Digital Home Thoughts: Smugmug vs. Flickr: A Detailed Look

"As a 2 year SmugMug “Standard” account holder, I built up a large collection of photos, painstakingly uploaded, organized and annotated. Since 2004, the online photo sharing service market has changed considerably. I’ve had a Flickr account for nearly as long and have always been impressed with the features, speed, and ease of use, but I also felt locked-in to Smugmug because of the large collection I’d amassed with SmugMug-specific metadata (that is not easily transferable). Despite those feelings however, I’ve started a “migration” from Smugmug to Flickr as of late for a variety of reasons that are all outlined in this article. I feel SmugMug has stagnated in the features department over the last 1-2 years. Flickr had an impressive feature set when it launched a few years ago (arguably a more complete service than SmugMug at launch) and has improved with big time features like geotagging. What follows is a description of the reasons I’m switching, but manages to be a review of Flickr and sharing services in general at the same time. I’d like to get your feedback via comments or “offline” by email. If a SmugMug employee gets ahold of this article, the SmugMug bashing that follows might be painful."

An interesting article, and sadly, not one that I can entirely disagree with. I went with Smugmug for a lot of reasons, the biggest being the ability for me to customize my photo site to matchmy blog. For that, Smugmug is great and Flickr wouldn't have worked for me. There's a lot that I like about Smugmug, but this article highlights a lot of the things that I don't. The fact that albums are either fully public, or fully private, is a bit frustrating. I'd like to be able to tag certain images as private so the public could see one album, and people logged in as friends could see some added pictures that the public wouldn't see. As much as I like Smugmug, there are so many small things (like larger thumbnail sizes) that I'm surprised they haven't added yet.

Smugmug cares about their users think though, so I wasn't surprised to see Don MacAskill from Smugmug comment on the post, and a great discussion ensued. I definitely think Smugmug is a great solution for many people, but I feel like their "home grown" approach is sometimes at odds with providing features that their users want. Give the article a read and weigh in.