Fair API usage
MaxCarey
Registered Users Posts: 1 Beginner grinner
Hi. I work for a web development company and one of our clients has a SmugMug account. They want to display their galleries on their new website. It is simple enough to retrieve a list of galleries and their contents using API requests, but I was wondering what would constitute fair use?
Would displaying a gallery similar to the example at http://phpsmug.com/examples where the thumbnails and large images are all displayed on the external site be providing too much of a abstraction from SmugMug to be fair? Would it be better if the full sized photo linked to the same photo in their SmugMug gallery? Would it be acceptable to embed a flash slideshow of photos on the client's website?
The client currently only has a standard account and I just want to make sure that we don't contravene any SmugMug terms when we integrate their galleries with their site (which does take money, though not from sale of photos).
The T&Cs mention that the API shouldn't be used to create "SmugMug in a box" type services, but I am unsure what this means. The client would still be using SmugMug to upload their photos and I would imagine that they could well generate more sign-ups for SmugMug if they encourage their users to sign up for their own accounts and share their galleries.
Many thanks,
Max
Would displaying a gallery similar to the example at http://phpsmug.com/examples where the thumbnails and large images are all displayed on the external site be providing too much of a abstraction from SmugMug to be fair? Would it be better if the full sized photo linked to the same photo in their SmugMug gallery? Would it be acceptable to embed a flash slideshow of photos on the client's website?
The client currently only has a standard account and I just want to make sure that we don't contravene any SmugMug terms when we integrate their galleries with their site (which does take money, though not from sale of photos).
The T&Cs mention that the API shouldn't be used to create "SmugMug in a box" type services, but I am unsure what this means. The client would still be using SmugMug to upload their photos and I would imagine that they could well generate more sign-ups for SmugMug if they encourage their users to sign up for their own accounts and share their galleries.
Many thanks,
Max
0
Comments
What your client wants to do is fine. What we want to prevent is people building a SmugMug type service on top of our API.
Cheers,
David
SmugMug API Developer
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