back and thank you for posting it.

The reason I hadn't done #2 yet is because I haven't done #1 yet, so in my mind it's still "in progress". But right now I'm going to make up for my procrastination and take care of #2, which should have been done long ago... I'm sorry.

Thank you, Peter, smugmug is exactly what I was looking for, and as soon as I feel ready to pony up the cash for an account, I will be in business! I already have someone halfway across the country who's eager to buy some of my prints.

[Peter_AUS]

Kelly, wasn't directed at you. Just generally venting a bit out loud. Been a frustrating 48 hours with Windows XP for the first time.

[Janie]

Kelly, wasn't directed at you. Just generally venting a bit out loud. Been a frustrating 48 hours with Windows XP for the first time.

Okay, this was weird! I was cruising around smugmug and found my dad and his friend on the site: http://concours.smugmug.com/keyword/lincoln/1/640155 That's the Dutch Schultz car they brought to Concours' d'Elegance last year! lol

[jar_e]

Those are some nice cars! Yikes. I totally love smugmug's viewing options, it's just so userfriendly!

[Janie]

Those are some nice cars! Yikes. I totally love smugmug's viewing options, it's just so userfriendly!

You know what I don't like though? I was able to right click and save the image, then print it for my freind - just to show the camera shy dope he's all over the internet! lol I want my photos protected.

[Todd Patten]

Just my .02. The supression of the right click/save is a false sense of security. Even though the right click is supressed one can VERY easily get the photo. The easiest way is from the menu bar, go to View Source (depending on IE or Firefox, it is a different menu option). The View Source menu absolutely CANNOT be supressed by the web designer. From there, anyone can easily see the path to the image, cut and paste it into the address bar and *bingo*, the supressed image is displayed nicely in the browser window.

The other item to note is that whenever you visit a web page, all images are written directly to your computer. Depending on various settings, those images could be there for minutes or months. One can easily search their temporary internet files and have a nice clean image, already downloaded onto their machine.

Trust me, and you can test me on this if you wish, I can pull down ANY image from a web page. There is no way to protect it.

The bottom line is that if you are going to put a photo on the internet, it can be downloaded, no matter what effort you might put into in order to prevent it. Knowing that, if you are concerned about people printing them out, you should create a translucent watermark or display a less than high quality image online. Keep it less that 500px wide. If you do this, the very large majority of people would not be able to create a print that has any quality worth displaying. They also would not be able to enlarge the image to a desirable print size because of the digital distortion.

Finally, one exception: You could display your images using Macromedia Flash. There's no way to rab the images from a Flash file if it has been locked and/or password protected from external use.

[Peter_AUS]

Oh yes there is Todd, but I'm not going to tell you how it is done.

[Todd Patten]

Peter, maybe I have missed something, but in my ten years of programming I have not come across any way of preventing one from downloading an image outside of including it in an external application such as Flash.

One can present it as a binary file using ASP or PHP, but it is still an image that is placed on your computer.

If it can be done, I would challenge one to do it and then challenge me to get the image.

I mean no disrespect, I just love this sort of challenge

[Peter_AUS]

I know you don't Todd, but I'm not going to elude to how it can be done either here or anywhere else. But remember what others think can't be done, others have found a way to do it. Think outside the box a bit more.

[lidarman]

Just my .02. The supression of the right click/save is a false sense of security. Even though the right click is supressed one can VERY easily get the photo. The easiest way is from the menu bar, go to View Source (depending on IE or Firefox, it is a different menu option). The View Source menu absolutely CANNOT be supressed by the web designer. From there, anyone can easily see the path to the image, cut and paste it into the address bar and *bingo*, the supressed image is displayed nicely in the browser window.

The other item to note is that whenever you visit a web page, all images are written directly to your computer. Depending on various settings, those images could be there for minutes or months. One can easily search their temporary internet files and have a nice clean image, already downloaded onto their machine.

Trust me, and you can test me on this if you wish, I can pull down ANY image from a web page. There is no way to protect it.

The bottom line is that if you are going to put a photo on the internet, it can be downloaded, no matter what effort you might put into in order to prevent it. Knowing that, if you are concerned about people printing them out, you should create a translucent watermark or display a less than high quality image online. Keep it less that 500px wide. If you do this, the very large majority of people would not be able to create a print that has any quality worth displaying. They also would not be able to enlarge the image to a desirable print size because of the digital distortion.

Finally, one exception: You could display your images using Macromedia Flash. There's no way to rab the images from a Flash file if it has been locked and/or password protected from external use.

I suppose if someone wants to screen capture a low res pic with a watermark across it, fine, have fun with it.

