SmugMug (www.smugmug.com) is a popular online photo-sharing service that
provides many benefits and features that similar services do not.
This article
takes a detailed look at SmugMug, what if offers and what sets it apart from its
competitors,
The service certainly has a wide variety of features that make it easy for
you to share your digital photos over the Internet with your friends and
family.
Costing a mere $29.95 per year makes a SmugMug account an attractive purchase
from the outset, but lets take a closer look at what this service has to offer.
Setup and Usage
Setting up a SmugMug account is as simple as can be, and when it comes to
uploading your photos SmugMug offers the most easy to use and informative system
available from any online photo service.
Uploading your photos can be as simple
as dragging and dropping them just like you would in Windows, and while your
photos upload you are shown the upload progress of each file, not to mention the
total upload time remaining. Such an informative and user-friendly upload tool
sets SmugMug well above its competitors.
Customization
There are a large variety of presentation styles built-in to SmugMug that allow
you to display your photos in a number of different layouts – a journal-style
that allows you to display text with your photos, as well as thumbnail and
slide-show views are also available, amongst many others.
Another nice feature
is a viewer-selected mode, which allows people to choose how your photos will be
presented to them as they browse your albums. The ability to edit your photos in
various ways is also included, but you are limited to customizing your photo
albums any more than changing the background color unless you are fluent in
HTML, JavaScript, or CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which will prove to be
annoying for some users.
Sharing and Security
SmugMug comes complete with some very useful and well-needed sharing and
security features. Setting up passwords for different photo albums is a simple
process, and sharing your photos on a sub-domain of SmugMug.com can be set up
quickly, providing you with an easy to remember URL to pass along to your
friends and family so that they can have quick access to your photos.
Another nice feature is that you are able to order prints of your photographs,
which will come in very useful if printing them yourself is not practical.
Shortcomings
Although there are many good points to SmugMug, there are still a few
shortcomings. The lack of more easy-to-use options for customizing your photo
albums may not be an annoyance for everybody, but I’m sure there are many people
out there who either don’t want to learn HTML and other scripting languages to
customize their albums, or simply do not have the time to do so.
Another slight
annoyance is the price of a Pro account that lets you watermark and sell images
from the SmugMug website – this costs $99.95 per year and does not offer that
much more over a standard account for the additional cost.
Conclusion
Overall SmugMug is one of, if not the best online digital photo sharing service
available. It has many useful and easy to use features that set it apart from
similar services such as PhotoSite and Sacko, and even though customization can
be somewhat bothersome, the rest of the service’s features make this product
highly recommended for anyone looking to share their digital photos online. I
hope that this review has helped you to decide if SmugMug is the right photo
sharing service for you!
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