Review - Smugmug
November 22nd, 2005 by gregr
And now we come to Smugmug, the last photo-sharing site in my series. A bunch of folks in the dpreview forums seem to use them, so I thought I’d take a look.
I had to put in my credit card to get a trial account. Not a problem for me, I’ll generally do this with reputable sites that have folks recommending them. So a few minutes later, I had a “standard” account set up.
The standard account is $29.95/yr, and lots of people will give you a link to get $5 off, so it’s basically $24.95/yr. Unlimited storage, and 4GB/mo of download capacity. Hmm…it’s hard to put that in perspective, but if I’m serving up more than 4GB/mo, hopefully I’m in a position to be happy about it and pay more. :-)
I like that I can organize photos into galleries, and surface those galleries very obviously on the front page. No problem telling people about it - “go to gregr.smugmug.com and check out my washington, dc pictures”. I can even control the ordering of galleries on the page, and also ordering of photos within the galleries. You can also group on the front page by category, and show galleries within their categories. All in all, quite a bit of flexibility.
Password-protection is available, and is very easy to use. I have one gallery on my site that’s password protected, and you just need the password to access it. It’s not exactly high-grade security, but I’m also not trying to protect blueprints of a bank vault. If something needs super-secure protection, I probably wouldn’t put it on a public site to begin with.
EXIF information is optionally exposed for every photo, and displays a popup. I’m not totally thrilled with the popup, but it works and I can live with it. For some reason, this site also shows shutter speeds in a very strange way - for this photo, shutter speed is displayed as “0.0062s (10/1600)”. Come on…couldn’t you just say 1/160, and save me having to figure it out myself? Zoto does the same thing, and I just don’t get it.
There are also some strange EXIF problems. This picture shows a shutter speed of 15.625 sec, which I can promise you is not accurate. I sent a note to their support alias to this effect…and WOW. Two separate folks wrote back to me within 10 minutes. This on a Sunday - very cool. It wasn’t perfect, though…Andy from Smugmug said the camera writes inconsistent info so they can’t fix it (doubtful, as Windows XP can display the correct info for this exact same file), and Ben said it looked strange and he’d pass it along to their developers. I chose to listen to Ben. :-) (one week later, haven’t heard anything, problem still appears).
Smugmug also supports tags (they call them keywords), and they’re pretty easy to manage. I couldn’t enter “night” as a keyword - it just wouldn’t show up. One more note to support, another response in about 5 minutes saying it was probably an erroneous entry on a blacklist, and he’d have someone take care of it. (one week later, problem is still there).
I like the overall look/feel. There are multiple styles you can use, and the site is easy to navigate for both the owner and visitors. The only nitpicky thing that comes to mind is the page numbers on the gallery pages - it’s a little hard to find, and watching over peoples’ shoulders, I notice that not everyone sees them, and they assume there’s only one page of photos. Small thing, but there is probably a way to make that stand out a bit more.
I like the geo-tagging capabilities (via Google Earth) - it’s fun to see my photos on a map. My only suggestion (sent to support guys) was to make it so I can tag multiple photos with one location all at once. So once I figure out the latitude/longitude of the Denver Zoo, let me tag all 20 pictures in a gallery with that data all at once. As it is, this process will take about 7 minutes to do 20 pics, and my mouse hand will be pretty sore by the end.
And a couple of things I haven’t experimented with too much yet. With upgraded accounts you can completely customize the site’s headers, footers, and styles - nice. You can also set your own pricing for people who order prints of your photos, and you keep most of the markup (not that I need that feature now, but I really like that it’s there).
All in all, I like Smugmug a lot, and I’ve decided to stay there for now.
[If you want to try it yourself, save yourself $5, and save me $10 :-), use this link.]
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005 at 6:28 pm and is filed under photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 22nd, 2005 at 7:49 pm
Why not host your own using Community Server?
