Smugmug vs Fotki

asinghz · June 26, 2006

I have thinking of selling pictures online and i am debating between Fotki and Smugmug. Fotki is $30/year and Smugmug is ~$150. As far as I can tell both the sites offer similar features. Can someone educate me what do I get with Smugmug that I wont get with Fotki....since Smugmug is 5 times more expensive. thanks

Barb · June 26, 2006

asinghz wrote:

I have thinking of selling pictures online and i am debating between Fotki and Smugmug. Fotki is $30/year and Smugmug is ~$150. As far as I can tell both the sites offer similar features. Can someone educate me what do I get with Smugmug that I wont get with Fotki....since Smugmug is 5 times more expensive. thanks

Hi

I do not have an account at Fotki, nor have I ever, so I'm not really sure what all they offer. I can tell you that with a Smugmug Pro account, you get unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited categories and galleries, customization (make your site look however you want), custom pro pricing (set your own prices and make a profit), several different styles of viewing your photos, slideshow, prints and numerous gifts are available, private and protected galleries, complete control over who sees your photos, and most importantly, an extremely proactive company and the best customer service you'll find anywhere. The Pro account is worth every penny

rainforest1155 · June 26, 2006

asinghz wrote:

I have thinking of selling pictures online and i am debating between Fotki and Smugmug. Fotki is $30/year and Smugmug is ~$150. As far as I can tell both the sites offer similar features. Can someone educate me what do I get with Smugmug that I wont get with Fotki....since Smugmug is 5 times more expensive. thanks

Don't know much about Fotki either, but unless you want to sell photos for a profit you probably won't need the $150 pro account and will do pretty good with the 60$ power account or even the $40 standard account !
Check out the pricing page.

Hope this helps,
Sebastian

albisa · May 21, 2009

Fotki has these things too.

Barb wrote:

Hi

I do not have an account at Fotki, nor have I ever, so I'm not really sure what all they offer. I can tell you that with a Smugmug Pro account, you get unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited categories and galleries, customization (make your site look however you want), custom pro pricing (set your own prices and make a profit), several different styles of viewing your photos, slideshow, prints and numerous gifts are available, private and protected galleries, complete control over who sees your photos, and most importantly, an extremely proactive company and the best customer service you'll find anywhere. The Pro account is worth every penny

I have account on Fotki. They have everything there.

albisa · May 21, 2009

asinghz wrote:

I have thinking of selling pictures online and i am debating between Fotki and Smugmug. Fotki is $30/year and Smugmug is ~$150. As far as I can tell both the sites offer similar features. Can someone educate me what do I get with Smugmug that I wont get with Fotki....since Smugmug is 5 times more expensive. thanks

I have account on Fotki. First you can try for free, but later if you will pay 30$ you will not regret it.

Malte · May 22, 2009

If it's a tossup, I would go with Smugmug just to spite spammer albisa.

Malte

Asha · May 26, 2009

I had Fotki for 6 1/2 years. They've come a long way, however, I don't believe they have watermarking available, nor can they prevent downloading/copying of your images. The "protect" images tool doesn't work. People were still able to obtain my photos with File/Save/As. I have not experience the above here on smugmug.

Fotki does offer co-branding, but I don't believe you can use your own domain name (Not sure about this).

One thing I did like about Fotki is that you could see in real time the number of visitors (individual visitors as Fotki didn't re-count the same visitor more than once) and the number of hits on each album.
"Visitors Chart

This chart shows how many visitors have accessed your photos and how many times your photos were "hit" (viewed). The number of hits may be different from the number of visitors as each individual visitor can create multiple hits by revisiting your page a few times."

You could see the above numbers for everyday of the week for up to 2 months at a time. I loved that! I don't see that here. Only the number of hits for each gallery and not in real time. This may or may not be important to you.

On fotki, you can copy multiple images at a time to move to another album ( can't seem to do this here). Bulk Edit, photo contests...

