SmugMug Rocks the Cloud
I’m a big fan of SmugMug and CEO Don MacAskil. Their use of the cloud for storage and processing is really interesting to study, and it’s very cool that Don keeps a blog about their software development.
Yesterday, Don announced that SmugMug will now store whatever you throw at it. Seriously – anything.
They’re accepting JPEGs, PSDs, TIFF, RAW files, and raw video. You can also store XMP sidecars, PDF files, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, video archives, and anything else you might want to store with your photos.
That’s very cool, but this is all possible because of their use of the cloud. The storage costs alone for this type of service could easily stretch into the millions of dollars. By using Amazon S3, they can offload the hard stuff and just keep throwing data at the cloud. The software development process is much quicker as well since you don’t have to worry about building and scaling the infrastructure.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
I was a Pro member at Smugmug for a few years, but it came with a hefty $149/year price tag. For that and several other reasons, I moved to Flickr. Now that I have invested so much time and effort (to the tune of 11,000 photos uploaded/tagged/organized), I think I might be stuck there for awhile until there is a good data portability solution. I just can’t spend 6 months moving my photos again.
Smugmug is great and I really love how their CEO gets it.
Brad, have you checked out Smugglr? http://www.smugglr.net/