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I am maintaining photographs in two off-line services, and I am in the process of setting special web sites for particular photographic interests.
I am passionate about photography, namely stereo photography. I've reserved two web sites, artstereo.com and math3d.com to reflect my interests in stereo photography and using 3-d imagery to teach and illustrate mathematics, respectively. These web sites are currently under development.
I maintain offline gallery hosting at two web sites: smugmug.com and flickr.com. (In fact, as this is being typed, on April 11th, 2005, I'm actively moving files to smugmug -- it may be a little while before that site is up and running.)
Here is a comparison between the two services (as of April 10, 2005) -- this is still incomplete -- send me an e-mail if you have anything to add or any experience comparing the two:
| Flickr.com | Smugmug.com | |
| Annual price for pro account | $25 (guest account free) | $100 (standard account $30, advanced account $50) |
| Maximum storage | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Maximum upload limit | 2 Gigabytes/month | Unlimited |
| Maximum download limit | Unlimited | 16 Gigabytes/month (extra bandwidth may be purchased) |
| Maximum photo size | 5 Megabytes | 16 Megabytes |
| Photo formats supported | JPEG, PNG, GIF (non-animated) | JPEG, GIF (Also: TIFF, PSD, BMP, & WMF -- automatically converted to JPG) |
| Video formats supported | None | MPEG-1 |
| Privacy levels | 5 (public, self, friends only, family only, friends and family) | Unlimited through password protected pages. |
| Per-photo privacy | Yes | No |
| Per-gallery privacy | No | Yes |
| Permits non-photo graphic images | Officially: no; unofficially: yes, as long as the user marks the item as objectionable | Yes |
| Permits sharing of photos | Yes, through Creative Commons (not working for last month) | Yes (room for Creative Commons or other license) |
| Permits selling of photos | No | Yes |
| Allows access to different size photos | Yes, if you explicitly give URL, otherwise, access to different photo sizes is not comes automatically with Creative Commons License on a per-photo basis. | Yes, completely configurable on a per-gallery basis. |
| Page and gallery customization | No | Yes |
| Hierarchical galleries | No | Yes --three levels of hierarchy (category, subcategory, gallery) |
| Unique websites supported | No | Yes |
| Client uploaders | Yes, but very buggy | Yes, a high quality one from a third-party supplier. |
| Open API | Yes | Yes |
| Encourages hacking | Unclear | Yes |
| Sells physical photo copies | No | Yes, very high quality |
| Sells photo mugs, t-shirts, etc | No | Yes |
| Provides backup DVDs and CDs | No | Yes |
| Ownership | Yahoo | Private |
| Size of community | 360 thousand members as of March (growing 30%/month) | 42,00 |
| Technical forums | I think so, but have yet to find a very technical one yet | Yes (dgrin.com) |
| Groups | Yes | Yes |
| Community activity | Super-active | Moderate |
| Support for tagging | Yes | Yes |
| Support for comments | Always on | Optionally on |
| Auto-sorting on galleries | No | Yes |
| One click-blogging | Yes | No |
| Badges (selection of photos) | Yes | No, but should be possible as third-party supplied code. |
| Customer service | Good | Outstanding |