I think the speed being faster in Zen (and most other galleries that I've ever seen on the Internet) has to do with the amount of server-side scripting that's on Smug galleries. There's a lot of javascript that the client has to process versus the server. Get on a slow computer and SM slows down A LOT compared to the competition. However, stripping away a lot of the customization can restore the speed.
My experience has always been the same. Faster thumbnails and faster photo navigation in Zen.
I have noticed that navigation from display copy to display copy is faster on Zenfolio, as if the next few photos in sequence are downloaded and ready to switch over. At SmugMug there's an empty white box for a fraction of a second. Thumbnails, however, are slower for me on Zen.
+1 on the last 2 comments ... it is more noticeable on our older computers (Pentium 4 and Pentium D CPUs), less so on the newer Core2 CPUs; all of the computers (running XP SP3) are connected on the same 20Mbit FiOS feed.
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And SM gets nearly unusable on slower systems while other services are still pretty decent.
:nah My everyday machine is quite old (It's a maybe 4 year old laptop, no bells or whistles) and SmugMug runs fine on it. When I was talking slower display copy loading I meant it could look slicker if the switch was instant, it's perfectly usable and still very fast as is.
Yep. P3-500 running 98se and opera9 portable. My SM galleries are slower than those from other services due to the client-side javascript. Even when I use 'Smugmug Classic' which is the fastest theme.
I'm not at that system or I'd send you links to some example galleries.
:nah My everyday machine is quite old (It's a maybe 4 year old laptop, no bells or whistles) and SmugMug runs fine on it. When I was talking slower display copy loading I meant it could look slicker if the switch was instant, it's perfectly usable and still very fast as is.
Malte
When I meant slower, I meant really slow--p3 class. These systems are found a lot of times in rural places and in use by the elderly. SM on these can look like it's broken at times.
Neither of which are supported OS or Browser by SmugMug. Heh, Win 98se is 12 years old. We go pretty far to support old OS and Browser versions (heck you can still browse SmugMug just fine in IE6) but I'm sorry Samir, Windows 98se, I'm not surprised it's slow.
Neither of which are supported OS or Browser by SmugMug. Heh, Win 98se is 12 years old. We go pretty far to support old OS and Browser versions (heck you can still browse SmugMug just fine in IE6) but I'm sorry Samir, Windows 98se, I'm not surprised it's slow.
You asked for the information, so I gave it to you. Even if you use XP on the same hardware, you'll run into the same problems. SM is the most taxing site that I've found besides the big media-filled ones like youtube and cnn.
Photoshelter and photoreflect don't typically have an issue, even on older hardware or mobile devices. I taxed my current system and just played with a few Zen galleries and found them to be faster than my customized SM galleries, but still slower than photoshelter/reflect. Just an observation.
I took a look at Zenfolio also. Unless you can write code and have the time to research and mess with it, Smugmug sites are not easy to make look like a mainstream professional site.
Zenfolio is much easier to get your site looking a bit more professional.
However the deal breaker for me is that the photos look Much better on Smugmug...on Zenfolio it almost looks like they upload them at reduced resolution and then enlarge them for viewing...they don't look sharp.
I am currently researching other options for a Professional looking website.
One of the main reasons I moved from SM to ZF was the quality of the image presentation. You can present full tiffs in ZF, and the images look like they do in PS. I have had trouble with artifacting in SM processed jpgs. You have to be careful that the zoom setting of your browser is default when viewing images on ZF, otherwise they can look blurred. It has happened to a few people including myself, and now I always check that when I go to ZF.
As a UK user, for me SmugMug offers a great online portfolio option. However, to support my small photography business, SM just doesn't offer the functionality I need to warrant the expense (UK pricing, ability to sell download versions alongside print, UK printing, Paypal payment service). I could live with that if I had a definite timescale and commitment that they would happen, I'd source a workaround that I could live with in the short term. But without that, I simply cannot warrant paying for a really nice way to show off my pictures, especially as a lot of them are taken solely for the purpose of reselling.
If I lived in the US, SM would be a no brainer, it would be close to giving what I need, but living in the UK, it's become a no brainer to not use SM. It's a shame, because as some have pointed out here, the customisation and community in and around SM is really really good. But unfortunately I have to give up some of the looks to get the functionality I need. And keeping on thread, Zenfiolio is the obvious choice for me because it does offer me that functionality.
