Smugmug Site Backup and Recovery ! A must feature to have

mountaindew · September 17, 2013

I feel where I would be ended up when I saw my sites gone during a disaster :cry. I guess SM would have there own backup and recovery process so that I can claim it back in original state but I want this backup and recovery is done by myself so that any tampering can be automatically recoverable by myself .

I guess we don't have this feature yet ! and yes if not we need this . Please vote if you want this to be included in future product enhancement as sooner as possible .
Ohh yes , I need the backup to be done seamlessly prompting me option of recovery page by page , folder by folder any other possible customized way etc etc ... :dunno

Regards
I guess SM hero's are listening .... :scratch

mountaindew · September 17, 2013

And Yes I wish entire backup and recovery facility would like we have in wordpress file upload mechanism .

zubenelgenubi · December 29, 2014

Has there been any further discussion/progress on backup and recovery?
Hi -

Just wondering of there has been any progress on the backup and recovery options?

In particular, I am starting to think about "what would I do if smugmug suddenly went black?" (Due perhaps to a business meltdown, a hacker attack, or whatever.) I have a LOT of images, metadata, and page customizations that exist only in smugmug now. (I do of course have archives of all my edited and processed raw images, but not necessarily all the jpeg exports. All the jpegs could be recreated, but even that step would take weeks to do now!) I understand that page customizations would not make sense in the absence of smugmug. But I sure would like a way to backup the images and metadata outside of smugmug.

So I'm wondering if there are any options for doing this? Once again my main goal is have some "insurance" against a scenario in which smugmug goes away.

Thanks,

- Mark

ChancyRat · December 29, 2014

I can't speak to the image-backup question, but as for customization and code, there is a backup tool for the new SM. Back up and more:
http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=247592

I see the last post on this thread was from June. That's an oversight because it should be promoted regularly. Invaluable.

zubenelgenubi · December 31, 2014

ChancyRat - yes, I've seen this tool, though I haven't used it myself. But I don't imagine it would be much use in the absence of smugmug? I'm mostly wondering about a scenario in which smugmug suddenly closed down. How would I recover my images and the metadata that, currently, is only associated with them via smugmug?

- Mark

ChancyRat wrote: »

I can't speak to the image-backup question, but as for customization and code, there is a backup tool for the new SM. Back up and more:
http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=247592

I see the last post on this thread was from June. That's an oversight because it should be promoted regularly. Invaluable.

AceCo55 · December 31, 2014

zubenelgenubi wrote: »

ChancyRat - yes, I've seen this tool, though I haven't used it myself. But I don't imagine it would be much use in the absence of smugmug? I'm mostly wondering about a scenario in which smugmug suddenly closed down. How would I recover my images and the metadata that, currently, is only associated with them via smugmug?

- Mark

My initial reaction is "you wouldn't recover them" if Smugmug "suddenly closed down". I can't imagine ANY company that suddenly closed down would be able to give you access to your data. I don't see why Smugmug would be any different.

My second reaction is "wouldn't YOU have these images and metadata on YOUR computer or backup system?". If you only have your images/data in one location then YOU are vulnerable for complete loss if that one source fails.

zubenelgenubi · January 1, 2015

Well, yes, I do have multiple local copies of all the raw and post-processed images. I often don't keep the jpeg exports, but recreating them would be a straightforward job, albeit time consuming.

The biggest issue I'm worrying about is preserving the titles, captions, and keywords associated with images and galleries. Perhaps there are workflows in which I could create these metadata prior to importing the images to smugmug, and then import both the images and metadata together. But if so I'm not aware of how o do this. So instead I've been associating metadata with my images by manually typing text into smugmug. (And, in some cases, manually entering location data.) This in turn means smugmug is the *only* place where the association of images and metadata exists for me. (My guess is that the same is true for lots of other users?)

Also, there is the step of selecting which particular images to publish. For a long time I was very bad at this, and just dumped everything online. Recently I've learned to be more selective, both before and after I upload. Part of my selection process now involves deleting images from my smugmug galleries once I see how a finished gallery looks. So I would like to avoid having to redo the evaluation and culling of images that was specific to smugmug.

Then there's the titles, descriptions, and background images that I've assigned at the gallery level. Once again, these data only exist in smugmug. And finally there's other subtle stuff, like the order in which the images are arranged, or the privacy settings.

So what I'd really like is tool that would let me download a zip file (or similar) containing a current snapshot of a gallery, folder, or my entire site, in a format that would give me some way to preserve at least the association of images and metadata.

I understand clearly that many aspects of my site would not make sense outside of smugmug. (Gallery styles, for example.) And I also understand that there's no commercial incentive for smugmug to make it easy to move user content to other providers. But I also believe that smugmug are now curating quite a bit of metadata for their users, many of whom depend on it for their businesses. So I would like to think that responsibility would be taken seriously enough to include a mechanism for disaster protection. It seems to me that a tool that focused on preserving gallery structure and associated metadata would be a good approach. This would address the "data curator" responsibility, without being an encouragement for users to move their content elsewhere. (As all the visual styles, shopping cart, etc would still have to be recreated elsewhere.)

