As I've mentioned before, I'm getting into digital photography more and more, and recently I've been looking for a place to host my digital photos. Basically, I've got two sets of photos - personal photos of vacations and family (mostly taken using my Canon Digital Elph), and artistic photos that I take with my digital SLR (Canon Rebel XTi). The photos from my Elph are in iPhoto, organized into events and albums, and the SLR photos are taken in RAW format and processed using Lightroom.

I had signed up for .Mac and used that for posting my photos from iPhoto into my .Mac site. Then Apple introduced web galleries, and all of a sudden I had another place for photos to go. I'm also a member at Flickr, and was posting my "artsy" photos there. I had friends who were posting photos on Facebook as well, and I uploaded a few photos to Facebook. It was getting out of control. I had at least 4 places that my photos were online - obviously this wasn't working for me. I loved each solution for various reasons: .Mac allowed me to use my own domain name, integrated into iPhoto, and had great themes that I could use. Flickr allowed me to share my photos with others, and get comments on them (assuming that others could find my photos). Facebook allowed me to share them with friends.

Smugmug takes the best of those sites and packages it into one package. You can use your own domain name. You can customize the pages as much as you like. They have various themes you can apply to your photo pages. And when you upload them, you can add them to other communities automatically. Your photos are added to communities that you specify, but only links to your photos, bringing traffic to your photos. (Within a week of uploading my last set of photos I had received a comment on it from someone in the "Flower" community. Cool!) You can also password protect your family photos, so that only family and friends can see those ones.

Viewing the photos is done in a nicely implemented Ajax powered application. You can also export your photos from Smugmug to Fotoflot, a nice Flex based RIA for creating wall mounts of your photos.

There's even a Facebook application that links to your Smugmug photos.

If you're going to try it out, enter this code for the Referred By field, and you'll save $5 and I'll get some money too: rxFVWsxd9QzgA. Win win.

If I were in charge at Smugmug, I'd deepen the Facebook integration, and add the concept of groups for my photos. I'd love to be able to select a group of people, from Facebook friends and others with email addresses, and share my personal galleries with them. As it is, I have to set a password on each gallery separately - having an easier way to share a set of galleries would be great. I also don't like the fact that I can't set default settings for new albums that are different from theirs. They default to allowing people to buy your photos (without paying you) and not protecting them with right click "Save As" protection. I don't think that's right - especially since I'm paying them a yearly fee. Finally, I can't upload my DNG photos to them - they have to be exported as JPGs. This nice Lightroom plugin makes that easy, but still, I'd prefer to use them as a backup service, and I want to backup my RAW photos, not the JPG versions. (Even better would be backing up my Lightroom library to Smugmug!) However, even with these "problems", I still think this is the best solution for sharing digital photos.

Now my workflow is much easier. All the photos in Lightroom are uploaded to Smugmug using the Lightroom plugin, and the iPhoto photos are added to Smugmug using their Mac uploader. I haven't tried the iPhoto plugin yet, but will soon. All my photos go to one spot, and are added to communities on Smugmug automagically, and integrate into Facebook with their plugin. I can get rid of my .Mac membership as soon as I get an invite to DropBox for file syncing.

If you'd like to see my photos, you can head to my Smugmug page.