I'm trying out both, but initially Zenfolio seemed much simplier to learn and customize, that being said, I do NOT know CSS... do I need to in order to have more than the silly looking default look Smugmug comes too out of the box?
Regardless, I feel like I should be able to program "pages" of code as if I were to go page-by-page using HTML, each page with a menu linking to other pages. I don't know where to start and it makes me feel kinda silly, but it just doesn't work with what I'm used to, I suppose.
Am I missing something?
Is Smugmug just seems counter intuitive, or dependent on users coming in with CSS knowledge or paid designs made up? In the time I've taken brainstorming Smugmug and where things were, I already have a Zenfolio site up and customized.
But it certainly much less expensive to archive raws onto Crashplan Pro or Backblaze. Smugmug Vault is stored on Amazon Simple Storage, but there are a number of Amazon backup utilities that would let you backup to Simple Storage for $0.14/GB/Month which is also less than Vault.
But it certainly much less expensive to archive raws onto Crashplan Pro or Backblaze. Smugmug Vault is stored on Amazon Simple Storage, but there are a number of Amazon backup utilities that would let you backup to Simple Storage for $0.14/GB/Month which is also less than Vault.
Yeah, I find BackBlaze is a much better deal for archiving my RAW files. Not only is it unlimited storage, but its uploader is massively better as it just works automatically in the background, 24 hours a day, completely tolerant of any faults (no manual intervention ever required).
...its uploader is massively better as it just works automatically in the background, 24 hours a day, completely tolerant of any faults (no manual intervention ever required).
But it certainly much less expensive to archive raws onto Crashplan Pro or Backblaze. Smugmug Vault is stored on Amazon Simple Storage, but there are a number of Amazon backup utilities that would let you backup to Simple Storage for $0.14/GB/Month which is also less than Vault.
It's not really an uploader in the same sense of what one would use at Smugmug because what it's doing is mirroring your files - you don't specify gallery destinations, you don't pick what you do and don't want to upload. You just tell it ahead of time what parts of your drive(s) you want backed up and it just does that seamlessly in the background as you create things, delete things, move things, etc...
It's even intelligent about moves so it doesn't have to reupload if you rename a directory or move a piece of your hierarchy somewhere else on the disk. You can pause it anytime if you need your full bandwidth for other things, but mostly I just don't pay attention to it - it just does it's job in the background. The pause is even intelligent - it can be sticky pause or the default is to restart automatically in two hours - which is usually what I want. If there are network outages, internet outages, computer down, etc... it just picks up again as soon as connectivity is restored. I never have to do anything in this regard.
I have almost 1TB backed up with BackBlaze and it took my system over a month to do so on my not-so-fast DSL upload bandwidth.
I can restore any file or group of files at any time and I can see the whole hierarchy online in a web browser if I want to look at an individual file, verify that everything is there, etc... With the highest encryption option, BackBlaze has no access to your content.
I have almost 1TB backed up with BackBlaze and it took my system over a month to do so on my not-so-fast DSL upload bandwidth.
I tried several of the online backup services, but all except one service will delete files from external drives if they are not backed up within 30 days. Here is what BackBlaze says:
Unplugged External Hard Drives
Backblaze works best if you leave the external hard drive attached to your computer all the time. However, Backblaze will backup external USB and Firewire hard drives that are detached and re-attached as long as you remember to re-attach the hard drive at least once every 30 days. If the drive is detached for more than 30 days, Backblaze interprets this as data that has been permanently deleted and securely deletes the copy from the Backblaze datacenter. The 30 day countdown is only for drives that have been unplugged. There is no countdown for local files.
This means that if you have a drive that you don't turn on within 30 days, you will lose the backup and/or have to back it up again. I have a photo drive and a video drive. They do not stay on all the time, only when I need them. I haven't had the video drive on for 3 months, as I haven't shot video in that time.
For this reason I chose Crashplan, as they do not delete backups from external drives, ever.
I tried several of the online backup services, but all except one service will delete files from external drives if they are not backed up within 30 days. Here is what BackBlaze says:
Unplugged External Hard Drives
Backblaze works best if you leave the external hard drive attached to your computer all the time. However, Backblaze will backup external USB and Firewire hard drives that are detached and re-attached as long as you remember to re-attach the hard drive at least once every 30 days. If the drive is detached for more than 30 days, Backblaze interprets this as data that has been permanently deleted and securely deletes the copy from the Backblaze datacenter. The 30 day countdown is only for drives that have been unplugged. There is no countdown for local files.
