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Smugmug is only a viable replacement for Flickr if your content stays within their absurdly strict and conservative acceptable content policy.

I've photographed a lot of burlesque events, and although none of the photos contain overt nudity, the mere presence of a breast with nipple concealed is enough to get your photos summarily removed by Smugmug's staff.

JayNeely 5246 days ago

That sucks. I don't want to support that.

With Flickr going downhill, what should I switch from SmugMug to?

potatolicious 5246 days ago

500px has been taking off in the photographer community lately, though they're nowhere near feature-parity with either Flickr or Smugmug.

No geotagging, not even API access, makes the use cases somewhat limited. But what is there is impressive, and the general caliber of work on 500px is higher than Smugmug, and a lot higher than Flickr.

I do find the discoverability features somewhat annoying due to the userbase they bootstrapped with. With Flickr Explore you'll find some puzzlingly banal photos making it to the top. With 500px's "most popular" galleries you'll just find a lot of nudes. It's like nothing else on that site gets any hope of rising to the top if it doesn't slip a nipple.

500px feels like it's evolved a culture that values very carefully curating your photos and posting only your very best to 500px itself; the expectation seems to be that the bulk of your work will end up on ${SOME_OTHER_SITE}. People seem prolific if they have 50 pictures up on 500px; I don't think I've seen anyone with 100.

It can be a great adjunct to a Flickr replacement, but unless the usage patterns change radically, it won't be that replacement itself.

pyre 5245 days ago

  > With 500px's "most popular" galleries you'll
  > just find a lot of nudes. It's like nothing
  > else on that site gets any hope of rising to
  > the top if it doesn't slip a nipple.

Really? I'm not seeing any nudes[1]. Am I looking at something different?

[1] http://500px.com/popular

Florin_Andrei 5246 days ago

I'm self-hosting my photos. The Linux server is a NAT firewall, but also a file server and Web server. Combined with a dynamic DNS service, works well enough. I've literally terabytes of space available, at little to no additional cost (I'd keep this machine around anyway).

http://theopenphotoproject.org

Have a look at OpenPhoto. You can download and install the software on your Linux server and use your NAT for storage.

justincormack 5246 days ago

At least on flickr there is the "take me to the kittens" facility for self-censored pictures.

gatlin 5246 days ago

Maybe that's true for public photos; I know of a photographer who frequently snaps shots of wild and crazy college-town happenings and from my inspection, by your rules she should have been canned a few hundred times now.

They'll allow that kind of content only in non-public galleries that are also password protected. It's possible to slip some things through the cracks, but if and when they're found they'll delist the photos.

There's no value for me in paying money for a service which requires I lock up my photographs like Fort Knox merely because they contain skin. Your friend's mileage may vary.

(this is the relevant section from their TOS: "By using any Interactive Areas, you agree not to post, upload to, transmit, distribute, store, create or otherwise publish through the Site any of the following:

Any photograph, video, message, data, information, text, music, sound, graphics, code or other material ("Content") that is unlawful, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, indecent, lewd, suggestive, harassing, threatening, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, abusive, inflammatory, fraudulent or otherwise objectionable or harmful, including without limitation photographs or other Content containing nudity that would be unacceptable in a public museum where minors visit;")

edit: It's also not hard to find them discussing their policy, like the customer reps on their public blog: http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2007/01/31/the-dark-side-of-the...

"I’m afraid if you’re a nude photographer, SmugMug isn’t the place for you. We’re a family safe site, and we will ask you to take down any photos that violate our terms of use."

"Our nudity policy is pretty simple and written in plain English. You can see it in our TOS. The summary line is as follows: “we prohibit the uploading and display of photographs or other Media portraying explicit nudity that would be unacceptable in a public museum where minors visit, for example. If your photos would only be suited for adult sites, adult magazines, or R-rated movies, they are not suitable for Smugmug.” We do enforce this rule to the best of our ability."

sp332 5246 days ago

I checked, it is in their Terms of Use http://www.smugmug.com/aboutus/terms

  A. General Terms
  13. User Content

a. User Content that is... obscene, pornographic, indecent, lewd, sexually suggestive... including without limitation Photos, Videos or other User Content containing nudity that would be unacceptable in a public museum where minors visit

dagw 5245 days ago

nudity that would be unacceptable in a public museum where minors visit

That has got be one of the most stupid 'clarifications' I've ever seen in an EULA. Have these people ever been to a museum? Think of just about any act or scene that is "obscene, pornographic, indecent, lewd, sexually suggestive" and I can guarantee you I can find a photo, painting or sculpture depicting more or less just that hanging proudly on display in some "public museum where minors visit".

sp332 5246 days ago

Ah, interesting. I've never tried it, but that's good to know.

