Photo migration: SmugMug to Flickr (and why Flickr is far superior)

Posted by Andy Atkinson on November 18, 2006 | Post type: Gain

As a 2 year SmugMug "Standard" account holder, I built up a large collection of photos, painstakingly uploaded, organized and annotated.  Since 2004, the online photo sharing service market has changed considerably.  I've had a Flickr account for nearly as long and have always been impressed with the features, speed, and ease of use, but I also felt locked-in to Smugmug because of the large collection I'd amassed with SmugMug-specific metadata (that is not easily transferable).  Despite those feelings however, I've started a "migration" from Smugmug to Flickr as of late for a variety of reasons that are all outlined in this article.  I feel SmugMug has stagnated in the features department over the last 1-2 years.  Flickr had an impressive feature set when it launched a few years ago (arguably a more complete service than SmugMug at launch) and has improved with big time features like geotagging.  What follows is a description of the reasons I'm switching, but manages to be a review of Flickr and sharing services in general at the same time.  I'd like to get your feedback via comments or "offline" by email.  If a SmugMug employee gets ahold of this article, the SmugMug bashing that follows might be painful.

Photo migration: SmugMug to Flickr

Photo migration: SmugMug to Flickr

Why pay someone to manage my photos at all?

I personally feel the value of sharing photos online is heightened greatly by good metadata.  Tags, Geotagging, and Annotations (Flickr "Notes") are examples of metadata that truly add value to images.  By paying for a service like Flickr, one can utilize new features that make photos more interesting as they become available, without having to maintain the photo software.  Tags create interesting groupings, geotagging helps organize photos by geography (which provides users with an entirely different approach to finding and navigating photos), and annotations allow the author and viewer to point out small details and have a "conversation" around a particular image.  As a programmer, Flickr has an API available that exposes images and metadata to create interesting and useful tools with all that data.  SmugMug has an API available as well, but I haven't seen nearly as many tools or utilities for SmugMug as I have for Flickr.  For example, one tool I use almost daily is a "gadget" for my Google Personalized Homepage to display the latest Flickr photos from my contacts (just search for flickr).  As of this writing, there are no official Google gadgets for SmugMug that I've found, only blogs.  Here are some interesting tools and toys that utilize the Flickr API: fd's Flickr Toys, Flickr Bits, QuickOnlineTips Flickr Tools.  With so many tools it is clear that the Flickr API is easy to use and here to stay.  That means more features for Flickr users, something I never experienced with SmugMug.

Tagging

I add metadata locally (on Windows I use iTag and OS X I use PictureSync) because the metadata is embedded into the JPG file, usually adhering to the IPTC and/or XMP standard.  Unfortunately I only learned about these tools earlier this year, which means that of the metadata I've added to my photos on SmugMug, less than half of that metadata is portable to another provider.  In other words, all the titles, captions, and keywords (a.k.a. tags) I added using the SmugMug user interface to the photos I uploaded will be lost when I move to Flickr.  The organizational structure, SmugMug calls them galleries and sub-galleries, will be lost as well, but this less of an issue since Flickr takes an entirely different approach to photo organization.  I think Flickr takes tagging more seriously than SmugMug too, as they make it much easier to view all of my tags, and quickly flesh out any errors, or consolidate misspellings or duplicates (for example I had: appel, appl, apple, and apples, but consolidates these tags to "apple").  Keep in mind that edits on Flickr are only relevant to Flickr; the "tag puritan" would go back to the original data entry point (the local tagging application) and correct the erroneous or duplicate tags there.  To verify this I removed a tag from a photo in Flickr, downloaded the photo and viewed it in my local annotation app, and the tag was still there.  Flickr has an amazing web interface for quickly tagging photos, but unfortunately you can't take this information "with you" should you move to another service.  This is frustrating for users wishing to not become completely dependent on Flickr, or view their high quality metadata locally (offline).  SmugMug does support browsing by tags from their front page, by most active tags for example, however Flickr really outshines SmugMug here.

Access control

Flickr offers a finer grained access control scheme.  I am able to restrict access to the world, friends, or family based on a set, or even on the individual photo level.  Smugmug limits me to the access control based on the gallery (verify this), and I found it unintuitive to modify access control after the gallery had been set up initially (by adding a password).  Flickr even lets you specify people to block.  One negative aspect of Flickr though is that filtered access control (friends or family) requires that your friends or family have Flickr (or Yahoo!) accounts where SmugMug photos are accessible without SmugMug accounts by supplying a password for each gallery you want to make private.  What is the problem with that approach? When you have dozens of galleries, adding passwords is a maintenance nightmare? What if I just want to make a few photos private but not the whole gallery? Sorry, can't do that in SmugMug.

Organization

This is a big one for me (or should be for anyone with a large collection of photos).  Flickr lets me group photos into "Sets" with are equivalent to SmugMug galleries in some ways, but have some deal breaker differences.  One thing that annoyed me about SmugMug galleries was that I couldn't easily have one photo in multiple sets.  Having one photo across multiple sets is very easy in Flickr.  This would let me move certain photos into public and private sets as well.  SmugMug only allows me to set permissions at the gallery level.  Flickr and SmugMug both support the notion of public photo pools.  SmugMug calls them "Communities" and Flickr calls them "Groups" but they both work the same way.  Essentially you become a member of the pool because you have an appropriate photo, and you add the photo to the pool.  Pool members can comment and perform other actions depending on how the pool administrator has things set up.  Over the last few years I've used several Flickr Groups and I've never, not once, used a SmugMug community.  I think the reasons are: Flickr Groups are easier and faster to use, Flickr Group community members (and Flickr users in general) give much more feedback (via comments or notes) on photos, making the sense of "community" much stronger.

