I'd like to find a reliable site that charges a reasonable printing &
processing fee.  I'm not looking for a premium service (these are sports
photos, not portraits), just a site that will do a good job of hosting
and order fulfillment.

Have you got any favorites?  What makes them great?

Incidentally, I am also on offer from them to get some kinds of
remuneration for introducing others, and to offer something for anyone
signing up using my account introduction. So, if you or anyone else here
for that matter, decide on using them, and wouldn't mind, please contact
me by email at
        jpmcw[at]mac.com

just prior to signing up and I'll send you the details of what their
bonus to you would be. It feels odd to be writing this, but there it is.

Thanks a bunch for the reference.  I've seen the customer side of
printroom, and I'm glad to hear the experience has been positive.

Yes, it makes sense for you to benefit from the referral.  I've sent you
a note offline for details.

What I'm choking on is printroom's one-time storage fee of $100/GB -
that works out to ~$0.50 per image, which adds up fast.  For the other
fees they charge, I'd expect storage to cost more like $1-2/GB.

It seems a bit unreasonable to charge fairly high prices per print, and
an annual fee, and a transaction fee, and a premium storage fee.  But,
perhaps current supply & demand allows for it.

FotoTime is like $2.00 per month for each 10GB, payable yearly in
advance, 30-day free trial.

I have seven thousand images there, have experience essentially no
downtime, and the technical service is rapid and competent.

http://www.fototime.com/inv/7FB3CB20960048D

But as to storage fees, I have about 13 Gigs of photos in my folder on
my desktop, which are linked to the thumbnails stored at Printroom; it's
the thumbnails' size which are counted against their storage, and so I
haven't incurred any storage fees, and some of my thumbnails are
customized, and at max. size.

I started with Smugmug.  I love many things about Smugmug.  The look
and feel is great, it's easy to use (for the features they offer, more
on that later), they do some neat things like automatically determine
if the visitor would probably prefer a larger page of thumbnails
(large browser size, fast network connection) and give them a page
with more thumbnails per page, etc.  Smugmug is a family operation
with a real commitment to customer service but they aren't "family" in
a way that is unprofessional.  Quite the contrary, they have extensive
internet business experience (Chris MacAskill was a founder and the
CEO of Fatbrain.com) and they are putting that experience together
with their experience and passion for photography.  See:

<http://www.smugmug.com/aboutus/aboutus.mg>

Smugmug offers unlimited space for uploading your photos.  No, really,
it IS unlimited.  

<http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/index.php?action=expand,9710>

Smugmug uses EZPrints for print order fulfillment.  During the time I
was using Smugmug I was happy with EZPrints (more on this later).

Smugmug is really really good at what they do, but ultimately they
didn't offer some specific features and services I need due to my
specific type of photography (event photography).   I need to be able
to upload proofs and then later upload print ready images only when an
item has been ordered.  When I used Smugmug for my event photo sales I
spent days and days making every image "print ready" before I uploaded
my galleries, which wasted a lot of time since no one buys all the
photos offered.  I still have a Smugmug account:

<http://equinephotoart.smugmug.com/>

but I downgraded my account from the "pro sales" level to the "power
user" level, and I no longer do professional sales from that site.  If
you find that Smugmug meets your needs and wanted to give me referral
credit when you sign-up, you can email me for my referral code.  Also,
the folks at Smugmug were very nice when one of my friends signed up
and then told me about it, Smugmug gave me the referral credit after
the fact.  I had enough referrals from talking about Smugmug to my
friends and associates in the first year that the referral credits
paid for my second year's hosting.

When I realized that the Smugmug workflow wasn't working for my event
sales, I went looking for a site that better met my needs.  This is
when I discovered Printroom.  My experience with pre-sales questions
and answers (or more correctly snippy incomplete answers and then
email that was not replied to at all) resulted in my deciding to never
do business with Printroom.  Others have had better luck, but for me
their lack of customer service was enough for me to decide to take my
money and business elsewhere.  

