Done! List Update & SmugMug Review

I’m happy to report I have 1 item crossed of my Done List!

Done! August To-Do List:
• Clean out my personal email
• Upload all iPhone pictures & videos to an online storage site DONE!
• Backup all family pictures & videos to an online storage site
• Create a warranty binder
• Finish and order one Blurb album

While this was extremely time consuming, I’m so relieved that all my iPhone pictures & videos are backed up online. I have already lost one iPhone (it was dropped in the toilet, while I was doing laundry… not one of  my finer moments). I was SO sad about the pictures and videos I hadn’t saved, and vowed to not let that happen again. Here I am, 8 months later, finally doing something about it!

I am totally type A about my pictures, and always have them backed up in at least 2 places. Before this year, those 2 places were my computer hard drive & my camera’s memory card. Once I started to run out of room on the memory card, I knew I had to come up with a better solution. First, I purchased an external hard drive from Apple. I use it to back up my entire computer, roughly twice a month. I tend to do it every time I upload new photos to my computer, so that I get into a habit of doing it often. However, after reading this post on Young House Love, I knew an external hard drive wasn’t enough. It would give me a back-up in the event something happened to my computer, but god forbid anything happen to our home...I would lose all of my pictures. So I set out on a mission to find the best online photo storage site. Here were my requirements:

• Unlimited photo & video storage (with no video-length cutoff)
• Photo & video uploads can be organized/renamed in any way I deemed fit
• Ability to download the original photo, in high-resolution format
• Ability to purchase prints directly from the site
• Ability to share links to my uploads with family & friends AND the ability to have private galleries
• An iPhone app where I could upload pictures & videos directly from my phone
• A reasonable yearly fee for storage

After much research, SmugMug was the only website I found that met every single requirement. And before I get into the details, I LOVE their site!

The one website that was a serious contender (although I found it after I had purchased my subscription to SmugMug) was This Life. While they are more expensive than SmugMug, they offer some pretty amazing features like face recognition. I am not sure that you can order prints from their site though. 

A huge, huge advantage that SmugMug had over most other online storage sites was that I could try them out free for 14 days. No credit card was required, and I could upload my own photos to play around with. This was amazing! I wanted full-access to make sure all the features I listed above were as easy as they made them sound. They were! On day 14 I happily purchased a yearly subscription, and have been using their website ever since.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a crazy picture-taker. I have over 5,000 pictures of A’s first year, and had roughly 800 photos and videos on my iPhone. I was able to back-up my iPhone pictures and videos to SmugMug through their iPhone app. Their app also has a feature called ‘awesomeize’, with allows you to run a filter on your photos and makes them look professional. Completing all the uploads required that I upload a picture or video every time I had my phone in my hand for about a week. I also took advantage of my lengthy train commute, and would upload for 2 hours a day. Now that I’m caught up, the maintenance should only be a few minutes a week. 

I would definitely recommend SmugMug to anyone looking for an online storage site. And, I’d be happy to answer any questions anyone may have about their services. Now, off to work on the rest of my Done List!

Note: I was not paid or perked by SmugMug in any way. SmugMug probably doesn’t know who I am. Although I may known to them as ‘the girl that uploaded the most photos during her trial period’. Ha!