SmugMug Photo Site

There are so many places that offer free storage of you images but very few give you as much control and ease of printing as SmugMug. Recently I keep hearing about this site and it made me very curious to see why so many of the industry commentators speak so highly of SmugMug.  So I took a quick look, signed up for the 14 day trial, spent half an hour uploading files, purchased by first set of prints, and quickly signed up for power user account.  That is how impressed I am of the site.  Now why on earth would I pay a store my photos when sites like flicker, Microsoft live spaces and others offer this storage for free?

First, I like the fact that there is no advertising on your site.  That in itself is worth a lot.  Nothing is worse than having some kind of dating advertisement show up on your page that you are displaying pictures of your wife and family.  The second reason is the amount of control that SmugMug gives me to not only set up the theme of my homepage but also to stop a separate theme for each gallery that you set up.  A gallery is a directory or storage area for set of photos. Once you have installed their upload program then you will be able to copy your pictures to your galleries. You can categorize your galleries so that they can be sorted, you can categorize your images by using keywords, you can put captions on the images that describe what they are, and there is room for comments that to be left by you or your visitors.  You can also sort your photographs so they appear in the order that you would like them to be displayed in. It takes only minutes to learn how to use it and customize your gallery. 

I jumped right into the power user account set up so that I could store videos as well as photographs.  You can select more than one photograph at a time to upload, and a stored in their full resolution unlike the free sites which will downgrade then to fit their storage requirements.  Your yearly fee includes unlimited storage, your videos are limited to 2.5 minutes Max for DVD quality video files.  If you upgrade to the professional version you can upload 5 minute videos in HD format and 10 minute videos and DVD quality format.  There is one caveat though, your files are limited to a 512 MB maximum size.

The last thing that I want to talk about is the buy this photo feature.  They give you a large number of choices for printing these pictures at very reasonable prices.  The only thing I don't like is the cost of shipping which I think is a bit exorbitant, however they do need to pay for someone to package the pictures and send them out to you.  You can also have your favorite photos placed on different kinds of items like shirts, bags, cups, photo books, greeting cards, note pads, posters, coasters, playing cards, puzzles and even ceramic tiles.  You can also have them create a CD or DVD of your images as a backup that can keep for safekeeping.  You can never have enough copies of your precious moments.  If you're interested in the site you can sign-up at www.smugmug.com and if you use this coupon code FkoWZ8IjsnygW to get a $5 discount on signing up for your very own SmugMug account.

To view my account go to: http://www.bappleby.smugmug.com