That led me to ExposureManager.  I *really* like EM for event
photography.  See my horse show gallery page for examples:

<http://equinephotoart.exposuremanager.com/g/shows>

EM is perfect for my event photo sales because I can upload proofs and
then process and upload print-ready images after I get print orders
for specific images.  I have been 150% happy with their excellent
customer service as well.  I find the fees I pay are quite low
considering how much of the "work" of my business is now automated by
using their services.  I don't have to manually create photo
galleries, I don't have to take/process payments, I don't have to
print and mail photos.  After I have finished taking the photos all I
have to do are 3 things that I can't (easily) outsource:  Upload
proofs, prepare and upload print-ready files when an order has been
received, and deposit the check they send me each month.  The only
thing they could do to make my life easier would be to offer
autodeposit on the payment.  :-)

EM was using EZPrints when I first signed-up.  Over time I became
unhappy with EZPrints - they lost some orders, they wouldn't stamp
"Photos, do not bend" on shipments (leading customers to blame me
rather than the post office if the order arrived folded). etc.
Recently EM changed to a new lab:

<http://blog.exposuremanager.com/2006/06/switching_labs.html>

So far I've been delighted with the prints and the shipping from the
new lab.  

EM offers 2 levels of accounts, one for Art sales (with 1GB of image
storage and 5 GB of bandwidth per month) and one for Event sales (with
unlimited storage and 20 GB of bandwidth per month).  If you find that
EM meets your needs and wanted to give me referral credit when you
sign-up, please hit my referral URL to let it set a cookie (if you
don't mind) at some point before signing up:

<http://www.exposuremanager.com/aff/equinephotoart>

I hope you find this info useful as you figure out which of the many
photo hosting sites will best meet your particular needs!

jc

--

http://photo.higginsoft.com

However re proofs, I don't understand the problem with uploading proofs
to SmugMug and later the edited pic.

However re proofs, I don't understand the problem with uploading proofs
to SmugMug and later the edited pic.

jc

--

Do you subscribe at a basic level, that they would have disabled this on
you and not his?

Thanks for the info.  I've finally got the time to compare these
recommendations side-by-side.  It's just an impression, but fototime
doesn't seem to have a strong emphasis on pro sales (more photo sharing,
it seems).  Do you agree?

What does it cost you to host those 7,000 images annually, and what
resolution are you storing?  Unless they offer the option to upload
proofs like the others, $24/yr per 1GB is going to cost a fortune for
hosting event photos.  Do you know if they support uploding high-res
after an order is placed?

I corrected my mis-type; it's 1 (one) GB.

I store for-web-link images, mostly. They tell me the average file
size is 79.14 KB, but that includes a few large-for-print files and
some video. If the projections Paul made (below) are in the ballpark,
It might not be an appropriate venue.

My (very low-volume) way of doing it has been to load un-processed but
re-sized images for proofs purposes, with instructions to contact me
with selections. When I know which are the desired ones I process and
upload print-ready versions to a separate 'album', where prints can be
ordered or the image downloaded, depending on prior arrangements.

Not really conducive to the kind of work flow you describe.

The few contacts I've had with the folks that run FotoTime have been
pleasant and productive; I wouldn't be surprised if they'd be willing
to make a better offer for the kind of volume Richard is
contemplating, and even adjust their capabilities to his needs.

:-)  Yep.  As example, the last event turned out 450 passable pics, for
a total of 2GB in high-res JPEG.  (Yes, compression could bring this
down a bit.)  Although I culled 80% of these from my personal
collection, they were still good shots that might be interesting to the
subjects / saleable.

Admittedly, I'm adjusting the requirements as I learn more about the
services.  The responses here enlightened me to the benefits of
uplaoding just proofs and deferring the edits until an order is placed -
a lot less work up-front, and less storage cost too.  And it captures
the sale on impulse, rather than requiring a return visit from them.

So far, it seems like printroom.com and exposuremanager.com are the two
offering this feature, so I'm looking deeper into them.  (It seems
really odd that MPIX.com doesn't offer a pro sales service - they've got
90% of it there already.)

Thanks for the info!

EM is looking pretty good, especially for events.

I like the domain masking support, the display-only (proofs) capability,
the ability to flag the same photo to fulfill differently by format
(e.g., different file uploads possible per print format; or print using
the uploaded med-res for 4x6, while queuing for the high-res file for
larger formats).

The comparison chart is pretty handy, though subject to verifying:
http://www.exposuremanager.com/scripts/website.pl?rm=compare

Their "self fulfillment" option is also pretty slick, but they do a
confusing job of presenting it.  i.e., "we'll take the order, you
print/ship the order".

I see you offer some items with custom treatment - can you define your
own products, or only select from their lists?

jc

--

The other reason is that I'm not sure if both URLs would continue to
work and I have a lot of customers who have the old URLs.  So, when I
do make the change it will be during my business lull in the middle of
winter (after xmas sales).

jc

--