Your Own Portfolio
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Making your own photographic portfolio is a major step up from the spam engines of Facebook, Instagram and the like. Maintaining a portfolio should be easy, so you spend more time making photographs than managing the online experience.
Simply, if you want to control how your viewers and clients if you are in business see your work, your own portfolio is the only way to go. It really is about what gets shown, how that is done and ensuring that your content isn’t buried in crap and ads. A portfolio is about you, not a stream of comments from fictitious people earning money working on the side. One of the many reasons why Facebook is such a piece of shit.
Portfolio Services
A portfolio service has one job. To present your work, the way that you want it presented. You also get what you pay for. A free site may be nice, but if you aren’t paying, be sure that someone is, often in the form of receiving bots, cookies, getting added to spam email lists and having their identity lifted. So if integrity matters to you, avoid anything from Meta or Google and anything owned and operated from China.
Adobe Portfolio
We will start with one that every Adobe Creative Cloud customer gets, called Adobe Portfolio. It integrates with your Creative Cloud account. It costs you nothing extra because you have already paid for it. It’s reasonably quick to create, not horrible, and can look decent, but it is very limited in terms of layout controls and if you want to sell or license your work, it’s not the place to be.
Pros
Included with creative cloud
Publish from Adobe Creative Cloud
Cons
From Adobe
Support experience is awful
Squarespace
Squarespace is a website builder and hosting platform. It is not free and the charges vary depending on how much you want to deliver to your viewers.
They have multiple professionally designed templates and their page layout in the current release is all grid based. You drag the object onto the page and define the content. It’s great for individual images, as well as photo carousels, and galleries. Squarespace support is excellent, I rank support as an important criteria for any one who is not web coder. There’s no coding required at all with Squarespace.
Pros
Fast to build
Professionally designed templates
Superb support
Integrated e-Commerce
Cons
Mid to High priced option
Does not offer integrated email services
https://www.squarespace.com/websites/create-a-portfolio
Format
Format is a long established online portfolio service built initially for professional photographers. It has many professionally designed templates and is well suited to portfolios and galleries but also does a great job in its client proofing services.
Pros
Designed for photography
Great templates
Easy cloud storage for imaged
SEO tools and analytics fully integrated
Cons
Takes planning to build a successful setup
Mid Priced Option
SmugMug
SmugMug is designed for photographers. As such its portfolios, galleries and client proofing options are excellent. You can also sell direct from SmugMug and its security is excellent so you can control what can be downloaded directly from the interface. There is no storage limit so one account can have a master portfolio containing many sub-portfolios. Like any good portfolio service, planning is required because the amount of depth and flexibility allows for errors if the user is not planful
Pros
Excellent client proofing
Extensible and customizable templates
Integrated e-commerce
Excellent security
Publish directly from Adobe Lightroom Classic
Cons
Developed a bad reputation over ten years ago, now addressed but memories persist
High priced option
Resolving sync issues can be ugly
Zenfolio
Zenfolio has also been around for some time and is well established. It remains very business oriented allowing for very flexible galleries that can be client password protected. It also has an excellent e-commerce engine included
Pros
Secure client specific sections
Integrated e-commerce
Includes marketing and SEO tools
Mobile specific templates
Cons
Can be complex to get started
Mid to High Priced Option
Wrapping Up
There are many more services advertising themselves as portfolio services but most of them are more accurately web hosts with a couple of image pages and are not built for photographers. All those listed here other than Squarespace are not also serious web property systems, they focus on photographers. Your best bet is to use a free trial if offered to see how hard it is for you to get to something that you like. If you find it difficult, spend no more time on it and try a different one. As you will be paying an ongoing expense for the portfolio service it just makes sense to aggressively try before committing.
I tend to go with Squarespace for my own clients first, but I have clients using Format, SmugMug and ZENfolio along with a number of students and former students who are happy with Adobe Portfolio, so long as they never require support.
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