This will keep you from losing your photos. Why would you lose your photos? Computer crash, house fire, or signing up with a photo hosting service that deletes your photos if you don't buy something. If you don't think this will happen to you I have something to tell you, it happened to me. I lost all the photos I had of my children on Ofoto. I'm terribly dissapointed and never even received one notice before it happened.
I don't want this to happent to you. By signing up with a pay service you can be assured that they won't delete your precious memories as long as you pay the fee, which comes to about $2.50 per month. There are free photo hosting services that allow you to keep your photos online regardless of whether you buy something regularly or not, but I wonder how long do you think it will be before they either start charging a fee too or decide to change their rules.
What Do They Offer? that makes them worth the money
- Unlimited storage space for your photos
- Load hundreds of photos at a time
- No spam, no ads
- Organize your photos into photo albums easily
- Share with your friends in one click
- Get your photos on CD's and DVD's
- Post your stored photos on blogs, forums and Web pages
- Upload photos from your camera phone
- Find out how many people are visiting your photo site
- Create your own custom URL for your photo site
- Create ShareGroups
- Crop unwanted scenes from your photos
- Enhance the parts you love
- Create a bio page so people know who you are
- Password protect your private photos
What Can You Do? after you sign up and sign in
- Create a bio where you can add a description of yourself and your family. Tell about who you are and what kinds of things people will find on your photo site.
- Use the bio section to put messages or family updates.
- Create a new gallery. This is where you can upload your photos. Create a different gallery for each group of new memories.
- Order a backup. For about $12 you can order your photos on a CD or DVD.
- Create categories and subcategories to better organize your galleries.
- Create ShareGroups with friends and families and share your photos.
- Customize the way SmugMug looks. Change colors, page title and more.
What Can Your Friends and Family Do? when they visit
- View your photos. If you password protected an album you will need to give them the password.
- Choose the way they want to see your gallery. There are 6 different viewing styles.
- Download photos from the site to their computer for free.
- Purchase prints for as little as $.29 per print.
- Buy gifts with photos on them.
- Edit the photos before they order them.
- Sign up for their own photo site so you can share photos with them.
What I Think after using it myself
Smugmug offers quite a bit of quality and service. When considering the price, $30 per year, you need to take into consideration that if you were to sign up to have a Web site hosted with a quality pay hosting service it would cost you at least this much. If you think of it that way then it's more than worth the money. Most Web site hosting services don't give you unlimited hosting and they don't provide the quality of tools that Smugmug offers.
The tools they give you to edit and upload your photos are top notch. The ability to organize your photo albums into categories and subcategories is fabulous. I like that you are able to order a backup copy of your photos for one standard set price. Overall I recommend this service to anyone who wants to have their photo albums online and can afford $2.50 per month.
