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Is smugmug really good to feature your pictures ??
mfkkoeln
Registered Users Posts: 20 Big grins
Something which is not obvious to me is the architecture of the "browsing" site, i.e. to see pictures and galleries of other people.
When I click on current popular photos, I don't see a link which could direct me to the homepage of the person wo has taken this photo.
How, by the way, can you get your photos displayed under "popular photos" ?
The "browse categories" section:
I understand that you can see the most recent published galleries here. But if I wanted to get my galleries displayed here I would need to split them up into all those catagories on my homepage.
I have all my galleries in one category (other). If I change the setting for my gallery "Animals -Birds" to Animals, in order to make it appear in that browse categories section, it disappears from my galleries in "other". Logically you might say. But I would have expected the categories in that browse catagories section to be sort of keyword you can give to your galleries, independent of where they reside on your homepage. Thats really odd to me. Do people really want to split their albums on their homepage into a dozen or more catgories ?
Then I tried if at least a freshly updated gallery in my personal other catagory shows up in the "other" catagory in that browse section, as this says RECENT other catagories. I checked a minute after updating, but it did not show up - ???
The section "popular photo communities"
Is that the place where you could present your galleries ? Well, I did not really try yet. There seem to be hundreds if not thousands of communities. What is the sense of that ? how would you get attention if you publish an album in one of thousands of communities ? Cumbersome to me.
A while ago I had created a test account on jalbum, with just three albums. Within hours I had a big number of "likes" and comments. I saw who was liking and commenting, go to their albums and comment. There you can easily explore by featured/popular/recent album, by users and by a reasonable small number of groups. This architecture facilitates user interaction, makes it easy to feature your albums. Why hasn't smugmug something like that ?
I have choosen smugmug because of the Lightroom plugin and the flexibility for customization is really great, as well as unlimited storage at reasonable price.
But the "community aspect" at least in my view is poor on smug mug. Or I have not understood how this works here and how you feature your albums.
Looking forward to comments from other users, and smugmug heros of course.
kind regards
P.S. the title might be a bit provokative, I wanted to draw some attention to this post in order to get a hopefully lively discussion :-)
Manfred
When I click on current popular photos, I don't see a link which could direct me to the homepage of the person wo has taken this photo.
How, by the way, can you get your photos displayed under "popular photos" ?
The "browse categories" section:
I understand that you can see the most recent published galleries here. But if I wanted to get my galleries displayed here I would need to split them up into all those catagories on my homepage.
I have all my galleries in one category (other). If I change the setting for my gallery "Animals -Birds" to Animals, in order to make it appear in that browse categories section, it disappears from my galleries in "other". Logically you might say. But I would have expected the categories in that browse catagories section to be sort of keyword you can give to your galleries, independent of where they reside on your homepage. Thats really odd to me. Do people really want to split their albums on their homepage into a dozen or more catgories ?
Then I tried if at least a freshly updated gallery in my personal other catagory shows up in the "other" catagory in that browse section, as this says RECENT other catagories. I checked a minute after updating, but it did not show up - ???
The section "popular photo communities"
Is that the place where you could present your galleries ? Well, I did not really try yet. There seem to be hundreds if not thousands of communities. What is the sense of that ? how would you get attention if you publish an album in one of thousands of communities ? Cumbersome to me.
A while ago I had created a test account on jalbum, with just three albums. Within hours I had a big number of "likes" and comments. I saw who was liking and commenting, go to their albums and comment. There you can easily explore by featured/popular/recent album, by users and by a reasonable small number of groups. This architecture facilitates user interaction, makes it easy to feature your albums. Why hasn't smugmug something like that ?
I have choosen smugmug because of the Lightroom plugin and the flexibility for customization is really great, as well as unlimited storage at reasonable price.
But the "community aspect" at least in my view is poor on smug mug. Or I have not understood how this works here and how you feature your albums.
Looking forward to comments from other users, and smugmug heros of course.
kind regards
P.S. the title might be a bit provokative, I wanted to draw some attention to this post in order to get a hopefully lively discussion :-)
Manfred
0
Comments
SmugMug is a great place to feature your pictures if your intent is to build and host your photography website, especially if you intend to sell prints. Most of us who frequent this forum use it that way, a photo hosting/print fulfillment/storefront WEBSITE. The pros do their own marketing to get eyes on their photos. In my opinion is one of the best (if not THE best) place for a pro to host a website and feature their photos, especially at this price point.
It never really has been a photo 'sharing' site with a community ala Flickr and the like where people go around checking out each other's photos and giving out likes and comments. As you noted there are hundreds of 'communities' set up by individuals, most of them were dead and not maintained five years ago when I checked them out and I never looked at them again. I think there are some people using the Daily Photo Community because I see a couple of them arguing about people downvoting their photos once in a while but after being here five years and spending a lot of time on this forum I couldn't even tell you how to find it. The strongest sense of community is here in the dgrin forum, and if you want feedback/critique or just want to share, there are sections set up for various genres.
