Smugmug is an online photo storage and sharing website, with many options and many perks for photographers of all levels. The website has a family feel about it, and is very customizable to fit all graphic tastes.

Technical Support

You don't usually want to contact them, but when you need to - how do they react?

Smugmug lets you ask for support on their Digital Grin forum or by email. Both forum answers and email response time are consistently within the same day, most of the times in less than a few hours.

Privacy

While photo websites are about sharing, you may not want to share all of your photos with everyone who happens to stumble upon them. What privacy options do the services provide?

Smugmug lets you hide galleries on the Internet in a way that makes them invisible to Google or other search engines. This makes them almost impossible to view for persons who don't know the specific gallery's URL (web address). This used to be a problem because those URLs could be guessed. But Smugmug changed the way they are created now (the problem may still occur for older galleries). You may also password protect all or some of your photos.

Photos Organization

Most people don't want to just dump all their photos as one big stream. Users normally want ways to organize their photos in a way that makes sense. What organization mechanisms do the services support?

Smugmug is quite good at organizing photos into galleries. The site offers a three-layered hierarchical organization, made up of categories, sub-categories and gallery, which most users find quite convenient and well-organized.

Photo Tagging

Photo tagging is about adding data to your photos - who is photographed? Where was the photo taken? What was the event? - All these may be added to the data around your photo, and take sharing to a different level.

Smugmug lets you tag photos with keywords, and also integrates with Google Maps API for geo-tagging. You can then search the photos by combinations of these keywords or locations.

Free Account

If you don't have many photos, or don't care how many photos the site shows, you may be looking at a free account. How do the services compete in this aspect?

Smugmug does not have a free account. It has a fully functional trial account for two weeks, but after that it's pay or go elsewhere.

Extras

What add ons do the website provide?

Smugmug has many nice add ons. It lets you order your photos on DVD (or cd) for an extra fee. The PhotoRank feature lets you thumb-up or thumb-down every photo. Smugmug has a site-wide "popular photos" page where the best-ranked photos are displayed. Power users can personalize the site completely, and, using their own domain name (which is an option) can be seen to not use the site at all. Smugmug is very geared towards professional users. The power and pro accounts let you sell photos and prints, disable right-click on photos (making it more difficult for users to save them to their computers) and watermark the photos. Photo prints may be ordered directly from Smugmug.

Customization

What if you don't linke the way the website and galleries are laid out? Can you change it? Can you add color or style to the gallery pages?

SmugMug has many ways for displaying photos. Its default method, of presenting a large photo side by side with thumbnails of the other photos in the gallery is very simple and intuitive. This way the photo you are viewing always remains in context. Apart from that, Smugmug has far better control on how your site looks. There are many themes you can choose from, and each gallery may have a different theme attached to it with different colors and layouts. Professional users may use Smugmug as their photo platform only, and in essence create a site of their own design that rides Smugmug's engine and looks completely different. This site may also have a domain name of its own. Smugmug lets you choose a subdomain of your choice (e.g. choozzaphotos.smugmug.com)

Low Cost

Both sites have yearly fee, but there are different options. How much will you pay with each service?

Smugmug is more expensive than Flickr. Its standard annual fee is $39.95 per year. For power users the price is $59.95 and Pro accounts pay $149.95. Users get unlimited space and bandwidth. In Standard and Power accounts there is a size limit of 8MB per photo, but this is more than enough for most photos out there. The Pro account has a limit of 16MB per photo. Smugmug does not allow uploading videos for standard accounts. Power and pro account get to upload videos of 2.5 minutes, 5mins or 10mins - depending on quality.

Community

This being the Internet, both services have a community around the photos and photo sharing. What can you expect of this community for each of the websites?

Smugmug's community is really its digital photo forum: "Digital Grin". In there, users share their photos, give and receive feedback.
While Flickr's community are usually amateurs, many of Digital Grin members are professional photographers and give free, valuable advice. Other forums on Smugmug deal with advanced photography techniques and tools such as Photoshop. On top of it all, Smugmug provides communities for users with similar interests , which are a bit like Flickr's groups.

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Flickr

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Average rating: 4 / 5 , based on 49 customer reviews
Feel factor: 6

Christmas gift

(score 3/5)

My sisters are really lame...they never let me know if they liked this or not. Sorry...

Posted on: 2010-02-01
By coffee lover

Very pleased with quality and price

(score 5/5)

This digital frame is not the most expensive on the market, but it does the job just great and the pictures look good enough to have this running in my husband's office all day to show off his family! It does not look cheap - it looks like a nice quality one to the average person watching the pics.

Posted on: 2009-12-03
By S. Elder

Great frame for the price.

(score 4/5)

This digital picture frame seems to be well-built and functioned perfectly out of the box. The on-screen menu is easy to use with both the on-board controls and the tiny remote. The screen resolution leaves a bit to be desired, but again, for the price it is pretty good. It also does not include any built-in memory, but a 2G SD card is under $10 these days, and that will hold thousands of pictures. There is also no computer interface, so the memory device must be shuttled between the frame and the computer to add pictures. There is no special software required, just transfer image files to the memory card. And there are lots of funky transition effects to choose from in slide show mode. I use this frame in my office to display a slide show of ads for my business, and I love it.

Posted on: 2009-09-08
By K. Kauffman

My mom loves it!!!

(score 5/5)

I bought this for my mom because of the flexibility it offers. My mom has a MAC and this gives her the ability to use a SD adapter and a SD card to load all the pictures she wants and put the card into the picture frame. A lot of the picture frames are not MAC compatible, or do not state if they are. She is very happy with her picture frame and I'm glad that she can easily use it! I'm very happy with my choice.

Posted on: 2009-08-17
By K. Oldakowski

Nice photo frame

(score 4/5)

I am impressed with the picture quality. I loaded up to 400 pics on my USB drive and it works really great. It has various slide show features. Calendar is also good but picture size becomes small.

I would give the frame 5 stars if they add mp3 support and video

Posted on: 2009-08-11
By Mohan R. Pindyala

Use the sliders to set your priorities, and find what's best for you in Photo Sharing Sites

Technical Support

Privacy

Photos Organization

Photo Tagging

Free Account

Extras

Customization

Low Cost

Community