Photogallery services/options? Smugmug, WordPress, Flickr, etc.

sirhawkeye64 · Feb 25, 2016

So, I'm going to be finished post processing a lot of photos that I'd like to post somewhere for the world to see (mainly family and friends, but anyone else whose interested as well, as these do not include people, but are of things like landscapes, nature, etc).

I've been trying out Smugmug a little as it is widely used in many of my photography groups. But, I'm also looking at other options as well, such as Flickr (which would probably be my last choice, despite it being free), WordPress (probably second to last) and Smugmug (probably my first choice).

Can anyone provide a good recommendation as to which options would be "Best" for non-commercial use (just for showing, not for selling so much)? I do like the idea that people would be able to purchase printed copies of the images so Smugmug is a definite plus for that. But as far as ease of uploading and maintaining my gallery, that's my biggest concern.

I'm not much for Flickr as ever since Yahoo acquired it, it has sort of lost its status. I'm willing to consider WordPress (As I have a web development background, but probably not enough time to write my own CMS or photo gallery system, but could customize WP to my needs if needed).

Ideas or suggestions?

Dans79 · Feb 25, 2016

sirhawkeye64 said:
Ideas or suggestions?

Depends how much control you want over the look and feel of your content, and how much work you are willing to do, or pay someone else to do. if you just want the images up use a hosted service.

Now I'm probably bias, as i'm a senior web system engineer, and one of my many duties is over seeing WordPress based sights that at times get over 2000 page loads a second. WordPress will require you to do more work setting it up, but it will give you more flexibility than any free/cheap hosted service.

if you have any specific WordPress questions I'll be happy to answer them!

KCook · Feb 25, 2016

I use both Wordpress and Zenfolio. My galleries on WP are plug-ins, I have not done any coding for that. For large collections I prefer a dedicated host like ZF. In my experience, WP uploads can be on the slow side. And the standard WP Media tool for photo management is crude. But WP is tops for integrating images with text content.

If I had this to do all over again, I might go with Flickr instead of ZF. With Flickr you can expect some visitors via Flickr searches. ZF just does not attract that sort of visitor. Only peeps you have given your ZF address to will ever find your ZF site.

Kelly

sirhawkeye64 · Feb 25, 2016

Dans79 said:
sirhawkeye64 said:

Ideas or suggestions?

Click to expand...

Depends how much control you want over the look and feel of your content, and how much work you are willing to do, or pay someone else to do. if you just want the images up use a hosted service.

Now I'm probably bias, as i'm a senior web system engineer, and one of my many duties is over seeing WordPress based sights that at times get over 2000 page loads a second. WordPress will require you to do more work setting it up, but it will give you more flexibility than any free/cheap hosted service.

if you have any specific WordPress questions I'll be happy to answer them!

See, I like the idea of Smugmug simply because it's a baked product, ready to go (And has integration directly from photoshop and lightroom). But, then again, I like WordPress because of the customization (plus Smugmug puts their logo and contact info on your pages--which is not a big deal).

I may just have to try both with a few small albums and see how I like it. I do like how Smugmug is also designed to be a photo gallery, whereas with WordPress, I'll probably need to find a suitable plug-in for it to act as a photo gallery, but then again, the other options (like adding other content) to WP is probably easier, and Smugmug probably doesn't support things like Document content (adding documents).

Dans79 · Feb 25, 2016

sirhawkeye64 said:
I may just have to try both with a few small albums and see how I like it. I do like how Smugmug is also designed to be a photo gallery, whereas with WordPress, I'll probably need to find a suitable plug-in for it to act as a photo gallery, but then again, the other options (like adding other content) to WP is probably easier, and Smugmug probably doesn't support things like Document content (adding documents).

do you mean a lightbox gallery?

tomoscott · Feb 25, 2016

I used to use Smugmug, and then switched to Squarespace (my site). Two reasons - 1) I liked the themes better . . . they seemed a bit more modern than SM's, and 2) Squarespace has blogging built in to the platform. I think Squarespace also offers you a bit more flexibility as far as customization.

