Unlimited storage, password protection, no ads. Excellent site for backup and sharing of photos.
Written: Aug 19 '05
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I recently went on my first vacation after purchasing a digital camera. After taking trips with my film camera, I used to just scan pictures and put them in manually-created HTML pages on my website, but I wanted to find a better option because I had taken many beautiful pictures that were large -- and I wanted to keep them large -- and I didn't have enough room on my website. In addition, I wanted to give viewers the option of viewing the images in a small size as well because I have several friends with dial-up connections. After looking at various options, I decided that going for a pay photo sharing site would be best for me. The free photo sharing sites tended to have strings attached, limited space, etc., and I decided that if I wasn't going to do it myself, I wanted to go with someone who would do it well. Another option was finding a larger webspace and creating my own galleries, but I decided that the time and effort saved by going with a service that would do all that for me was worth the price.
After doing a lot of online research, reading reviews such as those found on Epinions, I settled on smugmug. The unlimited bandwidth was a huge draw. Because I can upload all my originals, smugmug acts as a backup medium. (They actually store *two* copies of each photo!) Smugmug automatically creates four re-sized versions of each photo: thumbnail, small, medium, and large. The original is still there as well, so that means that there are 5 versions of each photo available for viewers.
There are three types of accounts. I went with the most basic account type, the Standard account, which is normally $29.95 a year, but I paid $25.95 using someone else's referral code (see last paragraph). With the standard account, you get a URL of the form http://{your-custom-id}.smugmug.com, which makes sharing very easy.
In addition to the features described earlier, you get the ability to sort your pictures into as many galleries as you want, and you can sort the galleries into multiple categories and sub-categories, creating a nice heirarchy. Batch uploading tools are available, and if you're a developer, there's an API you can use to create your own tools to upload and manage your photos.
Once photos are uploaded into galleries, you can sort (either manually or automatically by time, filename, etc.), move, caption, and do limited editing (color, crop) on your photos.
Password-protection is available for individual galleries or, if you prefer, your entire site. You can also hide galleries completely, so viewers don't even know they exist.
Viewers can comment on any photo or gallery.
With the Standard account, you get a handful of gallery styles. With the more expensive account types, you get more customization. Another limitation of the Standard account is the lower download bandwidth (4GB/month), but I haven't personally had a problem with this so far. If you think you're going to be getting a huge amount of traffic, though, be sure and crunch the numbers (multiply the average size of your photos by the number of photos you will have on your site by the number of times you think the photos will be viewed) to make sure it will be enough for you. Traffic statistics (per photo!) are available to help you track usage as well as to let you know which photos are the most popular. :-)
No ads. No spam. There are more features, but this review is long enough.
Now, for my complaints: I wish smugmug would separate traffic statistics for *my* views, while logged in, and those of others. I have to view photos in order to sort, rotate, edit captions, etc., and this influences my stats. I'd like to know how many times someone *other* than I has seen my photos. I also wish password-protection was available at the photo level. More customization for Standard accounts would be nice. More detailed traffic information (from the web server) would be nice as well, so I can figure out where viewers are coming from. ;-)
All in all, though, smugmug has worked out well for me (so far). I encourage you to examine other choices before making a decision, though -- maybe someone else has a feature that I don't care about, but you do.
Smugmug has a nice referral program. Every user is given a referral code. When a new user signs up using a current user's code, he/she gets $5 off their subscription while the current user is credited $10 towards his/her next subscription. Nice! If you found my review helpful and choose to sign up with smugmug, please use my referral code: YC5rSv1Zagxy2
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
rk_houston
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Reviews written: 1
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