I was asking around various forums for suggestions about image-hosting sites that were worth considering. Well, I answered my own question by going out and seeing what photo sites are there. The perfect one for me, so far, is something called Smugmug.com. Perhaps they are smug because they just bought Flickr. It’s not a free site, but it is very reasonable for what it offers.
For one, you get unlimited uploads. As a software engineer who had built and overseen many enterprise-level websites built, I am impressed at how functional and well-built this site is – very well thought out.
It deals mostly with JPG or GIF, but also include lossless .PNG, which not too distant from the TIF in which I store my finished photos. There are limits on the size, but they are good enough (150 megabytes in size and 210 megapixels). I am busy putting up some of my photo collection (or at least the start of it).
They have a number of finished templates that you can just adapt to your material and I choose one. Functionally, this is a very well-made system, with great tools for putting things online. I have never seen any better, IMO.
My site took about a day to put together, not including preparing files to upload. But with hundreds of thousands of images, it took me a week or two just to massage out some 40,000 images that I am considering. From these, I will pick a few thousand to post on the site as I find time.
They offer four plans and monthly subscriptions for $3, $5, $14, and $29 if billed annually. The two more expensive plans include a shopping cart complete with about every way to monetize images I could imagine. They offer fulfillment automatically through several major print-shops, a cradle-to-the-grave experience. Having built many shopping cart systems over the years, this one is really well made.
I am just starting to populate my site, but I have some 500 or so images up. Those of you interest in this sort of thing can check out what I’ve done here:
https://MichaelErlewine.smugmug.com