In May, Yahoo riled up photography lovers everywhere by revamping its popular Flickr photo-sharing site. The new Flickr offers everyone 1 terabyte of free storage. That’s a lot. It’s enough to back up and display 600,000 photos at full resolution. (Here’s my review.)
But the new Flickr eliminates the unlimited-storage plan for new members and drops a few features of the old Flickr. This infuriated some of the harder-core photographers.
There could be no better time, therefore, for Flickr’s rival SmugMug to step into the fray with its own revamp, which it says has been in the works for two years. It zigs exactly the way Flickr just zagged: by offering features that cater to high-end photo buffs instead of offending them.
“Over time,†explained the chief of SmugMug, Don MacAskill, “SmugMug became a lot less beautiful.†Buttons, links and other distracting elements cluttered up the screen. The mantras of the new SmugMug, which went live this morning, are “less clutter†and “customization.â€
You’ll notice the cleaned-up design immediately. But the real fun is lurking in the Customize menu when you’re logged into your account.
“Choose a New Site Design†opens a palette of 24 new layouts for your SmugMug world. Each offers different color and type schemes, photo layouts and sizes. With one click, you can make your collection look like a photo wall, an architectural coffee-table book or a commercial brochure.
The Customize menu also contains the command Customize Site, which lets you go much, much farther.
Now you can hand-tweak every single aspect of every page of your site. Change the color and texture of each gallery. Adjust the top, bottom or side margins of the Web page. Add or move navigation buttons, headings, even a map showing where the pictures were taken. Insert logos or bits of text. Choose a picture to fill the background behind your photos. Place the Comments box, links to your Facebook and Twitter streams and so on.
The point is to take SmugMug beyond simple photo sharing. It’s to turn your SmugMug account into your Web site for displaying pictures â€" something no other photo-sharing site can match. You can see how varied and attractive some of the members’ redesigned sites are here, here and here.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that the controls for all of this customization are dizzying. Of course, it’s totally fine to stick with one of the 24 canned designs. But if you do decide to hand-craft the look of your site, you’ll have to dedicate serious time to learning the controls.
The other bad news is that so many design options can turn a page into MySpace. Some of the beta-testers’ SmugMug sites are fairly hideous.
SmugMug isn’t free. It’s $40 a year for the basic plan (no videos or photo selling) and as much as $300 a year for pros who want to run a business selling their wares on SmugMug. All the plans offer unlimited photo storage.
But it’s hard to compete with free. Is SmugMug’s rebirth enough to woo the masses away from the free of Flickr?
Fortunately, SmugMug doesn’t have to worry about the masses. It caters to people who care enough about photos to pay for their presentation online. And those are precisely the people who will probably appreciate the much improved design, beautiful templates and infinite customization of the new SmugMug.
