22 Million Views on SmugMug this year!

As many of you know, I moved over my portfolio to SmugMug this year. Have you seen my SmugMug Review? The team there gave readers here the a 20% savings (!!) — use the SmugMug Coupon of “STUCKINCUSTOMS“.

So, I was recently checking stats and I was surprised at how many views we have gotten on SmugMug in such a short time. 22 million in just over half a year, compared to Flickr, which is at 21 million after 5 years! I have posted shots from SmugMug and Flickr below.

Now, most of those views are just because of the blog, but it does show how heavily I rely on SmugMug. There is one “hidden” feature that you may not know about…. and this is a little geeky, but it helps! I have big photos here on the website… you all know this. They are 900 pixels across. Well, Flickr does serve them up in many sizes, and 1024 across is on of the standards. With Flickr, I need to use the width=”900″ in the html, which forces the browser to make a costly size change.

SmugMug, instead, does the processing on their beastly servers.

For example, I can take the default Xtra Large size link from SmugMug: http://stuckincustoms.smugmug.com/photos/974189667_iqznc-X2.jpg

and change the end so that the server resizes to 900 pixels across: http://stuckincustoms.smugmug.com/photos/974189667_iqznc-900x900.jpg

This means that everything is served up super-fast. This is a minor and nerdy point… but it does make the blog a lot faster.

Still on Flickr

As you can see, I still post all my photos to Flickr as well. I still like Flickr a lot, but it is not where I keep my main portfolio. I find the viewing experience better on SmugMug. Now, SmugMug has less of a community, so that is kind of a minor knock against it… but it’s easy enough to put the photos in both places.

Daily Photo – A Gentle Kiss in the Hot Tub

These snow monkeys are the greatest. I spent so long with them, we almost had a three-way.

They are all wild (in the natural sense, mind you), and they come down from the mountains near Nagano, Japan, for several hours a day to play in the natural hot springs. They gallivant around, have fights, play with their kids, have a bit of sweet carnal monkey fun, check their email, and pose for my camera.

These two monkeys spent a lot of time together… they were in maximum “relaxation mode”. They lounged around in every possible position and took occasional breaks to do a bit of mutual grooming.

Video Recap – Heartbeats of Japan

We have many new people here on the blog that might not have seen this. There’s a lot more snow-monkey stuff in here for you… enjoy!