I switched from Flickr to Smugmug
Last week, after debating for months, I switched from Flickr to Smugmug. Some of you may remember that I used Gallery and then Gallery2 for many years, eventually switching to Flickr after finding tools to assist with the migration. Gallery was simply too hard to manage from the "infrastructure" side - notably dealing with errors encountered when installing new versions. Of course, you had to install the latest version to reduce security vulnerabilities. By moving to a hosted service like Flickr, I no longer had to worry about any of that, which was a relief considering the number of photos I have on my site. Now, don't get me wrong - I'm still a geek at heart and love "working under the hood" but there's a car analogy I use that holds true here as well - "Owning a car with character is great as long as you have another vehicle to get you to work tomorrow." In other words, I don't want to deal with a potentially unreliable solution when I have something as valuable as my photo collection at stake.
Flickr is great - while they offer a relatively small set of features for the 'pro', they have the best 'aftermarket' support and social integration. Tag photos appropriately and in no time you'll start receiving comments on them - something I had never experienced with Gallery. It's truly a great community - in part because it's so big and because they offer a free account level (I have a pro account).
It's this community that made it so hard to move away from Flickr. Social networking is getting bigger, not smaller, and I don't want to become less involved in the movement. On my Mac, I love the Flickr plugin for Quicksilver. I could simply hit my Quicksilver shortcut key, type in a filename or folder name (it will auto complete, of course), hit tab, and type 'Fli'... that was enough to autocomplete "Upload to Flickr?" voila, done. The Flickr application called "Charlie" for the iPhone is fantastic as well.
In the end, features and organization made me switch over to Smugmug.
Here's a simple comparison highlighting the differences that were important to me.
| Flickr | Smugmug | |
| Orgnanization | Flickr allows you to add pictures into 'Sets' and add sets into 'Collections'. You can have a picture that is not a member of a set. | A picture uploaded to Smugmug must be placed in a 'Gallery'. Galleries can be members of 'Sub-Categories' which belong inside a 'Category'... so there is an additional level of organization with Smugmug |
| Third party support | Flickr offers excellent third party applications | Smugmug's 'aftermarket' is not as big, but it's very likely you can find an application to do what you need. |
| Community | Very large community. Tag your photos and expect them to be commented on! | Smugmug has a much smaller user base and they do not have any free account levels; therefore, the community is smaller (but comprised of more serious photographers). |
| Terms of use | Although Flickr does not block "referrers", the official terms of use says that you should not use their photo hosting for a web page | Smugmug does not restrict your use |
| Image sizes | Flickr resizes to 75, 100, 240, 500, and 1024px wide | Smugmug offers 8 sizes PLUS you can specify a view size in the URL and it'll create additional sizes on the fly. |
| Privacy | Flickr allows you to restrict viewing to "Friends" and/or "Family". These invididuals must have Flickr accounts and be marked as such. | Smugmug allows you to hide a gallery from public view or password protect a gallery. |
| Design | You cannot change how Flickr looks. | This is where Smugmug really shines. Not only can you assign your own hostname for the Power and Pro levels (http://photos.linquist.net), but you can completely change the look and feel of your gallery to match that of your web page. You can upload javascript, css, etc! I love the way Smugmug's default gallery theme will resize the picture to fit the viewer's browser window. |
| Prints | Flickr allows you to order prints | Smugmug allows you to order prints AND sell them at a profit with the pro-level account. You set the price and receive 85% of the profits. Even without a pro level account, you can order photo books, shirts, etc! |
| Overall ease of use | Flickr is relatively easy. Batch operations can sometimes be painful, however | Smugmug is also very easy to use. Hiding a single photo, for example, is a single click when logged in. Batch operations are much more user friendly. |
| Cost | Free or $25/yr | $39, $59, or $149/yr based on account level. All have unlimited storage. |
The migration process took some time because of how my photos were organized on Flickr. I had a collection for every year, and inside I had sets named "MM-DD Eventname". The problem is that Flickr does not reveal the collection that a set belongs to in the API, so I had to first go through and rename all of my sets to "YYYY-MM-DD Eventname" so I knew what year they belonged to. After that was done, I used Smugglr (Firefox plugin) to move the photos. It moves them server-to-server, making it quick. I've got about 21,000 photos so it still took some time. After the 'sets' were moved over, I had to use an appliation called NitroDesk to move each 'set' (now a gallery) into a category organized by year. Unfortunately Smugmug doesn't support this gallery batch moving operation, but NitroDesk has a 15-day free trial that made the process painless.
So far I'm very happy with my decision!
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Comments
passenger side window
once i put the window down more than half way and then put it back up again the window does not close properly it drops about 6mm tilting towards the wing mirror which is annoying as you have to stop the car and pull it back up otherwise you get really bad wind noise is there a fix for it.
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