How to find other photographers and how to browse Smugmug

waldhaus1

I have been using Smugmug for years and send emails from the Smugmug photosphere link to share my galleries, but I realize I have never browsed galleries belonging to other photographers. I don't even know how to do a search for another photographer by name on Smugmug. I suppose if I google their name their smug mug galleries might come up, but it seems there should be a more direct way to do that. It of course raises the question as to how to give my site more visibility to others browsing smug mug. A brief search on the support page shows only how to set up my own site which I already have a way to do. Clearly others do find my site from time to time. A brief search in Digital grin had no result. (Probably I phrased the question wrong.)
With the merger with Flickr it seems that may become even more relevant.

Allen

You could probably start here for some excellent photos.
https://www.smugmug.com/popular
Under the large photo in the caption hover and click the persons name to go to their galleries.

BeautifulWorld

How does a photo get into this? What decides if a photo is popular? Can we search by location of gallery? For example, I am going to Shenandoah National Park in a few weeks. Would love to see how other photographers have captured it. Can I search?

Allen

Might try searching here.
https://www.smugmug.com/keyword
https://www.smugmug.com/keyword/Shenandoah;National;Park Brings up 1000 photos.
etc.

waldhaus1

Does GPS get used for tagging or is it necessary to key word images to get visibility ?.
Will Flickr be the place for exploration, and then Smugmug be the place for actually putting together a gallery with story?
Popular presumably requires a lot of people to look at your photos and rank them well.
There doesn't seem to be a way to browse new galleries in an unfocused way. Perhaps there are just too many.

Jtring

One other place to try is SmugMug's global search page: https://www.smugmug.com/search. A search for "Shenandoah National Park" by photo brings up 18,093 entries. A search by gallery gives 473.

BeautifulWorld

@Jtring Thank you. Now that brings up another question? How do galleries, images show up here? What is the algorithm? Most recent?

Jtring

The "Sort By" selector by default sorts by "Photorank", but I don't know how that's computed. Number of views? There's no way in SmugMug for people to rate pictures anymore. (There was once.) If you look at the "Sort By" drop-down menu, you can select oldest or newest first. By the way, I've used this feature for exactly what you mentioned: getting a look at place I was planning to visit.