There has been some recent commentary on a new UI for the Smugmug photo site. I use Flickr quite a bit, and it was asserted to be much better, so I thought I’d try it out.
The cool new thing is how the photo being shown dynamically resizes at high quality, to best fill the window. It is quite cool, but ultimately, it isn’t hard to resize a window to match what you are doing, and that seems a more natural way around to me. It also doesn’t show you ads, and has a cleaner interface which is nice. It also seems to have slightly more refined control over access – for example in having password protected galleries. But, as a Linux/KDE user, I can export to Flickr directly from digiKam (the photo handling app used in Kubuntu). This is clearly a network effect issue – if Smugmug gets more popular then the exporter will get built into DigiKam, but, right now it isn’t there. Also, I quite like the photostream model in Flickr, and that doesn’t seem to exist in Smugmug.
Anyway, my test shots here. It will only last for another 12 days as I haven’t paid – after that try it out from the Smugmug homepage. The same photos (and some more) are here on Flickr for comparison.
Greg Pyes blog 