Although Fotki has some great features, I moved to smugmug, because I wanted a more professional look for my website and I love the support forum here to death!

clap

Also, I absolutely love the customization page. There are so many things I want to still try, just haven't found the time to do so.

1. Customization creativity to your hearts content
2. Great Support 24/7 (you have to email Fotki and wait for a response)
3. Professional looking site
4. Protection for your images ( I can still get photos off of Fotki)
5. Great Customer service both hear and at GoDaddy

Hope I didn't write too much.

Take care.

darryl · May 27, 2009

I haven't researched Fotki totally thoroughly, but here's some data I put together about 2 years back (I need to update it):

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pes9Zmt9-3PySYn1CTTeNAw

habanr · May 27, 2009

Asha wrote:

1. Customization creativity to your hearts content
2. Great Support 24/7 (you have to email Fotki and wait for a response)
3. Professional looking site
4. Protection for your images ( I can still get photos off of Fotki)
5. Great Customer service both hear and at GoDaddy

I have only an Standard account, but I consider Smugmug one of the best nowadays photo sites.
To your previous list I'd add:
6) Administration of web pages using REST and other protocols. It's really big deal...

Smugmug has also problems:
1) Bad support of UTF8 through the smugmug site
2) Bad support of mapping features e.g. still there is no map scale (without a scale a map isn't the map but only an picture. I've pointed out this problems several times in this forum, but nobody repaired it. In fact I've also proposed working solution to add javascript single line to enable scale on the google map they use...

holzphoto · May 27, 2009

check out photocart. if smugmug doesn't get some serious changes by november, then i am changing to that system.

Andy · May 27, 2009

darryl wrote:

I haven't researched Fotki totally thoroughly, but here's some data I put together about 2 years back (I need to update it):

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pes9Zmt9-3PySYn1CTTeNAw

Errata/Updates for you, Darryl:

Original downloads: PC: AlbumFetcher or Rapidfetcher. Mac: Rapidfetcher

Service: 365 days a year, 20hrs / day (we're snoozing from 9p to 1a SmugTime.

Fast: Find one that's faster than us, as measured by one of the services that do this (Alexa, etc).

Video: 10mins, 600Mb. Power Users get 640 DVD quality. Pros get 1080p HD quality.

Products: Large prints-yes. Calendars & books-yes.

Andy · May 27, 2009

habanr wrote:

Smugmug has also problem:
1) Bad support of UTF8 through the smugmug site

UTF8 for keywords is in development and as soon as we work out some issues we hope to have this on the site. Your voice is being heard. Last year, we make a major effort to include UTF8 support in gallery names, captions, and other places on the site - and we did that.
Keywords, to come soon!

2) Bad support of mapping features e.g. still there is no map scale (without a scale a map isn't the map but only an picture. I've pointed out this problems several times in this forum, but nobody repaired it. In fact I've also proposed working solution to add javascript sigle line to enable scale on the google map they use...

Can you show me this post? Thanks!

habanr · May 27, 2009

My mapping feature requests...

Andy wrote:

Can you show me this post? Thanks!

My first request:
http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=600822&postcount=1

And simple solution:
http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=1018601&postcount=21

Thank you

RogersDA · May 27, 2009

habanr wrote:

My first request:
http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=600822&postcount=1

And simple solution:
http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=1018601&postcount=21

Thank you

Map Channels works well, it's easy to configure, it uses your Smug feed, and it's is free.

http://www.greyleafphoto.com/gallery/7410281_zdiwQ

habanr · May 27, 2009

I'm not Pro User so I can't configure/rewrite anything.

RogersDA wrote:

Map Channels works well, it's easy to configure, it uses your Smug feed, and it's is free.

http://www.greyleafphoto.com/gallery/7410281_zdiwQ

I'm not Pro User so I can't configure/rewrite anything. For Standard Users (including me) mapping features are not correctly configured...

RogersDA · May 27, 2009

habanr wrote:

I'm not Pro User so I can't configure/rewrite anything. For Standard Users (including me) mapping features are not correctly configured...

