Adobe Portfolio – Easy, Beautiful, Fast, Online Portfolios For Photographers & Other Creatives

I constantly struggle with how I want to display my images online. I have used/tried just about every single service, editor, portfolio site available. All of them have some flaw and some merit. But for some reason I am unable to settle down with any one service fo very long. I think online portfolios and camera bags are somehow related to mermaids. They sing a siren song and try to tempt you to come their way.

But I digress…

If you have an Adobe Creative Cloud account you might want to check out a very powerful service that’s included with your subscription. It’s simply called Adobe Portfolio. https://www.myportfolio.com/

What is Adobe Portfolio?

Portfolio is included with the Creative Cloud photographers’ program at $9.99 a month and happens to be a part of a larger package which also features Adobe Photoshop CC, Adobe Lightroom CC, and fonts from Adobe Type Kit.

Using this tool, your images will be the star but you can very easily (without any programming) add pages such as ABOUT ME, CONTACT, etc. You decide if you want these pages and what they say. You can even embed video if you like. It’s very flexible and very powerful given how easy it is to use.

While I have used (and even enjoyed) other ways to build an online portfolio, in my opinion there’s simply no easier way than this. The Adobe Portfolio site is designed for people like me. I don’t program computers and I don’t rate the value of something by how hard it is to use. I rate things based on how EASY they are to use and this folks, is as easy as it gets.

The editor is simple yet powerful. There are five customizable templates that are already optimized for for use as a portfolio. It’s clear that these templates will showcase any creative’s work. You get access to Adobe’s amazing Typekit font library and (here’s the cool part) anything you can see on the page – you can edit/change.

Adobe Portfolio sites are also automatically optimized for viewing on any device including mobile. Unlike some of the services that claim to offer cross-design for mobile, the site Adobe Portfolio creates really does look good on my iPhone.

On my desktop and laptop computers, the images are presented in large, beautiful detail. Few portfolio tools I have tested offer images that are featured so beautifully. Adobe was very wise to configure their templates so that the work came front and center.

I’ll mention two other quick things I like about Portfolio or that I think you should know. For those who use Adobe’s community site Behance, you can easily connect your images so that they sync between Adobe Portfolio and Adobe Behance. Lastly, there’s a cool lightbox feature that makes for an interesting presentation.

The Domain Question

One of the problems I’ve had with some portfolio sites is that they don’t offer custom domain names. While I don’t happen to need one for this site now, I am glad that it is an option. When you build your site the domain will be yourname.myportfolio.com. You can (if you pay for it separately) purchase your own domain name and connect it to your portfolio instead.

Conclusion

If you want to see what my Adobe Portfolio site looks like check out http://scottbourne.myportfolio.com/ – now just so you know, I built this site in about 15 minutes. While I still want to add more images to it and tweak a few things, I really like the simplicity of it all and I like the way my images are displayed.

You can easily spend $9.99 a month (or much more) to have your portfolio hosted on a site that ONLY offers you the chance to show off your work. I am not picking on PhotoShelter because I happen to think they do a good job now that they have a mobile site, but their basic site is $9.99 a month and does NOT include Photoshop, Lightroom or Typekit. Given the fact that Adobe Portfolio is part of a Creative Cloud feature that costs less than $10 a month AND it includes fonts, Lightroom and Photoshop, well this makes it easy for me to give Adobe Portfolio my highest recommendation.

I will go so far as to say that Adobe’s Portfolio tool is so good, it’s worth the $9.99 a month all by itself.

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Filed under: Photography Tagged: Adobe, portfolio, Scott Bourne