Uploading

Flickr has a tool that is easily accessible from their website called Uploadr (note the intentional misspelling).  Uploadr preserves all the tagging information I put in (although last time I checked metadata added using Picasa is not preserved if uploaded with Uploadr) using the tools I mention above.  Generally at SmugMug I used the Java applet because of cross-platform compatibility, or the individual file uploads before I knew about anything better.  There are third party uploading tools, but I don't think SmugMug advertises them well enough.  Lately I used PictureSync for photo uploads on OS X (which supports Flickr and other services).  Uploadr, or the combination of Uploadr and Flickr servers, seem to be much faster than any combination of tools or uploading routines I used at SmugMug.  Uploadr lets me jump right to the edit page after upload to inspect the titles, descriptions, and tags describing my photos as well (and make any last minute updates).

Photo licensing

Flickr provides an option to license photos under a Creative Commons license.  I can also provide licenses on a per photo basis (verify this) which I don't think is possible with SmugMug.

Geotagging

This is a huge feature.  SmugMug is at a disadvantage here because they do not have the "in house" mapping technology like Flickr does as a Yahoo! company.  SmugMug introduced a mapping feature via the Google Maps API but I have found that this crashes frequently and is unintuitive to use.  Flickr's geotagging feature conversely, is about as intuitive as it gets for a web application.  Simply bring up the map of your location, and drag your photo onto the map.  I can even set up who can view my photos by map location.  I'm not so sure I want to make this public, so I restricted map access to my contacts. 

Statistics and visitor information

Another feature gap of SmugMug is statistics on photos.  The best I've seen as a "Standard" account member has been gallery statistics that only show the total number of views on a per gallery basis.  This was always the same month to month for me, so not very interesting.  Flickr on the other hand offers a variety of options.  I'm able to see photos that other users have marked as favorites, number of views on a per photo basis, number of comments on photos (or which photos have the most comments).  Flickr also allows users to control who on the "outside" can add comments and notes to photos.  Generally the more popular the photo the more notes and comments it will have.  On Flickr I've always noticed much stronger feedback from the community, primarily because I think it is tremendously easier to comment and annotate photos from contacts (or anywhere) on Flickr when compared with SmugMug (and really it is intuitive and easy in general).  Upgraded SmugMug accounts (the "Pro" account) can run HTML and presumably JavaScript on their SmugMug sites, which means third party stats programs like Statcounter or Google Analytics could be used.  Flickr provides detailed access information to even the free account (SmugMug has no free account).

Printing photos

SmugMug and Flickr both offer printing options, though Flickr has an impressive live preview over a range of printing destinations.  Of particular interest to me is the QOOP photo books.  They offer fine grain control over which pictures are sent to a book, by set, date range, and more, and promote their low cost and attractive understated appearance (mostly white).  SmugMug offers printing of individual photos on their website.  The look of the shopping cart is consistent, but I'm wondering why SmugMug hasn't contracted with another company (like QOOP) as Flickr and other companies have done.  Maintaining a comprehensive list of photo printing options, making pricing competitive, improving the usability of their website service, this seems like an entire business to me.  I think Flickr (and apparently Facebook, Webshots, Photobucket and others) has taken the right approach by contracting with QOOP for the photo printing side of the experience.

Why SmugMug then if Flickr offers more?

I started using SmugMug before Flickr was released and built up a large collection of photos.  Over the last few years I've "tried to make it work" all the while noticing the cool stuff I could be doing at Flickr.  There are things that SmugMug does better.  I like SmugMug slideshows.  SmugMug slideshows are superior in one important way to Flickr slideshows in that they let you do a fullscreen slideshow (which could be slow on a high resolution monitor and slow internet connection).  Flickr limits the size of the slideshow, but keeps it really fast, even letting users move quickly between photos.  I like that SmugMug adds titles and descriptions to slideshows, which Flickr doesn't seem to do.

Back in the day (2003, pre-Flickr, Zooomr) SmugMug was the clear winner for features and design in photo sharing, competing with low-tech Webshots, Yahoo! Photos, and other yawn-inducers.  Then Flickr came along and shook things up with notes on top of the pictures, super speed, easy organizations with tags and sets, and a ton more.  What was SmugMug's answer? Not much.  I can't say they had "zero answers" because I'm sure they've introduced at least one feature over the last few years, but I honestly can't think of one, and certainly don't use any of them (I tried the Google Maps integration but it never worked consistently for me).  SmugMug has indicated they use the Amazon S3 web service to collocate pictures in three data centers around the world.  This is cool, but not a user feature, and certainly something most people don't care about.  Feeds? Atom and RSS? No one uses Atom.  RSS feeds are a trivial bit of programming and basically an expectation of modern web applications.  My 2003 experience with SmugMug is identical to my 2006 experience with it.  The only thing that has changed is my heightened interest in Flickr and disinterest in SmugMug.

