Flickr broke my heart. It hurt but I’ve moved on.
The free tier of Flickr was reduced from 1TB of photos to just 1000 photos. Flickr was my online portfolio solution for +5 years, but that move was a deal breaker for me. 💔 #shame
I started looking for another online portfolio platform. These were my requirements:
- Must: I can group my photos into albums
- I can share a link to an album with anyone outside the platform
- The design highlights the photos and has little distractions
- It can host at least 1000 photos for free
- Optional: it has social features like votes and comments
Based on that criteria, this was my review of the 7 mainstream platforms:
And the winner is…
Store all photos on Google Photos
Copy the best to 500px
500px won since it has everything I want for free: the design looks great, I can easily make and share albums, and it has social features built-in. The only downside is that I’m limited to 7 uploads a week, but there’s no rush.
It’s true that it has a photo limit unlike Facebook or Google Photos. Facebook was out because the design was very cluttered and mainly because I despise the company. So that’s where Google Photos comes in, as a last resort backup or when during a conversation I want to show some photo (which was not good enough to go to 500px).
I’ve used this flow for several months and I’m quite happy with it ❤️
It’s still free, it’s easy to organise and share, and I end up with two backups online. The caveat is, I’m uploading the photos after they are edited and converted to JPG — I still need some other reliable and cheat place to store my RAW/NEF originals. That will be covered on my next blog post.
