I switched from Flickr to using SmugMug for hosting my photos a few months ago, and it’s been a mixed experience.

The Good

• I now have all my photos on my own domain. I’m contributing content to my own site, rather than one owned by Yahoo!.
• I can run ads on photo pages. It doesn’t bring in a lot of money (barely anything, actually) but at least the money is coming to me.
• I can make the photo part of the site look like it’s really part of my own site, not just a link to someone else’s site.
• The photos are presented well, with nice big views, taking advantage of bigger screens well.
• It’s nice to be supporting a small family-run business, rather than a division of Yahoo! that could potentially get sold again any time.

The Bad

• It’s taken a lot of work to get things organised as I like them, and it’s still a bit odd. Every photo has to be in a gallery, and because I don’t think of photos in galleries, I’m ending up with lots of tiny galleries, often with only one or two photos in them.
• I can set up ‘smart galleries’, which pick up on keywords, and fill themselves automatically. I’ve used this for gathering pictures of specific things, or taken in specific places, and it’s really nice and flexible. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work reliably. Photos rarely appear in the galleries they should straight away. Sometimes they never do, unless you edit the gallery settings, and save them again. It means I can’t set this stuff up then just forget about it.
• Searching works well. Sometimes. Other times, it’s frustratingly slow. At the moment, I’m looking for a picture of a cup of coffee, but every time I search, I get a ‘gateway timeout’ error.
• Although SmugMug does have some social features, it lags a long way behind Flickr. There aren’t as many features, there aren’t as many users to interact with, and the users there tend not to use the social aspects. Even without taking part in Flickr recently, I’ve had photos ‘favorited’, and had comments posted. Not a single photo has been given a ‘thumbs-up’ (or down) on SmugMug. I’ve had one comment, but that was just a stream of abuse that I deleted straight away.

The Ugly

• Since ditching Flickr, they’ve released a beta version of their new photo page, and it works much better than the old one. It solves most of the problems.
• When returning to Flickr, it’s quite startling just how quick everything is, and how it all just works.
• Flickr is cheaper. By more than any ad revenue is ever likely to bring me.

The Conclusion

I haven’t reached one yet, but ditching SmugMug and returning to Flickr is feeling increasingly likely. I like SmugMug, and there are features there, but not on Flickr, that pros probably need. I don’t. It’s making uploading photos feel more like a chore.

I’ll probably start uploading all my recent photos to Flickr again, and see how things go from there. Unfortunately, my Mac is currently out of action, waiting for a new hard drive, so I’ll have to wait until it returns.

I used to use Aperture 2 for all my photos. Recently, though, I’ve taken to only using it for pics from my DSLR (Nikon D90 [: UK, US]), and using iPhoto for shots from my compact (Panasonic Lumix FX-550 [: UK, US]). I’ve found myself taking many more shots with the compact, and don’t normally carry the Nikon any more.

That means that for the last few months, I’ve almost exclusively used iPhoto.

When Aperture 3 appeared, it seemed to mix the benefits of Aperture with those of iPhoto, so I grabbed the trial version to have a go.

First impressions were quite good. I imported my iPhoto library, and it seemed to work quite nicely. Then I imported my Aperture library.

Except I didn’t.

I’ve been trying to now for two weeks. Each attempt means leaving it to work all day, or overnight. Every time I return, Aperture has crashed part way through. There doesn’t seem to be any way to get it to continue from where it left off.

There’s been an update from Apple, which addresses just the sort of problems I’ve been having, but it hasn’t helped matters for me.

I even decided to give up on that, and just import the original images again from scratch, losing all the metadata and edits. That crashed somewhere in the middle, too.

This morning, I wanted to post a picture of my breakfast. I opened Aperture 3. It decided it had to process some images and face data in the background, and wasn’t usable while it was doing that. I opened iPhoto and imported the images. Aperture finished it’s background jobs, so I told it to close. I was most of the way through editing and posting the images in iPhoto before Aperture actually got around to closing.

I gather there are some really nice improvements in Aperture 3, but so far, I can’t get to the point where I might care.

Noticings is an interesting idea for a web site. It’s based around the excellent Flickr photo sharing site. Imagine Flickr crossed with an open-ended treasure hunt. You spot things – any things – and take photos. Sign in at Noticings so they know to check for your pics. Post the pics to Flickr, and tag them ‘noticings’. They also have to be geotagged – added to the map on Flickr. Depending on how you took them and got them there, that may happen automatically, but I had to do it manually after uploading.

You then score points for the things you notice. There are a set of rules, and various ways of scoring bonus points, but they’re changing all the time as they work out what works and what doesn’t. You also have to have a little patience – things you notice are only added to the site the next day at 15:00 UTC. That also means you don’t find out about a problem until it’s too late to fix it – I tagged a photo as ‘noticing’ instead of ‘noticings’, and it cost me the points.