SmugMug features I never use

SmugMug supports theming and lets "Standard" account holders change their themes across their entire SmugMug presence, or on a per gallery basis.  I like the black SmugMug theme.  Even being someone who enjoys tinkering with themes, I always came back to the black SmugMug theme because it is the cleanest, meaning this feature has been useless for me.  SmugMug touts their "no advertising" pages which is nice, but I've yet to see an advertisement on a Flickr page (although they do say they will show ads to non-Flickr users).  SmugMug has a simple thumbs up/thumbs down ranking system, but it was never heavily utilized by visitors to my SmugMug page to where the rankings became useful.  SmugMug worked hard and added a lot of code to help people edit, crop and otherwise improve their photos online.  I think it is fair to say that Flickr does not allow users to edit their photos online as extensively as SmugMug does.  I wonder though, who uses this feature? Perhaps non-technical users find certain functions useful, but any tech savvy user will certainly edit their photos locally where it is much faster and where there are many more options (Photoshop).  I consider online editing, cropping, etc. a useless feature.

"Low tech" migration tips

  • I printed out my galleries pages from SmugMug to help me remember how I organized my photos (and remember which photos I uploaded)
  • SmugMug offers a backup of all photos on CDs or DVDs which will offer you peace of mind at a minimum and save you the hassle of backing up all your photos to physical media (Flickr offers the same type of backup from the same third party: Englaze)
  • Don't worry about the order in which you upload sets. Reordering Sets in Flickr is easy.
  • Try to give yourself enough time before your SmugMug account expires by purchasing Flickr and duplicating your content.  Then you can hit the "cancel" button in your SmugMug control panel when you are ready.

SmugMug will continue to take in revenue supporting their existing customer base, and remain popular among professional photographers that wish to use SmugMug as a photo store (and pay for the "Pro" account which supports customizable HTML).  For a user that doesn't care about any third-party tools, adding annotations or interesting collections, defining access control, and simply wants a repository with a gallery that looks nice, SmugMug could work.  As soon as that user wants more features however, they will be stuck.  If that user spends a few minutes with Flickr, I'll bet they'd stick with Flickr.

I hope you enjoyed this summary of my reasons for migrating my online photo presence to Flickr.  Please share your reasons that support mine or support SmugMug, I'd love to hear them.  Have a script or program that makes moving moving easy? Please share.

About the author(s)

Andy started Pain in the Tech in 2005 as a way to share tips and tutorials with friends and family, and evangelize great products and services. By 2008, Pain in the Tech had 7 contributors, thousands of daily page views. Site ownership was transitioned to Matt Thommes in 2008.

Comments

# Don MacAskill at 11/19/2006 9:20 am cst
Thanks so much for the great write-up! I'm the CEO & Chief Geek here at SmugMug and detailed write-ups like this are like gold. I devoured it, and will continue to refer back to it over time. We don't do much (any?) competitive research, but we listen to our customers closely. You have some great points. That being said, though, SmugMug isn't Flickr and we have no desire to be. We often refer customers to Flickr who aren't looking for the SmugMug approach to photo-sharing, and you definitely sound like more in line with Flickr's target audience than our own. They're a great site, and I'm glad you've found what you're looking for. A few notes: - We release new features almost every week, or at the very least a few times a month. You can follow the past few years over on our release notes blog. (We have released some minor features and one or two medium-sized ones in the last two months, but I'm out of date and haven't written them up yet. Sorry!) - We've examined QOOP a few times for printing, but they don't even come close to our quality standards with their products or shopping experience. Again, our target customer is different than Flickr's, so it's more important for us to not have a low-quality product than to offer a few more things in our cart as "checkbox" items. We are working on high-quality photo books and other products, but we're just not there yet. - Someone was working on a Flickr <-> SmugMug migration tool (bi-directional, and syncing) for awhile, including meta-data, using our APIs. I don't recall if it's shipped yet, but you may look around to see if it's out even in beta form. - We do offer per-photo stats. :) - We have something major coming out in the next few weeks, I'd love to get your feedback on it if I can. Please drop us an email or something so we can give you the heads-up when it's ready to be previewed if you're interested. Again, fantastic write-up, and lots of food for thought. Thanks so much! Don

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# Chris MacAskill at 11/19/2006 9:25 am cst
Hi Andy, No worries, we designed SmugMug so you can always fetch your high-res original photos and move when you want to. Much as we hate to see you go and are very sorry to disappoint you, learning why is like gold to us so we know what to work on. The photo sharing space doesn't seem to be like online auctions where one company dominates. We have many hundreds of fanatical SmugMug subscribers who came from Flickr, and many good friends who prefer other photo sharing sites over both SmugMug and Flickr. It's a huge market, like cars, and it's great for everyone that choice abounds. Thanks, Chris