November 23rd, 2005 at 10:19 am
Tim - good thought, but I really wanted to use a hosted service that wouldn’t require any maintenance from me.
That’s a bit unlike me, I know. :-)
November 23rd, 2005 at 2:03 pm
Good review! Haven’t heard of Zoto before, but I like the way you described all three services with their ups and downs, even though I’m already settled with smugmug.
Concerning the EXIF trouble - these extra zeros at the end used to be there more often, but I guess they managed to contain the problem more.
Even though the strange EXIF value is really strange. Don’t worry - if they said they’re looking after it it’s usually just a matter of time. It takes some time for them to roll out changes, as they have to test everything. In the last month they’ve been really busy with everything. If the problem still persists in a couple of weeks - send them a short reminder.
If you’re looking for more smugmug users - head over to http://www.dgrin.com - this is sort of the unofficial support forum for smugmug where Andy and a lot of other smugmug users are there to help you in case you’ve got any questions.
Sebastian
November 23rd, 2005 at 9:05 pm
Good review!
And, since you didn’t mention that part: Smugmug also provides some free open API for everybody to use. Which leads to a number of 3d party apps extending and expanding your Smugmug-related experience.
You can find them all on smugmug Hacks page. Or, even better, you can go directly to http://www.starexplorer.com and download Star*Explorer, which allows for unlimited upload, auto file format conversion, extensive sales reporting and a whole bunch of other neat tricks, including “Send To” shell extension that allows you to send your pictures and folders to your Smugmug account right from your standard issue windows explorer.
HTH
November 24th, 2005 at 12:55 am
Have a look at Fotki too. Great service as well. (http://www.fotki.com/)
January 29th, 2006 at 10:54 pm
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March 20th, 2006 at 3:06 pm
I have begun to hate this site. The software is full of bugs. I moved a whole bunch of photos from one gallery to the other and they dissappeared into thin air. The resolution sucks. If I click on any of the photos in the gallery, it says loading for ever and goes off into la la land.
September 20th, 2006 at 7:02 am
A SmugMug standard account is $39.95 a year now.
April 26th, 2007 at 10:00 pm
I love SmugMug. I signed up 3 years ago and so far did not find any web site which gets close. Is there anybody who like FLICK? It’s so disorganized and ugly.
why I love it so much?
1. I can put videos from my camera next to my snaps
2. I can see original size
3. I contacted customer support on sunday and got response in minutes !!!
January 6th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Any updates on the reviews? Its been a couple of years now and the photo sharing landscape has changed a lot. I think! An update would be really useful!!
March 31st, 2008 at 11:14 am
I use it for customizing my whole website! I love it!! I have been with Smugmug for over a year now.. they are nothing less then amazing!
May 8th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
Even better than the hordes of back-scratching $5 off codes, use the door-busting “yahoo” for 50% OFF the first year. I successfully used it 2 days ago. (”picasaweb” is another 50% refugee code I found but did not try.)
June 25th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
Thanks, Scott. I entered “yahoo” in the box titled “Email / Coupon” and saved $75.00 on a pro level subscription.
July 12th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
I have been using Smugmug for 2 years now. I emailed a complaint the first week about a lot of downtime for maintenance, and they gave me a free year subscription. On my renewal this year, they told me they I was getting a free year again as I had a lot of referrals. I only use the site to share with family and friends, but they all say that they enjoy it and they often order prints of my photographs through the Smugmug site, which I think refers the orders to Shutterfly, but am not sure. Anyway, over two years in now, haven’t paid a dime yet, and I am very satisfied. (They even sent me a free Smugmug camera strap recently.)
September 6th, 2008 at 9:05 am
There’s this insane plugin called Smugglr, which literally allowed me to move my entire Flickr album (1000+ photos) with virtually no effort. I set it up, walked away, and when I came back my entire Smug Mug Gallery was totally loaded with my Flickr photos, tags, descriptions, and even my Flickr galleries. It was just ridiculously easy to migrate the content.