This is why I’m going to cancel my SmugMug account

Posted on November 14, 2010 by Raoul

Updated 11/15/10: According to SmugMug, I can’t cancel my account and get a partial refund on my yearly fee. See below. That’s something to keep in mind for those interested in signing up with them. Once you pay, you’re stuck for the whole year. And if you sign up as a SmugMug Pro, that means $150.

“Unfortunately we can’t refund you, sorry about that. You have your account paid up until May 2011 so you may want to wait until your reminder email from us in April to cancel your account but that’s up to you.”

Over the past few months, I’ve been really frustrated with SmugMug. I tried to be a good sport about it, and waited for them to fix the issue — then waited some more… and then some… I wrote a post about my problem in early September, too. It’s now mid-November, I’ve had this very same problem since July, when I switched over to using a SmugMug Publish Service plugin in Lightroom to manage my photo catalog.

I’ll let my screen capture video explain what’s going on. Watch it and see.

Those of you familiar with the Publish Services in Lightroom know that it’s not easy to switch back to manual uploads once you begin using them. It’s not as simple as going back and forth. Once you commit to using a publish service, then you have to commit to making all of your changes there, otherwise there’s no point to using one. You can’t do manual uploads one day, then use a publish service the next day. Your changes won’t be reflected properly, and the photos which you uploaded manually won’t show up within the subset of photos managed by the publish service. You’ll never be able to keep track of what you put on on a photo sharing website, and you won’t be able to re-publish those photos if you should ever want to re-develop them, or to make changes to their metadata.

Yet when I told SmugMug about my problem, weeks after I’d begun using the publish service, their proposed solution was to upload my photos manually. As explained above, that wasn’t an option once I switched to the plugin and put in the work… I stuck it out patiently, for months, waiting for them to fix things, but they still haven’t, and it just doesn’t look like they care enough about me (and those in the same boat as me) to do so. Perhaps the percentage of users using publish service plugins is still small enough so that problems aren’t business-critical.

It’s just that it’s such a shame. I put so much time and effort into building my galleries, uploading photos into them, customizing the look and feel of my SmugMug website, mapping a custom domain to it, linking to my galleries from my blog posts, etc. And now it’s all for nothing.

You see, this is what happens when you rely on a third party service to handle something that’s important to you. Inevitably, at some point, problems will arise, and that third party service may choose to ignore you and not care about your problem, which in turn will make you miserable and frustrated to no end. I’d have expected this treatment from Flickr or YouTube, which are huge companies and could stand to lose a customer or two, but not from SmugMug, a company which prides itself on taking care of its customers, particularly its SmugMug Pros.

So here’s my parting wish for SmugMug: may you someday get the same treatment I’ve gotten from you.

My wishlist for Flickr

Posted on October 4, 2010 by Raoul

I joined Flickr in December 2004, and stuck with it since then because I like it. In spite of the various censorship issues that have plagued it over time, it’s still one of the best (if not the best) places to share photos. (Videos are another matter…)

Here’s a short list of what could make it even better:

Ability to view ALL of the photos that my contacts have uploaded. This is already available in the Flickr app for iPod touch and iPhone, but it still hasn’t been implemented on the Flickr website. It should be a simple option that would allow me to choose between seeing All or Five or One new photo(s) from my contacts. If I choose All, then when I go to my Contacts page, I see everything they’ve uploaded. It would be really useful.
Ability to set a licensing price for our photos. Flickr should get a bit of that money, and since they’re in with Getty these days, I suppose Getty ought to get something too, but certainly not what they’re getting now with the “Request to License” option, which is obscene when you consider they’re doing no work whatsoever on behalf of the user to market those photos.
Ability to set a custom domain to our Flickr photostreams, if we so choose. WordPress and Blogger already let people do this, so it’s clearly something that’s feasible to do for millions of users — the path has already been paved.
Smart sets, that update automatically based on criteria we set. This would eliminate the need to use third-party tools and websites, which are nice, but let’s face it, things would be even nicer if we could do it directly on Flickr.
Grey and black backgrounds for our photostreams, in addition to the standard white color.

You can find me here on Flickr.

Flickr launches People in Photos

Posted on October 22, 2009 by Raoul

Flickr launched a new feature they call People in Photos a few hours ago, on October 21, 2009. It lets you tag people in your photos or in your contacts’ photos. I guess it was only a matter of time before this happened. While Riya and iPhoto went the route of computer-aided facial recognition, which is a pretty cool feature indeed but processor-intensive, Facebook and now Flickr have gone the more low cost route of letting members manually tag people in their photos.

At any rate, the process is easy and real-time. You start typing in some identifier for a person you want to identify in a photo, such as a name or screen name or email address, the database of members is searched live, and you’re presented with a drop-down list of people that narrows down with each letter you type. Pretty cool. Flickr also went the extra mile and included the ability to let you determine who can add you to photos, and who can add people to your photos. Very nice touch there.

I added my wife and myself to a couple of photos where we appear, and took the following screenshots to show you what the new feature looks like. The only reason I noticed it is because I logged into my Recent Activity page a few minutes ago and saw a small change in the options, as you can see below.

The option to add people to a photo is located in the sidebar, below the photostream and groups thumbnails and above the tags.

As soon as I got done tagging my wife and I in the photos, I got an email from Flickr where they explained the new feature to me and allowed me to set the privacy options I mentioned above.

Like I said, pretty cool implementation, user-friendly, too, and it was something that was bound to happen sooner rather than later. There’s also a post on Flickr’s official blog announcing the feature launch.