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# Andy Atkinson at 11/19/2006 11:31 am cst
Wow, thanks for reading and responding. I, like you, appreciate the feedback. I've got a week left of my SmugMug “Standard” account, so I will dig in before making my final switch (or I may pay for another year just for evaluation purposes). How did you find this article so quickly? I’m a tough user to please when it comes to photo management. I like to take photos, I like to learn more about photography, but I also want the feedback via comments, I want to tag locally in IPTC/XMP standards and automatic recognition to whatever upload destination I choose, I want to syndicate photos on my blog, I want a well documented API (I am a programmer but haven’t played with Flickr or Smugmug APIs yet), but I’d rather pay someone else to manage this than install and maintaining my own gallery software. I know I have more “requirements” than most users. That being said, I think Flickr does fit my needs more at this time. Thanks for the link pointing to your features blog. I noticed a few features that are interesting (like API support for YUI). From an end user perspective though, the only new features I’d noticed were Google Maps integration (which seemed too buggy and slow but may be fixed in the last few months). I think SmugMug feature releases are not publicized well. For me the “excitement” is not there like it is for Flickr feature announcements (like Geotagging). I suggest submitted exciting new features to digg.com, del.icio.us, lifehacker.com and other high-traffic sites to get more exposure. I also suggest embedding some “hey, did you know…” messages when users log-in that are subtle, but point current users to descriptions and instructions on new features. I still can’t find stats per photo, like “this photo was viewed 500 times this month.” Are they available to “Standard” users or upgrades beyond that? I CAN display all photos with comments, what about sorting photos by popularity on “most commented on” or “most photos per tag”. Another problem I’ve seen is people mistakenly leave comments on the gallery instead of an individual photo. I think this is due to the way it is designed. Perhaps it would help to redesign this slightly or warn users that they are leaving comments on the entire gallery. I can see where SmugMug would be less interested in the commenting side of the coin, but this is a big attraction for me at Flickr. One major feature that SmugMug supports that I didn’t mention in the article is video. Flickr has no video support as of this article. I never used the video SmugMug feature, but the idea of transferring short clips from my (still) camera was always tempting, it just seemed rather expensive. Disclaimer: I have not ordered a QOOP book, although I plan to do so soon. I understand photographers would want highest quality prints, but I’m surprised to learn that many photographers print from SmugMug (I would expect them to deal locally with RAW files). I will search for that migration tool. Bi-directional plus metadata is EXACTLY what I am looking for. One thing I’ve mailed SmugMug about before though is: if I order backup CDs, why can’t I get the metadata with the photos? Someone could take your HTML and make a version of SmugMug that can be run off the CD with the metadata. Are there any plans to embed the data I enter into SmugMug into the JPG photo itself? Right now it seems that data is stored separately.

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# Andy Atkinson at 11/19/2006 11:50 am cst
Hello Chris. Thanks to you and Don for responding. I hope that my feedback has been constructive for your team. Working in software myself, I understand how nice it is to “close the loop” between developers, product managers, and the actual end users of the feature (“customer acceptance”). I offer up my comments as criticism of a good product, with the idea that it will helpful and not harmful. I understand the position and strategy of SmugMug. Clearly most photographers who want a high-quality, professional web presence are not concerned with some of the flashier features of Flickr like “Notes” or geotagging. SmugMug positions itself as the “landlord” of the “leased photographer’s e-commerce store” (among other things), but attempts to stay afloat (in my opinion) among stiff competition with “consumer” level features (call them Web 2.0 or whatever you want) like blogging, feeds, tags, etc. This article was basically detailing that Flickr wins in the consumer level features in my opinion. The problem a tech savvy consumer faces is that a lot consumer features are built atop metadata that is not easily transferable among desktop applications and online photo sharing websites. If I use Picasa or iPhoto for example to annotate my photos, data entry inconsistency abounds, data is not 100% compatible (I might get “Titles” but not “captions” or “Tags”) because there are a multitude of standards I understand (IPTC, XMP, EXIF for camera information) plus proprietary metadata storage schemes, not to mention newer metadata like latitude/longitude information (that I understand is starting to show up in cameras with onboard GPS). Neither SmugMug nor Flickr offers their own local annotation tool that mirrors their website. The tremendous advantage here being that data should the consumer decide to switch to another service in the future, it would simply be a matter of hitting “upload.” The best software I’ve used has been PictureSync, currently OS X only, as an annotation and upload tool. I’m happy to work with SmugMug or other software developers mentioned on this website with the goal of improving user experience for all. I’ll take Don up on his offer above and contact SmugMug offline. Thanks.

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# Don MacAskill at 11/19/2006 12:13 pm cst
Hi Andy, I couldn't resist, so I blogged about your review. :) I think we got an automatic notification by some of the blog search engines or something. We try to keep our fingers on the pulse of what our customers are telling us. :) I completely agree - Flickr is a better fit for you. Particularly because we just don't have the sheer volume of community members leaving comments. And we probably never will. But with a review of this caliber, I'd hate to lose you as customer with this much insight. Drop me an email if you get a minute and let's talk about some options. Re: Features. You say "from an end user perspective" but you have to realize we have millions of end-users who *do* get excited about the features we've released. They may not appeal to you, much, and I can completely see why. But that doesn't mean all end-users agree with your assessment. :) We do a terrible job of publicizing anything, to be perfectly honest. We'd just rather spend our time working on the product than trying to get lots of exposure on it. Probably dumb, but that approach keeps things extremely fun for us - we're making our current customers happy every day. Re: Photo stats. They're probably not presented in the way you'd like. If you go look at your album statistics, you can then click on each album and see per-photo (and per-size per-photo) statistics for each photo member in the gallery. We should do a better job exposing this and making it sortable in different ways across galleries, rather than just within one. Re: Comments on galleries instead of photos. We read you loud and clear. If comments were a bigger deal to our customers, we'd probably have worked on this sooner, but the fact is this is one area we differ dramatically from Flickr. Comments are important to us, the employees, but they're less important to our typical customer. We have something in the works that makes them more useful, though, so stay tuned. Re: Video. Our video support sucks, so you're not missing anything there, I'm afraid. But I've spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to do it better, and it will happen some day. Just not sure when. Re: Metadata in the JPG. Yes, we should have done this all along, but it's one of those things that doesn't click until you called us out on it. This will happen as soon as I can get to it. As you can see on my blog, I feel very passionately about this sort of stuff. My bad. Thanks! Don

