Flickr is a great place to show off photos, but not a place to trust their safety. Flickr’s community guidelines are extremely vague, with phrases such as “don’t be creepy” and “You know the guy. Don’t be that guy.” Despite there being no explicit clarification as to what these guidelines actually mean, Flickr staff are notorious for quickly deleting member accounts both free and paid without warning, and citing those guidelines as reasoning.

The worst part about Flickr’s account deletion process is that all data is immediately and irreversibly removed. Access to a deleted account can be restored in some cases, but photos, comments, tags, contacts and all other associated data promptly vanish forever. Unfortunately for Wilhelm his 5 year Flickr history is gone for no other reason than someone pressed the wrong button.

Flickr staff member Zack Sheppard commented in their help forum that a feature to restore deleted accounts is development. That sounds good, but the site has been around since 2004 and the lack of a restoration feature is not a new criticism. Mirco Wilhelm’s nuked account is just the first highly publicized case in which there’s absolutely no denying of innocence from either side.

Flickr is the best social networking photography site on the Web. It has an immense membership of highly talented photographers. Getting your photos seen and browsing work by others whose skill you admire is incredibly easy. However Flickr is not a place to backup your photos. Your account can go up in smoke at any moment, and nothing can be recovered.

The Difficulty of Self-Hosting

Self-hosting was the first method I used to store the photos featured on this site. That works fine for small images meant to illustrate posts, thumbnails and other such things, but when you get into photography territory it doesn’t really work. Despite web hosting companies that offer “unlimited storage space” at low prices (they’re overselling) nothing short of a dedicated server or a good cloud hosting service really has the capacity and power to host the tremendous image files that modern digital cameras turn out. But storage space isn’t the only factor — you also need software to manage those photos and I haven’t found anything that really comes close to the major photo sharing sites in terms of features.

Issues with Flickr

Flickr hosting came next. While I like Flickr a lot, it’s very good at certain things and not so good at others. Flickr is a great place to share your work, find inspiration from other photographers and meet new people. It’s a great photography-based social network, but it’s not a great photo hosting service. They don’t handle URLs well, and it’s not a place to archive your photos for security.

SmugMug handles URLs much better than Flickr. If you update an image in your photo library and re-publish it to SmugMug, its old URLs continue to work. But if you update an image in your Flickr photostream all its different sizes get new URLs. This breaks any blog post containing that image, replacing the photo with a generic “This photo is currently unavailable” error message.

While Flickr is a great place to post and share your photos, it’s not meant to be a place where you can archive the files. Flickr’s Community Guidelines are extremely vague, featuring a catch-all “don’t be creepy” article which states “You know the guy. Don’t be that guy.” This allows Flickr to delete any photo or account for any reason at any time. Staff has a history of doing so without warning and once content is deleted it cannot be restored. Archiving your photos on a service where your entire account can go poof in an instant is not smart.

Why SmugMug

At present SmugMug is the best option for hosting my photo library and the images feature on this blog. The site is extremely mature and full of features, it’s extremely customizable (and with great-looking defaults), and advertised as a safe place to backup your photo library.

When it comes to features SmugMug is a clear leader. The web interface makes managing thousands of images a breeze, the site has a extensive privacy options, each gallery’s settings can be individually customized, and their printing partners do very high quality work. SmugMug is integrated with Lightroom which means publishing and updating my photos is as simple as running an export.

Photos look great on SmugMug. The default gallery layout with left-hand thumbnails is very intuitive with large, impressive views. Other options are also available including one similar to Boston.com’s “The Big Picture” photo essays. And since SmugMug is a pay site there are no advertisements.

Most importantly SmugMug prides itself on being “like Fort Knox for your photos“.

SmugMug has saved many thousands of photos from floods, fires, tornadoes, and computer failures.

SmugMug provides unlimited storage of JPEG (what your camera stores), GIF and PNG files with your subscription.

Storage space is unlimited for all subscription levels.

If your photography is important to you then having your library backed up off-site is absolutely essential. I’m currently in the process of loading my entire body of work into SmugMug.

They Seem Like a Great Company

Also worth mentioning is that SmugMug is a profitable family-run business staffed by people who appear to genuinely enjoy their work. Many of them are also enthusiastic photographers. This makes me feel good about the site and its future. Watch this video to see for yourself.

If you’re interested in SmugMug, you can sign up for a free trial and have your galleries up in no time. If you sign up through my link, I’ll get a small kickback in the form of a discount on my own subscription.