I’ve never been completely happy with Flickr. I started using it several years ago because I got tired of maintaining Gallery on my servers when services such as flickr and smugmug existed. I originally chose flickr because it was free, but after i started scanning my family pictures I hit the upload limit fast and bought the pro account. Setup my sets and left it at that for a couple of years.

When I started dating Katherine and showing her some pictures she commented on how awful Flickrs navigation is. Flickr’s strength is when you are using its tagging features and searching for lots of pictures … especially if you want pictures from multiple people. I always browsed my pictures in iPhoto on my local machine, not on flickr. I used flickr to link to pictures and let other people browse them. But for people that are not used to tagging and searching tags, using Flickr really IS very cumbersome.

I recently became re-aware of SmugMug from Lifehacker. A friend of mine used it years ago, but i dismissed it because I was running Gallery on my servers. Then i ignored it because I was already using the free flickr and decided to just stick with it. Having some time to kill this week, i decided to give smugmug another serious look and signed up for their 14 day free trial and used Smugglr to automagically migrate my flickr data over to SmugMug. The import worked well, only 4 images failed to import properly. My only complaint about Smugglr is that it didn’t tell me which images didn’t import, so i need to figure that out by hand.

All in all I’m happy with SmugMug, and paid for the year subscription (50% off with the coupon code “flickr”). It allows much more customization and organization options than Flickr does: Categories, Sub Categories, Themes (global and individual galleries), etc …. I feel like I am in control of my pictures again instead of just having a stream of all my images and some “sets” which always felt like a hack to me. If i know what i’m looking for search the tags in flickr worked well, but sometimes you just want to browse your images. SmugMug excels at just browsing things, if you spend the time to setup categories and sub categories and organizing your galleries.

Here is my new Photo website, enjoy:

http://mbond.smugmug.com

I updated the navigation in the left hand bar as well. I won’t be getting rid of my flickr account but it does expire in January and I won’t be renewing the pro account. Pretty sure that means things will disappear after that.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 2:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.