Jim M. Goldstein posted an article at his blog yesterday that deals with recent changes at Photoshelter and Digital Railroad, two sites that have provided galleries, archival storage, and sales/licensing resources for many photographers. Photoshelter (which I’ve checked out and which seems to have a lot of interesting resources to offer) recently changed their service, eliminate an important element of what they originally offered to photographers. Digital Railroad suddenly announced its shutdown with almost no notice earlier this week, leaving many photographers in the lurch. In both cases, it appears that these services ran into funding problems that interfered with their business plans. Follow the link back to Jim’s article to read more background on this.

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit recently as well. Being somewhat internet-savvy, I have worked with web hosting companies and more or less operated my own server applications, including the software that supports this blog/web site and other software that supports my gallery. This has not been without its problems. Ignoring for the moment the fact that hosting companies can also fail (keep good backups! of everything!), I ran into a serious customer support issue with my previous hosting company and had to move my entire web presence to another host (which seems to be doing a fine job, by the way) on very short notice. Although it is probably a story for another time, I’ll acknowledge that my choice to manage my own web presence cost me a ton of time during the past month, and has left me with some problems at this site that are still unresolved. (Notably a number of photos are now missing and, in some cases, stories are now linked to the wrong photographs.)

During this little web debacle that I’ve dealt with, I almost came to a decision to host my photographs at one of these commercial photography sites. I looked at three: pbase, zenfolio, and Photoshelter. While a full review is beyond the scope of this post, I will say that all three have a lot of worthwhile features to offer, the pricing seems reasonable to me, and I came “that close” to moving my photographs to one of the three. While it still could happen, at this point I’m going to sit tight for a while and see what happens to this segment of the photography industry first.