Hoping to find a free/cheap hosting service that wont rob photo quality and either doesn't have a upload size limit or a very large one. Anyone know of anything? A friend told me about Screencast.com and they offer a free account with 2GB each of storage space and bandwidth, but I've never heard of them and I don't exactly know how it would work if I'm using them to host it and putting the image on my photography blog site?? The file I want to upload is 600MB TIFF or 100MB PNG. I also have atleast 2 more files that will be that size but most likely larger. Am I in the realm of hosting it myself on my own/friend's server or is there something economically friendly out there? Thanks!

 

Are you using a free blog service or did you install some blog software on a hosting provider?

For a photography site displaying a 100MB PNG is HUUUGE!! That would take forever to load.

You should really be optimizing your images for the web before displaying them on a site. I usually try to aim for around 65 - 80KB MAX. But.. if you use a CDN then thats a whole other story, then I'm sure you could display higher res/file size images.

Even if you got a CDN, hosting a 100MB PNG for a site will still be wayy overkill.

edit: So what I would do first is see if you can upload the images to your blog site. If not.. there are many cheap hosting providers that don't have a upload or bandwidth limit. Downside to that is you'll probably be stuck with poor performance from the host. One service I've used with clients is http://www.liquidweb.com/ They aren't the cheapest out there but they have good performance depending on which package you get and they have awesome 24hr support.

 

Thanks for the info stg2lgcy00, I'm afraid I don't know too much about making files web friendly. Usually my files are 5-10mb so it's never been too much of a problem. This particular file is a 10 image sequence with a few curve layers and other effects. The blog site I use is Wordpress so one of the free ones. I may upload it directly through Wordpress, just afraid the quality lost will blow as you said.

How much of a quality loss would you say you experience with the hosting service you listed? I'd hate to lose any quality, but I may not have much control there.

 

No worries if you don't know much about image optimization I can give you some resources for how to do that.

Anyways its late but I'll give you a more in-depth response tomorrow to answer your questions.

 

pbase.com

US$23 yearly for 1000 MB of photo storage.
US$43 yearly for 2000 MB of photo storage.
US$60 yearly for 3000 MB of photo storage.

Additional storage can be added at any time in increments of 1000 MB.

 

Flickr.com is something like $24/year I believe.

However, do NOT put full-size full-resolution versions of your photography work on the web.

 

I have my full res on flickr I just turn off original size and that leaves only large


They have a 25MB limit per image.

 

I love Zenfolio. $45/year for unlimited storage, and tons of options on how you can control content, downloading, sizing. SUPER EASY watermark use. Oh, and unlike Pbase or smugmug, it's SUPER fast for the end user to use and flip through pictures. They also do video hosting.

 

Computer monitors dont really see the difference only when you print you see the difference.

This is a 16bit image?

 

I really need to upgrade to Flickr Pro already. I filled that thing up like 2 months ago

 

As far as saving images for the web, depends what program you're using. I normally do it out of Photoshop, but I'm pretty sure you can save for web out of free apps like GIMP.

I think using Wordpress you shouldn't have any problem uploading your images to your blog once they're optimized. When you upload high res images its not necessarily going to reduce the quality (unless the host controls this) but it will drastically increase the downloading time for visitors. As far as quality loss from liquidweb, haven't noticed any since I save all images for the web before putting them on a site... so the optimized version on my local computer looks the same as whats on the web.

I'd agree with VRT, you definitely don't want to put full size/res versions of your photos on the web. Those are your master copies and only you should have those. Seems like theres some good options suggested so far for hosts so you'll have to research and compare them.

Here's a few samples of the same image to show you what I mean about optimized images.
For these I used "Save for Web & Devices" out of Photoshop.

They've all been resized to 600x450

JPEG quality: 100
File size: 370kb


JPEG quality: 70
File size: 134kb


JPEG quality: 40
File size: 62kb


JPEG quality: 20
File size: 43kb

 

WOW first off thanks for posting those. there is a pretty noticeable difference.

the master copy is the RAW file.

Gimp is pretty good

 

Thanks for all the info everyone and thank you stg2lgcy00 posting those examples as well. I was able to save it as a JPEG with the quality set at 8 of 12 and I think it came out pretty well. Ill have to try "Save for Web & Devices" and see what I get there.

Here's 8 of 12 JPEG Quality:

 

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7023/6...9ec18dae_o.jpg



10/10

 

Try posterous? I post all my stuff there, vids, mp3s. pics... Never hit a limit.