Sunday, February 24, 2008

I’m officially putting photos on Smug Mug

As I’ve continued to grow my photography collection, as well as the photography part of Pixeldust Films core business, I’ve started to look around at some other photo storage solutions besides Flickr.  I love Flickr, especially because of the huge community they have there.  Frankly, however, I haven’t really found the community to be very beneficial to me in terms of building out my photography business.

In fact, there are SO many people on Flickr that getting noticed at all takes a heck of a lot of work.  In the end, with over 1000 photos there, I have yet to receive any real feedback from anyone (except my mom, go figure).  Of course, I’ve only recently started to avidly post there, and I know all that will change over time.  And, in fairness to Flickr users, I generally don’t comment on people’s photos either, so it’s probably not fair to expect the world when I’ve hardly given it myself…

Anyway, I’ve been aware of Smug Mug for many years, as a good friend of mine has been using it exclusively and has, to date, well over 300,000 photos up there (they say they have no storage limit, and apparently they mean it).  As well, I found a heck of a lot of pro photographers over there, a lot of useful photography tips and tutorials, as well as some very robust client and organizational tools.  While this is not a head-to-head comparison of the 2 services (I may do that another time), it is clear that Smug Mug promotes themselves as a family business with personal service and more of a boutique approach to digital photography storage.  As well, there were a few other cool things that really pushed me over the edge to sign up as a pro user:

• Smug Mug makes multiple, redundant copies of your photos for maximum security in case of data loss
• There’s this insane plugin called Smugglr, which literally allowed me to move my entire Flickr album (1000+ photos) with virtually no effort.  I set it up, walked away, and when I came back my entire Smug Mug Gallery was totally loaded with my Flickr photos, tags, descriptions, and even my Flickr galleries.  It was just ridiculously easy to migrate the content.
• I got 50% off my first year as a Flickr defector (I signed up for a Pro account)
• Smug Mug offers pretty robust image management categories, and an especially useful set of tools for hiding and showing galleries.  This for me will make Smug Mug the place to house all my client-related photos.
• Smug Mug offers some pretty nice themes, and the ability to create your own.  I’ll eventually make my Smug Mug page look more like it’s integrated into the Pixeldust Films website.
• Smug Mug is a family-run shop, and that’s largely in alignment with where Pixeldust Films is headed.  More on that later, as I’ll have some cool announcements on this in a few weeks!

Anyway, I guess the list goes on, and maybe this is the beginning of a head-to-head shootout, but in the meantime, check out my new Smug Mug gallery of photos!