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# Leslie at 11/19/2006 1:11 pm cst
Thanks for the great write up comparing the two services. And thanks for the SmugMug people's responses. I use both Flickr and SmugMug for different reasons, for different projects. When I need strong community support, easy sharing, and do not care about archives or the longevity of pictures, Flickr is the easy choice. I know that Flickr has great archives, etc... but Flickr, let's face it, is the MySpace of photo communities. Its built for the mass-market and will do what the mass-market wants. Its now owned by Yahoo and Yahoo's bills are much higher than SmugMug's bills, so I simply do not trust where the service will go in terms of archives or in terms of access to a real, live person when the need arises (compare getting real help from Microsoft or Dell to getting real help from Apple for example). The fact that Flickr doesn't natively support dvd backups underscores this difference in mentality for me. Yes, I know its the same company that provides backups for both, but SmugMug makes it clear that longevity and sanctity of my data take priority over the latest online photo fads. Where Flickr is adding some community feature, SmugMug is busy using the latest photo archiving tricks (I love what they are doing behind the scenes with Amazon) to make sure that my photos are safe. And again, its not like Yahoo is a slouch or anything when it comes to servers, but its just the difference in purpose that makes me view Flickr and SmugMug as non-competitive. To real world examples. I'm the webmaster for my church and we use Flickr's service because they have free accounts. Members can have free Flickr accounts, contribute to our Flickr group, etc... and its great. For my personal family photo archives though, I wouldn't trust anybody but SmugMug. I have close to 10k images on SmugMug now, with several thousand more to go. I have photos transferred from slides that are close to 100 years old; in short, these are irreplaceable treasures that I will only trust to a service whose number one priority is to keep my photos safe and available over everything else. That's SmugMug, not Flickr. I would also say that SmugMug's customer service is superior to Flickr's. I've emailed SmugMug several times about various things and I generally get a response within several hours, if not sooner. Anyway, that's my two cents! I'm really happy you've found an online photo home that you're happy with! May Flickr serve you well.

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# Andy Atkinson at 11/19/2006 1:28 pm cst
Hi Don. Re: stats, you're right, I never actually clicked on the gallery overview portion (or realized it was clickable), but instead always clicked on the Gallery title. I know see the breakdown of photos per size and bandwidtch consumed. I guess I'm never been a huge fan size popularity, or bandwidth utilization as "top stats" info, more just how photos are performing relative to one another. In any case, it sounds like SmugMug has acknowledged that statistics information could be presented in an enhanced way. That is all I was driving for.Hi Don. Re: end users. This communication exchange experience has got me thinking more thoroughly about what the typical SmugMug customer is like. After reviewing some of the features on your features blog and reading your comments regarding quality, I understand your target customer is a professional photographer essentially. SmugMug wants to attract more “consumer level” customers though too (I think). The challenge all companies face is deciding in which area (characterized by a set of features) the company wants to position itself, and SmugMug seems to be dipping its toes into the consumer kiddy pool, opening up the possibility of criticisms like my article. Do we do geotagging? What is our design? Oh crap, Flickr introduced an amazing drag and drag geotagging implementation, what are going to do? How about writing the geotag data into the JPG (which you’ve addressed above) so that customers that tag here can take their data with them. Re: stats, you're right, I never actually clicked on the gallery overview portion (or realized it was clickable), but instead always clicked on the Gallery title. I now see the breakdown of photos per size and bandwidth consumed. I guess I'm never been a huge fan of photo size popularity, or bandwidth utilization as "top stats" info, more just how photos are performing relative to one another (sorted by most viewed and other sorting). In any case, it sounds like SmugMug has acknowledged that statistics information could be presented in an enhanced way. That is all I was driving for there. Re: promotion. The vibe I’ve gotten from the SmugMug organization culture is that it doesn’t toot its own horn often. Personally I think SmugMug should advertise more but I can understand your perspective too (assuming the current customer base is paying the bills and everyone is having fun). Re: metadata in the JPG. That would be awesome! As you’ve pointed out elsewhere, for customers like myself, knowing that I’m not locked-in makes a HUGE difference. If the service is good I’m not going to leave. I’m also going to tell my friends about it, and tell them how they aren’t locked-in either. For some customers, SmugMug could be a “geotagging interface” and nothing more, assuming they wanted to tag and archive their photos on SmugMug then move them elsewhere (admittedly not likely). SmugMug could get into the desktop app space like Picasa and Picasa Web Albums are doing. The difference would be that I could take my metadata with me. Re: video. Personal online video sharing I think is very constrained by (US anyway) internet connection speed. I doubt a company could have a business model around sharing my 400MB digital video, and I doubt for a long time I’d want to spend the half hour or whatever uploading that and sharing it (not to mention all the metadata features). Google seems to be the only people that can afford the bandwidth bill, but who really wants to upload their personal videos to Google/YouTube? I don’t. Thanks again!

