Adobe's "My Portfolio"

Basic Training

Adobe Portfolio Website

Okay, I haven't been out shooting since New Year's Day, but that's a different story. Instead, I've been working on some post processing practicing, including buying Scott Kelby's Photoshop CC 2017 book. I'm about 1/3 of the way through it and may write a bit of a review later.

Besides his book, I have watched a lot of his "The Grid" videos (http://kelbytv.com/thegrid/) and get quite a bit of information from his show. On his recent episode about "Is Your Presentation Killing Your Photography - Episode 269", he mentioned the Adobe Portfolio hosting as a great option for photographers.

I thought I'd check it out this weekend...

I like it

Okay, I gave it away. I'm not planning on writing a long bit on this host, at this point anyway. I just started using it this afternoon and after about 6 hours it looks promising. So much so that I may just use it instead of my SmugMug site.

Before getting much farther, check out my new site at: https://randallmorter.myportfolio.com.

I have a few of points to make...

Free for Adobe Photographer CC Subscribers

This was the thing that Scott Kelby mentioned which caught my attention. If you're paying the $10 per month (and he has a discount available, by the way), you get a free hosting account! 

Simple Layouts

There aren't a boatload of layouts available but there's probably enough because you can customize them quite a bit. I'm using the "Marta" layout. You can see my site looks different than their examples.

There are some customizations I wish were available but aren't. But I seem to have gotten around them okay so far.

Notable Benefits

Here are a few things that I immediately like:

• It's free for me and other Adobe Photo CC subscribers!
• It's got a "responsive" design - it scales nicely for my iPhone. There are previews on the editor to let you see how it will look on smaller monitors.
• It's freeish!
• There aren't a lot of options and the ones that are there are pretty intuitive, at least if you've used any other WYSIWYG editor (I've used SmugMug and jAlbum).
• You can order your images manually.
• It beats writing your own web site!
• It doesn't cost me any more because it's freeish!

Notable Limitations

Here are a few of the limitations:

• No shopping cart. It won't work for selling your photography directly.
• No way to put any of your own scripts in the site - you can't embed 3rd party shopping carts.
• I wish there was a way to limit vertical orientation photographs so that they fit on the viewer's screen. You can kind of get around it with a lightbox but I wish that extra level of button clicking wasn't necessary.
• You can't enter text on a "gallery".
• The site doesn't use any of your photo's EXIF data.

What took me so long?

I wasn't aware of it, but I'll bet there was information about it in one of the Adobe newsletters that I get but never look at.

As for the time required to set it up, I found out you can kind of automate things almost like the SmugMug plugin for Lightroom. You have to set up and enable syncing to Lightroom mobile. Once you do that you can create a collection in Lightroom that is "syncable", add images to it, and they're automatically uploaded to an Adobe Lightroom site. From there you can import them into your portfolio after you create a "project".

I'll post more about this after I've used it a bit more...