What to do? SmugMug vs Picasa

I started out photo sharing on Flickr. It was fine, but I had to pay to upload more than 200 pictures. I liked that I could take one photo upload and designate it to several albums/topics/galleries/etc.

And then my year was up. Do I pay again or find something better/different? Some photographer friends in the area use SmugMug, so I looked them over. Using a 50% discount, I signed up for a year and imported all my pictures from Flickr. That was a minor disaster. The import software (Smugglr) banjaxed a bunch of the descriptions and tags in the photos. After 8 months, I still have some pictures that I need to re-edit, or delete.

I agree that SmugMug is not really good for general upload and display of daily, routine, pictures. But, I’m turned off from Flickr, too.

So, I’m looking at PicasaWeb. I’ve had Picasa for a while and love it for tagging and noting pictures. I like the plug-ins for uploading to FaceBook and SmugMug, too. However, the PicasaWeb user interface feels a bit clunky to me. As a uploader, there are way too many option buttons to contend with.

However, when you use Picasa and PicasaWeb together, it is powerful for ongoing events. You can sync a folder in Picasa and it will automagically update the contents online in a like-named folder. And vice-versa.

I had never played with this Sync option until yesterday. We are having our carpet ripped out of the common areas of the house, and replacing it with 18″ tile. I am at home babysitting the installation, and my wife is at work. She keeps badgering me for photos of the work.

I am snapping several pictures, transferring them from the SD card to Picasa, and tagging/notating them. They are automatically uploaded to the web, where she can show all her friends at work. I used to have a Eye-Fi card, which would have made it seamless, but it went missing a couple of months ago.

I guess this ramble is not really a “this or that” post. Maybe it’s more of a “this AND that” type of thing. SmugMug works great for photos of events and such, and Picasa for right-now, constant update stuff. Although, I’m not sure which I would use on a crime scene, or fire scene, accident, etc, shoot.

All I know is that I miss my eye-fi card. Maybe during the tile install, it’ll turn up. I hope so.