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# Eno K. at 11/20/2006 4:07 pm cst
Thanks for the article Andy. I found the last post about DVD backup intriguing since I'm doing a trial of Smugmug right now. I was surprised to see the following message: "DVD backups are $22.00 for the first 1GB, plus $3.50 for each additional 1GB, plus shipping." Why is this so expensive? DVD's cannot cost more than $.50, I would be providing the content (and heck, even pay S&H) so what exactly makes this $35??? Also, why aren't some of the features from the Pro or Power accounts available a-la-carte? I was looking to get domain forwarding but I don't want to pay $150/yr and just need/use basic account+forwarding. I really like the site so far and I'm thinking of staying after the trial... that dvd price still torments me though.

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# Andy Atkinson at 11/20/2006 6:11 pm cst
Well the last time I checked with SmugMug, the backup CD/DVDs don't include any of the metadata. I don't know if they include any organization by folder or any type of lightweight HTML viewer or anything, point being, you might as well pay yourself to backup the photos with your own DVD burned (Disclaimer: I have never purchased an Englaze backup disc). Then again, 35 bucks might be inexpensive enough for most people to justify (so that they didn’t have to burn discs themselves). I'm curious to see how much Flickr charges as they both use the same service. I’m mailed SmugMug about including metadata on backup DVDs but I don’t think this is a feature they have planned. This would probably mean they’d have to switch to internal backups (not contracting with Englaze), but then they could offer a identical experience by DVD or CD to what one would find on the web, to bring along to friends and family houses for example, where firing up the computer and crowding around a small computer screen is a crappy way to view photos. The backup discs could also server as offline presentation, not just backups with (presumably) flat folder hierarchy. Put the photos on a disc with nice menus, titles, descriptions, organization, and people will be happy to pay 35 dollars or more in my opinion.

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# Don MacAskill at 11/21/2006 9:32 am cst
I can't speak for Flickr, but our DVD and CD backups do contain the folder hierarchy in such a way that it mimics the categorization and organization you've done on SmugMug. Further, it maps very closely, if not exactly, to mounting your SmugMug account via WebDAV (SmugDAV), and contains enough "metadata" in the form of ImageIDs, AlbumID, CategoryIDs, etc that you can easily correlate your data with your account using SmugDAV or the API. As for the price, we offer the DVD and CD services from Englaze at or very near cost. We may mark them up slightly to cover our customer service costs related to them, but they certainly aren't even a blip on our radar in terms of a profit-making product - we offer them because we truly believe our customers should be able to easily get backups of *their* photos in a variety of ways with no hassle. Their prices seemed fair to me, since they're handling the whole process in an easy and seamless way, but it'd be easy for you to make your own DVDs - just mount your account via SmugDAV, fire up your favorite burning software, and go to town.

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# David Parry at 11/22/2006 8:23 pm cst
Hi Andy, Just thought I would comment on a few 3rd party tools available for SmugMug which might be of interest. - AlbumFetcher: Which downloads SmugMug images and embeds captions and keywords into the IPTC headers. http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=47160 - SmugBrowser (beta): Firefox extension for uploading and general album maintenance. http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=47484 Cheers, David

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# Dan B at 11/28/2006 3:06 am cst
Honestly, I agree 100% with Leslie in her view that Flickr is a rather volatile company and its' business model likely changes with each new web 2.0 trend and/or business aquisition. I, personally, also use Flickr for hosting of personal and business blog-based web graphics and portfolio images. We are a media company and need a decent place to host images in a nice web 2.0 fashion, so I like Flickr for that reason. But then the realist in me wants to ensure that in the event of a disaster in our home or company location, I can depend on Smugmug to preserve our digital images and give us multiple ways to recover any images we might lose in such an event. Simply put, Smugmug is our fool-proof, 3rd layer of data backup for all of our images. Very rarely do we even give public access to our folders. We usually keep them private. They are locked down, backed up, full-resolution, and safe. To me, sharing is what Flickr is for. Storage and peace of mind is what Smugmug is for.

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# Andy Atkinson at 11/29/2006 7:25 am cst
It is silly to upload your photos twice in my opinion (to Flickr and SmugMug). If you are a busy person who takes a lot of photos, that doesn’t scale. Maybe there would be a tool that would upload ALL your photos to SmugMug as private galleries, then easily allow you to share a few over to Flickr, but I don’t think you’ll see any easy migration tool like that unless someone masters both APIs and really loves using both services. Both Flickr and SmugMug want to compete in both consumer and pro spaces it seems. Flickr wants to host pros (even though they do “web 2.0/sharing” better), Smugmug wants to host "web 2.0" users (even though they do “pro” presentation, ordering, customization better). I think the best solution is to use a photo sharing site for what it is supposed to be for, photo sharing. Don't use a photo sharing site for backup, use a "backup service" for backup. I’m arguing Flickr is a better photo sharing site. If you are using SmugMug to leverage their S3 colocation/redundancy/etc. and you plan to "share" private galleries, then why not skip the middle man entirely and go with an archive service like [Box.net](http://paininthetech.com/online_storage_solutions_box_net) or similar. Among many other benefits to this approach, you aren't limited to photo files, you can save video files, important Word and PDF documents, blog posts backed up as XML, anything else you might want. I imagine most services of this type offer DVD (and eventually HD-DVD or Blu-Ray) backups as well, one more layer of protection and backup. Order a backup DVD and keep it in a safety deposit box at your bank for posterity.

