The past few years, I have been using a combination of flickr (photo hosting), vimeo (video hosting) and WordPress (self-hosted blog) to share our family’s pictures and videos. I had a pretty good workflow going for a time there. But after waiting forever for flickr to allow more customization, I decided to consolidate everything to SmugMug. You can see the work in progress here at er-fans.smugmug.com.

I had been looking at SmugMug over the past couple years, but always felt that it was too “professional” for what I needed. But after looking at it again and with some ‘arm-twisting’ by Alex, I realized that SmugMug could host both our family photos and videos (with HD) all together on one site. And with a little bit of customization, I could get it to replace most of the functions of our family WordPress blog.

There were some tools that I was able to use to help migrate most of our pictures from flickr, but unfortunately, it didn’t handle transferring video very well. So I am still in the process of uploading all of our videos. And also, since SmugMug is not a blogging platform, I have had to transfer all the post content over to SmugMug manually.

For the photo and video side, everything works really well, considering that’s what SmugMug was designed to do. There are some things that I wish it did better, like how links are shared, but the great thing about SmugMug is that the developers are much more responsive to fixing or improving the website, with an active discussion and support forum.

The main downside of choosing SmugMug to host everything is that since it is not a blogging platform, the customization is not as easy to do and also the publishing tools are pretty limited. But there are some workarounds.

Let me know if you see anything that’s not working right on the smugmug site. I am still not completely sold on not using WordPress on the side, so I for now, I’m holding off on moving our family domain, ER-Fans.net.