SnugUp - what is it?

A friendly photo uploader for SmugMug.

SnugUp helps keep your SmugMug account up to date with your latest digital photos.

It was designed to help better utilize your awesome SmugMug account. You're paying for it. Why not put it to even better use?

Do you Backup your Photos?

If you take lots of photographs, you might have a reasonable backup strategy (copying them to multiple hard drives is a must!). Sorry, but sending some of the better photos to the Grandparents and friends does not count as a backup. Are you prepared for the worst? Do you regularly back them to a location outside of your home? You should if you value your digital memories.

Or, are you like most people: you put your pictures in one giant folder "system" and that's the only place they are stored? (Maybe you copy some to SmugMug ... but not all because it's too much work?)

Sharing your photos with Friends and Family

Do you want others to be able to see your photos online, but with a password (or not)?

SmugMug is a great place for storing and sharing your photos. It's a simple yet powerful interface for managing a small or large photo collection.

OK, so what does it do?

SnugUp is designed to copy your photos from your local computer (or network drive) to a SmugMug account, while preserving your folder structure as best as it can (SmugMug galleries can't be nested, so nested folders are expanded into multiple galleries). If you store your digital photos in folders like this:

SnugUp automatically creates galleries for each corresponding folder. In that way, you'll end up with a mirror image of your folder structure.

If however, you use a method that uses sub folders:

It creates galleries for each sub folder, although named so that it implies the hierarchy. Folder Kitara, Day2 as shown above, becomes this single gallery on SmugMug for example:

Notice that the folder names do not include the root location (like "c:\users\Aaron\Pictures"). This simplifies the folder names and makes them more human friendly, but also makes it easy to synchronize photos from multiple computers, like a laptop and a Windows PC. When traveling, you are able to synchronize the new folders directly from a laptop so that you're certain that the photos have been securely saved before you erase the memory card or even head home from vacation! Once home, just copy the photos from the laptop to your primary storage location, and you're all set!

It copies new photos, and changed photos (there are a few options to adjust the behavior).

What doesn't it do?

It isn't a "photo management tool." Nor will it ever become one. Those are a dime a dozen and work perfectly fine. (I recommend Windows Live Photo Gallery. It works really well even with large photo collections. It's also free!)

It doesn't change your local images. It won't delete your images.

It won't organize your photo galleries on SmugMug. Use SmugMug for that.

If you change the name of a gallery, SnugUp won't know about it, and may upload the photos into the old folder name.

It also doesn't do lots of other things. SnugUp was designed to do one thing primarily and not have lots of bells and whistles.

A SmugMug Oddity that may cause a headache

SnugUp aggressively checks your photos for changes, but alas, it can be befuddled by a SmugMug oddity. Photos may be auto-rotated by SmugMug when they are uploaded (sometimes incorrectly unfortunately). When SmugMug auto-rotates a photo, it changes the original and reports back to SnugUp that the photo is different from what was uploaded the next time it is asked. This may cause SnugUp to upload a photo that hasn't changed. Nothing bad happens per se as it's just a replacement of a photo, but it may waste some bandwidth and time. Once a complete pass of all your digital photos has completed, this generally isn't an issue (after the first pass, it uses file date and time to watch for changes).

But, there's an option to use only filenames as a comparison within the settings of SnugUp to get around this issue if it's bothersome. Rather than the aggressive check, if the filename matches, it won't (re)upload the image.

Support

This program is free and comes without any support or warranties. If you want to contact the author with feedback and suggestions, please do so here.