There's no doubt Wordpress gives you the most flexibility. I administer a WP site for an art group I belong to, and the number of plugins is just amazing. However, you have to do a lot more fiddling around to get what you want. If that's your thing, go for it. But if you just want to concentrate on photography, and the themes in SM or SS (or Zenfolio, for that matter) are good enough for you, then I think that's a much better route.

sirhawkeye64 · Feb 26, 2016

Dans79 said:
sirhawkeye64 said:

I may just have to try both with a few small albums and see how I like it. I do like how Smugmug is also designed to be a photo gallery, whereas with WordPress, I'll probably need to find a suitable plug-in for it to act as a photo gallery, but then again, the other options (like adding other content) to WP is probably easier, and Smugmug probably doesn't support things like Document content (adding documents).

Click to expand...

do you mean a lightbox gallery?

What I'm really looking for (and this may be what you're describing--but I'll be honest, haven't heard of the phrase/term "lightbox gallery") is more of a CMS type that supports documents, but has the capabilities of a good photo gallery (As the emphasis of my site will be on photography and photos, but I still want to be able to add documents or blog entries, etc.

So that's why I was saying that WP may be better for this, as Smugmug, while great for photography, doesn't seem to have the option to add documents (by that, I mean actual document files like Word files or PDF files, etc) that I'm aware of.

Dans79 · Feb 26, 2016

sirhawkeye64 said:
Dans79 said:

sirhawkeye64 said:

I may just have to try both with a few small albums and see how I like it. I do like how Smugmug is also designed to be a photo gallery, whereas with WordPress, I'll probably need to find a suitable plug-in for it to act as a photo gallery, but then again, the other options (like adding other content) to WP is probably easier, and Smugmug probably doesn't support things like Document content (adding documents).

Click to expand...

do you mean a lightbox gallery?

Click to expand...

What I'm really looking for (and this may be what you're describing--but I'll be honest, haven't heard of the phrase/term "lightbox gallery") is more of a CMS type that supports documents, but has the capabilities of a good photo gallery (As the emphasis of my site will be on photography and photos, but I still want to be able to add documents or blog entries, etc.

So that's why I was saying that WP may be better for this, as Smugmug, while great for photography, doesn't seem to have the option to add documents (by that, I mean actual document files like Word files or PDF files, etc) that I'm aware of.

a little background.

To WordPress media is any type of document you upload to the server, videos, images, pdfs, executables etc. Normally, You can get media into WordPress in one of two ways. You can go to the media library and upload stuff there. The problem with this method, is you're basically just throwing everything in one big folder that's only organized by the date it was uploaded. The second way is far superior. When you are writing a post, you will see an 'add media' button above input area. if you add media here, that media will be associated with the blog post. If you go back to the media library, you will see this association in the 'uploaded to' column. This gives you a basic way of sorting all your images.

The next step up is using a plugin or some custom code to add tags and or categories to your uploads, to allow you to further sort and filter them.

these links will explain it better than i can.

one of many plugins that add tagging

a quick do it yourself tutorial

ok, now about galleries.

when you are writing a post, and you click the add media button you get an option to crate a gallery. The steps can be seen in this feature overview page. This puts a bunch of thumbnails in your post organized into rows. The down side of this is the end user has to click on each one to be taken to another page to see the full sized image (not a great user experience).

This is where the "lightbox" effect comes to the rescue. basically, when a user click on an image link, JavaScript loads the larger image over-top the page they are viewing instead of sending them to a different page. This is whats happens when you click on a flickr thumbnail image. The user can now use the mouse, keyboard, or finger swipe (on touch devises) to navigate through the larger images without leaving the page they are on.

