It’s a question that’s been passed around a bit this semester so I went online and found myself a few online portfolio websites to try out.
I started with a list of parameters of what I wanted based on what my faculty was telling me:
- Free
- Easy
- Privacy Settings
- Website does not own rights to your work
- users must be able to comment
This was about as difficult as I imagined. Number five on my list was especially hard to find. Most of the online portfolio sites have really beautiful layout options, are free, and don’t generally have a huge limitation on storage space. However, privacy is a very big deal over here on my campus. I get that most of these sites are made with the idea of promoting the artists. A lot of them have ways to sell your work from their sites. But for us, any website that didn’t hide the images behind some privacy settings was officially off my recommendation list. I’ve heard too many stories of artists online work getting ripped off by someone.
So I’ll start with my favorite which was Glossom. It met all of the above requirements. It had some variety in presentation of photographs, but was limited to the look of the website. The other site I found, Behance, also met the above requirements, but has greater restriction on how the images can be placed. Both have comments enabled, but Glossom allows for comments on combined image sets as well as individual images. Both have privacy settings allowing viewability only to specific users signed up with the website. Behance has a prosite for a price, so I didn’t bother to look at it.
I was looking really for a place to have an online portfolio of photographs. I was also focused on the architecture department. I mention this because Glossom has terms of service prohibiting work that might be offensive or pornographic. Behance, on the other hand, warns that you might find this stuff on their site. Not that I found any porn, but I’m sure that when you have a website for art photography there are going to be a few nude images around.
I didn’t try every website in the list of recommended 15 I linked to at the top of this blog post, but i think I have enough for a good recommendation. If neither Glossom nor Behance seem to meet the needs of my faculty, I’ll probably look into the others.
Slightly Tech 