Hope i'll be forgiven for asking a question which has probably been asked before - but i've been trawling webpages and forums all day and not got the exact answer so here goes -
I'm in the Uk. I bought a small portable studio and went to take photos at a kids halloween party locally. some of the rsults were pretty good I think. (There's a couple in my portfolio.) I think if they were of my kids I'd have bought a copy.
I'm selling fairly cheap - starting at £4 - it's not high art or wedding photography - this is basically fancy dress souvenir photography. I got no sales at all on photobox - but several people have told me they have seen the prints and how good they are. So people have been copying the on screen image and printing them. I am told that this is unavoidable - just left click and drag them into paintbox - it's basically a screencapture as I understand it. Low quality - they can't get my original files - but i'm at the cheap end of the market here - and some people watch pirate films shot on hand held cameras with people walking in front of the screen and are happy with the result if it saves a couple of quid.
Photobox will not let me watermark the images - or reduce the size of the on screen images to make it pointless saving them.
So does anyone know of a web hosting gallery, based in the Uk, or at least with a printing opeeration based in the Uk, who allow watermarking or minimisation of on screen thumbnails ? Or any other solution ? Eg I'd use Smugmug or one of the US based sites but I can't find out from their FAQ's about the pricing and logistics of having prints done in the US and psoted to the UK.
One of the best things about Smugmug is the customer service. Why not shoot them a quick e-mail and ask about sending prints to the UK?
I wish I knew of a site based in the UK such as you describe.
One thought that came to mind is: why not host the photos on your own site? You can use Smugmug or any other place that allows watermarking to power the images on the back-end, and fulfill the print orders yourself in the UK.
If anyone has any experience of doing what was suggested above and can offer any advice, I'd be grateful. I'm a real novice with web pages and such. i do have a volunteer who is good at the tech stuff who will do it all for me, provided I tell him what I want doing - he knows nothing about photo sites specifically.
Is your photobox gallery a "Pro Gallery"?
If so, the images displayed are really small, around 450 pixels (400 pixels across longest edge - just checked!) across so would look AWFUL printed out!
If not a pro gallery, I suggest you check them out...
My Pro Gallery (Not a great deal in there though...)
Unfortunately mine is a pro gallery - the images on screen are small bur not small enough - several people just stole the on screen image and settled for that - I asked if i could watermark or make the on screen images even smaller and they said no.