I’m hitting the problem that I’m not often out during daylight at the moment – winter isn’t great for photography when you have a job with ‘normal’ hours. Even when I am out, I don’t walk much during a normal weekday, but anything that encourages me to walk more has to be a good thing!

I’ve only had one ‘noticing’ so far, but it’s making me look for ‘things’ more when I’m out, and I like that change.

I’ve had my Nikon D90 for a while now, and I like it a lot. I have Nikon’s 18-200 VR lens, and both SB-600 and SB-800 flashes. I carry all of these with me every day. I use a LowePro Slingshot 200, which makes it all quite easy to carry, and keeps the camera quite quick and easy to get to. Even so, it’s a lot to carry, especially when you’re just nipping to the shops, or going to work and back.

There’s a camera in my phone (Nokia E71), but it’s awful.

I’d been thinking for a while that I’d really like a compact camera, that I could take everywhere, without needing the weight and size of my usual kit. My birthday is coming up, and my parents kindly said they’d send my birthday money early so I could spend it when I had time off work.

My first thought was a Canon Ixus. I’ve had an Ixus before, and loved it. I’ve had other Canon cameras before, and never been disappointed. It was the safe choice, and the most likely choice, but I was going to take the chance to have a look around and read some reviews.

I wanted some decent zoom range, especially at the wide end. The more zoom range the better. I also wanted it to be small. The bigger the zoom range, generally, the bigger the camera. I had some trade-off issues to work out.

The front-runner for a while was the Canon Ixus 120 IS [: UK, US]. It had a reasonable zoom range, 3x, starting from 28mm. It was very small, and very nicely designed. Like almost all Ixus cameras, though, it had no manual control, and the zoom range still wasn’t great. I was finding some good recommendations for Panasonic’s Lumix range. Their ‘travel zoom’ cameras had an amazingly good zoom range for their size, but still seemed a bit bigger than I wanted.

I had a look at what our local camera shops had in stock. I really like Cameras Plus, but they didn’t have anything much of interest. J&A Cameras had a few brands in stock, and opened the cabinet for me to poke a few. I really liked the feel of the Panasonics, but didn’t quite like anything they had enough to go for it.

After a little more reading online, I was starting to feel a little frustrated. There were plenty of reasonable options, but nothing stood out. The Ixus 120 was still the best option, and I loved the way it looked, but it certainly didn’t stand out on features.

Then, I happened on a review of the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX550 [: UK, US]. It had a 5x zoom, starting at 25mm, which improved a bit on the Ixus. It wasn’t much bigger. The styling wasn’t quite as nice, but still looked pretty good to me – brushed metal is always a win. It had full manual control. I also wanted to use pics straight from the camera as far as possible, and it had two ‘rough’ modes that looked like they might take the sort of pics I like.

I really wanted to go somewhere and just buy it, but that didn’t seem to be an option. Nowhere seemed to actually stock it at a store. Amazon had it, though, and could deliver it the next day, so I ordered there.

It arrived the next day.

So far, it’s doing just what I wanted. The Film Grain mode takes wonderfully ‘dirty’ low-res mono shots. The Pinhole mode takes nice low-res, low-saturation shots, with lots of vignetting. In its normal modes, it takes decent quality shots.

It’s nice and small, fits well in a pocket, as well as in a very small bag, and it makes pics I’m happy to throw straight at Flickr, without processing first.

This post is part of a series of posts about switching to a Mac – here are links to all the posts:

• Switching to Mac Part 1: The Decision
• Switching to Mac Part 2: The Retail Experience
• Switching to Mac Part 3: The Unboxing
• Switching to Mac Part 4: In Use
• Switching to Mac Part 5: Finding a Photo Editor

Latest Update: See the ‘Update’ section at the end – a useful extra feature in DoubleTake makes it even better.

One thing that struck me as a bit odd about the whole process of switching to the Mac was that there didn’t seem to be an obvious choice for photo editing. On Windows, I’d happily used The GIMP, and loved it. I didn’t see any reason to change, until I tried actually using The GIMP on the Mac. It doesn’t run as a native app, it runs under the X11 interface. That means it doesn’t get a real menu bar, and it doesn’t look or feel like a real native app.

Things that look and feel a bit crap aren’t so jarring on Windows. On the Mac, though, it’s a different matter. The machine is beautiful. Most of the software is beautiful. Running The GIMP under X11 in the midst of all that just didn’t feel right.

Photoshop is available, but it’s expensive. Really expensive. The vast majority of the editing I do is pretty simple, so there’s just no real need to spend that much. There’s Photoshop Elements. That’s a much more reasonable price. It’s a version out of date on the Mac, I’m not sure I like the direction it’s going anyway, so a step behind isn’t a problem. The feature set isn’t perfect, but it’s close enough for me.