This means that if you have a drive that you don't turn on within 30 days, you will lose the backup and/or have to back it up again. I have a photo drive and a video drive. They do not stay on all the time, only when I need them. I haven't had the video drive on for 3 months, as I haven't shot video in that time.
For this reason I chose Crashplan, as they do not delete backups from external drives, ever.
I can see the pickle that a backup company is in. They don't want to store data forever that you yourself aren't storing. 30 days seems a little short to me, but having some expiration time makes business sense to me.
I tried several of the online backup services, but all except one service will delete files from external drives if they are not backed up within 30 days. Here is what BackBlaze says:
Unplugged External Hard Drives
Backblaze works best if you leave the external hard drive attached to your computer all the time. However, Backblaze will backup external USB and Firewire hard drives that are detached and re-attached as long as you remember to re-attach the hard drive at least once every 30 days. If the drive is detached for more than 30 days, Backblaze interprets this as data that has been permanently deleted and securely deletes the copy from the Backblaze datacenter. The 30 day countdown is only for drives that have been unplugged. There is no countdown for local files.
This means that if you have a drive that you don't turn on within 30 days, you will lose the backup and/or have to back it up again. I have a photo drive and a video drive. They do not stay on all the time, only when I need them. I haven't had the video drive on for 3 months, as I haven't shot video in that time.
For this reason I chose Crashplan, as they do not delete backups from external drives, ever.
1 Photo drive????? Try having 15 ...most are now sata internals that I swap in and out of ThermalTake docks....some of these are not plugged back in for months at a time.....and that is why these online services are no good for me......15 drives is actually 45 spread around ...some of these are small less than a gb per drive and I am moving the files to 2gb seagates...in the end I predict having approx 5 or 6 after the upgrade move...so that is X 3 for my back ups..........and that is still waaay cheaper than smugvault or jungle disk or any of those solutions.
1 Photo drive????? Try having 15 ...most are now sata internals that I swap in and out of ThermalTake docks....some of these are not plugged back in for months at a time.....and that is why these online services are no good for me......15 drives is actually 45 spread around ...some of these are small less than a gb per drive and I am moving the files to 2gb seagates...in the end I predict having approx 5 or 6 after the upgrade move...so that is X 3 for my back ups..........and that is still waaay cheaper than smugvault or jungle disk or any of those solutions.
I gave up on offline storage awhile ago. It's way too much work to keep up-to-date and to make sure it's still fresh and working. I find it much easier to have two live hard drive copies of everything in my tower PC (one working copy and one backup) and then one online backup with BackBlaze. When I need more storage, I buy a new modern drive at the latest sweet spot of capacity (currently around 1-2TB), take my current active drive and move it to backup service and retire my smallest backup drives. These keeps the total number of drives down, keeps everything online where I can always get to it and keeps my drives from getting too old. I buy a new drive every 18-24 months (depending upon how much I shot and how big a drive I can get a deal on).
Crashplan and CrashplanPro keep your data until you tell Crashplan to delete it, whether or not the drive is plugged in. It runs $5-$8 per month per machine for as much storage as you want.
Both smugvault and jungle disk use Amazon S3 for storage which is $0.14/GB/Month, which makes them typically a lot more expensive. Amazon S3 does storage a bit differently than Crashplan or most of the other inexpensive cloud backups do, so you are getting something for the extra cost.
In general your want data backed up locally and "somewhere else". A cloud service is a good "somewhere else" and a lot less effort than going to the safe deposit box with backup tapes every few days. CrashplanPro will manage both local and cloud backup, pretty much automatically.
The cloud backup space is constantly changing... for example CrashplanPro is a different product than it was 6 months ago, driven by things like Carbonite, Backblaze and such.
1 Photo drive????? Try having 15 ...most are now sata internals that I swap in and out of ThermalTake docks....some of these are not plugged back in for months at a time.....and that is why these online services are no good for me......15 drives is actually 45 spread around ...some of these are small less than a gb per drive and I am moving the files to 2gb seagates...in the end I predict having approx 5 or 6 after the upgrade move...so that is X 3 for my back ups..........and that is still waaay cheaper than smugvault or jungle disk or any of those solutions.
