SmugMug

[Fox Paw]

I'm not sure what category this belongs in. After seeing MissMia's side-by-side comparison of photos hosted on Photobucket and SmugMug, I tested SmugMug and signed up. It seems to me that you clearly get more detail on SmugMug. If you're going to work at getting the details right, that's gratifying.

One surprise, though, is that flaws in the photos show up much more clearly as well. On Photobucket, a little oversharpening might get lost in the compression, but on SmugMug I'm seeing it. If I selected a portion of an image for processing and didn't feather the boundary enough, I'm now seeing it. Guess that's good. I need to be more careful about such things.

I have no complaints about SmugMug but I gather that they have the right to sell prints of your photos and keep all the revenue. I'm not expecting any demand for prints of my stuff but that bothers me a little. Does anyone know if I'm wrong?

[Terri]

I gather that they have the right to sell prints of your photos and keep all the revenue.
No way...do you sign away your copyright when you use their service? I have not been a customer of theirs, but can't believe that anyone would be comfortable with this notion....

[Aggie]

unless it is spelled out in the agreement you signed with them, it is not a right of theirs to exercise. If you find they have sold one of your photos, there are already cases on the books about the photographer winning against such sites.

[Chiller]

I have been on smugmug for a few years now, and have the Pro account. The photos are mine, and they are not like Facebook, where they can steal your photos. I have been totally happy with Smugmug, and the support there is amazing.
Recently, I had some photos "stolen", and they appeared on another horror site, claiming to be theirs. With the Smugmug pro account it has right click protection, which adds a bit of security .
I will never post a high res image on a photo forum again:irked: There is no need to, and as long as my prints are nice and crisp, Im not worried about what they look like on a photo forum.

[Fox Paw]

I got the cheapo account but MissMia has advised me that I misunderstood the terms. Apparently I can block any sales.

[Chiller]

I got the cheapo account but MissMia has advised me that I misunderstood the terms. Apparently I can block any sales.
IM not sure how the small account works. With the pro, I have full control over everything, including the layout, sales, everything. There are a ton of features, and I havent had the time to check out half mine. :biglaugh::biglaugh:

Hope it all works out well for you tho. :-):-):-)

[Walter]

I have a pro account also. I do sell some photos out of it, but they are all with my knowledge. I charge enough to make a few bucks on each sale. I usually keep a watermark in the middle of each photo, and never show full size images publicly. I like the password feature and hidden galleries for work I do for clients.

For the stuff I post online; I keep my own servers and upload to them through an FTP program (wsftp). When I upload to my server (aeve.com) the images are the exact size and sharpness I want. That way there's no problem with compression.

Here's my flow, start to post;

Snap shot, convert raw to tif, save tif, convert to 8 bit and save to full size jpg. (upload full size jpg to smugmug if it's good enough to try to sell --limit display size to large or medium with autowatermark*).

Resize jpg to < 800 x < 600, sharpen and upload to my server (aeve.com) then post. Every now and again, after maybe a year or so I delete the posted files. By uploading them the size I want to post, there's no problems with the server doing sharpening I don't like.

An extra, unrelated step I often do more than the other two is to size down the jpg to maybe <430 x < 600, for my project servers, which are on the same host machines as all my servers (20+-). These smaller shots get a hard watermark at the bottom as the mindless unwashed masses often use them for their facebook/myspace/blogs. If they don't give a link credit (typical) I can block referral from the site giving them a little tiny 'x' until they go away. To see this in action, look up any of my posts on TPF where I didn't edit out the image.

*Chiller was nice enough to provide an explanation awhile back to me on how the watermark on smugmug could easily be worked around- so I don't enable original size displays with exceptions being private, hidden galleries.

Curses. I thought I'd be able to explain that easier. Uh, er, nevermind.

-

[Fox Paw]

All pretty clear, Walter. In the description of your workflow, I was puzzled by your converting the tif to 8-but before converting to jpeg. I always just save a copy of the 16-but image as a jpeg. Is there a disadvantage to that approach?

[Walter]

All pretty clear, Walter. In the description of your workflow, I was puzzled by your converting the tif to 8-but before converting to jpeg. I always just save a copy of the 16-but image as a jpeg. Is there a disadvantage to that approach?

My olde tyme cs2 won't save as a 16 bit jpg. SM seems to print the 8-bit jpg excellently--especially with the bay photo lab option. I keep the layered 16 bit in tif for if I see something I need to edit out save and resave the product .jpg's. I try not to edit jpg files with the exception of images for my production sites where I use lview for hard watermarking and web compression.

BTW, Bay photo lab is far superior to EZ Photo lab. The paper is better and on larger prints everything is shipped flat rather than rolled. More expensive, but well worth it. IMO.

-

[Fox Paw]

Thanks.

[Chiller]

My only problem with Smugmug, is shipping to Canada. :( I have heard a lot of bad stories, and I have not heard that smugmug plans on getting a Canadian print company...yet. Anybody here who wanted any photos, I have had printed, and sent on my own.