I take a lot of pictures and I am a total geek when it comes to organizing my pictures (and audio files). I have pictures going back to the first images that appeared on my Olympus C-700 Ultra Zoom back in early 2001. I got a relatively late start to digital photography, but 37,951 pictures, 1798 directories, and 67.98 GB later (at last count), I have a lot to protect and manage.

I have this obsession with being able to find any picture I have ever taken within just a few minutes. I have every picture (and video) organized into individual directories for individual events. An example might be "2008.05.11 - Hiking at Radnor Lake - Nashville, TN".

You might expect that I would have found a good tool to help me with this by now. However, try as I might, I have never trusted any of the photo organizer tools that are available. I have tried lots of them: ACDSee Photo Manager, Adobe Photoshop Album, Microsoft Picture It 10 Library, Corel Photo Album, ULead Photo Explorer, and more. Most of them worked decently, had sharp interfaces, and some had some neat features that set them apart from the others. However, having seen many programs come and go, many of them requiring me to allow them to organize my photos using the program's specific storage methodology, I have always been hesitant to turn over the management of my photos to a tool that might not be around when I am looking for a good embarrassing picture of my son to show at his wedding reception 10 or 15 years from now.

So, I stick with my un-trusting and archaic means of managing my photos. They sit on my machine, where only I can get to them. One of my wife's constant complaints is that of all the digital pictures we have, I have rarely taken the time to print any of them (I don't know what I would do with them if I did). I have a slide-show of my photos running on my ReplayTV (pre Tivo device, and better) when my TV shows are paused, on two digital photo frames, on all of my family's 5 iPods, and in my Vista Sidebar gadget (because I was stupid and bought Vista). But no prints.

My biggest problem is getting these pictures into the hands of my wife and family members who want to see them and sometimes order some prints of them.

SmugMug

A little while back, I discovered SmugMug. In a nutshell, SmugMug is an online photo management tool that allows you to upload ALL your photos (and optionally videos), organize them into galleries, and share them as you like. They offer unlimited photo storage, unlimited traffic, with no ads and no spam. SmugMug offers a 14-day free trial, but doesn't have a free version. The Standard versions costs $40 annually, and the Power version costs $60 annually. The big difference between the Standard and Power version is support for DVD quality video (limited to 2.5 minutes). Beyond support for video, the benefits of upgrading to the Power account are listed below.

You can create a custom hostname for your SmugMug account. Direct people to something like photos.MyDomainName.com instead of MyAccountName.smugmug.com. Not terribly important for sharing photos, but a nice touch for the real geeks.
SmugMug helps protect your photos from right-click downloading by viewers.
Change the look and feel of the site and modify the headers and footers of your page. Some of the customized sites I found would be somewhat difficult to identify as SmugMug sites to someone not intimately familiar with the SmugMug site.

If you haven't seen SmugMug recently, visit it now and browse around a bit.

I have used SmugMug for a while now and love it. It isn't perfect, but it is better than the handful of other sites I tried before devoting myself (for a while anyway) to SmugMug. I bought a Power account for the video support and I I love the custom domain name.

