smugmug size for dial-up adequacy

[Mum2J&M]

Weird subject line. Sorry. My FIL has dial-up in England. He looks at our smugmug site more than anyone. So if I add a lot more images, I don't want him having to wait forever to view them. Any idea what is a fair size for smugmug pics where they could still be printable without going overboard? I was reading here somewhere that sticking to 800 pixels in LR for width & height is a good start, but what about resolution? Thanks for your help!

[StewartR]

You don't need to worry about it too much, I would suggest. Every time you upload a photo to SmugMug, the system automatically creates multiple copies of it.

For example, I uploaded a panorama which was 1750x800 pixels, 541kB. It's too big to fit on most people's screens but SmugMug automatically created:

Tiny (100 pixels, 3kB)
http://StewartR.smugmug.com/photos/178088581-Ti.jpg

Thumbnail (150 pixels, 5kB)
http://StewartR.smugmug.com/photos/178088581-Th.jpg

Small (400 pixels, 34kB)
http://StewartR.smugmug.com/photos/178088581-S.jpg

Medium (600 pixels, 70kB)
http://StewartR.smugmug.com/photos/178088581-M.jpg

Large (800 pixels, 112kB)
http://StewartR.smugmug.com/photos/178088581-L.jpg

and of course the original (1750 pixels, 541kB) (http://stewartr.smugmug.com/gallery/3224622/1/178088581/Original) is still available too.

SmugMug allows you to look at galleries in different ways. The control is in the upper right hand corner of the screen: it's a drop-down box labeled 'style'. The 'all thumbs' style, which I note you've used on your 'Family Album Updates' gallery, displays the tiny (100 pixel) versions of the photos. The 'traditional' style displays the thumbnail (150 pixel) versions. Either of these should be fine for dial-up, even here in England. I don't know whether you can fix which style your gallery displays, but you can tell you family how to change the style if they find it's (temporarily) displaying in a style that's not suitable for dial-up.

When you click on a tiny or thumbnail picture in SmugMug, it displays a larger version. It offers you a choice as to whether you prefer the small, medium, large or original version. Again, I don't know whether you can fix this, but you can tell your family how to use it and they should be able to choose a setting that works well for them on dial-up.

If you upload the full-resolution pictures then your family can look at them on-screen at any size they like, but if they want to order prints from SmugMug then they will be made from the full-resolution versions so there's no problem with image quality.

Does that make sense? Any more questions?

[Mum2J&M]

That makes total sense. Thank you. I think I did realize they could view it in small, medium, or large, but I guess I was thinking my FIL wouldn't "get" that. KWIM? But that's really good to know in case anyone wants prints. Thanks for your help. ;)

[Mum2J&M]

Come to think of it, I do have another question - as I'm trying to create an "archives" gallery on my site, I've got hundreds of photos to upload at once. Any suggestions as to how to do this with smugmug? I tried selecting all and doing them all at once, but it crashed my computer at some point in the middle of the night. If I try to do it that way again, do you know if smugmug will recognize already-processed images? Thanks again.

[StewartR]

SmugMug will not, so far as I am aware, recognise a duplicate photo. If you try to upload 100 photos, and your PC crashes after you've uploaded 50, and you reboot and start the upload again, then you'll have 150 including 50 duplicates.

Of course you could test this by uploading one photo and then uploading it again.

I would suggest a slightly different approach. Is it really desirable to upload hundreds of photos into one gallery? If the main object is to share photos of your kids with the extended family, then you (or they!) might find it helpful if you had, say, one gallery per month, or one gallery per quarter, or one gallery per term, something like that. It would make things easier to find. It would also make it easier to manage the upload process, since it would be easier to work out what you'd uploaded and what you hadn't.

Just a thought.

[lungdoc]

Look for and download from the Smugmug site the little uploading application "send to Smugmug" - works like a charm.It's endorsed by Smugmug and I got it via their links under "other uploaders". Get in from http://www.shahine.com/garage/content/SendToSmugMug.aspx"]http://www.shahine.com/garage/content/SendToSmugMug.aspx[/COLOR] ([COLOR="Red) directly.

I upload to Smugmug at high quality jpg approx 3meg files, makes for a good offsite backup. As noted Smugmug does the resizing. If viewers choose "all thumbs" viewing option they can see only small thumbnails and select from there, works well with a slow connection or a large image gallery where you only want to see a few.

[rhys]

That's a lovely photo.

[Mum2J&M]

Thanks for your help. I'm trying a different uploading thing now. I didn't send to smugmug, but tried an alternative method. Hopefully it will work... I'll keep you posted. And I was going to make more galleries within the archives once all the pics were up, so it would be easier to transfer them over... but obviously only if they load in the first place, lol.

[In2Photos]

I have had my upload crash one time and I was uploading around 150MB of photos. So I uploaded it again and this time it worked fine. this also meant that I had duplicate photos. So what I did was sorted the images by filename, then selected the duplicates and deleted them. Took only a few minutes.

[Ephemeral]

There is an upload log in your control panel that will list what you have uploaded recently. It's not perfect, but you can use that log to see what you have uploaded, or what uploads had failed, and only upload what's left.