smugmug (and other image hosting)

for those who have smugmug as their image hosting site (i'm looking at you mhc!) how do you like it? i notice there's no real free membership like flickr (besides a trial). is it worth the money for a baisc membership?

what would you say the pros and cons are of this host?

or, for others who have experience with other hosts (free or pay services), how do you like yours?


at this time, i've got a free flickr account and a free account at deviantart (my wife is having a hard time with the url and look/feel of the site...).

I really like SmugMug and I would say it is worth what you pay for. I have the Standard account and I also have a freebie Flickr account.

I like the customization of galleries, the controls for the gallery creation, you also have GEO data support with your photos so people can view where and when you took your pictures with Google Map (it uses a timeline).

Contrary to Flickr, you have real, separate galleries while Flickr has virtual galleries: i.e. your photos in Flickr can be moved but they are not physically in a gallery. Maybe I lack the vocabulary to explain this...

SmugMug also has its own support forum, Digital Grin and they make software for Mac like the SmugMug Uploader.

When I was shopping around for a photo hosting place, I had to choose between going Pro with Flickr, SmugMug and PBase. I liked SmugMug better than PBase, thought the support was better and just liked the looks. As for Flickr, I've never really felt comfortable with the way I could place my images or navigate in the various galleries.

I hope this explains a bit why I went SmugMug's way. I think you can try the service for 30 days before buying your membership. If you're interested, you can save $5US off of your membership if I refer you.

You'd have to PM me for the details, if ever you were interested.

excellent!

thanks for the info!

how long does the referal last for - say if you refered me today, do i have a set period of time in which to sign up?

[pm'ing you, and adding rep!]

edit: will add rep when i can - gotta spread it around!

I've been using Photobucket for years as the place where I host my blog images, and I've been really happy with them.

They don't have galleries per se, but they get the job done for me.

imageshack for me

oh, yeah, i've got imageshack too - almost forgot about that...
it's way too unorganized for me though.

never tried photobucket.

though part of what i'm looking for is what mhc has - if you go to the link, it's like a real web page with access to lots of photos neatly organized. this is what i want for family and friends to keep tabs on my family and any artsy stuff i do.

eric said:

excellent!

thanks for the info!

how long does the referal last for - say if you refered me today, do i have a set period of time in which to sign up?

[pm'ing you, and adding rep!]

edit: will add rep when i can - gotta spread it around!

Click to expand...

Nope I don't think there is a time limit on the referral. It's been in my control panel there ever since I've had an account which is two years. I referred a friend there last year, btw.

caribiner23 said:

I've been using Photobucket for years as the place where I host my blog images, and I've been really happy with them.

They don't have galleries per se, but they get the job done for me.

Click to expand...

Oh man, Photobucket. I had a freebie account with them as well and I uploaded photos just like in my Flickr account (I was thinking at that point of buying an account with Photobucket, that's true forgot about that!...) and one morning all my images were wiped!

I went to their forum and in big bold red letters it said that you should always do backups of your stuff. Which is understandable but it was because they weren't accepting any complaints in the forums. So I then realized that I would never ever do business with them. Pah!

ooh, good to know.

when i can give you that rep, it will be well deserved!

Doh! Forgot to send you my referral info in those PMs! *Head hits desk*

Ok sending it to you now, eric, so you can use it if you want to sign up for good.

Interesting... it may not be too long before I need an image hosting service. How much storage do you get with SmugMug?

details here:

http://www.smugmug.com/price/

39.95/yr unlimited storage

Well, I discovered there is no max storage, but what about bandwidth? How much are you allowed before they cut you off?

I think it's 6 GB monthly (they always stack up the bandwidth used in my account to that number). I never was even close to that figure and for this month alone I've had 20324 hits so I suppose that 6 GB monthly for bandwidth is good? I haven't a clue...

Wow... 20K+ hits and not even hitting the 6GB total... I like it. I certainly can tell you that the storage provided with .Mac will not be anywhere near sufficient, and few other places store reasonably sized images, thus landing me in the predicament of finding a suitable image server.

EDIT: Attempted to give some rep, but was told to go spread the wealth, lol.

I've had a Flickr Pro account for 2 years now and have always been happy with them. They also just lifted the upload caps for their Pro accounts and have had unlimited storage space.

Smugmug looks interesting, I just don't know if the price premium would be worth it for me.

It seems to me that Flickr also has a much higher degree of social networking built in (and via 3rd parties), but I could be missing that at the Smugmug site.

I know you can join groups at SmugMug just like at Flickr and like I posted earlier SmugMug does have a user forum for problems with the site or just to hang out with other photographers and exchange tips and ideas.

In the end all this might be equal in a lot of ways. I think my choice came down to me not being comfortable at all with the way I could build galleries at Flickr so just the freebie account is plenty for me.

I like the user controls and the control panel a whole lot at SmugMug.

Yeah, it does seem smugmug gives you more options to customize your galleries. So in your case, it makes sense that you went with them.

Yes that's exactly it. I guess I wanted themes to my pages and stuff (a little like changing a theme in my blog) and creating galleries at SmugMug and the gallery controls were very much what I wanted. :girl:

I only use image hosting for this forum and as iPhoto has flickr integration built in, I used that for a while until I discovered some limitation with the image sizes so I use ImageShack now. This suits my needs perfectly as I only share with Mac-Forums anyway.