If you're looking for a customizable gallery site for your digital photos, or want to try to sell images online, SmugMug is a very capable option. But SmugMug's interface looks outdated compared with Flickr's seamless one, and its community is dwarfed by Flickr's, which has abundant ways of exploring the work of and connecting with other photographers of every interest type. What's more, Flickr and most other competitors offer a free account option, while SmugMug has a minimum $40-per-year membership fee.
Signup and Setup
Though SmugMug offers no free account like Flickr, Picasa, PhotoBucket, and others do, there is a free 15-day trial, and thankfully, this doesn't require credit card info. You can sign up either by entering and email address or through Facebook Connect. Right when you first sign up, you get a personalized URL at the smugmug.com domain. Next, you name your gallery, choose a category for it (over 60 choices, from Airplanes to Zoos, with Births and Funerals in between.) Or you can create a category name of your own. The gallery gets its own URL, using a slash after your main one.
Your homepage in SmugMug by default shows your user picture and any biographical info you've supplied, followed by thumbnails for your galleries. You can add horizontal entries for slideshows, individual large photo views, communities, a keyword tag cloud, or most popular or recent photo. You can easily move any of these sections up and down on your homepage. It's more configurable that Flickr or Picasa's, but one basic behavior I prefer in those two competitors is that the basic site URL takes you to your own gallery dashboard page; in SmugMug, this takes you to SmugMug's advertisement page.
Uploading
SmugMug offers drag-and-drop uploading on its site if you're using an HTML5-compliant browser, where Flickr requires installing a desktop uploader app for that. Both also let you upload via an email address. If you use standard software like Adobe Photoshop Lightroom or Apple Aperture, though, none of this matters, since both services have included publish exporters. SmugMug does offer a good deal of third-party integration, but most apps, like the popular iPhone image editors are more likely to have built-in uploading to Facebook and Flickr than to SmugMug, and Flickr's flourishing App Garden makes SmugMug's look tiny.
Video
One area SmugMug beats Flickr is in video hosting: You can upload videos of up to 20 minutes, compared with Flickr's 90 seconds. Then again, if you're going to do that, why not use the free YouTube or Vimeo sites? Flickr's HD video quality is among the highest I've seen, so the shorter limit makes sense. Flickr's video capability is more for "long photographs" than for video. The SmugMug video player offers "Stretch" and "HD" options. SmugMug reported being done with the uploads very quickly, but when I tried to view the images online, a "Processing" icon displayed in place of the image thumbnail.
High definition video looked great in both services. Both also let me download the video, but in SmugMug it came back with a 3,279 Kbps bitrate, wheras Flickr sent a much higher-quality 24 Mbps bitrate file. Audio was similarly compressed, even though I'd chosen "Hidef" from the SmugMug download menu.
Organizing
After you upload images to a SmugMug gallery, you're simply taken to the gallery. Flickr, by contrast, offers the chance to add titles, captions, and tags right after uploading. You can add these from links at the bottom of an image view in SmugMug. An even bigger missing tagging component is SmugMug's lack of face tagging, for which both Picasa and Flickr offer strong implementations.
SmugMug does offer a Map This button, which does a nice job of showing where your image was taken on a Google Map if the location data was included?as is the case for most smart phones. But again, competitors offer deeper map integration, showing a map thumbnail alongside the photo on its page, and Flickr even shows a world map where you can browser your own or all members' photos. For the ultimate in photo mapping, though, check out Panoramio.
Galleries
SmugMug's galleries of your uploaded photos and videos show the thumbnails of all gallery content on the left, with a larger image taking up the right sides of the browser window. Under the photo are Tweet, Facebook Share, and Facebook Like buttons. When you hover the mouse cursor over the image a flyover panel slides from the right side, offering Thumbs Up and Down, other viewing sizes, EXIF information, and a folder icon for downloading.
You can change a gallery's appearance by choosing among SmugMug's 70-odd themes at any time. But this seems more of? MySpace style approach, while Flickr and Picasa offer a more Facebook-like approach?choose one consistent, well designed interface for everyone's photo galleries.
Clicking on a picture opens a larger version that takes up most of the window, but unlike Flickr's equivalent view, SmugMug still displays the distracting menu bar across the top, with size choices, purchase options, and social buttons. I did like how SmugMug's Slideshow button switches the browser to full screen mode automatically.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/d6Yz_vr6c78/0,2817,1859061,00.asp
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