Please forgive our blog, missing pictures and all.  I’ve been in the middle of a photo sharing showdown (have we been here before??) over the last several months, and still haven’t made an ultimate decision on which one I want.

I was originally enamored with Phanfare, and we signed up right away.  Then, almost a year into our subscription, they completely changed their business model (going towards a social networking scheme), created a new version – 2.0 – and removed many of the features we enjoyed.  So we switched to SmugMug, at Josh’s insistence.  I used SmugMug for a while, but found it too customizable (I liked the simplicity of Phanfare) and didn’t like the site’s design, compared to Phanfare, among some other features (categorizations, uploading most notably).  SmugMug makes Josh all giddy inside though, because as a developer, he loves the fact that he can write code to integrate with our account / photos (like tweaking the categorizations, creating a site entry login, etc). 

Then – a couple of months ago, Phanfare finally realized that they were making some mistakes with 2.0, and they issued a notice to current customers indicating they were reinstating some of the 1.0 features.  So, like an ex-girlfriend with a weak wounded heart, I went back (again, does this sound familiar??).  I was still on the 1.0 platform.  But last night, I was upgraded (without notice, with my account disabled for 24 hours, and all my photo links now broken) to 2.0.  I was eager to download the new desktop app, and check everything out.  I immediately noticed the desktop app looked like CRAP.  Something, as Josh put it, “they should be embarrassed about.”  The text / logos are fuzzy and hard to read, and they now have the thumbnails and images to download as you go through them, which caused many delays and fuzzy images as I was searching through my albums. 

Then I go to make my newest blog post, and something just didn’t look right.  The pictures were from my lower quality camera, but I’ve used some from there before….and yet the images looked less sharp with the 2.0 Phanfare.  So we started doing some comparisons.  Here’s what we noticed:

Phanfare 2.0 quality

SmugMug (and similar to Phanfare 1.0 quality) – SMALLER & yet better quality!

Apparently it is too much to ask for a photo AND video storage site (original, hi-res downloads / backups available), that will allow for external linking (for the blog of course!) AND works smoothly and has a clean simple design.  We have been, and are still willing to, pay for these services. 

So it’s back to figuring out what I want to do with our pictures and videos again…..leaning towards SmugMug but we’ll just have to see…