smugmug gallery or not?

riversinn

I like the format and ease of use of using the smugmug gallery to post photos to share on-line but am concerned that in order to make the site fast you must comprimise image size which in turn might hurt print quality if you want to use that location to order prints from. Any suggestions? It seems to be a hassle and defeat the purpose of taking pics in large and/or raw format if you must reduce them so much to upload.

Seems like I should stick with organizing my on galleries on my pc and upload larger files for printing. I don't want to keep multiple file sizes and locations for each image. Am I missing something?

:

jfriend

Upload originals, smugmug automatically makes the other sizes for you

riversinn wrote:

I like the format and ease of use of using the smugmug gallery to post photos to share on-line but am concerned that in order to make the site fast you must comprimise image size which in turn might hurt print quality if you want to use that location to order prints from. Any suggestions? It seems to be a hassle and defeat the purpose of taking pics in large and/or raw format if you must reduce them so much to upload.

Seems like I should stick with organizing my on galleries on my pc and upload larger files for printing. I don't want to keep multiple file sizes and locations for each image. Am I missing something?

:

It sounds to me like you are not understanding how smugmug works. Upload your highest resoution originals. Those get stored as the "original" version of the image and are always used as the source for any prints that are ordered. Smugmug then automatically produces a whole bunch of other sizes from that original for fast, efficient web browsing (at least 5 other sizes: small, medium, large and a couple thumbnail sizes). Your high resolution original will NOT be used for normal gallery-based web browsing unless the user specifically requests to look at the original-sized image.

So ... you get the best of both worlds. People can order prints from your originals, but you get fast, efficient gallery browsing without having to do any of the work to create smaller sizes yourself.

I, myself, upload nothing but high-res 6MP originals. Take a look at my galleries in my sig below to see how the galleries work.

riversinn

So if I understand correctly, the uploaded files to my smugmug galleries will be automatically saved in several file sizes. How do you then select which files will be used for the web galleries or is that automatically done by smugmug?

Looking at your photos, I did not see how or where to view the different file sizes.

SamirD

The biggest pain you will find with large originals is the upload. So I do them while I sleep. But that's the hardest part. I used to resize everything manually and host my files locally before signing onto smugmug. It took longer and was harder work. At least now I can sleep while it's working.

Just get the fastest upload speed you can get and then set it and forget it. I use StarExplorer to help me with my uploads--and I've done a lot of uploading. I had to upload over 70,000 pictures amounting to over 50gb, and I will be uploading 1-2gb every week from March to October of this year. If I can do it, anyone can.

Mike Lane

SamirD wrote:

I use StarExplorer to help me with my uploads--and I've done a lot of uploading. I had to upload over 70,000 pictures amounting to over 50gb, and I will be uploading 1-2gb every week from March to October of this year.

:yikes

devbobo

riversinn wrote:

So if I understand correctly, the uploaded files to my smugmug galleries will be automatically saved in several file sizes. How do you then select which files will be used for the web galleries or is that automatically done by smugmug?

Looking at your photos, I did not see how or where to view the different file sizes.

riversinn,

it looks like John has done some customisation to remove some options from being displayed.

Try out the link...
http://introversion.smugmug.com/gallery/1031195

Also, different Styles, provide different layouts and sometimes different siz e options. Select the Style droplist in my gallery to see the different options available.

I hope this helps.

David

SamirD

Mike Lane wrote:

:yikes

And can you imagine, I did that using a cable modem...well 3 actually.

I'll only be able to use two of them from here on out though.

jfriend

Smugmug picks the sizes for you

riversinn wrote:

So if I understand correctly, the uploaded files to my smugmug galleries will be automatically saved in several file sizes. How do you then select which files will be used for the web galleries or is that automatically done by smugmug?

Looking at your photos, I did not see how or where to view the different file sizes.

Smugmug automatically picks which generated sizes to use according to which gallery viewing style you are using and, in some cases (I think), according to your reported screen size.

When you go to one of my galleries such as this one a couple different sizes will be selected automatically for you by smugmug. Which sizes are used depends upon which gallery style you choose to review in and the other sizes should be offered to you. For example, in the "smugmug small" viewing style, you will get a small thumbnail and a small main image. In the "smugmug" viewing style, you will get a medium thumbnail and a medium main image.

In this screen shot from my gallery below, you should be able to see in the lower right corner where it says "other sizes: medium large" . Click on those links and it will show you different sizes of the selected image. I happened to have disabled viewing of originals in this gallery so they are not listed as a choice, but that's your option to control.



I'd suggest Just creating a test gallery, uploading a bunch of original images to it and then just playing with the different gallery viewing styles: smugmug small, smugmug, journal, etc... It's easier for you to just play with it and see what it does with your own images than for us to describe it all in words.

The whole smugmug upload process should be a ton easier than uploading to your own web-site. Besides print orders one of the main reasons for using a photo-optimized site like smugmug is because they do all this image generation and layout work for you automatically.