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# Jane at 12/12/2006 10:34 am cst
Thanks for this review, it was insightful. I was truly on the fence when I was first looking for a photo service but I decided in the end after some research to use both. I just use a free version of Flickr to put up photos that I may want to share with others and have them comment on or have limited licences on. Flickr does make it very easy to upload and share with groups. I use SmugMug to put up all of my photos and share privately mostly with family and friends. Their customer service comes back to me quickly and I love going on their forum Digital Grin where there seem to be many knowledgeable people that want to talk about photography. I think that both services do cater to different people - or in my case, different purposes and maybe people don't have to choose one over the other in some cases. I would tell people to do SmugMug for their free trial period of 2 weeks (you don't even need a credit card) to try it out at least - they can easily walk away afterwards if it's not for them. (And no, no one from SmugMug told me to say that! =P) One thing about Flickr that I am not crazy about is that if you call someone a friend, they can see all of your photos you mark for friends-you can make multiple groups like college friends, work, family, etc. I may want to show an album to my family and not friends. Yes, Flickr now has guest pass but that is one more step you would need to do. So for sharing with select groups, I like SmugMug better and it's my primary use. Thanks again!

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# Andy Atkinson at 12/12/2006 10:58 am cst
Hi Jane. Can you clarify your comments on Flickr friends? I only mark a few people that are in my list of Contacts as friends. I understand that any photo I mark "friends" they can see. If I want to show a photo to friends and family, Flickr has those options presented as checkboxes. More granular permissions would certainly be possible, but I think they cover most uses of the system. You could use Flickr to accomplish what you are describing you use SmugMug for as well. Upload all of your photos as Private and do not check Friends or Family. Now create a set called "College Friends" or "Work" and click "Share This Set" (using the Guest Pass feature) and mail the link out to a few select people. This way your photos are still marked as private however the person receiving that email link will be able to see all the photos in that set. What I don't like about SmugMug is that I can't have one photo in multiple galleries or have permissions set on each photo. Flickr lets me accomplish those two things.

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# Jane at 12/12/2006 4:40 pm cst
Hi Andy, I did see the guest pass option. That option was not available when I was comparing the two and trying to decide whether I wanted a Pro Flickr Acct or SmugMug. Before that option was available, if my co-workers and friends were all in my 'friends' list, everyone could see those photos, there is not subset in 'friends'. This was not appealing to me, I tend to not want to use multiple services to share photos as albums, hence SmugMug was a better choice for me. Don't get me wrong, I really like Flickr, (this is progress too b/c I did not like how it looked or navigated at first but I'm understanding it now and the idea it was built around) I just wasn't looking to pay for a place to share photos with a community at the time, more of an online tool to just share photos with friends and selectively at that. Using Flickr to get feedback on photos or post notes on images is good, they make it very easy. I am warmer to the idea of making images public for this kind of feedback, I wasn't before. I also like that they let you tag private photos as well, I wish SmugMug would make their keywords work as well for private photos. I agree on your points about selective permissions within a gallery, I just don't do enough volume where there would bother me yet. I would just make another public album or send them the image link which you can do within a private album, there is no album id in the address line when you do that-or send it to Flickr! I know two uploads but I don't much that I want to share with the world and Flickr doesn't take that long. Smugmug serves my purposes for which I chose it. I have faith that if there are options that are in high enough demand, they will work to roll them out to their customers. Their customer service has been good so far, responses are always within a few hours and usually sooner. I guess if you had consumers in a venn diagram, I would be one of those that are in the overlapping part.

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# Les Hawkins at 12/17/2006 7:12 am cst
I kind of disagree with the comments smugmug is for for serious or professional use. Yes I suppose it is if you want a backup. However their security modal is wrong. For instance most people want to be able to backup all their images but share only the ones they select. To do this on Smugmug means firstly uploading to a private gallery, and then duplicating any images into a public gallery. That doesn't sound to bad, ok your doubling work and space on those images you want to share, more of an overhead for smugmug than you. Then you find out you have no ability to search all those captions you did, or the keywords and even the Timeline function will not work. Even the most basic of backups usually gives you some kind of search facility. If I was a pro and did a shoot of a party. Firstly I would only want the most relevant and obviously best quality images, to be made public, especially if people want to buy them. But say someone then requests "a picture of little billy pulling a face that I know you took at the party but I can't seem to find it on your site" The only way I would be able to find it is to go through every thumbnail in the private gallery until I find the relevant image. Slow and very tiresome. This appears to be a problem for a lot of users when you search the forums, but little appears to have been done about it.