An almost obscene number of WordPress plugins exist for this.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/search.php?q=lightbox

You can see a custom example of this on my blog.

http://www.dans-hobbies.com/2013/10/18/the-end-of-end-tables/

KCook · Feb 26, 2016

sirhawkeye64 said:
So that's why I was saying that WP may be better for this, as Smugmug, while great for photography, doesn't seem to have the option to add documents (by that, I mean actual document files like Word files or PDF files, etc) that I'm aware of.

Agreed, such an emphasis on text puts you squarely in WP territory. At least the ZF blogging page is too primitive for this, and I suspect this is also the case for SM. Maybe SquareSpace or Weebly are balanced well enough to handle both, I just have never looked into those. Probably worth a serious look though.

For WP, in addition to the standard Media collection, there are also gallery plugins that use their own image storage. This is kind of a double edge sword. On one hand, the dedicated gallery storage will usually be better organized. On the other hand, if the gallery is ever orphaned your images may become inaccessible without some sort of hack. In addition to the gallery game, there are also subscription WP themes for photographers that try to bundle all this and get you out of the plug-in game.

So lots of options, hope you enjoy the research.

Kelly

sirhawkeye64 · Feb 26, 2016

Dans79 said:
sirhawkeye64 said:

Dans79 said:

sirhawkeye64 said:

I may just have to try both with a few small albums and see how I like it. I do like how Smugmug is also designed to be a photo gallery, whereas with WordPress, I'll probably need to find a suitable plug-in for it to act as a photo gallery, but then again, the other options (like adding other content) to WP is probably easier, and Smugmug probably doesn't support things like Document content (adding documents).

Click to expand...

do you mean a lightbox gallery?

Click to expand...

What I'm really looking for (and this may be what you're describing--but I'll be honest, haven't heard of the phrase/term "lightbox gallery") is more of a CMS type that supports documents, but has the capabilities of a good photo gallery (As the emphasis of my site will be on photography and photos, but I still want to be able to add documents or blog entries, etc.

So that's why I was saying that WP may be better for this, as Smugmug, while great for photography, doesn't seem to have the option to add documents (by that, I mean actual document files like Word files or PDF files, etc) that I'm aware of.

Click to expand...

a little background.

To WordPress media is any type of document you upload to the server, videos, images, pdfs, executables etc. Normally, You can get media into WordPress in one of two ways. You can go to the media library and upload stuff there. The problem with this method, is you're basically just throwing everything in one big folder that's only organized by the date it was uploaded. The second way is far superior. When you are writing a post, you will see an 'add media' button above input area. if you add media here, that media will be associated with the blog post. If you go back to the media library, you will see this association in the 'uploaded to' column. This gives you a basic way of sorting all your images.

The next step up is using a plugin or some custom code to add tags and or categories to your uploads, to allow you to further sort and filter them.

these links will explain it better than i can.

one of many plugins that add tagging

a quick do it yourself tutorial

ok, now about galleries.

when you are writing a post, and you click the add media button you get an option to crate a gallery. The steps can be seen in this feature overview page. This puts a bunch of thumbnails in your post organized into rows. The down side of this is the end user has to click on each one to be taken to another page to see the full sized image (not a great user experience).

This is where the "lightbox" effect comes to the rescue. basically, when a user click on an image link, JavaScript loads the larger image over-top the page they are viewing instead of sending them to a different page. This is whats happens when you click on a flickr thumbnail image. The user can now use the mouse, keyboard, or finger swipe (on touch devises) to navigate through the larger images without leaving the page they are on.

An almost obscene number of WordPress plugins exist for this.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/search.php?q=lightbox

You can see a custom example of this on my blog.

http://www.dans-hobbies.com/2013/10/18/the-end-of-end-tables/

OK now the lightbox effect makes sense (never referred to it as that before). Anyway, looks like WP may be a better choice for what I'm looking to do, even though showcasing my pictures is going to be the primary purpose and focus of the website (the documents I'm referring to may or may not relate to photography or my pictures), so I guess I'm looking more of a CMS than a true photo gallery-only setup, which it looks like WP may be better for that as there are tons of options for plug-ins and add-ins to customize it to your exact needs.