That is the one disadvantage that smugmug seems to have is no watermark. I suppose on printroom.com, the watermark could put people off enough not to buy, but then I guess they didn't want it that bad in the first place.

[Todd Patten]

It's interesting that we were having this discussion. I received an email today with a link to a photo site from Kodak and Disney. They want you to buy the images. So, of course, being a cute picture of my two boys and The Incredibles, I right clicked to save the image to my computer. Well, I get the "Right Click Disabled" message. However, it appears that this only works for IE. I use Mozilla Firefox (Best. Browser. EVER). The right click menu came up and I was able to save the image to my computer. I was also able to copy the image to the clipboard and open it up with photoshop. The folks at Disney have unlimited resources and it was as easy as changing browsers to view the site.

Now, the other thing that Disney implements, which I suspect that Peter may be alluding to, is setting the source of the image to a server side application that returns a binary stream of data, likely pulled from a database, as the source of the image. Even in this case, one is able to get the image from their machine.

Sorry for the techie stuff. I am a software engineer who loves to try and get around these things.

I guess that the real point is that if you don't want someone downloading your image, don't put it online. Otherwise, the risk will always be there.

[Todd Patten]

Wow. I just found another method that is a billion times easier than looking at cache, etc. As I said before, the Disney site uses a server side program to display the image. Well, if you simply mouse click(left) the image, hold the click down and drag it to your desktop the file appears there. In my case, the file was named "proxy[6].aspx". I changed the extension to .jpg and I was able to open it in PS with no problem.

Peter, seriously, have I hit on any of your ideas that are "out of the box"? I'm not trying to get into a p*ssing contest. I just want to see if it can be done, because I do not believe it can, and have yet to find a method that will prevent people from downloading.

[Mig]

I think Peter may have meant that there IS a way to get images from Flash presentations, not that there's a way to protect images from being downloaded. (Sorry Peter if I'm wrong here).

In which case he's correct - you can get any image, regardless of where it's stored, if Flash is used, etc, etc - although resolution will be questionable.

Danielle

[opus]

I was told that Flash is one of the best ways to protect your images, of course it's not foolproof. Well, it might be foolproof, as it would keep a lot of common fools from getting your images. If you're not a fool (would that make you wise?) then you can get at the images.

Of course, that wouldn't be very wise, would it ... which would make you a fool ... which ...

~AAAUUGGHH!!~

[Peter_AUS]

Todd,

No you haven't hit on how it is done from the flash side of things. But surfice it to say, you like to try things that are outside the box. Programs are written to do the flash, don't you think there would be programs that are written to reverse the whole thing, even crack passwords, like when they have been forgotton.

If it is on the net, then nothing is safe at all. How do you think software gets around the world so quickly. For instance, Photoshop CS2 hit the net with a workable crack within 24 hours of its official release in the USA. I know of around 300 people (not personally or who or where they are) that have it already free of charge, apart from the cost of downloading it on to their machines. This is pretty common by the way. Why, because if you make something too expensive, people just won't pay for it anymore. I know the upgrades are reasonably cheaper, but overall the cost of keeping up to date can be draining on finances and that is the main reason why this happens.

A particular case in point at present is Phase One Capture 1 DSLR software at present, which is in Release Candidate stage but still contains many bugs. People have paid $499 for the program which isn't working correctly, updates remain buggy and update packs that were purchased in good faith are being diminished by a company that seems no longer interested in their customers, because they have the money already. Example, they have ceased the SE version and are upgrade customers to the pro version with the release of the official 3.7 version sometimes supposedly in May (Version 4 is already a year late). They will give the next update to SE owners as well, wether it is version 3.8 or 4 who knows. SE owners that purchased a special 5 update pack were originally told they would be upgraded to Version 3.7 and have a further 4 major updates as well, because of all the problems with the software and as a public relations thing for the customers. Now they have gone back on that, upgrading them to Version 3.7 with 2 updates and they will have to use those for the future updates, which is inequitable if you look at the normal SE owners without a 5 upgrade pack, actually get an upgrade for free. There is a lot of talk going on at www.rawworkflow.com and on the phase one support forum (which is pathetic compared to rawworkflow). The owner of rawworkflow.com was heavily associated with phaseone as a software consultant for capture one, but has recently cut major ties with them although not completely and this has been noticed on his website as he no longer supports the forum he runs as much as he did previously. Why, because it is no longer subserdised by Phase One at all. I can read between the lines of his original post as good as the next person.

Anyway, enough about that, but only goes to show, why things happen around the world.

Can you now work out, how to get stuff from flash movies.