Announcing Portfolios

The Landing Site (the-photo.org/) has a new set of pages - Portfolios - the-photo.org/portfolios.html

This is where you can display your best (or favourite) works. Just send me (alan.dprevived@outlook.com) up to 12 photos with some explanatory words and I will create a page for you. If you also wish to add something about yourself, then that can be added.

If you want to do multiple sets, then we can accommodate that too.

At the moment, it's one page with my pictures on - for future stuff, each person will get their own page.

Let me know if you like it and want to join in.

Alan

Great idea!

Once the page has been created, will the subject be able to edit it?

David

No, sorry. At the moment, the web site is a read/only site for users.

Alan

You certainly can create a portfolio in a thread - we could have a whole forum just for that. I was just looking at a different way of displaying them.

I agree- long term plan is not to email photos to me. But at the moment, I can't think of another way. If you think about it, normally photographers create their own web site for photos - so there is no need to send them to someone else. But of course, if they hire someone to do that, they still need to get the pictures to them somehow.

I could (if I worked on it), give interested people an FTP upload area so they could upload their own pictures and then the galleries would just look there to pick them up rather than a folder in my site. But they'd need to remember the username/password etc. and it's probably not going to work for many.

The end result for me was to make the landing site more interesting. If people don't want to use it, that's fine. But let's see what happens.

And yes, your picture does show the sort of thing I was planning. I only put my pictures on the main page because that's all I have at the moment. Once we get more, I will create cards like you are showing and then put each set of pictures in its own page.

Alan

As it says somewhere, this is "The community-run digital photography forum", so having pages where members can post the most recent photos of which they are proud is an excellent idea. I dont know how the programming would work, but it seems to me that a member should ask for a portfolio page, and one would be assigned. There might be space for a specific number of photos. The member would have access to posting and changing the photos and descriptions at will (just as I can edit my own posts in normal threads and change the photos there). One should be able to link from normal threads as we can do within the threads at present. There ought to be no need for an extra password, as the user would already be logged into the site.

A few portfolios could be linked to (automated in turn) from the front page as a means of showcasing our members. We would also need a page listing those members with portfolios, so other members can find them.

I would be comfortable in paying a small annual fee for this service, to support the site costs.

I consider it important that this should work with minimal intervention by staff.

David

David,

This is something I could do, but the upload area would need to be segregated (so users could only access their own area) and I can't do that with the existing upload area (we don't own the server). But we are looking at a lot of enhancements and that could be one of them.

For now, if people want to highlight their works, I'm happy to receive pictures and I will put them in as good a light as I can. At the moment, no one has taken up the offer so it's not a great burden.

Alan

Thanks Trevor,

Your porfolio is up and viewable here download.dprevived.com/trevor-port.html

regards

Alan

I could, but I'd rather you told me which ones you wanted me to put there. And if some are stored elsewhere, it's much harder.

Alan

Another portfolio has been uploaded. Feel free to have a look here www.the-photo.org/photobygms-port.html

Alan

To be honest, none at all - any pictures uploaded to public areas can be downloaded. It's an issue with every web site. If you can see it, you can get at it.

Alan

Like Alan said, currently there is none and there can't be one.

Unsplash has no limitations, most likely authors do not sell those images - or use that site as (free?) advertising medium.
Flicker has no limitations (or I have not seen any; I haven't almost never browsed it).
Stock image sites use extensive semi-random watermarking - this is not suitable for photo galleries.
Some posters on some sites add nice frames and signatures to images - this doesn't avoid downloading, but some work is needed to "clean up" such image.
Hidden watermarks (steganography) are possible, but those can only be extracted and checked from unprocessed (or not heavily processed) digital images - no one will try to find them on t-shirts or on other printed media.
We could in future make portfolios accessible only by logged-in members (optional of course) - but this does not help against someone creating account, downloading images and using them in other places - you even won't know that.
We could exclude images from web scanning by search engines - but this is only hint and won't help against direct download.