A few weeks ago I stumbled across SmugMug, an excellent photo sharing site that I had inexplicably never noticed before. I was impressed by its look and feel and intrigued by some of its features (especially the Google Maps-powered geocoding stuff), so I uploaded a few of my photos and started playing around with it. I’m very pleased.
Most of my photos are currently on Flickr. I like Flickr a lot, but SmugMug takes a slightly different approach that I like even better in some ways. Flickr has its strengths; the endless stream of photos is especially conducive to freeform, random photography like photoblogs. SmugMug is more structured, which works well for more organized, professional photo galleries.
Since I liked so many things about both SmugMug and Flickr, I needed to find a way to use both of them without spending all my time uploading, tagging, and writing captions twice for all my photos. Enter Picasa.
Flickr and SmugMug both support IPTC tags and EXIF captions embedded in photos. Picasa conveniently supports those features as well. What’s more, the latest beta version of Picasa integrates with Google Earth, so I can easily add geotags to my photos that SmugMug will recognize. The only thing I have to do twice is the actual upload process, and that’s easy.
I love it when good software makes my life easier.