Comments on: Smugmug vs Flickr

By: The Visions of Kai

The Visions of Kai — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 20:34:10 +0000

I have to agree with Alfonso. There are always pros and cons to everything, everywhere. Smugmug’s font and logo
is definitely not professional looking.

By: Philippe Bouffaut

Philippe Bouffaut — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 21:07:00 +0000

Smugmug is the best online sharing photo tool I ever used.
Beside the fact that it stores your photos in full size and that it offers really unlimited storage, it can be upgraded with tons of community tools (upload from right click, …).
It starts at 39.95$/year for non professional accounts, but even at 39.95 it is really unlimited storage.
Living 6000km from my family, smugmug is a must have to share moments in pictures, also as a part time professional photographer smugmug has been very useful sharing and promoting my work.

You can even use this coupon on the smugmug coupon field in the sign up form to get 5$ off the price : 7Ppmk1PbRiBVQ

Strengths:
- Full size pictures
- Really unlimited storage
- Great themes
- Easy to use
- Nice interface
- Community creating addons (upload from right click, screensavers…)

Weaknesses:
- It is not a photo backup tool as you cannot bulk restore photos from galleries, you have to order DVDs from smugmug.

By: Lindsay aka @_thetraveller_

Lindsay aka @_thetraveller_ — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 18:36:20 +0000

Humm… I just joined SmugMug and I was unsure about the prices, because I found the yearly rate for pro slightly high… but after selling a good amount of photos in the first week, it has already paid for itself.

By: Gary

Gary — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:31:48 +0000

Search and replace doesn’t work when every photo has a unique ID on each system and there is no mapping from one to the other….and I’m dealing with different sizes and links to pages where the photos are hosted sometimes.

By: Todd Eddy

Todd Eddy — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:28:15 +0000

Just do a search and replace for links :)

Yeah I’m really good with technology. My site is hosted on a server I bought myself and tossed in company’s datacenter for free. So disk space isn’t a concern and “getting my hands wet” wasn’t an issue. I dropped gallery2 for similar reasons and use zenphoto now. The database behind the scenes is much cleaner, links are more seo friendly, not as bloated as gallery2. Definitely not for everyone but I’m sure there’s some people that read this that may like self hosting a gallery.

By: Gary

Gary — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 06:13:55 +0000

I did use Gallery2.

1) It was just too much effort and the time spent constantly having to customize it made it more expensive than SmugMug. $150/yr is a deal compared to what I ended up having to deal with, with Gallery2. The time I had to spend on it just wasn’t worth it.

2) My Gallery2 experiment was a disaster for SEO.

3) The space it took on my web host was over 20gb and the hosting costs made it unappealing to continue. I know there are webhosts that have unlimited storage, but moving 20gb of stuff, especially when I was dealing with international internet connections, was something I didn’t want to do. I had been using Flickr as a backup while I was using Gallery2, so moving my stuff from Flickr to SmugMug was painless. They have tools that don’t require moving photos to the desktop.

Other sites like Zenfolio might be great, but I’m satisfied with SmugMug. I have so many photos and links on my blog that switching photo hosts would be an enormous cost for me. I have thousands of links I’d have to change by hand and I just don’t want to do that again.

By: Todd Eddy

Todd Eddy — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 05:30:49 +0000

You didn’t really say why you didn’t go with self hosting. Although I guess you mentioned all the things smugmug can do. Gallery2 can do a store and stuff I think but I think you still have to track things yourself.

I looked at smugmug and honestly the thing that bothered me the most is the title of the page would be something like “bob’s cool photos – powered by smugmug” and to drop the powered by smugmug part you have to be a pro user ($150/yr as of writing)!. Granted there’s a hack that can do that but not sure how happy it makes the smugmug people. I’m fine with giving them credit at the bottom but if I want to have a gallery that seemlessly fits within my site I don’t want the powered by thing in the title of the page. Minor, but it’s what kept me away from it.

By: @pompoB

@pompoB — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 19:41:06 +0000

No matter how good SmugMug is with a logo and a font like that I couldn’t even look at it for more than five secs! :)

Isn’t that font Micro$oft Comics…something?

I urge you all to look at Zenfolio.com again..it’s killer!

By: Goggo

Goggo — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 19:35:34 +0000

thanks for your great article.
i also moved from flickr to smugmug from above factors.
i repent it!!!

By: Elliott Ng

Elliott Ng — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 04:18:38 +0000

Great review of SmugMug vs. Flickr vs. Facebook. I use Flickr for the stuff I want to share and SmugMug for the stuff I don’t. I’m afraid I don’t really know how to use Facebook. :) Guess I should start putting some photos up there for my friends!

By: Audrey

Audrey — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 16:55:59 +0000

Thanks for the quick reply and info. It’s amazing how there is a Firefox plugin for almost everything!