If “build my website” is still on your To Do list and you’re an Adobe Creative Cloud member, Adobe Portfolio might be your next stop. Adobe Portfolio is a web-based service that lets you build a website for your best photography, design, video, and other creative work. Portfolio is neither the first nor the most feature-rich of the many web-based site builders. But it’s well targeted to Creative Cloud members who need a quick, easy way to get a focused body of work online.
Adobe Portfolio replaces the ProSite online portfolio service that originally came with the Behance creative social network acquired by Adobe. Portfolio and Behance are Creative Cloud services for presenting your work and interacting with the creative community online. Adobe Portfolio isn’t a desktop or mobile application; you use it in a web browser. You start it up by signing into myportfolio.com with your Adobe ID.
As with other Creative Cloud services, you sign in to Adobe Portfolio with your Adobe ID.
Is Adobe Portfolio the Right Choice for Your Website?
Browser-based website builders are nothing new; we’ve covered quite a few on CreativePro (see Best Websites for Graphic Design Portfolios and Choosing a Website For Your Photos). With so much choice out there, why consider Adobe Portfolio? Free sites tend to show ads and have limited design control, while feature-rich sites without ads typically have a significant monthly or annual fee.
Adobe Portfolio doesn’t have ads and gives you a fair amount of creative control, and the templates are designed well enough that creative professionals won’t be embarrassed to show their work on them. And if you’re an Adobe Creative Cloud member, there is no additional charge for using Portfolio.
Adobe Portfolio is a good choice if you want to:
- Quickly and easily create a website for your creative work without writing code
- Use your own domain name
- Add buttons for your social media feeds, such as Instagram and Twitter
- Sync projects between Adobe Portfolio and Behance
- Use Typekit fonts
- Upload content you already have in Lightroom Mobile and Creative Cloud file storage
- Analyze site traffic using your Google Analytics account
On the other hand, Adobe Portfolio isn’t a good fit if you want to:
- Design or install additional themes
- Edit CSS, PHP, or JavaScript code
- Provide non-public services to clients, such as private proofing/review galleries or print fulfillment
- Sell from the site
- Blog from the site
- Upload and manage thousands of images from your camera
If you need more than Portfolio offers, depending on your skill level you can build your website using Adobe Muse or Adobe Dreamweaver which are also included with a Creative Cloud membership. You can also try one of the browser-based website builders in the CreativePro articles mentioned earlier. Because Portfolio is a web-based service, its capabilities may change as Adobe improves the service over time.
Planning an Adobe Portfolio Site
The basic units of a Portfolio site are Projects, Project Galleries, Custom Pages, and Links. Creating your Portfolio site goes much faster if you previsualize and organize your content along these lines before you start working in Portfolio.
Projects are sets of your work, while Project Galleries are like categories under which you can organize those sets. The terminology can be a little confusing if you think of a “gallery” as a container for individual works, because in Adobe Portfolio, “gallery” means a container of projects, not of individual works.
This is how Adobe Portfolio terminology corresponds to the parts of a typical portfolio website.
You can use Custom Pages for other purposes, such as the About page or Contact page that you see on many websites. For example, on an About page you might type a paragraph about yourself along with a photo that you upload. A Link lets you send visitors to a URL you enter, such as your online store.
Working with Layouts
Portfolio offers a selection of site designs, or layouts; you can see a demo of each layout on the Portfolio site. Layouts are similar to what other website builders call themes. The range of styles is limited, but you can differentiate your Portfolio website by customizing background images, margins, spacing, colors, rollovers, site icons, fonts, and other details. You can switch layouts at any time while keeping all of the content you entered.
I change my 2-column gallery layout (top) to 4 columns (bottom). The space between thumbnails is set by Margins sliders in the Cover Images panel which isn’t currently visible.
If you’re accustomed to other browser-based website builders that let you install more themes or design your own themes, that isn’t available in Portfolio. On Project or Custom pages you can insert media in any order, but they’ll flow in a single column. Adobe Muse and Dreamweaver provide much more control over page layout, but Portfolio is easier to use.