1 Photo drive????? Try having 15 ...most are now sata internals that I swap in and out of ThermalTake docks....some of these are not plugged back in for months at a time.....and that is why these online services are no good for me......15 drives is actually 45 spread around ...some of these are small less than a gb per drive and I am moving the files to 2gb seagates...in the end I predict having approx 5 or 6 after the upgrade move...so that is X 3 for my back ups..........and that is still waaay cheaper than smugvault or jungle disk or any of those solutions.
Oh I have plenty of drives, but having the drives in one location is a bad thing, as it leaves open the possibility of theft, flood and fire of my home.
This is why I chose Crashplan: they keep all the data, no matter when the drive was last connected. So I have local backups and offsite backups via Crashplan. (you can even use Crashplan to backup to another PC, but several TB isnt nice to push on anyone)
Backing up is a simple as mounting the drive, adding it to the 'scanned' drives list in Crashplan. It does the rest. Next time the drive is connected, it backs it up. True, backing up many GBs takes time over the network, but only the initial backup is painful, and can take weeks. Once done, incrementals are fairly quick. It just happens, I don't think about it.
1 Photo drive????? Try having 15 ...most are now sata internals that I swap in and out of ThermalTake docks....some of these are not plugged back in for months at a time.....and that is why these online services are no good for me......15 drives is actually 45 spread around ...some of these are small less than a gb per drive and I am moving the files to 2gb seagates...in the end I predict having approx 5 or 6 after the upgrade move...so that is X 3 for my back ups..........and that is still waaay cheaper than smugvault or jungle disk or any of those solutions.
I've found this to be dangerous in the long run. As drives age, they suffer from 'bit rot' where the bits skew. This can happen in as little as a year. I keep three backups of all my data, and then run comparisions between all the backups yearly. When there's a file that doesn't match the rest, I still have enough good copies to replace it with a good copy.
Right now, I don't have the money to do what jfriend is doing by keeping data on fresh drives, but that's the ideal method. This way, you avoid drives crashing on you, which they will, and can recoup some of the cost of newer drives by selling the old drives at market value. I've also learned that enterprise class drives are the only way to go. I've been tempted to start buying SCSI again. Their reliabilty is unmatched.
And we are still waiting for the EU lab..... and waiting.... 3 years gone and waiting.... and waiting..... no update from smugmug.... still waiting.... my hair is gray..... but still waiting.... smugmug do not care about updating the user.... waiting....
And we are still waiting for the EU lab..... and waiting.... 3 years gone and waiting.... and waiting..... no update from smugmug.... still waiting.... my hair is gray..... but still waiting.... smugmug do not care about updating the user.... waiting....
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I have noticed that navigation from display copy to display copy is faster on Zenfolio, as if the next few photos in sequence are downloaded and ready to switch over. At SmugMug there's an empty white box for a fraction of a second. Thumbnails, however, are slower for me on Zen.
Malte
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:nah My everyday machine is quite old (It's a maybe 4 year old laptop, no bells or whistles) and SmugMug runs fine on it. When I was talking slower display copy loading I meant it could look slicker if the switch was instant, it's perfectly usable and still very fast as is.
Malte
I'm not at that system or I'd send you links to some example galleries.
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Neither of which are supported OS or Browser by SmugMug. Heh, Win 98se is 12 years old. We go pretty far to support old OS and Browser versions (heck you can still browse SmugMug just fine in IE6) but I'm sorry Samir, Windows 98se, I'm not surprised it's slow.
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Photoshelter and photoreflect don't typically have an issue, even on older hardware or mobile devices. I taxed my current system and just played with a few Zen galleries and found them to be faster than my customized SM galleries, but still slower than photoshelter/reflect. Just an observation.
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Zenfolio is much easier to get your site looking a bit more professional.
However the deal breaker for me is that the photos look Much better on Smugmug...on Zenfolio it almost looks like they upload them at reduced resolution and then enlarge them for viewing...they don't look sharp.
I am currently researching other options for a Professional looking website.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/21695902@N06/
http://500px.com/Shockey
alloutdoor.smugmug.com
http://aoboudoirboise.smugmug.com/
Neil
http://www.behance.net/brosepix
If I lived in the US, SM would be a no brainer, it would be close to giving what I need, but living in the UK, it's become a no brainer to not use SM. It's a shame, because as some have pointed out here, the customisation and community in and around SM is really really good. But unfortunately I have to give up some of the looks to get the functionality I need. And keeping on thread, Zenfiolio is the obvious choice for me because it does offer me that functionality.
