Photo Sharing on Smugmug

grapejape

I have a new Smugmug account, a new Canon 40D, and a 6 week old baby - so I've been blasting away photos and uploading them to Smugmug like crazy for the past few weeks. We set our entire site to be password-protected, and send out links to the albums to close family members who have the password so that they can view, save, and print them. However, we also have some "acquaintances" who we periodically like to send photos too, but we'd rather not give them access to the full site or give them the site password. The only way I found to do this was to upload the selected pictures a second time into a new album, set it to "password protected" and "hide owner", and send the link to that with a different password. This gets fairly complicated and time consuming, and my wife gave up on it and started using Picasa web albums to share photos instead. I really like the Smugmug look and feel, but I do agree that sharing photos is clumsy unless you want to give someone full access to your site. If there was a way to quickly duplicate an album, or photos into a shared album with "hide owner" settings things would be a bit easier. I did find a Smugmug hack app that allows for copying photos, but the interace is very poor.

Any suggestions here?


- Jason

moose135

Copying photos into another gallery is the one thing that frustrates a number of us on SM. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be an efficient way to copy a full gallery of photos to a new one. Your best bet is likely to be re-uploading them to a new gallery.

As far as the settings on the new gallery, have you tried saving your gallery settings and then applying them to the new galleries you created? When you have the settings the way you want them on the "Customize Gallery" page, go to the drop down for "Quick Settings". You will have the option of "Save settings on this page as..." which will allow you to create a name for the settings. Now when you create a new gallery, or modify an existing one, go back to the "Quick Settings" drop down, and select the name from the "Use an Existing Quick Setting" list. That may make at least part of the process a little less painful :

grapejape

I see that Smugmug has a ShareGroups feature. I just tried this, and it has potential - but needs some additional features to do what I want. For one, it needs to be able to have individual photos added instead of entire galleries, as I want to be selective in what photos I publicly share. Also, the sharegroup needs to be able to be customized via its own control panel to remove links back to other galleries or have a "hide owner" feature.

If we could create sharegroups with these two options, I'd be set. This would be a great way to send a link to folks over e-mail without giving them the keys (or directions) to your whole site.

Am I the only one who wants this feature?


- Jason