It's tragic in that they otherwise have a very nice service and I would very much welcome the ability to give them my money; they're taking themselves out of the running for rather a lot of photographers.

dxbydt 5246 days ago

Shameless plug: We've been using smugmug for the past 8 years. My wife's an amateur photographer, & she's been posting a daily ( a jpg shot the day before) every single day for the past 7 years. With zero marketing, we've sold over 20,000$ worth of merchandise ( photographs, photos on greeting cards, photobooks etc) & gifted free smugmug accounts to few dozen photographers. Amazing, amazing website, cannot recommend them strongly enough. They also do RAW & HD Video. They do phototours & have monthly photo contests with hefty prizes ( we won a few - a $5000 prize on a self portrait), strong smugmug communities in several cities. Downside - no adult content. http://vandanaphotography.com

joebadmo 5246 days ago

Why recommend a Flickr replacement that has all of the same potential pitfalls of Flickr? In this context (HN) in particular, OpenPhoto seems like the best alternative: http://theopenphotoproject.org/

bad_user 5245 days ago

The problem is hosting your photos with OpenPhotoProject would cost more.

With a Flickr Pro account, for $2 per month you can upload an unlimited number of photos. Well, I'm sure there are limits, but I uploaded 8,000 full resolution pictures on it in only a couple of days and it didn't complain. Also my collection is growing like crazy ever since I became a father.

So the whole collection is like 32 GB. On Amazon S3 that would cost me $4.48 per month just for the storage. Managing it, like uploading new ones or deleting from it would also bring additional costs. I'm also starting to make movies, so I'm sure my collection will double in size pretty soon. So that would be $8.96 per month. And it won't stop there.

The only cheap alternative to Flickr would be Google's Picassa. You can purchase 80 GB of storage for $20 per year, or $1.6 per month. Also 1 TB of pictures would cost on Google $256 per year, while on S3 it would be $1720 per year.

Personally I'm not interested in showing off my work to the world. I'm only interested in storing those pictures somewhere in case I need a backup or in case I want to access them from a remote location. Flickr is great for both, too bad that Yahoo is killing it.

Disclaimer: lead developer on OpenPhoto providing some clarification.

That's sort of the point though. $2/month is cheap but the actual cost is the 4 years you probably spent uploading and tagging photos only to have the service die.

Your options are continue using a service you don't like for a great price or start using something else and leave behind the 4 years of organization (which you need with 8,000 photos).

It's kinda like the free hit crack dealers give out. In the end it's not worth it. Trust me, I've been there in a previous life.

That being said, Amazon S3 isn't required. You can install it yourself and point it to your NAS.

bad_user 5245 days ago

Thanks for your opinion.

And btw, I've been thinking about building something like OpenPhoto myself because I also don't like the lockin and I'm really glad that you've seen this need and did something about it.

gcb 5245 days ago

Host yourself is not Amazon s3.

If you need extreme availability for highrez images then it's another problem out of scope

So I've spent like ten minutes clicking around the OpenPhoto site, and it seems to me that they somehow forgot to mention what it is that OpenPhoto actually does.

Like, I don't need special software to store photos on S3. I don't need special software to hand links to files on S3 out to others, or display the files on my own site in galleries I build myself.

Presumably, then OpenPhoto lets me collect said photos into galleries and hosts the gallery bits? If so, why doesn't the word gallery appear anywhere on their site? Why isn't there any way to explore the galleries that they are hosting right now? Do I have to create an account to even see them? Would people I want to share with need to? Why aren't there some screenshots of what these galleries look like? Does the absence of all of this information mean that it doesn't actually handle the gallery bits? If that's the case, what does it do?

Their website is like a case-study in what not to do. It looks great, but at no point does it clearly communicate to me what it is their product does.

joebadmo 5246 days ago

I pretty much agree with you that their landing page is a bit of a mess.

Though, I probably should have given this link instead: http://openphoto.me/

My understanding is that the OpenPhoto Project is the open source project, and that site is aimed at developers. OpenPhoto.me is at least partly aimed at users. It explains it a little better.

I will also take this opportunity to plug a piece I wrote for the Atlantic tech blog that explains a bit more about OpenPhoto: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/the-st...

Oh that makes a lot more sense. I assumed that the original link was the user site, and wondered why there was so little content aimed at explaining the end-user experience, interesting as the dev details were.

Thanks!

jmathai 5246 days ago

It's actually our second attempt at making it easy to understand WTH we're building. I guess we need to take it back to the drawing board. Out of curiosity, did you ever (even think to) click on the "Get Started" links? Our goal was that end users would click that and then click the giant red button we put on that page. Not sure it's working though :).

Basically, imagine if you could use something as awesome as Flickr but have the photos stored in your personal Dropbox account or S3 bucket.

msbarnett 5245 days ago

> Basically, imagine if you could use something as awesome as Flickr but have the photos stored in your personal Dropbox account or S3 bucket.