Regardless, I feel like I should be able to program "pages" of code as if I were to go page-by-page using HTML, each page with a menu linking to other pages. I don't know where to start and it makes me feel kinda silly, but it just doesn't work with what I'm used to, I suppose.
Am I missing something?
Is Smugmug just seems counter intuitive, or dependent on users coming in with CSS knowledge or paid designs made up? In the time I've taken brainstorming Smugmug and where things were, I already have a Zenfolio site up and customized.
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It's even intelligent about moves so it doesn't have to reupload if you rename a directory or move a piece of your hierarchy somewhere else on the disk. You can pause it anytime if you need your full bandwidth for other things, but mostly I just don't pay attention to it - it just does it's job in the background. The pause is even intelligent - it can be sticky pause or the default is to restart automatically in two hours - which is usually what I want. If there are network outages, internet outages, computer down, etc... it just picks up again as soon as connectivity is restored. I never have to do anything in this regard.
I have almost 1TB backed up with BackBlaze and it took my system over a month to do so on my not-so-fast DSL upload bandwidth.
I can restore any file or group of files at any time and I can see the whole hierarchy online in a web browser if I want to look at an individual file, verify that everything is there, etc... With the highest encryption option, BackBlaze has no access to your content.
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I tried several of the online backup services, but all except one service will delete files from external drives if they are not backed up within 30 days. Here is what BackBlaze says:
Unplugged External Hard Drives
Backblaze works best if you leave the external hard drive attached to your computer all the time. However, Backblaze will backup external USB and Firewire hard drives that are detached and re-attached as long as you remember to re-attach the hard drive at least once every 30 days. If the drive is detached for more than 30 days, Backblaze interprets this as data that has been permanently deleted and securely deletes the copy from the Backblaze datacenter. The 30 day countdown is only for drives that have been unplugged. There is no countdown for local files.
This means that if you have a drive that you don't turn on within 30 days, you will lose the backup and/or have to back it up again. I have a photo drive and a video drive. They do not stay on all the time, only when I need them. I haven't had the video drive on for 3 months, as I haven't shot video in that time.
For this reason I chose Crashplan, as they do not delete backups from external drives, ever.
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1 Photo drive????? Try having 15 ...most are now sata internals that I swap in and out of ThermalTake docks....some of these are not plugged back in for months at a time.....and that is why these online services are no good for me......15 drives is actually 45 spread around ...some of these are small less than a gb per drive and I am moving the files to 2gb seagates...in the end I predict having approx 5 or 6 after the upgrade move...so that is X 3 for my back ups..........and that is still waaay cheaper than smugvault or jungle disk or any of those solutions.
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Both smugvault and jungle disk use Amazon S3 for storage which is $0.14/GB/Month, which makes them typically a lot more expensive. Amazon S3 does storage a bit differently than Crashplan or most of the other inexpensive cloud backups do, so you are getting something for the extra cost.
In general your want data backed up locally and "somewhere else". A cloud service is a good "somewhere else" and a lot less effort than going to the safe deposit box with backup tapes every few days. CrashplanPro will manage both local and cloud backup, pretty much automatically.
The cloud backup space is constantly changing... for example CrashplanPro is a different product than it was 6 months ago, driven by things like Carbonite, Backblaze and such.
Dan
http://www.danalphotos.com
http://www.pluralsight.com
http://twitter.com/d114
Oh I have plenty of drives, but having the drives in one location is a bad thing, as it leaves open the possibility of theft, flood and fire of my home.
This is why I chose Crashplan: they keep all the data, no matter when the drive was last connected. So I have local backups and offsite backups via Crashplan. (you can even use Crashplan to backup to another PC, but several TB isnt nice to push on anyone)
Backing up is a simple as mounting the drive, adding it to the 'scanned' drives list in Crashplan. It does the rest. Next time the drive is connected, it backs it up. True, backing up many GBs takes time over the network, but only the initial backup is painful, and can take weeks. Once done, incrementals are fairly quick. It just happens, I don't think about it.
Right now, I don't have the money to do what jfriend is doing by keeping data on fresh drives, but that's the ideal method. This way, you avoid drives crashing on you, which they will, and can recoup some of the cost of newer drives by selling the old drives at market value. I've also learned that enterprise class drives are the only way to go. I've been tempted to start buying SCSI again. Their reliabilty is unmatched.
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