I'm On SmugMug

I’ve been a user of Flickr, Yahoo Photos, Photobucket and Facebook photo albums for awhile. Yahoo Photos have since been absorbed into Flickr, while I found Photobucket rather slow and I wasn’t taken by it. Facebook while excellent for mass “display”, auto-compress the images down to smaller size. That’s understandable since Facebook is probably the largest social networking site out there and storage and speed are going to be an issue if no compression are performed. Then there was Picasa but somehow I never checked it out. All the above are viable options for the casual photographer but when I went down the “dark side” of photography, there was really no going back – I needed more. Disk space was being gobbled up quicker than you munching on your favourite keropok, what with each image averaging 3MB.

I wanted a reliable photo hosting site that offers their customers great flexibility, scalability, ease of use and fast. Having a nice interface would be great too as it enhances the viewers experience. I considered going with the subscription-based Flickr account for awhile, because of its huge community. But one of the podcasts out there highly recommended SmugMug. To cut to the chase, I was hooked. It certainly has to be the best looking site out there and they’ve plug-ins to many of the popular photo editing software in the market which allows you to upload directly (or Export) from say Photoshop or Aperture. No such software? Then use their Drag and Drop Uploader. Best of all, even the basic account doesn’t limit you to storage space. They accept and display your photos as you want them to in various sizes, allow your “fans” to download their favourite shots, provide a Control Panel to monitor your traffic and other stats, ability to control your albums’ privacy and more. Once you decide to take the next step and upgrade your site to a Pro account, a humongous level of customization is made available such as eCommerce, inserting your own banner among other neat features.

Lest you think the basic account is expensive, let me say that I paid less than RM140 per year, after using a discount voucher. If you’re a shooter like me and are also looking to having a great presentation that does justice to your photos, I highly recommend SmugMug with no hesitation to you.

You can also enjoy the savings I did by entering my email (runcarbomanrun@gmail.com) and coupon code (ReWTeg2ry0Zak) in the “Referred by” field on the signup page. Just entering these 2 details will get you USD5 off your subscription.

Oh yeah, please visit my Galleries at http://jamiepang.smugmug.com and leave your comments and votes there. If you’re a shooter, you’ll be interested to know the EXIF data of each shot – you can do that by moving your cursor over the image and select “Photo Info”. Then you’ll be able to tell me where I went wrong.