So anyway, maybe if I adopted a better workflow I wouldn't have theses concerns. But right now I don't feel very well protected against a hypothetical post-apocalyptic future without smugmug...

- Mark

AceCo55 wrote: »

My initial reaction is "you wouldn't recover them" if Smugmug "suddenly closed down". I can't imagine ANY company that suddenly closed down would be able to give you access to your data. I don't see why Smugmug would be any different.
My second reaction is "wouldn't YOU have these images and metadata on YOUR computer or backup system?". If you only have your images/data in one location then YOU are vulnerable for complete loss if that one source fails.

denisegoldberg · January 1, 2015

zubenelgenubi wrote: »

The biggest issue I'm worrying about is preserving the titles, captions, and keywords associated with images and galleries. Perhaps there are workflows in which I could create these metadata prior to importing the images to smugmug, and then import both the images and metadata together. But if so I'm not aware of how o do this. So instead I've been associating metadata with my images by manually typing text into smugmug.

I used to enter this data in smugmug but I've changed my workflow - I now do this work in Lightroom so it is attached to each photo. A snapshot for entries from one photo (although it could very easily have been for multiple photos) from Library mode in lightroom is attached below. I usually work with multiple photos when I am assigning keywords. Captions (and sometimes titles) sometimes are applied to multiple photos, sometimes to only one photo.

The copyright data is placed in the file by my camera but if that wasn't done I could assign it in Lightroom as well.

zubenelgenubi wrote: »

So what I'd really like is tool that would let me download a zip file (or similar) containing a current snapshot of a gallery, folder, or my entire site, in a format that would give me some way to preserve at least the association of images and metadata.

You can request a download of a gallery - but I don't know if that would include the keywords, captions, etc. assigned in smug. It would be worth trying though to see what the results are.

--- Denise

zubenelgenubi · January 1, 2015

Denise,

Thanks for this advice. I don't use lightroom; I use a combination of Capture 1 Pro and Nikon's free ViewNX2 program. However after reading your post I see that both these programs at least claim to do the same sort of bulk editing of metadata that you describe for lightroom, so I'll give it a try.

Also, while I was aware of the option to bulk export gallery contents, I had assumed this wouldn't include metadata entered in smugmug after I uploaded the images. But now that I think about it, I agree it's worth experimenting with, which I'll do some time over the next few days. (Right now I'm busy n travel.)

Thanks for the suggestions!

- Mark

denisegoldberg wrote: »

I used to enter this data in smugmug but I've changed my workflow - I now do this work in Lightroom so it is attached to each photo. A snapshot for entries from one photo (although it could very easily have been for multiple photos) from Library mode in lightroom is attached below. I usually work with multiple photos when I am assigning keywords. Captions (and sometimes titles) sometimes are applied to multiple photos, sometimes to only one photo.

The copyright data is placed in the file by my camera but if that wasn't done I could assign it in Lightroom as well.

You can request a download of a gallery - but I don't know if that would include the keywords, captions, etc. assigned in smug. It would be worth trying though to see what the results are.

--- Denise

leftquark · January 7, 2015

To second what Denise said, lightroom has the ability to 2-way sync comments, captions, titles, etc. We're working on improving to make sure everything gets sync'd but it is one additional way to backup those you may have done on the site.

Jtring · January 7, 2015

leftquark wrote: »

To second what Denise said, lightroom has the ability to 2-way sync comments, captions, titles, etc. We're working on improving to make sure everything gets sync'd but it is one additional way to backup those you may have done on the site.

The LR plugin isn't quite that good yet. See http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=247592&page=4

onethumb · January 8, 2015

The way SmugMug stores things
Just by way of an informational update, currently SmugMug stores all of your photos and videos on Amazon's S3 service, because after careful analysis and frequent review, we think it's the safest place on Earth for them: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

Among other things, this means that your data is securely stored in multiple geographic locations and is projected to be 99.999999999% durable. In human terms, this means if you store 10,000 photos with us while we're using S3, Amazon projects it will lose about 1 of them every 10 million years.

As a company, we're devoted & committed to doing everything we can to take great care of your photos and to make it easy for you to access them whenever and however you want, including retrieving them as backups. They're your photos, after all, not ours. We've spent huge amounts of time and energy over the last 12 years making sure this is possible and keeps getting easier, and we expect to continue doing so. If there are ways we can make access & backups easier, we're all ears and will incorporate your feedback into our roadmap.

I can also tell you that the company continues to do well financially, is growing, and plans to continue growing in a safe & secure manner so that our business and your photos aren't placed in jeopardy. Having been doing this for so long, I can tell you I've never seen another company as devoted to photography and especially the preservation of those priceless memories and works of art.

However, I cannot predict the future, and we are a company run by humans. Our software and service aren't perfect, we make mistakes, and mistakes will happen. We try hard to minimize them, learn from them, and not make them again, but we can't make any guarantees.

