Photoswarm (beta)

Frequently Asked Questions

Where are your terms of service?

Our terms, along with a special treat if you are a dedicated terms reader, are here.

Is there a limit to the amount of photos I can upload?

Our free sites have an upload limit of 300 photos and the light & pro versions are unlimited. It is possible to increase the limit of the free sites free of charge by referring your friends. There is more information on that here.

Do you keep backups of my site?

Definitely. They're pretty solid too however as photos get compressed when they are uploaded to our system (it would take all day to upload if they didn't) there is no substitute for keeping your original photos and making local backups of them.

Can I make my site to look different?

We didn't want to end up with any crazy myspace like garishness so decided to keep the customisation simple and clean. You can change the background colour of your site (we forget the number of colours but it's a lot!) and also the background pattern by going to "site settings" within the admin section.

Is there anyway to stop images scaling to my screen size?

No! Your photos deserve to be as big as possible! We opted for a scaling effect so that if users wanted to view images larger than other services they would only have to make their browser bigger.

I'm a little worried people are going to steal my photos. What protection is there on Photoswarm?

We've disabled right clicking on large photos to make it a more difficult for people to steal photos and we've also got a "make this album private" feature which will hide the album from the homepage in case you don't want it displayed there.

A concrete way some photographers use is to mark their images with a "watermark" in photoshop or similar software before they upload them. There is a good tutorial here on how to watermark your photos.

Can I sell my photos via Photoswarm and is there any commission?

Our pro sites have the ability to sell images. As the transaction is taken care of via Paypal and the fulfilment of the order is carried out by the owner of the site there is no need for us to charge any commission as we're not really involved. Seemed fair to us anyway. It's incredibly easy to get setup too. There is more information here.

I want to sell photos via Photoswarm and have my clients download them rather than send CD's. It's this possible?

Our system doesn't support downloadable photos however there is a free 3rd party tool called dropbox that can be used in conjunction with our pro sites to enable the selling of photos and the downloading of them by clients. The process would look like this:

Photoswarm:

1. 1. You upload photos to one of our pro sites
2. 2. You configure different sale options for the photos (eg: full resolution download - $100 USD, 50% resolution download - $50 USD etc)
3. 3. Your client browses photos and decides to buy
4. 4. You receive money via paypal.

Dropbox (free 2gb account):

1. 5. You prepare the photos your client has purchased
2. 6. You make the photos available as a download link on dropbox
3. 7. You email your client with the link and they then download the photos.

Dropbox is a free 3rd party tool however it is something we're more than willing to help get setup and working.

Does Photoswarm run an affiliate program?

We sure do. For more information either head to our affiliate page or read our affiliate announcement on our blog.

I have a pro site and would like an email address associated with my domain name. How do I get this setup?

Simply get in touch with us and let us know what you would like your email address to be and we'll do the rest.

I could look at statistics all day long. Is there any way of tracking how many visitors there are to my site?

Yep! We've got Google Analytics Integration on our pro sites. There is more information on how to get this setup here.

What kind of server does Photoswarm run on?

Well it's not really a server but a distributed collection of server farms. We've got redundant storage which ensures high-availability and data safety and as our system is backed by over 50,000 servers it's infinitely scalable too. Rock solid and lightning fast is what you can expect.

OK, I want a pro site but want to use an existing www.yourname.com domain name that I already own. Is this possible?

Definitely. Send us an email and we'll let you know what's involved.

Where do I leave feedback or feature requests?

Over here!

How do I cancel my account?

Simply get in touch with us and let us know you would like to cancel.