dippin

I am about to take the plunge and start paying for a hosting services for my pictures. I already have a flickr account and I like the ease of commenting and sharing on photos. It is a great way to improve as a photographer and get good feed back by people who know what they are talking about.

However, one of the reasons I want to upgrade to a paid membership somewhere is to be able to host a large quantity of personal pictures (family, vacations, etc.). But I don't want those pictures to be visible to the general public**. I know flickr has the "visible only to friends" and "visible only to family" options, but the thing is, a good part of my family is quite "web-illiterate" and would have a hard time signing up, finding me, adding me as family, etc. So I was wondering how other photo sites are with relation to this.

One system that I really liked was smugmug's, where you can set passwords for certain pictures while making others public, so a link and a predetermined password is all it takes to share. The downside is that smugmug doesnt seem to have quite the community that flickr has, while being a little more expensive.

There are others that I have no experience with (zenfolio, pbase, etc) and would love to hear from anyone who uses them.

So I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations with regards to this.






**I teach for a living, and, finishing my PhD, the number of students will certainly increase as I become a professor full time, and I've been "cyber stalked" before by students (nothing serious) and Ive seen colleagues been seriously cyber stalked, so privacy is a must.