You do not need to be a pro user. All you need are (a) geo-tagged photos uploaded to SmugMug, (b) the URL for the geo-feed from Smugmug, (c) an account at Map Channels to configure your map, and (d) some gallery on SmugMug that you copy the Map Channels code to. The Map Channels code is generatated by Map Channels when you configure your map. The code is placed in the Description section of the gallery on SmugMug (between html tags of course).

In my case I created a gallery with no photos and embedded the following code into the gallery's description.

<html>
<center>
<iframe src='http://data.mapchannels.com/mc3/3930/greyleafphotographyver3_3930.htm?v=090222055605&x=-95.971069&y=36.124565&z=4&t=3' style='width:100%;height:700px;border:double 5px black' frameborder='0' marginwidth='0' marginheight='0' scrolling='no' ></iframe>
<br>A big thanks to <a href='http://www.mapchannels.com'>Map Channels</a> for providing the free mapping tools.
</center>
</html>

I configured my map over at Map Channels, and the iframe code is provided by them.

Asha · May 27, 2009

RogersDA wrote:
You do not need to be a pro user. All you need are (a) geo-tagged photos uploaded to SmugMug, (b) the URL for the geo-feed from Smugmug, (c) an account at Map Channels to configure your map, and (d) some gallery on SmugMug that you copy the Map Channels code to. The Map Channels code is generatated by Map Channels when you configure your map. The code is placed in the Description section of the gallery on SmugMug (between html tags of course).

In my case I created a gallery with no photos and embedded the following code into the gallery's description.
<html>
<center>
<iframe src='http://data.mapchannels.com/mc3/3930/greyleafphotographyver3_3930.htm?v=090222055605&x=-95.971069&y=36.124565&z=4&t=3' style='width:100%;height:700px;border:double 5px black' frameborder='0' marginwidth='0' marginheight='0' scrolling='no' ></iframe>
<br>A big thanks to <a href='http://www.mapchannels.com'>Map Channels</a> for providing the free mapping tools.
</center>
</html>
I configured my map over at Map Channels, and the iframe code is provided by them.

Hope you don't mind my being a bit off topic, but what are map channels<img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/headscratch.gif" border="0" alt="" >scratch?

TIA

RogersDA · May 27, 2009

Asha wrote:

Hope you don't mind my being a bit off topic, but what are map channelsscratch?

TIA

Sorry - should have stated up-front..

Map Channels is a free Map Customization tool: http://www.mapchannels.com/Home.aspx

Running the lastest version (3.01) allows you to take a feed (such as what you would have from SmugMug) and configure/customize a Google map.

There are a lot of cool benefits such as using your own icon (instead of the green smuggy icon), customizing the size, and several other things that can be done using CSS.

jchin · May 29, 2009

Reasons I love SmugMug ...
1. untouchable superior support team ... the actually get back to you

2. Pro account customizations and use my own domain name
3. Pro labs support the printing backend and delivers great prints

Now for the things I do NOT like about SmugMug ...
1. too much iPhone "playing" ... they need to develop a site that is more "mobile" friendly ... heck the site doesn't work on my Blackberry (even if I use the Opera Mini browser) ... it just does not load properly
2. some basic features that members have been asking for over a year are still "in development" (granted Andy does give us updates as soon as he can, but some features are just taking too long)

However ... I am staying with SmugMug and willing to wait it out on those "features". They have added a few nice things in the years I've been a Pro member.

DmitryS · May 29, 2009

jchin wrote:

Now for the things I do NOT like about SmugMug ...
2. some basic features that members have been asking for over a year are still "in development" (granted Andy does give us updates as soon as he can, but some features are just taking too long)

Same here. I trivial and an extremely useful feature that Fotki had for years - mark recently created folders with a "New" tag, smugmug is not capable of implementing.
However I am stuck with it, since all images are here.

