I don’t know, to be honest - I’ve never tried those services.

You do that!

Sean,

Great, I’m really glad it was useful for you!

Fantastic comparison and information. I have been on the fence for some time in regards to SmugMug, mainly due to price. I have always appreciated their quality and professional appearance and your notes helped me jump that fence today.

I take and upload on average about 1.5-2.5k pictures a week for online auctions on eBay (ohiobazaar) and for Bonanzle &c. And I have had some troubles with using photobucket, my primary host. It seems they are forever bogged down with ads and videos that they insist on playing during every single upload. That is a huge negative for me due to the volume I’m sending, and the fact that my computer must crash ten times a day during their uploads.

I just did the quick sign-up with SmugMug and happily saw that they have a direct link available for Picasa. You can easily send your photos directly to SM. I took about 20 minutes and sent roughly 65 pictures - woohoo! Now, I’m on a farm using a local satellite hookup and I was still able to quickly upload - so I am ecstatic right now. And on top of everything mentioned, the pictures can be sized any way you like and they look sharp.

Robert, you are the man…

Brad, as of today, 10-16, that 1/2 price code worked. Thank you for that. Price was my first consideration and this helped considerably.

I actually checked that out, and may play around with it. But at the end of the day my website is my programming sandbox… Its main purpose is for me to have fun programming and its secondary purpose is the content

So once I get down and dirty with Javascript (something I’ve been reluctant to do… haha! But recently have decided to look more into) & familarise myself with the syntax & some of the js libraries, I’ll perhaps be more willing to come back and give it a spin

Absolutely, thanks for mentioning that!

Thanks for visiting!
Yeah, AlbumFetcher for Mac would be great to have.

I do know about your video advancements, and in time, perhaps it will be the first choice for video clips as well. What currently gets to me is the time limitation. Sure, you’ve got to have a limitation, but IMHO it should be perhaps 15 minutes or so, to be interesting.

Steven,

Hope Santa’s listening.
For me at least, SmugMug delivered in the areas where I was less pleased with Flickr.

Jennifer,

Well, perhaps I can lure you in to use PictureSlides for now on your own web site, and when you’re ready, I’d recommend SmugMug.

Grant,

As long as you’re content, that’s what’s most important.

Nick,

Thank you!
And yeah, good tip. At the time, I just couldn’t bother…

Marien,

It is mentioned in the blog post. Personally, I prefer to regularly upload to both services, than just one and using SmuggLr every time.

Picking up on one of the least important aspects of the story (would you expect anything less? ;-)):

(impossible to get a link to Windows version if I’m on a Mac… :-()

…if you’re using Safari, enable the “Develop” menu (Safari->Preferences->Advanced->”Show Develop menu” checkbox at the bottom) and you can then set your User Agent to be something suitably Windowsy. The selected UA only applies to the current tab, so it shouldn’t affect other aspects of your browsing.

This usually works for me when I’m trying to get a Windows download without firing up a virtual machine.

I did look at other options, including SmugMug, and concluded that Flickr seems to be the foremost choice.

At this stage in my life, being a student and all, the price sadly matters most Having said that, I have a Flickr account but I only use it to check up on photos that my friends and others have put up. I’ve only put one up myself. I guess it’s a community thing - only a couple of acquaintances use Flickr, so travel photos tend to get placed on my own website (with its currently primitive photo album system… hahaha) and social photos on Facebook.

Sad? Maybe

[NIKON Santa, if you are listening that's a D90 for Xmas right?]

It’s interesting what you say about it not being the most points in your comparison but the ones that matter most. That’s a pearl of wisdom that can be applied to a lot of web development / interface design, too. Discover the features that users really value and how they want to use them.

I might check out the trial on SmugMug - I actually didn’t get sold on Flickr.

Video? Over the past year we’ve made a huge commitment to it and we’re going even further. Check this out and more in our CEO’s Blog.

Thanks again!

Smugmug uses amazon s3 for storage (and ec2 for other stuff) so its wierd that there’s no good download support.