Smugmug.Com: Possibly the Best Photo Sharing Site

With all the free photo sharing sites available why should anyone pay to store their photos?

That used to be MY thinking. But it seemed like any of the sites I went to had certain limitations. For instance, Kodak, Snapfish, DotPhoto, and others required the users to buy photos or merchandise or else pay a yearly fee to keep their photos on the site. Some sites have a limit on the number of megabytes that allowed on albums and there are those that require your friends and family to sign up for an account before they can see your pictures. And my biggest complaint is that most of the free sites do NOT allow anyone to save the original size image to their hard drive. That is because they want you to order prints from THEM!!

Along Comes www.smugmug.com

I noticed that one of my brothers and my nephew kept sending me links to our family photos and the site was called "smugmug." I went to check it out and lo and behold, for abut $40 a year (not that much, really!!), you can store UNLIMITED number of photos on smugmug. Photos for standard and power memberships can be as large as 12 mg each so that's PLENTY big for most people. Smugmug account members can create as many albums or galleries that they want and share the photos the way they want without asking friends and family to sign up for accounts or to buy the photos. Yes, if you choose to allow it, people can download the full size images to their computer and then they can print themselves or take to the photo lab of their choosing.

Smugmug does offer print and enlargement services along with the standard photo gifts such as mugs, photo canvas bags, puzzles, etc. at reasonable and competitive prices. We even ordered our holiday cards from Smugmug.com last year and were pleasantly surprised at how good the cards came out and how efficient the ordering process was.

Setting up your albums is quite easy. Members would first set up a "category" and then "galleries" are set up within the categories. For instance, I have set up categories for each year of photos: 2009 and on down. Within those categories I have set up galleries with pictures of each event during the year such as vacations, birthday parties, etc.

Each gallery can be individually customized with passwords and a number of options that include a wide variety of look and feel designs, whether you want photo information to be shown or whether you want file names displayed. There are a number of privacy options, and choices on the maximum size of photos you want viewers to be able to see. Smugmug will show thumbnail up to 3x the size of your photo if you so choose. Smugmug is a family site and they do not "allow anything that wouldn't be seen in a public museum that admits minors.

It's easy as pie to sort your photos just about any way you want as well as move or copy photos to other galleries. There are so many customization choices and they make it so simple to learn how to use the site. And if you need help, send them an email and you get a very friendly helpful answer usually within 24 hours. There's also extensive online help for every facet of the site.

Smugmug also makes it easy to share your photos to a number of the popular social networking sites. There are also user forums and groups on smugmug to ask questions or share your galleries with others.

This site will definitely be keeping my business for a long time. But what if you need MORE power? For $59.95/year you can upload DVD-quality video clips, you can give your site its own look and feel with customized banners and you can use your own domain name. If you want to prevent people from using your photos you can put in 'right click' protection.

If you're a professional and want a really slick site, you can pay $149.95 and get the Professional Account (my kids' sleep away camp had one of these accounts). The maximum size allowed for uploads is 24mg per picture (and unlimited number of photos, of course). The pro account lets members upload High Definition video clips and allows watermarking of photos to prevent use of your copyrighted pictures. You can also earn money by setting your own prices for prints and the photo merchandise to earn a profit.

Smugmug is not as widely known as Snapfish, Google's Picasa, and others and I think that's a good thing! The entire look and feel of the site is absolutely professional but still somehow retains a really friendly and a "you're not just a number" feel. You can sign up for a 2 week trial to see how you like it. If you do, you can get $5.00 off your first year with this code: LDAhV4nRDon02