ArticlesThis post is part of the Online Photo Database project documentation. Learn more about the project’s current status.
Which requirements does SmugMug meet?
| Id | Pri | Requirement | Pass? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GEN1 | C | Accessible by a typical web-browser | Y | |
| GEN2 | I | Active development of new features | Y | |
| OWN1 | C | Ownership of photos is retained by me. | N | Backup required |
| OWN2 | C | Future-proofed against money running out: mine or yours | N | Backup required |
| OWN3 | I | Ownership of meta-data is retained by me. | N | Didn’t look for API |
| CAT1 | C | Photographs grouped into albums by event | Y | |
| CAT2 | C | Photographs tagged with people | N | You can put names, but then you find everyone in the universe called Bob. |
| CAT3 | I | Photographs tagged with locations, objects, activities | Y | |
| CAT4 | I | Performers tagged with real and stage names. | Y | |
| CAT5 | I | Attribution of photographer details | N | |
| CAT6 | I | Attribution of copyright owner’s details | N | |
| CAT7 | I | Rating of photographs | Y | |
| CAT8 | I | Sorting/Filtering by rating | ||
| CAT9 | D | Albums grouped by type | Y | |
| CAT10 | D | Albums grouped by date | Y | |
| CAT11 | D | Areas or points of photograph tagged | N | |
| CAT12 | D | Simple contact management of subjects | N | |
| CAT13 | D | Hidden fields on contacts to distinguish like-named people | N | |
| CAT14 | D | Tagging of anonymous people to enable searching | N | By convention |
| CAT15 | D | Corrections to names update everywhere | N | |
| CAT16 | D | Attribution of copyright details | ||
| CAT17 | D | Control over (default) ordering | Y | |
| S+L1 | C | Link to other photos with same tag within an album | N | Only all albums |
| S+L2 | I | Associate URLs with subjects, that are displayed. | N | |
| S+L3 | I | Link to other photos with same tag across my albums | N | Only all albums |
| S+L4 | I | Search of tags by keyword | Y | Only all albums |
| S+L5 | I | Cross-promotion of other albums and sites. | N | |
| S+L6 | D | Link to other photos with same tag across other photo sites | N | |
| S+L7 | D | Search of album names by keyword | N | |
| S+L8 | D | User-generatable URLs to search tags by keyword | N | |
| COMM1 | D | Multi-user Tagging | N | |
| COMM2 | D | Notifications of appearance in photos | N | |
| COMM3 | D | Comments permitted | Y | |
| COMM4 | D | Notification of comments | ||
| COMM5 | D | RSS or Atom Feeds for comments | ||
| COMM6 | D | RSS or Atom Feeds for subjects | N | |
| COMM7 | D | RSS or Atom Feeds for new photos | Y | |
| PQ1 | C | Web-quality images shall be displayed by default. | Y | |
| PQ2 | I | Print-quality images shall be available. | Y | |
| PQ3 | I | Automatically generated thumbnail and web-quality versions. | Y | |
| PQ4 | D | Archive-quality images shall be stored. | Y | |
| PQ5 | D | Custom thumbnails (e.g. choosing to crop over shrinking.) | N | But it has a smart algorithm built-in. |
| PQ6 | D | Support for short video | Y | For a price |
| PQ7 | D | Support for long video | ||
| PERF1 | I | Quota > 0.5 TB, if any | Y | |
| PERF2 | I | Low-cost | N | |
| PERF3 | I | Fast response time | Y | |
| PERF4 | I | Scale to thousands of tags | Y | |
| PERF5 | I | < 1 minute face-time per photograph | Y | |
| PERF6 | D | Free | N | |
| UI1 | C | Forward/Backward navigation between photos in album. | Y | |
| UI2 | D | Slideshows | Y | |
| UI3 | D | Display of many thumbnails at once | Y | |
| PRIV1 | C | Their email address should never be published on the web. | N/A | |
| PRIV2 | I | Registration and logging in not required for general use. | Y | |
| PRIV3 | I | Robust privacy features for photographs | N | |
| WF1 | I | Hint to original location on my harddrive | Y | |
| WF2 | I | Auto-complete or partial search on tags during input | N | |
| WF3 | D | Read EXIF data from image | Y | |
| WF4 | D | Support unpublished draft state | Y | |
| MIGR1 | C | API to add photos | Y | |
| MIGR2 | C | API to add tags | Y | |
| MIGR3 | I | Tags can be non-specific to areas of photo | Y | |
| METR1 | D | “How many visitors?” metric | ||
| METR2 | D | “How long does a visitor stay?†metric | N |
Summary
Mmmmmmm… nice.
Where Zooomr feels like it had been written by a really hard-core hacker, SmugMug feels like it has been written by a team of designers.
This site is less focussed on your party-animal friends dissecting the previously nights’ adventures, and more on your professional photography friends trying to sell their wares. No multi-user tagging, no tagging of regions of the photos, but the ability to add watermarks, edit photos on-line and charge for copies of your prints.
It is very slick, with a lot of attention to detail. I liked being able to upload directly from my photo-editing tool. I liked its apparent automatic face-detection in producing thumbnails. I like the clean lines of the site.
But, I don’t like the price.
Comment by Mark MacAskill on August 15, 2008
Julian,
Wow, great info. I can see you put a lot of work into this. I’m an employee of SmugMug, so I found it very interesting.
I should point out though that there are a few minor errors. I understand, as I’ve been working at SmugMug for three years and I can’t keep up with all the features either.
First, you can manually zoom/crop thumbnails to your heart’s content. Second, we do give viewing statistics and allow Power/Pro users to easily add Google Analytics or SiteCounter as well.
Third, I firmly believe we have far and away the most robust privacy features of any photo sharing site on the Web. Aside from hiding individual photos, making galleries unlisted, password protecting the entire site or individual albums, and creating sharegroups, we have the very adaptable SmugIslands (http://www.smugmug.com/help/private-search-island).
Finally, I’m not sure what you meant by “Future-proofed against money running out: mine or yours”. But you can download your full-resolution original files at any time and can quickly and easily order backup CD’s or DVD’s. With SmugVault, you can even store RAW’s and PSD’s directly on Amazon’s S3 through our interface (I don’t think Amazon is going to run out of money very soon).
Anyways, thanks for the write-up!