The Battle Between Flickr vs. SmugMug
I just received all of the pictures from the 2009 Cal Poly Business Plan Competition from a professional Cal Poly photographer and I wanted to upload them on a photo sharing site where I could keep the quality of the photos but be able to easily share them on this site and with friends and family. After a quick Google search I came across two popular choices SmugMug and Flickr.
Initially I decided to go with SmugMug because of some reviews I read on Twitter and the very high quality of the photos/slideshows users had on there site. I made my profile http://chrismccann.smugmug.com uploaded pictures and they looked great. The quality was perfect, the presentation of the pictures was clean, and overall I was impressed.
Until I tried adding the photos to my wordpress.com site. I searched forever trying to find the easiest way to embed gallery to this blog with no luck. The closest thing I found was converting the SmugMug gallery to a flash object then embedding that flash object in a post but WordPress.com doesn’t allow flash objects in posts.
After all that time was spend uploading 157 photos with tags and descriptions all into my SmugMug account I was now doubting my first impressions of the site and decided to move to Flickr.
While Flickr doesn’t look as good as SmugMug in terms of the presentation of your photos Flickr is so much more user friendly than SmugMug. Flickr’s photo upload is much faster, it’s a whole lot easier to add tags and write descriptions for multiple pictures at one time, and embedding galleries into posts is a whole lot easier
If you’re a publisher or blog writer on wordpress.com I would highly recommend Flickr over SmugMug simply because it’s much easier to publish your photos and albums from Flickr.
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Hey Chris,
Here are a few 3rd party apps that provide SmugMug/WordPress integration.
Hope this helps!
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=49541
http://quicksmug.dyndns.org/
http://www.coverthisphotography.com/services/web-designdevelopment/smugwp-wordpress-plugin
http://www.mediafire.com/?0yjwszt2t5z
http://www.mariedeluna.com/projects/
There’s a plug-in for WP-Smugmug integration. Try it here:
http://www.tow.com/projects/wordpress/wp-smugmug/
One of the many great things about Smugmug is the open API.
Hi Chris, I’m from SmugMug – you’re exactly right, about the links for sharing in your blog…. and you’ll be glad to know we’ve already begun taking steps to improve this. I hope we have something to show you really soon.
Thanks for posting about this!
Andy thanks for leaving a comment. Let me know when there are better sharing features for SmugMug and I’d be happy to check your site again.
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I’ve written some brief thoughts on Smugmug and Flickr. For me SmugMug looks better, Flicr is more of a community, and yeah, Flickr seems to interface better with other services.
http://halesy.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/photo-hosting-sites/
Tried both, and Smugmug works best for me. I have not quite perfected it, but you can see an example at my site http://www.johntmcgregor.com, and click on Photos in the navigation bar. I like that I can customize my Smugmug site to closely match the design of my main site. I also have a link on my Smugmug site to take you back to my main site.
I have to go with Smugmug as well. Flickr wins in the price department, but everything else is horrible. The way the images are displayed and the organisation in general is poor.
Also with smumug you can get some discounts to bring the cost down. If you don’t want the video storage option you can get the price down to the same as flickr.
Use this code for a $5 discount: MjmiE0xAHBhwQ