We just discovered that the SmugMug “MAPTHIS” button is only mapping the first 200 geotagged photos in a gallery. Therefore, we have broken up the pictures for our North Cascades camping into two galleries, Part 1 and Part 2. The link to the pictures in that post takes visitors to Part 1. In the description of Part 1, we have given a link to the Part 2 photos (and vice versa).
We love SmugMug and its unlimited storage. But from now on, for this blog, we will be using Picasa as our photo album, as we like its mapping abilities better than those in SmugMug. In Picasa, when you click on a gallery, it initially shows you a small map with all the tags for all of the photo locations clustered on the map. Then when you click on a single picture you see the location for that one picture. It makes it a little easier to see the specific location of each picture. They also have a link that allows you to see a larger map with thumbnails of the photo tracing the route. As you click on each picture in the left panel it shows a larger image on the map.
You can see a sneak preview of our pictures from last weeks, June 12th trip in Picasa at http://picasaweb.google.com/RVingExpert/June122009Rainier# . Mike has done an excellent job of putting descriptions on each picture, so it is somewhat of a picture blog of our trip. More about the trip will be coming in our next post.
Picasa has a free user account for up to 1 GB of photos. After that it is $20 a year for the first 10 GB, which is shared with your Gmail account. Subsequent upgrades are at the rate of $75 a year for 40 GB, $250 a year for 150 GB, and $500 a year for 400 GB. Therefore, we will be using Picasa for our blog and SmugMug for our personal photos, and to maintain an archive our older travel photos to try to stay under the 10 GB per year.
SmugMug has three different account levels for users (Standard, Power, and Pro). All three levels come with unlimited storage, just different capabilities. We have the Standard plan for $39.95 a year. The most sophisticated package, the Pro package, allows you to protect and sell your photos. The Pro Package also offers the ability to upload HD videos. The cost for the Pro package is $149.95 a year.
We love to take pictures and share them with family and friends and have used online photo storage for years. It eliminates the need to email the photos to friends. You can usually “Share” the photos from within the gallery. We haven’t really gotten into Picasa that much yet to know all of its capabilities. But SmugMug has a “Share” feature, and it has an “address book” that you allows you to keep the email addresses of friends and family to whom you frequently send links to your pictures. SmugMug sends them a great email with one of the pictures from the album in it that also links to the gallery / album.
Since obtaining our digital camera (Nikon D200), we haven’t actually had a picture developed or printed in years. We move too often to be toting around photo albums, and as you can see, my wife, Pam, takes a huge number of pictures in one day. We frequently come home from one of our trips with almost 1,000 pictures, and then she has to weed them down to 200 to 400 pictures. She has trouble trashing digital pictures. That is why our photo albums are so huge. We are working on a solution to her addiction, so that we don’t put so many pictures out there for our viewers to wade through. I wonder if they have a 12-Step program for photo addicts?
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