My Favorite Features

Uploading photos and video is a breeze. SmugMug supports 8 upload utilities, although I use the Simple one (that's what they call it). It is a Java utility that allows you to select individual files or an entire folder and it uploads them, in full resolution, very easily. Because of the photo directory naming convention I described above, this is especially helpful for me.
The interface is the best looking in the industry. Slick use of AJAX makes the site smooth and fast. The pages download extremely quickly and the pictures load nearly instantly - great overall user experience.
The galleries show large pictures that make it easy to quickly find a picture. In addition, other users (my family mostly) can subscribe to RSS feeds to be notified of new pictures posted to my site.
I host a blog on TypePad for my extended family to keep in touch with the goings on of my family. It is mostly a digest of our family's activities, but I always post pictures throughout the post along with a link to the SmugMug gallery for the event. All standard stuff. SmugMug makes it extremely simple to do this with a 'sharing' page that displays several links to various sizes of each picture. I go into a gallery, select the picture I want to display on my blog, and click the Sharing button. This brings up a page (actually an AJAX frame) displaying links to 8 different sizes of the picture I selected, from tiny (up to 100 by 100) to what SmugMug calls X3 Large Link (up to 1600 by 1200). When I click the link for the picture that I want to show on my blog, the URL is automatically copied to my clipboard (nice touch). For the pictures I show in the blog post, I typically use either thumbnail or small. At the bottom of the blog, where I link to the gallery, I use one of the 3 links provided on the sharing page that brings the user to the gallery where the selected photo was stored. The sharing page is one of the many small touches that helped me to choose SmugMug.
The granular security provided is helpful. Since most of my site was created mainly for the purpose of sharing photos with my family, I have my site set to Public, meaning anyone with a link to it can view the photos. In addition, I elected the following settings: Google will not index my galleries and other SmugMug users cannot find my galleries when searching the SmugMug site. In short, if you find one of my galleries via a link from my family's blog post, you can see all the pictures, but no one else is likely to happen across them accidentally.
SmugMug also allows friends and family members to modify the keywords and comments associated with pictures. This has been a nice feature as it helps to ensure that some of our better pictures get the captions they deserve.
There are lots of choices for displaying your photos. SmugMug lets you select a different theme for every gallery, allowing you to really 'set the mood' for the occasion. As of Dec 2008, there are 50 to choose from.
Unlike most sites, you can arrange the pictures in your gallery the way you want them to appear. Normally, I am happy leaving the gallery alone, allowing it to display the pictures in the order they were taken. Sometimes though, there are a few pictures that you want to make sure everyone sees. SmugMug has an Arrange mode, which allows you to drag photos in the gallery to other locations - I sometimes like to take 1 or 2 of the my photos in a gallery and move them to the top of the list.

So far, SmugMug hasn't replaced my local storage methodology for pictures, but it does solve several of the problems that I have made for myself. Chiefly, my family members (Mom, Dad, brothers, grandmothers, etc.) can see what we are up to from week to week. From the monkey-off-my-back department, it also allows my wife and Mom to print the pictures they want without my intervention.

If you a professional photographer, there is also a Pro version available as well for $150 annually. You can modify the site very extensively to make it your own. You can sell prints with profitable markups, sell digital downloads of the prints, and display HD quality videos up to about 10 minutes in length.

Wish List

That said, there are some things I don't particularly like about SmugMug.

First, I have had infrequent problems logging into the site. It does not always keep me logged in, as I expect, and when I enter my email address and password and click login, the page to which I am taken operates as though I have not logged in. It seems that this problem could be easily remedied.

Second, the site seems to be unstable a little more often than I expect - the problems are rare, just more often than I expect. When the site is obviously having problems, sometimes I get an error message that lets me know they know about the problem (which is somewhat of a relief), but more often there is no notification.

Another quirky issue I have is with uploading. After I select a group of pictures to upload, I click upload and continue doing something else. Almost every time, I come back to it and find that one or more of the pictures has not uploaded. Ready for this, SmugMug has added a Retry button that retries all the failed uploads, but I sometimes need to click this button more than once to get all the files to upload successfully.

Like I said above, I love my custom hostname I use to access my SmugMug account. However, throughout the site, I find that the URL has reverted from my custom hostname (something like photos.MyDomainName.com) to the standard hostname (MyAccountName.smugmug.com). It isn't a huge problem as all the links work and the navigation is seamless, but it is aggravating that the site can't keep my URL stuck on my custom hostname. Having paid for the Power account, I expect my custom hostname to be used throughout.

Navigation seems to be a little clumsy. It seems that navigation around the site was added as an afterthought. When I am viewing a gallery, the high-level navigation links at the top of the screen disappear and you are required to use the breadcrumbs links to find your way back to the list of galleries. I have learned to get around very easily, and I think most people will quickly do the same, but it was initially very non-intuitive. I fear that it will be an issue for my Mom.

I will update this post if the status of the items on my wish list change. Check back.

Overall, as I said at the top of this post, SmugMug is easily my favorite photo sharing site on the web. It has some shortcomings, but I have learned to live with them for the greater good.

Read the rest of the SmugMug story in a 2007 Los Angeles Times article.

Give SmugMug a try.