Online photo sharing sites [General]
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warby

2009 Dec 17
Sorry for the slightly off-topic post but I know that a bunch of you are into (food!) photography. I'm fed up with the horrible picture quality on PicasaWeb (when they scale down from original large size) and I'm looking for a new place to store and present my photos.

flickr is appealing because the picture quality is good and they're well established. The only real downside is the lack of a traditional photo album view, which could cause confusion for some of the intended consumers of my photos.

I'm seriously considering SmugMug. It seems to have everything I'm looking for. Does anyone have any experience or endorsements to share?

Thanks!
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Pete-In-Ottawa

2009 Dec 17
What about best of both worlds? Isnt there software that allows you to make web photo albums (or PDFs for example) from Flickr data? I'm a fan of Flickr Pro myself...
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zymurgist

2009 Dec 17
Run gallery2 on your server - only downside is large up-stream bandwidth consumed by photos (on an already slow pipe), but this would likely only really be of concern if you had large numbers of visitors. But gallery2 is an exceptionally good system. And you keep control of it all.
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Ashley

2009 Dec 17
SmugMug is pretty good. My nephew stores all their photos there. I can download any of their photos in 3 different sizes (even the original maximum size). But I believe that it is not free ($39.95/year).

Some of my friends like to use Flickr. But I found them a bit slower sometimes.

I use PicasaWeb very often to share photos. But when my friends ask for the original size, I then send to them individually. It is free!
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warby

2009 Dec 18
zym, I used Gallery (1 and 2) for quite a few years, but my server's relatively slow up-stream bandwidth pushed me to try PicasaWeb.

Thanks for the info, Pete and Ashley. I'm still on the fence between flickr and SmugMug.
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monty

2009 Dec 18
always used Flickr largely because Rogers subscribers had the free Pro subscription. they've since cancelled this freebie. Flickr is nice if you want to upload snapshots here and there. the whole community aspect of it is also neat. i do find the layout frustrating for full series and albums of photos though. there also isn't much available in terms of customization.

SmugMug seems to be pretty popular with the photography community. there's certainly a lot more flexibility with the layout/presentation as well.

if i were paying for a service, i'd consider SmugMug.
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Momomoto

2009 Dec 19
I pay for and enjoy Flickr. Yes, the lack of a real slide show is a bit crummy, but to be honest I don't miss it. There's also a fairly established community, which is nice because that means I only have to track one RSS feed to see people's updates.

I guess what I'm trying to say is you can go right ahead and use SmugMug, but I probably won't see your pictures! ;)