SmugMug has been my favorite photo sharing service for about 6 months now. I'm so impressed with the quality of their service and the enthusiasm of their community. In my opinion, it's the best place for a budding photographer to start, especially if they are looking to start as a professional photographer.

But I have a Problem with SmugMug right now.

Because they don't enable tags in private galleries.

Tagging is a critical feature in all digital photo galleries and there is simply no better way to manage photos in the digital age. Privacy is also important. Unfortunately,on SmugMug - tagging and privacy are not available at the same time. With Smugmug, when you make a gallery private, your viewers can't see your tags. I know of one example where a teacher takes a few hundred pictures at her students event and puts them on SmugMug in a private gallery. Parents go online and see the private photos; however, they can't find their child's pictures because tags are disabled. I've got another example where I photographed a private art collection and the ownered wanted it to be private. But without tags, browsing through the photos is UN-enjoyable.

Not having this feature is driving me to remain non dedicated to SmugMug and continue to use other services. To their benefit, not a lot of services offer private galleries like SmugMug does so I can't determine how good other services are at blending tags and privacy. But I will say - as a web developer, I know this is technologically possible and they just need to do it.

In the meantime, Picasa Web combined with the syncing functionality of Picasa 3 is really growing on me.

Labels: Social-Ping