Review 1 of 4
Price Paid:
$25.00
from www.clubphoto.com Summary: Avoid paying for ClubPhoto! I purchased storage for sharing family photos, and because I can lock albums via passwords to share artwork with clients, etc. Adding photos is fairly simple, although arranging/adjusting them is unnecessarily tedious and frustrating.
As I found it useful, I paid to upgrade to the Gold level and eventually to Platinum as my storage needs grew. Over the years, support has gone downhill, customer service is horrible (even minor questions are not responded to), and features have expanded only slightly.
Strengths: Easy (albeit not very fast) to upload multiple images. Site no longer nags visitors to join (they used to do this years ago, which scared away many of my visiting family members who wanted to avoid spam. Make sure whoever you use does not do this to your visitors). Fairly good resolution limits, allowing for larger pictures. Password protection offered for albums, granting easy access for managing access to artwork with clients and/or hiding other image albums. Many options provided for purchasing prints (I have not used this, but looks like a wide variety of products including cookies and cakes). ClubPhoto used to be a great service. Weaknesses: Pathetic customer support (detailed below).
More than just once, I have had images or even entire albums lost due to their storage servers crashing (apparently this data is not backed up, screwing the customers.) Hundreds of photos can be lost at a time. This means long upload times again, and awkward reorganizing and labeling of images (often the adjustments don't take when submitted).
Clicking on a thumbnail brings you to an medium sized version in a pop-up, and you have to click that one to get to the normal resolution image (no way to disable the intermediate image).
Higher connection speeds should give much faster upload times than ClubPhoto can apparently accept. A larger group of images that aren't even that large can take over an hour. This used to be facilitated by a browser plug-in, but it's now handled by an external downloaded app. It works fairly well, but has some odd UI quirks that make it unnecessarily frustrating to use (I work in software production and KNOW it doesn't take much to make it user friendly the first time!)
Limited ability to customize the look of albums. This feature is very basic and ultimately not that important, but they often looks like crap no matter what you do.
Storage is measured by the quantity of images stored, NOT space consumed. Therefore, having ten smaller pics that occupy a tenth of a megabyte would be far more limiting than a single five megabyte photo.
Image types are limited to JPG. PNG, GIF, TGA, TIF, etc are not allowed.
No storage for movie clips. That really sucks, since I'm an animator. Even for small ones that take little diskspace. But they will handle huge photos, because they hope to sell prints.
Similar Products Used: For my needs, “smugmug” appears to be the best choice so far. I’m glad to see there’s plenty of competition in this service, so choices are wide open. I am reviewing many options now, and although I will lose more data leaving for another provider. ClubPhoto will lose more of my data anyway, apparently as part of their service. I hope to complete transfer of all images in near future. Anything will be better than to continue to use what ClubPhoto has become. Customer Service: Pathetic customer support (many emails are never responded to, others may contain attitude). Direct questions remain unaddressed. Even questions about their print products will go unanswered. I have never been intentionally ignored by customer support like this, and it feels almost offensive after paying for the "premium" level of service for years.
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