You can’t add a watermark to images with Portfolio, but many creative professionals believe that watermarks are unappealing to potential clients. Portfolio preserves image metadata, including copyright metadata you embed into images you upload. 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. Also, Portfolio displays those formats as JPEG (.jpg) files, and displays only the first page of multiple-page documents. Of course, this means you have to copy those files to your Creative Cloud file storage first.
But by adding content using the Creative Cloud option, I was able to import InDesign (.indd), Illustrator (.ai), and Portable Document Format (PDF) files. 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. Like most website builders, Portfolio expects you to upload in web-friendly image file formats such as JPG and PNG.
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. For smartphone screens, Portfolio limits images to 600 pixels wide. 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.
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. 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. The Add Media panel provides many ways to bring content into a Portfolio website. 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. Projects are sets of your work, while Project Galleries are like categories under which you can organize those sets. Creating your Portfolio site goes much faster if you previsualize and organize your content along these lines before you start working in Portfolio. The basic units of a Portfolio site are Projects, Project Galleries, Custom Pages, and Links. 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. 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.