Stéphane Lee

After watching the ScobleShow on Smugmug, I decided to give it a try. My original intent is to pay for a Smugmug subscription and let my Flickr account die. In the interview, they showed how they auto-resize the picture. You get a larger picture if you have a larger screen. If you resize your browser window, the picture is resized automatically. It’s a pretty neat feature. They also have video for premium accounts. The videos are re-encoded in various formats and are streamed to the appropriate format (iphone, wide screen…).

Unfortunately, this is not enough. I uploaded some pictures in bulk (original format, unsorted). The Canon camera software downloads the pictures in folders by date. If the picture is taken on January 7th, 2008, it will automatically create a 2008_01_07 folder. I’ve uploaded a couple of these folders using Send to SmugMug tool. You right-click on a folder and you have an option to send to SmugMug in the contextual menu. This software is pretty cool and is better that the Flickr Uploadr.

The problem starts when I wanted to reorganize the photos. I wanted to create galleries, move pictures around easily, put a title and description on the pictures and galleries in a quick and easy manner. To delete or move a photo for example, you will have to choose an action in a drop-down list. There is also a ‘bulk’ option. Since you are trying to sort and organize your photos, the bulk option is not very useful. There are far too many clicks before things get done. If you have used the Flickr Organizer once, you will see what I mean. With Flickr, you drag and drop the pictures, create collections (groups of albums), click on a picture to edit its description… Click once on the title to edit and then press Enter to finish (no second click necessary).

You are invited to give Smugmug a try. It’s free for 14 days. You get 50% off the regular price if you put ‘flickr‘ as the coupon code. For me, at the end of the day, Flickr remains a better product and I renewed my pro account.