Now, anyone know if there's a Smugmug plug-in for WP where I could get the best of both worlds (photo gallery with Smugmug, but the flexibility of WP).

Dans79 · Feb 26, 2016

sirhawkeye64 said:
OK now the lightbox effect makes sense (never referred to it as that before).

It's called lightbox in the industry, because the first implementation of it was called lightbox.

Loading…

en.wikipedia.org

sirhawkeye64 said:
Now, anyone know if there's a Smugmug plug-in for WP where I could get the best of both worlds (photo gallery with Smugmug, but the flexibility of WP).

I see a lot of plugins that mention various tie-ins with smugmug, but none of them look to have a high rating.

Loading…

wordpress.org

sirhawkeye64 · Feb 26, 2016

tomoscott said:
I used to use Smugmug, and then switched to Squarespace (my site). Two reasons - 1) I liked the themes better . . . they seemed a bit more modern than SM's, and 2) Squarespace has blogging built in to the platform. I think Squarespace also offers you a bit more flexibility as far as customization.

There's no doubt Wordpress gives you the most flexibility. I administer a WP site for an art group I belong to, and the number of plugins is just amazing. However, you have to do a lot more fiddling around to get what you want. If that's your thing, go for it. But if you just want to concentrate on photography, and the themes in SM or SS (or Zenfolio, for that matter) are good enough for you, then I think that's a much better route.

We use SquareSpace at work (not for photography stuff) and while I like the ease of use of SquareSpace, my biggest concern with systems like that (including Smugmug, Flickr, etc where you're just putting content into a pre-made system) is that if that company decides to remove or discontinue a feature or theme, you're stuck with their decision. At least with WP (I think) that is not as much of a concern. Granted, they could discontinue to support certain older versions, but its sort of like you're tied into their system and any choices they make for it.

I'll look at the photography-oriented templates for SquareSpace, but that is just my continued concern with using those types of systems where you have very little control over those aspects.

Not to say that WP is perfect, because I do have reservations about it since it is open source, but at least you have access to the source code and can modify it for your needs. But on the other hand, so can someone who wants to do something malicious. This is one advantage of a system like SquareSpace or Smugmug--they're closed source.

But that's something I"ll have to weigh out in my final decision.

sirhawkeye64 · Feb 26, 2016

Dans79 said:
sirhawkeye64 said:

OK now the lightbox effect makes sense (never referred to it as that before).

Click to expand...

It's called lightbox in the industry, because the first implementation of it was called lightbox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightbox_(JavaScript)

Dans79 said:

Now, anyone know if there's a Smugmug plug-in for WP where I could get the best of both worlds (photo gallery with Smugmug, but the flexibility of WP).

Click to expand...

I see a lot of plugins that mention various tie-ins with smugmug, but none of them look to have a high rating.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/smugmug

OK I figured that was probably the case. I guess I'll just have to set up a trial web server on a home PC and try out different WP themes and templates, and then do a trial of Smugmug (which I"m currently doing actually) and see which one i like best.

The documents thing is not a must, but it would be nice to be able to add other non-photography/video content to a site.

I do like the sleekness of Smugmug, I just don't care for the links at the top and bottom. I would be OK with a small link at the bottom saying something like "Hosted by Smugmug" but for example when you click on their Support links at the bottom of your Smugmug page, it takes you to their site. Maybe that's just in the trial, but I would imagine it would not change in the full paid version.

Moti · Feb 26, 2016

After trying out several galleries including Smugmug, Flickr and others, we have finally decided to develop our own web site based on WordPress, and we are extremely happy for taking this decision.

The gallery plugin we use, after testing several options, is Envira Gallery. It is flexible, customable and easy to implement, to upload images and to maintain.

You can check it out here

Moti

--
http://www.musicalpix.com

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Photogallery services/options? Smugmug, WordPress, Flickr, etc.

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