I’ve had my photo gallery at SmugMug for a couple of years now. SmugMug is a great site, but a couple of things have made me look for an alternative. First, the price: the pro level is a bit spendy, at $150 a year. For people who make a living at photography, this is a great deal, providing a lot of shopping cart options. For me, though, it’s a bit of overkill. The other issue is that I’ve never really been happy with the search visibility of the site, given its reliance on Flash. Images I put on my blog get indexed by Google Image Search, but images on my SmugMug site have never really been picked up.
Since I already have a website, I figured why not host the photos myself? So that’s exactly what I’ve done. My photos are now here, powered by ZenPhoto. It’s not quite as feature-filled as SmugMug, but it works well enough for what I need. Since I’m hosting it, I can customize everything. It’s also very easy to sync my Lightroom catalog with the albums on the site using the Publishing function of Lightroom 3.
SmugMug is a good site for pros, but I’m hoping that ZenPhoto will work for me for a while.