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# Dan P at 1/25/2007 12:37 pm cst
I think "far superior" is kind of a big statement. I currently have a subscription to both and I largely find Smugmug's experience better in every way. I was making a gallery of family photos I'd taken over the last year and because my children are involved, I didn't feel right about making their likenesses public. It was easy to create a password protected gallery, tell everybody the password and also put a hint there that only those close to me would know. Since I've been mirroring everything on Flickr, it took a while to figure out that those whom I wanted to allow viewing needed to either be members (instant deal-breaker) or they had to be invited in a rather convoluted manner through the Flickr interface using some arcane URL. What happens to those people when they delete your email? Do you have to send it again? Other bummers for me are the mandatory white background, default viewing of my (or anyone else's) photos as a photostream (a concept I cannot warm to no matter how I try) instead of the individual's own layout and preferences—I think SmugMug does this elegantly. I don't like the Sets, either. They are as rudimentary a form or organisation as it gets. The initial set layout is confusing, because you see one featured photo and a load of thumbnails, but if you click on any of them, you go to a completely different view (kind of a medium-to-small sized list view) and the utility of the thumbnails is completely lost. It makes me feel like organisation is not highly regarded at Flickr, and rather that chaos reigns and the fact that the photostream is the default view bears witness. Sorry, but this is an element of the MySpace-like behaviour that makes Flickr skew to the somewhat adolescent, in my view. not it's members but it's overall appearance. It's bothersome that you cannot turn off the filename display, which Flickr positively ACHES to put in your title field. I will say I'm impressed with the sheer amount of user-created software coupled with the Flickr API. There are certainly things to like about Flickr for me, and I'm finding them now and then, but I don't think there are clear winners except for what you want and what you expect.

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# tjstankus at 2/7/2007 8:51 pm cst
I have accounts on both Smugmug and Flickr. For a long time, I was perfectly happy with Smugmug, but a few things have pulled me solidly into the Flickr camp: flickrexport for iPhoto, inexpensive 1-hour prints from Target, and a more vibrant developer community. Flickr Export is easily the quickest and most convenient uploader tool that I've used (and I've tried a bunch). It's payware, but so worth it. The Target print thing turns out to be something that my family uses more than I do, but is very convenient, if not the best quality. And finally, as a software developer, I appreciate the various API wrappers and tools that come out of the Flickr development community, and the flexibility that gives me to "play" with my photos. So, for me, it really boils down to convenience over quality. Flickr is a more convenient experience. I wouldn't call either service "far superior" to the other. They just fill slightly different niches.

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# Pindy at 2/15/2007 4:04 pm cst
Smugmug now has 3 user/developers with free plug-ins for Aperture export, and I believe there's already an iPhoto plug-in.

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# Tom at 4/23/2007 3:28 am cst
Speaking about "geotagging": do you know locr? locr offers the ideal solution and makes geotagging exceptionally easy. locr uses GoogleMaps with detailed maps and high-resolution satellite images. To geotag your photos just enter address, let locr search, fine-tune the marker, accept position, and done! If you don't know the exact address simply use drag&drop to set the position. For automatic geotagging you need a datalog GPS receiver in additon to your digital camera. The GPS receiver data and the digital camera data is then automatically linked together by the locr software. All information will be written into the EXIF header. Use the "Show in Google Earth" button to view your photos in Google Earth. With locr you can upload photos with GPS information in them without any further settings. In the standard view, locr shows the photo itself, plus the place it was taken. If you want to know more about the place where the photo was taken, just have at look at the Wikipedia articles which are also automatically assigned to the picture. Have a look at www.locr.com.

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# Wolfy at 6/27/2007 9:55 am cst
I am in agreement. Flickr is much better on the social networking end. Also sharing is esier (fewer clicks). Is there a tool to transfer my smugmug to flickr? Or a way to export Smugmug? -M

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# testerus at 10/12/2007 9:42 am cst

Easy uploading is one thing, but at least as important is if and how you are able to export your pictures from Flickr (or sth. else) with all the added information to another web-service or your hard disk.

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# Brian at 10/20/2007 12:31 am cst

Thanks for the thorough and insightful review and discussion thread. I've been looking for a photo sharing site to host old photo albums and new ones of my family. I think we've considered Smugmug and Flickr very well, but what about the other clear standouts: Photobucket and Picasa Web Albums? Thanks.

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# kikidelosfeliz at 7/11/2008 12:04 pm cst

Can anyone point me to some beta ware or other tool to export from smugmug directly to flickr? I see several folks have asked the same above, and there seems to be a reference to something like that from the smugmug folks, but I couldn't find it.

Thanks all!

P.S. Seems to me that Smugmug is more professional, more secure, and more elegant, while Flickr is hipper, more fluid, and more social (you get comments on your photos, which you generally don't seem to on Smugmug). In other words, I have to send people to Smugmug, whereas folks somehow find me on Flickr.

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# ashley at 4/2/2009 10:54 pm cst

I had an account on Webshots about 3 years ago. I was getting a new computer, so to back up my photos, I e-mailed them to myself. Now I cannot open these, as there is a red X in every spot, since the URL for the file is so old. Is there any way possible of recovering these photos? Thank you for any help you can give me.

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# software developers at 8/13/2009 4:26 am cst

Thanks for the thorough and insightful review and discussion thread. I've been looking for a photo sharing site to host old photo albums and new ones of my family. I think we've considered Smugmug and Flickr very well, but what about the other clear standouts: Photobucket and Picasa Web Albums? Thanks.

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# Matt at 12/31/2009 10:40 pm cst
Excellent review, In the end I chose Smugmug because of the easier ability to display photos. You didn't mention Zenfolio which was another provider I had a look at and a good competitior to smugmug. I did a review myself of the various options here if you'd like to have a look: http://smugmugphotosharing.blogspot.com/2009/12/smugmug-photo-sharing-review.html

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# antivirus at 2/7/2010 4:51 am cst

I have to agree that flickr rocks , 2 gb web space unlimited bandwith etc!It's the best

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