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payment option

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cprphotography
 
Posts: 14
Location: New York

payment option

Post Wed Oct 30, 2019 7:39 pm


When are you guys adding some kind of pmt option, is 2019-2020, you need to do this..

richo
 
Posts: 247

Re: payment option

Post Wed Nov 06, 2019 6:06 am


cprphotography wrote:When are you guys adding some kind of pmt option, is 2019-2020, you need to do this..

First, you probably would do better sending an email to support@pbase.com.

Second, do you mean add an option to sell prints of your photos? In the 17 years, I have been a member that was never on the table as far as I know. I used to sell prints via my galleries here using a PayPal form pasted into the image description...painful. There are much better options now that are free or for a yearly fee and some even handle fulfillment and returns for a cut of the sale.

thresholdprod
 
Posts: 575

Re: payment option

Post Mon Dec 16, 2019 6:48 am


A bit late but PBase was started with sole purpose of photographers being able to share images online for free.

That was in the day of free/paid personal websites options of Tripod, Angle fire(only two left standing) Geocities, Aol Hometown and numerous ISP based websites that when you moved to new provider your site(since the account was deleted) was removed. Back then digital cameras were about Grand for 3 Megapixels, my how far we have come cause that was high quality from 1.4 that stored them floppy disks. If you had a popular website with photo galleries(every image loaded and reloaded as they went back forth navigating was that many Kilobytes to megabytes of your allowance per time period. Which you would be penalized for using too much bandwidth. Websites that existed on advertiser revenue from page views like yahoo's Geocities would shut you down until the clock reset, you had a 24 hr limit a week limit and month limit, violate the month often and they would delete your website. Direct linking wasn't an option. Pbase was supported by donations of like minded people and Slug(chuck) and Emily were just friends in College, yet you could upload thousand of images in any size and they were served with out penalty. *note* "Please store your porn collection on your own harddrive please!"

What does that have to do about your question, Pbase wasn't set up to be commercial website, it never showed advertisements and trial accounts had no time limits nor any storage limits. If you images were popular you weren't penalized, nor were the hidden from public view. Of course some people tried running their porn sites off of Pbases Generosity on image bandwidth but for the most part it work for a long time when only 2 other competitors existed geared to photos, no myspace no facebook, no photobucket, no imgur, no instagram, no insert every option today... There was Live Journal but they didn't allow images just text. . One of the Big 3(name escapes me right now but it rocked the online photo image world) shut down with a no notice and only allowed you the option of buying your images at $80 per CD(that is 700MB) You could be several CD's in because you used them for online back up, the "cloud" wasn't even a dream. Those 2 other Photo sites did go the ads and sales route. Didn't work to well. Over the years and especially at Christmas when people received their brand new larger mega Pixel cameras ,the 5 megapixal barrier was a huge deal, by the way what is Pixel count of your phone today? Photoshop was $800 and rotating and fliping images and making pixel color swaps was huge. Look up PhotoShop 4's new features for laugh... Pbase had some growth pains due to everyone trying to upload all their largest sized uncompressed in max resolution pictures all at once. The users were a DOS attack. PBase could have become Getty Images but that isn't where they wanted to go, nor who they wanted to attracted.

There is lot of history from back when Slug's Dream became a registered domain which grew and expanded to be listed in Computer Shopper, PC World and Wired Magazines as one of the best top 3 websites in the world! Yet it was free with no ads, no sales, just photographers sharing photos. A lot has changed since then, a lot of users have left for free services and ones that let them sell prints, they also were encouraged to build their own websites. .com addresses were still available for almost everything.

So we're here in 2019 soon to be 2020 and PBase is different photo site, I wish we still allowed the trail accounts indefinitely and that the old ones were saved in archives. Many friends had free accounts here who weren't photographers. Sadly those accounts are gone, I always considered by donations as allowing me and the world access to see their's too. After all I have few photos of me but everyone else has more and I they few of them from back then but i do. That was the beauty.

Most of my images while popular aren't of the highest quality and I deleted many of those for being tired of them stolen and appearing on pay/porn sites... People using them to impersonate friends online and being the copyright holder having to go to battle to shut down people role playing as them. Some dram based for the modeling world, others innocent girls that didn't understand those images were of live person who has an active online life & Business model that they are confusing people and stealing from them.

I even was once threatened with being sued for shutting off direct linking on my images by a guy who claimed "I broke His Pay Website" by doing so, and was going to pay him the thousands he was loosing every day.... Yes he didn't just steal images, he was stealing the bandwidth I was paying for or may have been donating for . Sorry i don't remember the year but have the email saved somewhere for laughs.

For All that Pbase is and isn't being frustrated they aren't pushing the business model you want at the cheapest hosting, is a go set up shop on the websites that offer exactly what you want. Oh wait there is lot of competition and everyone is selling there, and that is kind of annoying. I paid for many years in advance, and thought I bought way beyond my life, so my friends could enjoy the early photos of them would survive. From back when I gave most of them their first digital image of themselves. Which reminds me I need to send in a check to pay for another 5-10 years worth of hosting, kinda surprised I'm still here. Not that I'll sell any photos or be able charge people to see them but because I want to share my images in the simplest form, without a bunch of scripts and/or ads trying to sell the image or some other product. That is what Pbase is for and has always done. Sadly in this day and age the website does cost money and so does all the professional back end people trust. Pbase doesn't go down anymore. Pbase doesn't have slow response do to college finals.... The Christmas overloading issue has been migrated.

So if you want to sell photos, there are numerous options, they will take a cut of what you charge though. Which what I'm guessing you hoping Pbase would set up and not do, not even the credit card processing fees.... If you want a custom website with credit card processor they come standard with a commercial package from any domain (re)seller. If you have so many images that the band width would cost too much you can still direct link them into you pay site or images for sale website.

Then again if think this is such an under served demand and the profit is there, you can set up such a website and service. Just set the uploads to automatically be edited in to different sizes like PBase does. That was once revolutionary for website to do for you. You had to make a thumbnail image yourself and link to the fuller size, now code does that for you. Those scripts once extremely processor heavy are now nothing compared to available options. Storage and serving data is cheaper than it has ever been per Gigabyte. If you do so I wish you the best and I hope you unseat Facebook's image services both so you do well financially,because the market needs competition and needs a service that is about privacy and doesn't use its people as the main product.
Bill Freeman
"A picture may be worth a thousand words, but usually consumes the bandwidth of more than two thousand." --Gym Quirk
Many great words of wisdom and advice http://www.pbase.com/help http://pbasewiki.srijith.net/


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