Wow...11 months since my last post.  That is shameful.

For our family blog (linkage) we needed an external service to host our family photos.  Initially I was serving them myself on my home server, but the bandwidth quickly became too much to handle (I've also since moved the hosting of these blogs to 1and1.com to off load even more traffic).

In shopping for a photo hosting service we had the following requirements:

• Ability to download full size images for free
• Unlimited space
• Archival of images via CD/DVD
• Fairly robust security to control who can see what images/albums
• Open access to visitors (no requirement for them register or login to view images)
• Easy print ordering

The first service we used (and still have pics on) is www.phanfare.com.  I was referred to Phanfare by another developer at work and liked it immediately.  It's setup was fairly intuitive and aside from some nuances in the security configuration it was easy to get up and running, encumbered only by the atrocious upstream of my cable internet.

Things were rolling along swimmingly with Phanfare.  Aside from the requirements above Phanfare also provided:

• Free DVD(s) of all images if you ever leave their service
• Support for CNAMEs, so I could point a subdomain photos.the-collins.net and it would resolve to my Phanfare albums
• Nice .NET-based client application to upload and manage images.

But like all good things, the owners of Phanfare decided they needed some changes.  In an effort to widen their user-base they decided to roll out Phanfare 2.0.  2.0 was deemed to be more social than the original, and I am not a social person.  The biggest change and the deal breaker for us was the requirement that visitors to your images/albums register (for free) with the site and log in.  Once registered these new users get a free gigabyte of space for their own pictures with the hope that they would upgrade to the paid service.  You could still link to individual images for use in blogs, etc, but the CNAME would no longer work. 

At this point I'm searching for other services.

Surprisingly there are not a ton of services out there that meet our requirements.  One that does is SmugMug.com.  SmugMug is pretty awesome.  On top of our requirements SmugMug brings the following things to the table:

• Tons of customization.  Ability to provide your own CSS and JavaScript allow you to really make your images your own.  For instance by default any visitor to a gallery has access to bread crumbs to navigate upwards inside your images.  Generally when we send out a link we want to keep people contained to the level of the link and anything below it.  With a bit of DHTML I was able to change the site to deactivate the links if the visitor is not logged in.  Very sweet.
• Lots of photo upload options.  There is a tool from the Windows context menu, a browser-based Java uploader, and others.  There is even a tool called SmuggLr which allows you to automatically migrate photos from other popular sites (including Phanfare) into SmugMug.  I was able to move about 1650 images (over 3 gigs) in about 4 hours using the tool.  Much better than manually downloading from Phanfare and uploading back up to SmugMug.
• Great support.  I have yet to send an email that was not responded to fully and competently in less than an hour.

'Gangsta Jackson' approves of SmugMug.com

Time for a shameless plug.  If you take a look at SmugMug and like it, use my referral link and save yourself $5 off your first year of the service.

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Hey, I'm Josh.  A software developer currently working for a large financial institution in Charlotte, NC.

I concentrate on .NET development (C#) of both the web and winform persuasion.

Sometimes I come across problems who's solution isn't readily found on the web.  I'll blog about such things, make myself feel smart, and maybe help someone else out along the way.

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