Preparing Media
You can add content to a Portfolio project in many ways: Upload files from your computer, embed iframe content tags from sites such as YouTube and Google Maps, or import photos synced with Lightroom Mobile. You can also import directly from your Creative Cloud Files (document storage), but not from Creative Cloud Libraries. The Add Form button inserts a complete contact form in one click.
The Add Media panel provides many ways to bring content into a Portfolio website.
In my tests, if an image is 1920 pixels wide or larger, Portfolio serves it at 1920 pixels wide to a desktop web browser, even if its displayed size is much smaller in the browser window. This large size seems to slow down the editor at times, and it makes it possible for site visitors to download high definition versions of your images. If this concerns you, consider downsampling images to smaller pixel dimensions before you upload them, though you should use pixel dimensions large enough to satisfy potential clients who visit your website using desktop displays. For smartphone screens, Portfolio limits images to 600 pixels wide.
Some website builders allow uploading and storing full size images while letting you limit the pixel dimensions of displayed images, but Portfolio doesn’t appear to have that option at this time.
Like most website builders, Portfolio expects you to upload in web-friendly image file formats such as JPG and PNG. What if you want to show off the great work you did in InDesign, Illustrator, or other Creative Cloud applications? You can’t upload those native formats if you use the Upload Files option. But by adding content using the Creative Cloud option, I was able to import InDesign (.indd), Illustrator (.ai), and Portable Document Format (PDF) files. Of course, this means you have to copy those files to your Creative Cloud file storage first. Also, Portfolio displays those formats as JPEG (.jpg) files, and displays only the first page of multiple-page documents.
Worried about people downloading your portfolio images? You can choose to disable context menus on images, though Portfolio wisely warns that downloading images is still possible by tech-savvy visitors. Portfolio preserves image metadata, including copyright metadata you embed into images you upload. You can’t add a watermark to images with Portfolio, but many creative professionals believe that watermarks are unappealing to potential clients.
Building Portfolio Pages
When you’re getting started, the big plus sign of the Add Content button leads you to choices for creating a new Project, Custom Page, Project Gallery, or Link.
After you click the Add Content button (left), you can choose which type of content to add (right).
You’ll often use the floating editing remote control panel to customize your site. Its buttons expand into panels and tabs that reveal many more options. A nice touch is that you can watch the page update immediately with your edits, although those edits don’t change your live website until you tell it to.
The editing remote floats over your layout as you work, changing to provide relevant options for the current page.
You can insert or delete content at any time. When you make changes, you can preview them before they go live. When you publish your site, by default it’s a subdomain of myportfolio.com (username.myportfolio.com), but you can also use a domain name you already own.
I’m about to choose a photo from Lightroom Mobile that will be inserted between the two photos already on the page.
Performance
Portfolio performed well for me in the Mac Safari web browser, but full-size images seemed to slow it down. Because it’s web-based, I decided to work on a site using my iPad mini 2, but Portfolio seemed to crash browser tabs regularly. It may be because my iPad mini 2 has less RAM than current models, but I can edit sites using a competing service on the same iPad without crashes.
There are several ways that the user interface and performance of Portfolio don’t scale well for large numbers of images, projects, or galleries. Those issues may not affect a portfolio site intended to focus on a few of your best works, but if a large-scale site is your goal, Portfolio is not the best solution.
Every project you create is listed under every gallery so that you can toggle which projects are displayed within that gallery. But a long list of projects can make galleries hard to manage.
A Nice Perk for Creative Cloud Members
The market of browser-based website builders is so rich and diverse that Adobe Portfolio isn’t a reason to join Adobe Creative Cloud on its own, but if you’re already a member and you need a simple showcase website that’s easy to set up, Portfolio is ready and waiting to help you out. Portfolio fulfills the basic mission objectives of a creative professional’s website: “This is my work, follow me on social media, and contact me so we can work together.”
Update: Since I wrote this article I’ve noticed that at least two things have changed in Portfolio. One is that images are now reproduced at a maximum of 3840 pixels on the long side, even if you upload a larger size.
The bigger change is that what used to be called a “project” or “custom page” in Portfolio is now simply called a “page”. Adobe announced these changes in September 2017; read Updates to Pages and Galleries.
This article was last modified on January 8, 2023
This article was first published on July 7, 2016
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