I was having a quick surf around for photo stuff, I'm a pro user of Flickr which is a rarity for me as I almost never pay for anything online (other than actual shopping) but I liked it and several friends used it so it made sense to plunk down $45 for two years membership. And I'm very happy with it to date and use it almost daily for different things, mainly either uploading my own photos to make sure they are stored safely and and can be shared with family for personal stuff or colleagues for bloggy type stuff.
However in the project I am immersed in now I needed to look around, a quick search revealed that there are loads of course, which came top - Flickr of course, then Pbase, then Fotki but I noticed Smugmug on the sponsored links and it sprung a memory somewhere so I decided to check it out.
What struck me was the way they make a great effort to describe how much better they are than any other service, they seem to focus on the Kodak type sites rather than Flickr for example, the shout out load features?
- define your own style to your album (HTML skill nice to have)
- view photos up to 8MB each, some customers have 20 megapixels!
- slow connection? no problem pick smaller images
- improve your online life! i.e. you can link to your photos from elsewhere
- upload 100s of photos with a few clicks! including uploading whole directories
- take control of your options - privacy settings, filename control etc
- upgrade to Pro and you can choose your own look and feel
- If pro you can upload video clips
- batch operations for rotation, arranging etc
- film quality prints or access your own photos on your home printer!
- and finally a cost structure - standard $29.95, power $49.95, pro $99.95
I'm not going into each one but there isn't anything there above what I get with Flickr that would make me switch, but as a product it looks nice enough, just seems they protest too much about how much better they are which makes me sceptical.... for example check out this page which claims they can prove it!