I'm going to be very upfront and honest here because I've been hearing this complaint/question so frequently lately that I really hope that SM reads this and understands the issue I see which is a major identity crisis right now, at least in the G+ community which is where I spend the majority of my time. I've had this exact same discussion with a multitude of people over the past few months mainly because of the way SmugMug is being portrayed on GooglePlus. It's being pushed as a photo sharing site, rather than a photo hosting site, by people with large followings who are doing a great job selling SmugMug (I personally know at least 30 people on G+ who have recently switched to SM) but creating some misunderstandings perhaps due to their own relatively new experience with SM and that has been causing a lot of disappointment in the G+ community. People are also being told that SmugMug pays out an 85% commission when in actuality the photographer pays SmugMug a 15% commission...the difference is that one gives people the impression that SM will market and sell their photos and pay the photographer a commission while the other correctly implies that when the photographer sells a photo (after doing his/her own marketing) he/she pays a commission to SM for the backend printing and transaction processing. I've had to address that specific issue with people numerous times, it seems they think it is going to be like the Flickr/Getty program and they are disappointed when they find out that SmugMug doesn't do any marketing of their photos. SmugMug has a lot of really great selling points that I'm always happy to discuss with people but it isn't helping them that people are getting the wrong impression of how the site works and then are disappointed to find out it's not what they expected.
It also doesn't help that across the web you'll find sites comparing SmugMug to Flickr for people looking for a place to share photos, which is like comparing apples to oranges. In my mind a better comparison would be SmugMug to Photoshelter, Zenfolio and LiveBooks.
I don't know if maybe SmugMug WANTS to be a sharing site like Flickr, but if so it is not optimized for it and I'm not so sure that they could do so without alienating their pros. I don't know that they can do both and do them well; I don't know of any other photography website host of professional quality that also has a sharing community like Flickr. For most of the photographers I know SmugMug is where we host our website, if we want a sharing community we post our images here in the dgrin forum or to Flickr, G+, etc.
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Manfred
I think that Lori makes some really good points in her post. SM cannot be thought of as a Red Bubble, FAA, PD type site. It is purely a hosting vehicle with some major benefits.
I have been here about a year now and prior to this, I attempted to host my own photographic site. This meant contracting a designer to code the site the way that I wanted it to look. Once this was done, there was then the issue of how to accept payment on any product sold, how to print it to the spec and product required and then deliver it... all of this being really time consuming, and frankly, not that easy!
SM take care of all of the above. With the various templates available, it becomes a plug and play environment and you can have a really good looking site up in no time. Sales are taken care of via their payment portal and then they take care of the production and shipping of the order.
The one thing that I would like to say that makes SM stand out from other similar companies, is their attitude to customer service and in my experience, they are very customer-centric. Dave will surely put something into this topic, but it is not often that the CEO of an organisation takes personal interest of clients' needs (or grumbles at times). The other thing that really works for me, is that the developers of SM also monitor these forums and are actively involved in answering issues and rectifying gremlins.
There are ways of getting your images 'seen', but as Lori says, I don't worry about the communities either.
What one needs to be aware of when hosting here, is that you need to market yourself, as traffic won't come flying in to see your site and buy your goodies, unless you take care of this aspect yourself.
In the browse > popular photos section you can see the photographer's name, link to their site and the gallery the photo is in below the photo:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/283274/sc4/20120614113910-01418x1011239.jpg
Photos in public galleries that are voted and commented on, take part in the popular photos. Check out the help article on search&browse for more information.
Communities are there to allow members to share their galleries with photos on the community subject. Lets say you're interested in still lifes, then you could join this community. Once you've joined a community, you can add a gallery to it via the gallery settings > community section.
Then, whenever you upload a new photo to the gallery in the community, it would bring your gallery to the top of the "recent galleries" for other visitors and members of the community to see.
Each community has their own today's popular photos section, but at the same time community photos take part in the global populars as well.
More information on communities are available here.
SmugMug Support Hero
A word of warning though. As the most popular and active Smugmug Community the Dailies does attract more than it's fair share of trolls. This is what was refered to above by the comments about "Daily members arguing about their photos being voted down in the most popular rankings". Most people in the Dailies are great, but occasionally someone turns up and leaves abusive comments, and/or manipulates the rankings. If you can avoid the trolls the dailies is a great place to be, and a good shop front for your work if that is what you want.
However, to join the Daily Community you really do need to commit yourself to taking a photo every day. Some people attach random galleries of event photography, or holidays, to the Daily Community, presumably to get lots of views, but this seems more than a little weird to me. A bit like posting your wedding portfolio in the Sports Community