SmugMug

Introduction

I switched from my own installation of gallery to the SmugMug photo sharing service for a number of reasons including the following:

• Due to hosting space limits I was only uploading reduced resolution images to gallery so did not have a full quality online backup. With SmugMug the full resolution images are stored online.
• Due to hosting space limits I was not storing my older photos online. With SmugMug I can store an unlimited number of full resolution photos online for a fixed yearly fee.
• I had a number of gallery hacks and customizations which would invariably take time to migrate with each gallery upgrade that I did.
• I had to keep gallery updated myself which takes time to keep up with.
• SmugMug has a more user friendly photo display interface in my opinion.
• Arrow key image navigation is supported in the browser on SmugMug.

Customization Tricks

I've found the following tips to be very helpful in getting my galleries the way I want on SmugMug.

How to display a list of most recent galleries on your homepage

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=688574#post688574

How to bulk change thumbnails for already uploaded photos

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=168848

How to manually change gallery modified dates so that the most recent galleries hack works right

I'm still looking for a better solution, but for now I follow these steps:

1. Upload a new image to your most recent X gallery that you want to show up in the most recent list, starting with the oldest gallery.
2. Delete the newly uploaded image from the galleries

This is a total hack but it worked to get things started after doing bulk uploads. In the future most recent dates should work correctly most of the time. I did find this thread asking for a better way to handle this problem but it's pretty old: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=21711