Andy · May 29, 2009

jchin wrote:

Now for the things I do NOT like about SmugMug ...
1. too much iPhone "playing" ... they need to develop a site that is more "mobile" friendly ... heck the site doesn't work on my Blackberry (even if I use the Opera Mini browser) ... it just does not load properly

Let your voice be heard! http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=125760

Asha · May 30, 2009

Thank you RogersDA and no need to apologize. I appreciate you taking the time to explain.

RogersDA wrote:

Sorry - should have stated up-front..

Map Channels is a free Map Customization tool: http://www.mapchannels.com/Home.aspx

Running the lastest version (3.01) allows you to take a feed (such as what you would have from SmugMug) and configure/customize a Google map.

There are a lot of cool benefits such as using your own icon (instead of the green smuggy icon), customizing the size, and several other things that can be done using CSS.

darryl · May 30, 2009

Andy wrote:

Errata/Updates for you, Darryl:

Original downloads: PC: AlbumFetcher or Rapidfetcher. Mac: Rapidfetcher

Service: 365 days a year, 20hrs / day (we're snoozing from 9p to 1a SmugTime.

Fast: Find one that's faster than us, as measured by one of the services that do this (Alexa, etc).

Video: 10mins, 600Mb. Power Users get 640 DVD quality. Pros get 1080p HD quality.

Products: Large prints-yes. Calendars & books-yes.

Thanks! I'm still going to leave that "yet" in there re: speed. Sorry, but I still have too many problems to not qualify it. Also, Rapidfetcher on the Mac didn't work for one of the school parents (repeated crashing), but SmugDAV did, so I'm leaving that too.

Andy · May 30, 2009

darryl wrote:

Thanks! I'm still going to leave that "yet" in there re: speed. Sorry, but I still have too many problems to not qualify it. Also, Rapidfetcher on the Mac didn't work for one of the school parents (repeated crashing), but SmugDAV did, so I'm leaving that too.

I'm very sorry you won't take recognized trusted sources over your one experience, re: speed.

darryl · May 30, 2009

Andy wrote:

I'm very sorry you won't take recognized trusted sources over your one experience, re: speed.

Oh c'mon Andy. My spreadsheet is not intended to be some pillar of objectivity like Wikipedia (hah). Anyways I figure and other users here (like Allen, yeesh!) are as trusted of a source as Alexa. And we've had problems. I'm not saying you guys haven't tried to fix them. But for me, I can't say it's always fast.

It's not like I just got a trial account and made my judgement based on that. I've been a customer for the past 5 years. (Although I confess I did get a lot of free/trial accounts with other services in my spreadsheet. However if I couldn't come up with a good answer, I left it blank -- that's why the "Services" page of my spreadsheet is not very well-populated.)

Anyways, the spreadsheet is in dire need of an update. I just gave Flickr a whirl and re-rated the speed as "Enh." (Seriously, reloading the whole dang page for each image? That's crap.) Picasa Web Albums is faster these days too.

ulrikft · May 31, 2009

Andy wrote:

I'm very sorry you won't take recognized trusted sources over your one experience, re: speed.

I have had _very_ many problems the last few months with Smugmug. I have my own account, and I also got the photoclub which I'm on the board of, an account. And the last months I have had problems creating galleries, problems uploading, problems doing quite a lot of basic stuff.

When it works, the speed is good, and the gallery is great. But when it doesen't, it doesen't.

I love smugmug, but I hope that a few of these wrinkles will be smoothed out.

Andy · May 31, 2009

ulrikft wrote:

I have had _very_ many problems the last few months with Smugmug. I have my own account, and I also got the photoclub which I'm on the board of, an account. And the last months I have had problems creating galleries, problems uploading, problems doing quite a lot of basic stuff.

When it works, the speed is good, and the gallery is great. But when it doesen't, it doesen't.

I love smugmug, but I hope that a few of these wrinkles will be smoothed out.

Can you write me, at our help desk, ATTN: Andy? I want to help with the specifics. http://www.smugmug.com/help/emailreal

Smugmug vs Fotki

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