Fotki -> SmugMug

I finally was able to make the conversion completely to SmugMug!Why did I switch? A few reasons:

• First and foremost I really like to look of the site; the navigation that I can offer my visitors is great. Scaling the lightbox display to the screen size dynamically is simple, but effective. Fotki doesn't have that. Dynamic image sizes don't exist either.
• I think it looks nicer than Fotki's interface as well. Second, and almost as important, is that I like the folks that run it and I want to shuttle a few bucks their way. (They happen to run AdvRider.com out of the goodness of their hearts)
• I love the fact that they have a real API that you can access to do all sorts of cool things with! (Fotki claims to have one, but you need an API key you have to ask for in an email. They never responded.)
• Third-party support in IOS apps and whatnot; easy upload-on-the-go!
• Integration with Adobe Lightroom (both built-in and other third-party plugins)
• Better reliability. Fotki lost some of my pictures! SmugMug stores all the pictures on Amazon S3 which has a super-high level of reliability.

While I have backups of everything on Fotki, I don't want to be monitoring my site for losses. Fail.

The prints are a little more expensive than Fotki's, but when I did a comparison they looked a little bit nicer too. To me the quality overshadows the price, so I'm OK with that.I was originally going to write a program to upload the pictures to SmugMug since they have an API to manipulate your account. As I wrote up there I couldn't do the same with Fotki so I would have been reduced to scraping the HTML to get at the pictures. At least they offer an FTP interface that I was able to pull down all my pictures. (*) (I used Beyond Compare to do the sync. Brilliant program! But more on that in another post)I thought about writing the program to do the upload for me but I realized it would take longer to write and test than it would be to do it manually. From there it was just slogging through uploading the folders one-by-one. Around a hundred or so folders later and it's all up on SmugMug!Yaay!Go sign up. If you do use the code CdvynmIDOFG4c for a $5 discount!Besides, they gave me a way-cool camera strap!