smugmug - AndrewKnight.com

Photography Tip: #4 Use an Online Publishing Platform like SmugMug to Share Your Photos

I love taking pictures but I also love sharing them online with my friends and family. Back in 2000 I started sharing my albums online via this website. I used a newly added feature to Photoshop that would output an album in HTML for easy uploading to websites. That worked for a few years but it quickly became difficult to manage. When I got my Canon 10D in 2004 I knew I needed a better option. I looked around and found some great reviews of a site called SmugMug and have been using it ever since.

Publishing on SmugMug

I have been using SmugMug for 15 years and love the service they provide! It is fast, intuitive, and makes publishing my images online super simple. They have an awesome plugin for Adobe Lightroom where I can literally have an album published with a few clicks without ever having to leave Lightroom. The plugin even keeps my Lightroom albums synced with my SmugMug albums for any changes.

Here is how I work with SmugMug in 5 simple steps from inside Lightroom:

I use a date based hierarchy on SmugMug that matches my local albums: YYYY -> YYYYMMDD Album Name
When an album is ready to be published in Lightroom, I select all in grid view.
Right click on the year folder in the SmugMug plugin where I want the album to go and select new gallery with include selected items checked.
In the new gallery dialog box I paste the name of the album and usually leave all other defaults as is
Hit publish and I am done!

There are a lot of different services for photo publishing but I have found that SmugMug works best for me.

Digital Photography & Smugmug

I got my first digital camera in 1999, it was a Kodak DC290 with 2.1 Megapixels. I don’t even want to remember how much it cost. I think it was close to $800! Yikes! Although it was expensive, that camera got me hooked on photography and Photoshop. Over the years I have upgraded and now use a Canon 10D DSLR. The great thing with digital photos is that you are only limited by storage. The downside is that the more photos you take the harder it is to manage them. This is where Smugmug comes into play.

Smugmug is a photo sharing site that a lot of people still have not heard of. I signed up for Smugmug a few years ago an instantly became a huge fan. For $40 a year you get unlimited storage and bandwidth. That alone makes it a great deal, but throw in LOTS of great tools to manage your photos and share them with friends and it becomes a GREAT application! If you have not seen Smugmug I highly recommend them!

Here is a photo we took at Stone Mountain a few weeks ago: