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James, will your new website be a commercial website (selling prints) or will it be an information only site. That's going to make a difference. Flickr is strictly a photo-sharing site. Since you won't be able to sell any prints there, you may want to consider using a "storefront" business site where you can post and sell your images. You can choose your own website domain name, you can choose one of their templates to design your own website, you can post your images to the website and the store does the rest. It operates in the background and handles the complete ordering process and distribution of any prints that are sold at your site, taking the burden of tracking and mailing print orders, off your shoulders. There is an annual charge and a transaction fee, however. Storefront businesses typically have an annual fee for this type of service. Considering all the administrative work that the storefront business does for you, it's well worth your consideration. One of the more popular storefront businesses is zenfolio.com. You may want to check it out. Personally, I'd rather spend my time taking pix rather than tracking and mailing out customer orders.
Image Resolution. Be aware that maximum resolution for any viewable image on the Internet is 72ppi for an image viewed on a MAC and 96ppi for an image viewed on a Windows-based computer. I've been a Flickr user since 2009. Although uploading images to your Flickr site is easy, Flickr has changed the page layout/format and the user procedures for the image sharing process multiple times during this past year without any advance notification to users. Makes me wonder whether or not I should continue my pro account. They've also made my Flickr site a beta test site to test their new "enhancements", on occasion, without even telling me. That drove me bonkers whenever I was trying to post one of my Flickr images at another website. Although Flickr seems to have tweaked the resolution of the viewable image a bit, the maximum viewing resolution on any monitor is still going to be 72 or 96ppi depending on what kind of computer monitor is being used to view the image. For this reason, you may want to stop and give some very thoughtful consideration to what you want to accomplish with your own website and what you want to accomplish by using Flickr as the hosting location that's going to be storing all your images. I shot over 8000 images on recent photo shoot. When I got home, I posted some of them at my Flickr site, with the intent to share/post a few of them at a forum website. Well, once again, Flickr had changed the sharing process. I bet I spent at least 3 hours trying to figure out how how to do it. Flickr has also bumped the annual fee for maintaining a pro account. So, I'm definitely considering my options at this point...might move over to a storefront business. At least I'd be using my time more productively and far more efficiently. BTW, if you think that having your own website is going to generate a lot of business/revenue for you, forget it. It won't. It's better to structure it as an information only site and then use a storefront business to sell prints. Very few pros make a living selling prints off their own website. Too many digital photographers out there in recent years who are giving their images away for free, just to see their name and one of their images in print. If you want to get paid for your images, then research the organizations for highly respected publications that pay money for images that are published in their publication. With so many aspiring pro photographers taking some very fine images, you've got to be extremely careful not to give a publisher exclusive rights to an image. You can lose a lot of money doing that if the image is a once-in-a-life image. READ ALL THE FINE PRINT IN THE PUBLISHER'S/ORGANIZATON'S LICENSE AGREEMENT!!!
Lastly, be sure to do whatever you can to keep your images protected from the pirates who may want to steal your image and use it at their own website. Here's the process I use to upload an image on Flickr. It's definitely slows down the pirates.
1) select your image, make a copy and import the copy into your photo-editing program. If you're shooting in RAW format, you'll first have to convert the RAW image to a TIFF and then import the TIFF into the editor.
2) resize a horizontal image to 600ppi (width) x 480ppi (height) and a vertical image to 480ppi x 600ppi.
3) make any editing enhancements/changes you want (saturation, color, contrast, highlights etc.)
4) when you're done doing the basic editing, then sharpen the image, using your editing program
5) Use the "SAVE FOR THE WEB" command" to save the edited image as a jpg (using the highest image quality setting) Do not use the "SAVE" command!!
Editing the image BEFORE you post it on Flickr gives you the best possible image quality for viewing on the Internet.
5) when you're done enhancing the image, then put your copyright notice directly on the image.
For PS or PS Elements users, select the text tool, the font and text color you want to use
Then insert your copyright notice directly on the image. I use the lower left-hand corner.
To get the copyright symbol, use the following keyboard combination: Alt+ 0169.
6) then upload the edited image copy to your Flickr site. I never recommend editing or uploading an original image.
Here's why I use this process. You've got to make it very difficult for a pirate to steal your images. The more work that's involved for a pirate to edit/modify a stolen image for his own use, the less likely he is to steal it...far too much work! Remember, your edited image was re-sized to a maximum 600x480 and was saved at the highest resolution (either 72 or 96ppi). As far as I know, the Internet can only read and display jpeg images. And the maximum viewing resolution for an Internet image is only 96ppi.
For a pirate to be able to use one of your Flickr images, he'll have to edit your posted image. That means using his own editing program to re-size the image. He'll also have to remove your copyright notice. So, the pirate has a significant amount of time and labor involved if they want to make one of your images their own. Moreover, if the jerk wants to use your image for printing purposes, then the lower resolution on your image (96ppi) is going to pixelate like crazy. The print is going to look absolutely terrible (all the edges will be jagged). Remember, most pro labs make prints using a resolution somewhere between 250 and 400ppi. So, just imagine what a 96ppi web image is going to look like as a print.
If a pirate wants to steal an online image for use at awebsite, then they still have to edit the image (re-size it and remove the copyright). It's important to remember that every time you save an image as a jpeg, the image is compressed, resulting in a loss of color data. So if you're shooting pix in jpeg format lets look at how many times your original image is being compressed and saved as a jpeg, resulting in lost data: 1) the camera compresses your original raw image and saves it in jpeg format before it ever gets written to your memory card 2) every time you edit and save the jpeg image in a photo editing program, image data is lost again. 3) since the pirate also has to remove the copyright notice from your low-res image, the image loses even more color data.
So, is it really worth it for a pirate to steal an online jpeg image? Not hardly! There's far too much work involved and the image results are going to look absolutely terrible either at a website or as a print. Going through this editing process has really lowered the theft of my images. It takes longer but it really slows down the pirates. I also do periodic website reviews, searching for my images. Takes some time but you'd be shocked at the organizations that are using other people's images without getting the photographer's permission. And many of them, know better. Sadly, far too many people think that, just because an image appears on the Internet, they can swipe it and use for their own use. Not so...it's a violation of US Copyright Law. The US Copyright Office has an excellent website. If you want to know more, check out the website. FYI...Every website, including all the site content and images, are protected under the law.
Hope this information helps you, James. And the best of luck to you!
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