If you are a professional photographer with many digital photo and image for displaying online, an online photo portfolio is the best way for you showcases your talents and promote your service.

There are many online photo album and portfolio services that allow you to upload your digital photos, and create your online image gallery or photographer showcase. Many of these sites offering their service for free, as they generate their revenue from banner advertising or sponsorship.

Many People use these type of services because they don't need to bother with buying their own domain name, signing up with a hosting company. Fiddling with photo gallery software might sound difficult for non-programmers. Also many people don't have the time to learn or do not want to buy additional software, hence these free online photo portfolio and album services seems to offer easy solutions.

However, there are few problems with this approach. Although the photos are yours, the website is not, which means that your online photo portfolio's availability is depending on the website and the service provider. And when you want to switch to another hosting company, you would have to manually backup all the images from your existing online image portfolio, or all your work will be lost. Many online photo album website also state in their terms and conditions, that they will have ownership of the photos once they are uploaded to their server. Which means you might lose the ownership and copyright of your photos as soon as your photos are uploaded, and they might be sold or distributed without your awareness.

If you are serious about your online photo image portfolio, it would be best for you to have your own domain name and hosting, build your own website, and use a photo gallery software to establish your very own photographic image portfolio. This way all images are kept on your own PC, you can upload the portfolio to any server of your choice, and you can avoid any potential copyright issues.

You might have question about how to add an online photo gallery to website. Gone are the days when you had to learn html and php coding just to add an online photo album to your website. Now you can upload and create your own photo gallery easily using available photo gallery software tools, you can even make your entire website a photographic image portfolio, with multiple flash photo galleries.

Store the photo albums on your own web server means that you are not depending on another company to keep them online for you, and they are much safer as well. You keep the full ownership and copyright of the images. People can no longer easily download your photos using their browser, because flash gallery automatically disable the mouse right-click button. Your pictures are safely stored on your own host and you can update and upload new images anytime from your own PC.

There are a wide selection of flash photo gallery templates available online, with different skins designs and features such as clickable thumbnail, scrollable description and slide show functions. Presenting your online portfolio or exhibition in a fancy, sophisticated and professional way is all about making you stand out from the crowd. A photo gallery software with suitable templates will allow you do that just that with no effort or time involved at all in doing so. You will be able to create and upload your own web photo gallery to your own hosting a/c with just a few clicks. You can add an unlimited number of images and photos in each album, so if you have photos on various topics such as holiday, wedding, professionally portraits, etc, you can create multiple photo album and add your photos to them very easily and fast.

About the Author:

Godfrey Ko, website designer and software author. Develop software including a website builder and flash photo gallery.