For the photographers

Hope you don't mind me resurrecting this topic...

I have a problem... I have TONS (meaning hundreds) of wedding pics to put on an online web site where I and others can then order prints from. I chose Ofoto as they have both a US and a UK site. This is important as we can't afford to do prints for everyone and lots of folks in the US will want them.

My problem is that even with broadband, this is taking FOREVER. 15 minutes ago I started uploading 3 pics and now, 20 minutes later, it's still uploading.  Is this normal? I can't believe it is but I don't know why it's such a problem. Clearly I can't post hundreds of pics this way.

Photobox looks good here but are useless for me in the US.

Suggestions? (Tebs, why did you have to take so many good pictures??!!)

What's your file size?  More importantly what's your bandwidth speed?

Have you considered burning copies of the pictures to a CD and mailing them to people?

Caryn, I can put any photos you need up on my server. I would be happy to in fact,,lol.  Then all they would have to do, is what Cait said, and burn them to cd, then take the cd to a photography shop to have prints made. I loved taking the pictures, and being part of the day  

I still havn't finished doing 'tweaks' on the ones I have here, and I am dying to see what you have done to the photos. With you being the graphics guru, I am your willing 'grasshopper'    

Only a few of my family have CD burning capabilities. I could send a couple CDs to them but it would be so much nicer to be able to let everyone browse through them and choose their own. Plus, having the Kodak print options was really nice. I just know that if a few folks get CDs, then the lazier or less computer savvy people will never get any pics done.

The pics are very big (unaltered from what Tebs gave me). What size can I reduce them down to and still have high quality prints?

Tebs, I haven't done anything fancy with any of the pics. I've just chosen ones we like so far. I'd like to do a few black and white with a touch of color ones but so far am just struggling to get these viewable by the masses.

Cait, I don't know what my bandwidth is though I do think it's on the lower end of broadband. 

Ah, the lower speed might be your problem, plus some of these places where you store photos have loads of people uploading at the same time which clogs up their bandwidth.

On Boxing Day, I uploaded 28 pictures (3MB per file) to Photobox.  That may have taken me about 20 minutes for the whole lot.  We are on 750kb broadband.

If you are uploading to the US, you might want to try at a time when there isn't heavy traffic in the US.  It may speed it up some.

For pantone perfect color calibration for your monitor use Colorvision Spyder - http://www.colorvision.com/. When you have a perfectly calibrated monitor you know for certain what your prints are going to look like (provided you understand how certain inks look on certain papers and blah blah blah) Regardless, when you edit your photos on your pc with pantone perfect colors you'll get a great result back from a printer that uses high-end professional printers. Thats really the only way to guarentee perfect prints every time. But a lot of people dont notice what I do. Im a color snob lol

Im about to do a huge run of photos (when I get a minute!) with Houston Photo Imaging, who not only do regular sized photos but will also canvas back and mount my exibition scale sepia panaramics from Paris. Give me a couple more months and I'll be printing them out the old fashioned way all by myself. Mmmm the smell of chemicals in the morning.

Ive also used shutterfly.com - who produced good results for me, but not my mom. Then again it might have been the photographers sh*t digital camera - and it was 4 years ago as well... when digital SLRs were only just coming out on to the market.

A quite expensive but excellent quality way to go for SERIOUS photographers is Epson...

Epson Stylus Pro 4000 at $1,795.00

Epson Stylus Pro 7600 at $2,995.00

Its sister the 9600 at $4,000.00 which I wont even bother linking to lol

and the more affordable Epson Stylus Photo 2200 at $699.00

For the Slightly less enthusiastic photographer Epson offers extremely good printers between $200 & $300 too.

Well, I've found the problem. Stupid me!!

I was taking the pics Teri gave me and opening them in Photoshop and renaming them and making very minor corrections. For some reason though, this vastly increased my file size. I went from 3 MG files to 18 MG  !!! I have no idea why and I never checked the sizes as I've never had this happen before.

Too weird. Now I've gotta go either resize them or start from scrath again. Grrrrrrr.

Gracious, that's a huge size difference!   Would photoshop add that much bulk to touched up photos?  I tend to favor psp9 so I havn't worked much with photoshop, altho I hear it's worth messing with, if only to work with the 'heal' tool.  I have it on one of the computers here,, will have to get David to find where it is,,lol.

MARSBAR! Dont' go showing  all those fancy smancy printers, cos it will just make me drool all aver my keyboard! 

I shoot using Nikon's raw format (NEF), then do whatever editing that's required using Photoshop's Camera RAW plugin.  Photobox only accepts JPGs or GIFs, so I save the file in Photoshop as a JPG at maximum and I still generally get a 2.5-3 MB file (with an image size of 3008x2000px).

hehe - sorry for that last post of mine. talk about WAAAAY off the current topic. I started reading the thread from post 1 and was too tired to finish reading it so I just posted! lol

slightly OT but snapfish.com have a special offer at the moment, first 20 prints free - I just got a set done and we're really pleased with the results.

For those of you who can use PhotoBox, when I signed up for AOL broadband they gave me an offer for 50 free prints! I'm not sure if the offer is still on or not, but it might be worth dropping them a line and begging ... I mean asking.