W.W. Webster · January 9, 2015

onethumb wrote: »

As a company, we're devoted & committed to doing everything we can to take great care of your photos and to make it easy for you to access them whenever and however you want, including retrieving them as backups ... I can also tell you that the company continues to do well financially, is growing, and plans to continue growing in a safe & secure manner so that our business and your photos aren't placed in jeopardy. Having been doing this for so long, I can tell you I've never seen another company as devoted to photography and especially the preservation of those priceless memories and works of art.

That's why I've been with SmugMug since 2005!

sarasphotos · January 9, 2015

Hi zubenelgenubi, since I came to SM long after I'd been using Lightroom, the idea of entering metadata in SmugMug would never occur to me. Lightroom is an excellent program for library organization, geotagging and photo developing. I see SmugMug as a temporary storage area.

I use Jeffrey Friedl's Publish to SmugMug plugin (http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/smugmug ). It has more features than the SM plugin and I've been very happy with it. You could also use his Folder or Collection Publisher plugin to create a local jpeg copy of your files. I use the Folder Publisher to send copy of my entire file structure with the same parameters as my SM Galleries to a network drive. And the plugin automatically recognizes any changes - I just have to make one click to re-publish all changed files.

Naturally, one has to have a backup of the Lightroom catalog and the raw files otherwise you're scr?!*ed when your hard drive dies.

Good luck and happy organizing,

Sara

BigRed · October 4, 2015

For Legacy, there was a wonderful 3rd-party app called AlbumFetcher, but unfortunately it isn't being maintained for New Smugmug. Not only could it do a complete site download, organized to reflect the Smugmug gallery hierarchy, but it actually embedded Smugmug-loaded captions & keywords into each image's IPTC fields. Thus creating a repository of "complete" image files -- independent of Lightroom and other non-future-proof organizational apps (as well as Smugmug). Beautiful.

Speaking for myself, I have solid backup processes for my images, at every step from capture to upload. What I DON'T have in that backup are the elements that Smugmug subsequently contributes to their value: up-to-the-minute edited caption/keyword data and gallery structure (e.g., where I've both stored & collected the photos). So I'm also finding it daunting to need to re-invent my workflow in order to preserve that value in New Smugmug World.

To be clear, I don't have any concern about the security of my images while Smugmug continues to host them. But Smugmug understandably has no business incentive to provide for a post-Smugmug future, while we all like to think that our images will survive us (and metadata is a key ingredient).

camner · June 12, 2023

@sarasphotos said:
Hi zubenelgenubi, since I came to SM long after I'd been using Lightroom, the idea of entering metadata in SmugMug would never occur to me. Lightroom is an excellent program for library organization, geotagging and photo developing. I see SmugMug as a temporary storage area.

I use Jeffrey Friedl's Publish to SmugMug plugin (http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/smugmug ). It has more features than the SM plugin and I've been very happy with it. You could also use his Folder or Collection Publisher plugin to create a local jpeg copy of your files. I use the Folder Publisher to send copy of my entire file structure with the same parameters as my SM Galleries to a network drive. And the plugin automatically recognizes any changes - I just have to make one click to re-publish all changed files.

Naturally, one has to have a backup of the Lightroom catalog and the raw files otherwise you're scr?!*ed when your hard drive dies.

Good luck and happy organizing,

Sara

Do you still use Jeffrey Friedl's Publish to SmugMug plugin? I tried it recently and I found that when I create a new gallery using the plug-in, I get two copies of it both in Lightroom and on SmugMug.

sarasphotos · June 12, 2023

Do you still use Jeffrey Friedl's Publish to SmugMug plugin? I tried it recently and I found that when I create a new gallery using the plug-in, I get two copies of it both in Lightroom and on SmugMug.

I used Jeffrey's plugin until a couple of years ago, when there were some technical issues going on between him and SmugMug. I now use the SM plugin which suits my purposes.

If you mean that the plug in (JFRiedl's as well as SmugMug's) makes a gallery both in Lightroom and in SmugMug (one gallery in each place), then that is the correct behavior; the Lightroom (publish collection) gallery being of course a collection of virtual links to the actual photos, which are stored in other folders. But if you mean having two copies of each gallery in Lightroom as well as SmugMug, then no that is not the desired behavior.

camner · June 14, 2023

Thanks for your quick reply! I appreciate it.

If you mean that the plug in (JFRiedl's as well as SmugMug's) makes a gallery both in Lightroom and in SmugMug (one gallery in each place), then that is the correct behavior; the Lightroom (publish collection) gallery being of course a collection of virtual links to the actual photos, which are stored in other folders. But if you mean having two copies of each gallery in Lightroom as well as SmugMug, then no that is not the desired behavior.

I mean the second, sort of…Friedl’s plugin was making 2 identical galleries in Lightroom, but only 1 on SmugMug.

I also had problems when I used his plugin features to try to move existing SM galleries to be managed by his plugin. Many galleries moved fine, others did not, with missing photos being the biggest, but not only, issue.

Smugmug Site Backup and Recovery ! A must feature to have

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