Intellectually I had a fairly good idea that that was what was on offer, from reading through the high-level info and the REST API, but there's really nothing that spells that out in a concrete way for non-developer end-users. It's great that I can host photos on my own storage and that the code is on github and that the API is well-documented and hey it got started on Kickstarter!

But where's the beef? What do I get in a tangible way for signing up? Which leads us into...

> Out of curiosity, did you ever (even think to) click on the "Get Started" links? Our goal was that end users would click that and then click the giant red button we put on that page. Not sure it's working though :).

Yeah, I got there pretty quickly, but I didn't want to sign up until I knew what I was signing up for in a concrete sense. Freedom, Peace-of-Mind if OpenPhoto goes away, etc, are all good and noble things, but I don't want to create an account until I can see tangibles: what do the galleries look like, and how do they feel to browse around in? What kinds of customizations are available? That's the sort of information I'd expect to find in your Overview page[1], but there's almost nothing concrete to be found there. http://openphoto.me/ [2] is slightly better, once I was pointed to it, but only insofar as there are two tiny thumbnails which appear to show something of the user experience.

Flickr and 500px have sold me over the years because I could hit 'Explore' or 'Popular Photos' straight from their landing page and experience exactly what signing up would get me in terms of what the site feels like to use, what the community is like and how it functions, etc. One of my big concerns as a user of one of these sites boils down to: if I take photos of someone, and use this site to display the photos, and send links to that person, what will that person's experience be, and is that an experience I want to associate myself with?

Neither http://theopenphotoproject.org/ nor http://openphoto.me/ offer me a way to really answer that question for myself, so neither site makes me want to sign up, however nice hosting on my own back-end might sound.

[1] Incidentally, "3) RELAX, ORGANIZE AND SHARE YOUR PHOTOS (REQUIRED)" comes off to me as a lot more ominous than its probably intended. It sounds like it requires me to share all of my photos with the internet, privacy be damned. Maybe needs a rethink of the verbiage?

[2] The combo sign-up/request an invite form seems pretty confusing. After finally deciding from squinting at the thumbnails that I might want to at least click around inside, I started to fill it out before realizing I didn't have an invite, apparently required, and abandoned any thought of going further out of discouragement. Just my opinion, but I'd probably just have a request-an-invite form, and send invitees to a different private link via email. Realizing something is closed to me 3/4ths of the way through a form can be off-putting.

All suggestions in this post come from an engineer, not a UX expert. YMMV. Check local listings for details. You have been warned.

Wow, thanks for the detailed response. All extremely good points.

You're not the first person to say it needs screenshots of the product you're signing up for.

I actually agree on all points, but I'm also an engineer so I'll pass it by someone else :).

Thanks again.

Yay! http://theopenphotoproject.org/screenshots

ashr 5246 days ago

+1. OpenPhoto offers the freedom of storing my photos in the storage I own and it is something I really care about. Besides, it is an open source project. I can even run my own server if I wanted to!

It's working great for my ≈5k photos. I'm the lead dev on the project so feel free to let me know if you have questions or suggestions.

http://photos.jaisenmathai.com/photos/list -- hosted version with my TLD - FTW :).

sp332 5246 days ago

1. Smugmug isn't owned by Yahoo.

2. All of Smugmug's users are paying customers (even if it's less than $4/mo).

fdb 5245 days ago

I just installed OpenPhoto on my server, and it works great! Nice work, thanks.

Awesome. If you have any questions we're happy to answer them. #openphoto on freenode or http://groups.google.com/group/openphoto

sern 5246 days ago

I've never been able to take them seriously with Comic Sans in their logo.

mahyarm 5246 days ago

Does it choke on uploading your entire photo collection at once? I bought a flickr pro subscription, but getting my photo collection up on there reliably was like pulling teeth.

Smugmug also doesn't support RAW/DNG uploads, which makes using it as a photo backup and sharing service unattractive.

Do smugmug staff also look at your private photographs?

brlewis 5246 days ago

As someone who runs a photo sharing service that works great for uploading your entire JPEG photo collection at once (or at least in a few 2GB batches), it would be to my advantage to perpetuate the myth that Smugmug does not support RAW. But the truth is, their SmugVault service does.

mahyarm 5246 days ago

Yes but it's not a fully integrated workflow, and you have to pay extra for SmugVault.

bad_user 5245 days ago

If you know how to write Ruby scripts, checkout the "flickraw" gem. Myself I've written a script that behaves like rsync (i.e. uploads files from a directory that haven't been uploaded yet).

And overnight I ended up uploading ~ 7000 fullres pictures on Flickr. It didn't complain.

quadhome 5245 days ago

How is your script determine which files had been updated previously?

jsavimbi 5246 days ago

I've been using Uploadr for years, paired with direct individual uploads and I've never had an upload problem of note (>6000 uploads).

Once the photos are uploaded, well, that's another story. Photo management was never at the top of the work queue, I guess.