SmugMug was my choice

I'd done quite a bit of research into online photo sharing sites, and found SmugMug to be the best option. I won't go into granular details of feature differences, because there seems to be to many to wade through. I did however, use this site for feature comparisons. The final two determining factors were price and whether there was a clear way my data was backed up. Nowhere on dotPhoto's site did I see any notation of hot-site, or backups, just that I could order a DVD of my data whenever I liked. That didn't particularly give me warm fuzzies.

Another thing I like about SmugMug is that you can use 3rd party software to post your images. iPhoto, Photoshop, or in my case, Linux and Picasa2. Works like a champ, along with the Firefox SmugManager plugin from J. Rinaldi, which is very slick. Gives you oodles of account setting options for your SmugMug account right on your browser toolbar.

You see, the main reason for the move to post to a site like SmugMug was that our family suffered a data loss. Yes, I know..."But John, you're in IT, you should know better." Have you ever heard that old phrase, "The cobblers children wear no shoes." Well, my desktop wore no latex. Nope, no protection at all. And that $1++y little Maxtor HDD that was just 2 years old decided to expire, chunk, puke blood, and take everything with it. Including some pictures of my son being born.... As my hero, Homer Simpson would say, DOH! The think that kills me is that the system drive, which still hums like a top, is a 10 year old 30gb IBM drive. Guess who is IBM's biggest fan NOW? Guess I'll be sticking with my ThinkPad, and out with the NON-BLUE devices. You can imagine, my wife is not letting go of that one anytime soon, and I can't blame her.

Additionally, my Mother-in-Law lives in Missouri, and loves to see current pictures of her grandson. At the moment, she browses my Joomla server in my basement, which is connected via cable modem. 1.5mb down, 256k up. Hardly a great experience for her, especially when I'm doing some power using on the LAN. That box, I will add, has a mirrored drive, to save my @$$ if one decides to die. I can't afford RAID and a DAT drive at home... ;-]

Sooo anyhoo (What we say in WI) right now, you can get UNLIMITED storage of images and movies, with UNLIMITED (1pb, and who'll use that up??) bandwidth for $59.99 per year. What's more, if you use this coupon code, izZXvnmn7rz82, you'll save $5. Geez, they even give you 14 days to test drive it, and_you_don't_have_to_give_them_your_CC. You'll not see that very often.

Wow, this was my first non-very-technical post...WHOOT!

Comments

Unknown said…
Cool- I did the free 2 week trial, and was somewhat satisfied. I hadn’t seen that photo site review page though, that woulda been a help! Anyways, I have been using pixamo because the way the tags stick with your photos is really helpful!

Popular posts from this blog

NPI Search Redundancy

freeFTPD

Using ImageMagick and Tesseract to sort TIFFs on Windows