Frequently Asked Questions

If you have any questions, you may find the answer here. If you don't, please ask us and we'll get in touch with an answer as quickly as possible.

What does Photium do?

Our service enables photographers (or artists or anyone else!) to easily, quickly and at a low cost have their own website to display, share and sell their work.

No technical skills such as HTML or CSS are needed and the service is hosted by us, removing the hassle of setting up a website. You can control everything through an easy-to-use control panel in your web browser.

What are your prices?

We have a range of prices depending on the package you choose, as well as a 30 day free trial, with no card details needed. For detailed information about pricing, please check out our pricing page here.

What support will you offer?

We offer seven-day a week email support and we generally reply to all support queries within six hours, often within minutes. Our high level of support is something our customers often thank us for and we get a lot of referrals from happy customers as a result.

Of course, we don't expect you to take our word for it! Sign-up for our no-obligation free trial and experience it for yourself.

How long will it take to setup?

Many Photium users have their websites running at a basic level within 10-30 minutes of signing up for the free trial, although it may of course take slightly longer to have your website completely set up.

We've taken great care to make everything as easy as possible. For example, uploading with our Java upload tool is as simple as dragging and dropping jpeg images onto the upload page in your web browser. There's no fiddling around re-sizing each image before you upload it, or downloading FTP clients and entering login details.

Can I upgrade or downgrade between packages?

Absolutely, you can upgrade or downgrade at anytime.

I'm not a photographer, can I use your service?

Yes absolutely, we already host a lot of non-photographic websites, ranging from hair salons, to hotels.

I already have a domain name, can I use that?

Yes, when you are ready to start using your domain name with your website, we just need to know what the domain name is and we can provide further instructions and help as much as possible with the changeover.

I am using another company currently, can I switch my domain name to this website?

Yes, when you are ready to start using your domain name with your website, we just need to know what the domain name is and we can provide further instructions. We'll do everything we can to make it quick and easy for you.

I already have a hosting account, can I use your system on it?

Sorry, but the Photium system is too advanced to be easily installed on a traditional hosting account. You would also lose the benefit of the constant free tweaks and improvements we make, that all our customers enjoy without having to do anything themselves.

I am not from the UK will this be a problem?

Our system is configured for most of the major world currencies. We have customers from all over the world and welcome everyone to try our service.

What do I need to do to get a Photium website?

You can start your 30 day free-trial here. No card details are needed.

How reliable is the service?

We take the availability of the websites we host very seriously and have an excellent track-record as a result. Backups are performed every hour of the day and we have multiple off-site backups as well.

The data-center we use has a very high quality network and unlike some competitors, we never over-load our servers, which means your website will always load quickly. This is a key-difference between a service like ours and traditional web-hosts, where people can upload whatever they like and often cause problems for other users on the server, not to mention security-risks. As our servers only have Photium customers on and the service is tightly controlled, the risks of service disruption are massively reduced.

Can I sell my photos?

All our packages, including the trial include a powerful shopping cart built-in. As well as making it easy for your customers to buy from you, it also allows you to offer them discounts to encourage sales via promotion codes and offers like spend £50 get £5 off. There's comprehensive postage & packing settings so you can set up international delivery, next-day delivery, gift-wrapped postage charges etc.

Payments from your customers can be received directly to your own PayPal account, which they can use a credit card with if they don't have one themselves. If you don't have a PayPal account yet, it's free to create one and millions of potential customers also use PayPal.

If you don't want to use PayPal, or want to offer an alternative payment option, there is an offline payment method. You can use this to receive payment by post or use another service to invoice your customers for payment, after they have sent in their orders using the shopping cart.

After receiving an order, you can print it yourself and post the order to your client. Or you can choose from any of the online print labs available and send the order to them to process. We don't have any partnerships with printing companies and don't offer the service ourselves, so there's no inflexible tie-ins. Or on our Standard and Advanced packages you can have customers purchase low or high resolution downloads and automatically be emailed download links, so you don't have to have any involvement.

Last but not least, we don't take any commission, so for all payments, the profits go directly to you. With the minor caveat that PayPal do charge a small amount per transaction but they don't charge monthly fees like most merchant accounts. This can provide considerable savings over most of our competitors who charge commission on all sales.

Will you take any commission?

No, we don't charge any commission, either on print or download sales, the profits go directly to you.

Can I protect my photos from un-authorised use

Yes, we offer one of the best protection methods available: watermarking. This can be enabled on all your photos with just a few clicks. Another useful feature is that it is non-destructive, so you can change the watermark text and it will be updated on old photos as well as future ones.

Can visitors leave comments on my photos?

Yes, there is an option you can turn on to allow this. You can also choose whether their comments are shown, or whether you want to view and approve them before they are shown.

Can I change the colour scheme and design of my website?

There are many different colour combinations you can create by altering the colours of various sections of your website. This is done easily through a point and click interface. There are lots of fonts to choose from, different layouts and image border effects etc.

Plus, on the Standard and Advanced package we can help with custom design changes, often with no extra charge.

What other features are there?

There are too many to list here! We recommend starting a free trial to get a better idea of what is possible. Our Features page also covers a lot of the major functionality.

Will more features be added?

Yes, we always listen to customer feedback and try and incorporate new features as our customers request them. There is no additional cost for new features and all customers will receive them.

We typically add new features and improvements on a 1-2 week basis, even if we don't mention them all on our blog.
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