A while ago, I ran a little test. I had trial versions of Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, along with a couple of good Mac native photo editors – Pixelmator and Acorn. I took an image that wasn’t very good, but worked out a few steps that would make it usable. It was a mallard. I selected the duck, inversed the selection, and desaturated the background. I then reverted the selection to the duck, and over-sharpened it to make it pop.

• In Acorn, the selection was really hard work. Feathering the selection seemed to be ineffective. The adjustments didn’t turn out well.
• Pixelmator was better, but still not great. The results took some work still, but less, and looked ok in the end.
• Photoshop was great – easy to make the selection, as if it was doing most of the work for me – and the result was nice and smooth.
• Photoshop Elements was harder than Photoshop, but not much harder. The difference was probably due to it being based on an earlier version of Photoshop.

I concluded that Photoshop Elements was the one for me.

I didn’t get around to buying it.

This weekend, I started trying to work on photos again, and happened on an article that listed some useful Mac apps for photographers.

The main thing I like to do with my photos that requires anything beyond what Aperture can handle is making what I usually call ‘Photo Constructions‘. Think of panoramas, where you take several photos of a scene, with the camera setting locked, and then stitch them together to make one big image. The usual aim is to make the joins invisible. After seeing an article in Practical Photography magazine about Michael Hallett, though, I didn’t want to hide the joins. I loved his style of rough panoramas, or Constructions. I loved his habit of including his own shadow, or even a foot, in the final work. I’d always thought that the last thing I needed, then, was software designed to seamlessly stitch panoramas together.

The article mentioned DoubleTake, though, and I decided to give it a go. It was very quick and easy to use. I threw a pile of images at it, intended for one of my Constructions. It seemed to have a pretty good idea of what to do with them. It did try to stitch them together, but seamless stitching wasn’t possible with such a rough heap of photos. I rather liked what it did with them. I rearranged them a bit, and liked the result even more. I put a few images from the same set around the merged result, and liked it a lot.

The only problem was that it tried to merge any image added to some extent. I couldn’t layer another image over an ‘empty’ part of the original (like an area of grey sky), which I like to do. I realised that I needed two things – one panorama maker, and one more general photo editor. Pixelmator was pretty good at the image editing, and DoubleTake was pretty good at making the base panorama.

I had some doubt, though. Photoshop Elements had a routine for making panoramas, and could certainly do the rest of the job perfectly well. I wanted to try it out again, but installing a new copy still knew my trial had expired. My gut feeling was that Photoshop Elements was the final version I’d get for the money, and it wasn’t a good well-written Mac app. Both Pixelmator and DoubleTake were nicely written, and felt very Mac. I installed the latest version of Pixelmator, and it gave me another chance to try it out.

DoubleTake did it’s job perfectly. Pixelmator is very fast and does it’s job well. It isn’t perfect, but a new version is due soon, free to owners of previous versions, with more features. And, it’s from a small independent developer, not from Adobe. It’s written from the start as a Mac app, not something derived from a bigger app, written primarily for Windows.

I bought licenses for Pixelmator and DoubleTake. Using the SmokingApples coupon code, I saved 20% on Pixelmator, which helped a little. DoubleTake was more expensive than I’d expected, as they seem to have decided that UK VAT is 25%, not 15%, and the Euro exchange isn’t as good as I’d remembered, but even at £20, it does a job that’s otherwise a lot of work, with ease.

I’ll know better when I’ve spent more time with them, but I’m pretty happy with my choice at the moment. They both work very nicely with Aperture, too. I can select the images I want in my basic panorama, and drag them straight from Aperture to DoubleTake on the dock. It attempts to fit them together, so I just need to tweak what it’s done. I then just click the Aperture button on DoubleTake’s toolbar to send the image back to Aperture at full resolution. From there, I can open that image in Pixelmator as the external editor, drag any further images to layer over it straight from Aperture, and save the result straight back. Aperture just shows the final image as a new version of DoubleTake’s original export.

Update

It’s a week later, and I’ve learned a little more. The developer of DoubleTake, Henrik, contacted me to let me know that it actually can build constructions without merging at all – just hit ’0′, and it stops merging images. I’ve tried it out today, and it works. I’d hoped it would let you turn off merging, and drag another image or two into place, leaving the rest still merged. What it actually does is just turn off merging completely. All the merged images un-merge themselves. Hit 0 again, and they all go back to how they were.

For doing constructions the way I always have, it can do it very quickly and easily, so it’s an even better buy than I’d thought. I may well still play with its merging functions, though, as I do like the results.

Henrik also explained about the VAT calculation. As I really should have known, EU states collect VAT at their own rate, and Danish VAT is much higher than UK VAT. PayPal displays it badly as ‘UK VAT’, but it’s being collected correctly.