What I’d like to know now is if Flickr can read the iPhoto person tags and somehow match them up with Flickr members, so that photos uploaded to Flickr from iPhoto get people-tagged automatically. Or is that the next step down the road?

An announcement about my photos

Posted on December 2, 2008 by Raoul

I’ve been mulling over this decision for some time. As I thought about it, I wanted to balance my desire to let people enjoy my photos with my very real need to retain the ability to sell my photographs, because I do want that to become a larger source of income for me than it has been thus far.

I think I may have reached a happy medium, and I hope I won’t regret what I’ve already begun to do. As of last week, I’ve been publishing my images at a much larger resolution — 1920 pixels on the longest side vs. 800 pixels previously. This means that you, the reader who sees this, will be able to download them and use as desktop backgrounds, without seeing a decrease in the photo quality as it fills up your screen. As a matter of fact, you’ll be able to use my images on monitors up to 24″ or more in size (1920×1200) or on HDTVs of any size, without seeing a decrease in quality. I am also resizing all of them to an aspect ratio of 16:10, so they’ll fit natively on widescreen displays.

Now, what am I not doing? I am not posting them at their native 240 dpi, as my Canon 5D gives them to me. I am posting them at 72 dpi, which is the native dpi spec of computer screens everywhere. I am doing this because I want to discourage the making of large prints from my photos, since I’d like to make money from those prints. This also makes it a little harder for people to blow them up to larger sizes for serious commercial work, which is where I also hope to make money.

I am also not removing my copyright notice from the photos. You’ll see it as a small watermark in the lower left corner that says “(c) raoulpop.com”. I want to keep that there to let people know that while I may be giving my photos away, I am not relinquishing my copyright, nor am I moving to a Creative Commons type of license, which I believe is inadequate for photographs. I also realize that the photos will get edited in various photo editing programs, and any meta-data will unwittingly get wiped from them. The watermark is the only sensible way to tell people down the line that I made a certain photo. I do wish Lightroom would let me format the watermark in some way, but for now, that’s what it gives me, and I’m not going to run all my published photos through Photoshop just to put a watermark on them.

Am I opening myself up for theft? Yes. There’ll be unscrupulous people (I hesitate to call them people) who will likely steal my photos and try to profit from them. For them, I should point out that I do register my images with the US Copyright Office, and I wouldn’t mind getting a six-figure payout.

For you decent folks out there, I’ll be happy to know that you get a little joy from looking at my photos at a resolution where you can actually enjoy them. Go ahead and download them and use them as desktop backgrounds, put them on your HDTV, email them to your friends, use them on your website, whatever. As long as it’s personal, non-commercial use, and you give me credit, it’s okay with me.

If you’re a company or some kind of organization that wants to use my photos in some way, please get in touch with me first to clear that use with me and to pay for the license. I’ll do my best to accommodate your needs.

Okay, so where do you partake of this fantastic offering? There are wo places where you can get it:

My photo catalog.
My Flickr stream. I’ve opened up access to the All Sizes button. Download away.

Remember to play nice. Here’s how to use my photos. Please obey the rules listed there when using my photos for free, and if you’ll end up licensing some, then you’ll make me very happy. Thanks.

Photography, take two, part two

Posted on October 9, 2007 by Raoul

I continued to work on replacing photos hosted with third party services. The list of modified posts is provided below. This has proven to be a huge effort. I had to locate the photos in my digital library — not all of which is keyworded yet, though I’ve got location information for all my photos — but I also chose to re-process, keyword and re-title the photos. You see, most of these photos were keyworded through bulk uploaders, for the purpose of displaying that data on third party photo sharing sites, not for my own library. Clearly that effort was wasted, but I didn’t know that back when I did it… Where applicable, I am also re-writing some of the text.

I want to make sure that the content I provide here at ComeAcross is truly top tier, as much as possible. What does that mean? Well, it means I spent my entire weekend, including Monday, working on the posts listed below, and on the posts listed in part one. I still have more posts to go. I don’t mind doing this — actually, I look forward to it — but I do hope that you, the reader, appreciate the effort that goes on behind the scenes.

Also see Photography, take two, part one.

Photography, take two

Posted on October 8, 2007 by Raoul

Over this weekend and the last several days, I’ve gone through posts that contain photographs, and replaced all of the images with ones hosted directly at ComeAcross. In the past, I’ve used photos hosted with third party photo sharing services, and I realize now that’s a folly.

If a third party service goes down, which is very likely with beta services, my photos become unavailable. Even if that service is not in beta, a simple action like closing one’s account shuts down access to all of the photos uploaded there. It’s much more practical to host the photos together with my website. That way, I am fully responsible for making sure that all of my content is accessible. If something goes down, I can take care of it. If I need to change web hosting providers, I simply transfer all of my files over to another server.

It’s not as simple to transfer one’s content with photo sharing services, no matter what they may promise. Image and meta data portability is still not 100% there, and it doesn’t help when a photo sharing service advertises their API’s availability for more than a year, yet fails to put it out for public use. It also doesn’t help when said portability is rendered useless by the amount of compression used on the uploaded originals, or the deletion of meta data embedded in the originals…

You see, everyone is ready to promise the world to you when they want to sell you on something. Quite often, that “world” is nothing more than an empty little shell. I speak in general terms here, from the things I’ve learned through my various experiences — mostly recent ones…

At any rate, I’ve still got to modify a number of posts, but I thought I’d point out the ones I’ve already worked on. They’re quite a few, and I’m happy with the results so far. Here they are:

Also see Photography, take two, part two for more updated posts.

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