After almost 4 years with Smugmug I gave up on them a couple months ago. They spend way too much time out of service, the weekends are hell even when just viewing images, and upload speed can be painfully slow/problematical any time. Also, there are cheaper alternatives that actually offer more. My wife is trying to get away from them (after renewing her subscription just 3 months ago) but they aren't making that easy. Finally, they refuse to embrace browsers other than IE (which we don't use).
Smugmug was good in the past but they certainly aren't what the use to be.
What uploader are you using? When I use the java plug-in its pretty quick. I uploaded a slew of stuff last week and I'd estimate that 40 photos would have taken me under 25 minutes. Are you on cable or DSL? Upload speeds are very different from download speeds on those. I'm on Verizon FiOS which is known for much better upload speeds. Just saying it might be your ISP rather than SM.
That being said, I also am frustrated by the down time. Last week it went down right while I was doing some updates to my layout and it made things look pretty bad until I was able to get back in and finish. I'm also interested in alternatives (specifically ones that won't break the bank right now).
I might give Zenfolio a try. I've spoken with two friends who've been with them for a while and they're both (mostly) happy with Zenfolio. The downside is, again, the IE issue. Like Smugmug, Zenfolio plays best with IE. One of my friends uses Safari and he states the upload speeds are very fast on his DSL. Zenfolio is a bit less expensive than Smugmug, and offers right-click-protect for all accounts (SM only offers the feature on the two more expensive accounts).
Another option is to go to a multi-rendering engine browser like Lunascape. It moves easily from Trident (IE) to Gecko (Firefox) to Webkit. So, for anyone preferring browsers like Firefox, Opera, and Safari one could easily switch Lunascape over to IE rendering to upload images and then easily get back to their preferred browser rendering engine.
Yup, that's the same java applet that I use. But as for Verizon, their basic tier only has 128kb/s which is pretty slow. Could also be your phone line quality. Either way, I'd bet a buck that its a Verizon slowness issue rather than a SM issue.
We're on a 1.0Mb/s up DSL line here and it doesn't make any difference. There are simply times when uploading to Smugmug is a pain. Doesn't matter what uploader we use... and the upload challenges are much worse than they were just a couple years ago. Coupled with the frequent "maintenance" shut downs along with the trouble just viewing images, and we've had enough.
Trouble viewing images? Curious to hear about this. I've had an account for a while, but just started using it so I haven't seen this. Do images just not display, slow load?
Jeff Langevin wrote:
Do images just not display, slow load?
It'll do both. If it's really bad, images will take forever to load... often minutes.
If they are experiencing problems with their "infrastructure", that's their problem... and it's been a problem for awhile. Shouldn't be the customers problem... they are afterall paying for a service.
bitmaker wrote:
I might give Zenfolio a try. I've spoken with two friends who've been with them for a while and they're both (mostly) happy with Zenfolio. The downside is, again, the IE issue. Like Smugmug, Zenfolio plays best with IE. One of my friends uses Safari and he states the upload speeds are very fast on his DSL. Zenfolio is a bit less expensive than Smugmug, and offers right-click-protect for all accounts (SM only offers the feature on the two more expensive accounts).
I've been with Zenfolio for three years and I'm very happy with them. The only downside I find with ZF is the lack of customization vs. SM. Otherwise, I think they are as good or better in the other areas.
I don't use IE, but use Firefox and have no issues with ZF. I use the plugin for LR2 and uploads are easy.
Thanks!
