PBase Switching to for-fee Service

PBase is like Geocities for photographers. The service has been free from the beginning. It has some neat features which make putting up a photo gallery on the Internet very easy.

PBase allows a user to upload a zip archive containing a collection of photographs, expand it on the server, extract metadata from each photo and generate the web pages, all automagically, with minimal effort from the user. Each photo gallery comes with a guestbook and comments system. This is a highly valuable service to photographers who wish to show-case their work.

It has long been speculated that such a valuable service would eventually cease to be free. Indeed PBase has just announced that they are switching over to a for-fee service. The annual fee is US$23 for 100MB of space, or US$60 for 300MB.

Considering the high cost for bandwidth, storage, software development and maintenance, and labour involved in running a website like PBase, what PBase charge is very reasonable. From a different perspective, considering all the goodies PBase offer, the deal is a steal.

Short of spending lots of money to rent gallery space, have gallery prints made and organize a photo exhibition, what is a better and more cost-effective way to show one's photographic work than putting it up on the Internet for all to see and, maybe, admire? A photographer showing his/her work on the Internet could do a lot worse than using PBase.

A fellow amatuer photographer posted on one of the local news server that he would have to shut down his photo website since PBase now costs money. I am not too sure that this make sense to me. In contrast, I bought 10 rolls of Fuji Superia 400 for around HK$150 (~US$19) a couple of weeks ago, which hopefully would take me a couple of months to use them all. One may argue that the running cost of digital camera is much lower, in which case, one would have to consider that the cost of the equipment is not insignificant: I paid around HK$2K for my lowly Canon A40, ~HK$300 for a 2nd hand 128MB (tiny capacity by today's standard) CF memory card, and ~HK$200 for the charger and two sets of batteries. Most advanced amateurs and even beginners buy something more expensive. If PBase's US$23 annual fee is going to stress this fellow photographer's finance, then maybe he should consider giving up on photography and take up a less costly hobby, e.g. drawing, knitting or origami.

Disclaimer

I have no relationship whatsoever with PBase, except maybe as an observer. I am not a PBase user. In fact, I don't even know who runs PBase.