Online photo hosting with print service?

[Jackleman]

Hi

Can anyone recommend a UK based service that offers roughly the same as http://www.imagekind.com/

What I am looking for is a website that offers professional websites for photographers to upload their work to dedicated sites, offers all the usual photo galleries and customisation etc but who will also take care for handling the money and doing order fulfilment!

Any recommendations would be great! thanks in advance.

[xrrr]

Jackleman said:

Hi

Can anyone recommend a UK based service that offers roughly the same as http://www.imagekind.com/

What I am looking for is a website that offers professional websites for photographers to upload their work to dedicated sites, offers all the usual photo galleries and customisation etc but who will also take care for handling the money and doing order fulfilment!

Any recommendations would be great! thanks in advance.

I looked into this a few months ago. For me it was a toss up between SmugMug and Zenfolio. I elected for a SmugMug Power account in the end even though they do not yet offer printing outside of the US. A European based print lab is their number one feature request so I am hoping that something will come along eventually. Zenfolio partner with Photobox for European printing but I went with Smugmug because the customisation options were greater, the EU printing is "coming soon" and the support/community on Smugmug forums seemed exceptional.

The UK specific option is Clikpic. It is the cheapest but my experience with the 30 day trial was horrible. I don't know if it was the trial but they limit the size of the images, don't import captions and keywords automatically from the image meta data and they only seem to offer prints and not all the other types of product such as canvases etc.

Finally, I used to have a photoshelter account. It was more expensive and offers many more features (that I did not use so moved to Smugmug).

All offer a 30 day trial so best is to sign up and have a play.

As I said Smugmug for me had the best customisation options and I am banking on EU printing soon. I have created a site that blends Smugmug for the photos and galleries and blogger.com for the static "contact me" page and blog so that they look (reasonably) seamless. I created the Smugmug one first then imported the CSS file into blogger and hacked about with the blogger template HTML to make it look identical to the SmugMug site: http://simongreig.com

[LeoV8]

I can personally highly recommend the imagefile. Does all you want and much more, possibly too much.
Go to http://www.theimagefile.com/?Action=SU&type=0 for trial photographer account. UK based (Surrey), real people answer the phone and they know what they are talking about. I have used them for years, they have transformed the way I work.