I had a smugmug account for a couple of years but never had more than 20-30 pics in it, so I let the subscription expire and took my meager few pics to photobucket.

Recently I wanted to buy a print of a beautiful pic of my mom and dad and found that photobucket had compressed the file so the biggest pic I could buy was a wallet sized one. (Baldy is trying to help me get a better solution to this...he rawks! )

So, since I want to start taking more pictures I was wondering if someone could tell me if smugmug does the same thing? I just figured I uploaded and the hosting site just held on to the pics for me, I didn't realize they did stuff to the pics.

Any thoughts/reasons why one service is better than another?

Originally Posted by Queen Recently I wanted to buy a print of a beautiful pic of my mom and dad and found that photobucket had compressed the file so the biggest pic I could buy was a wallet sized one. So, since I want to start taking more pictures I was wondering if someone could tell me if smugmug does the same thing?

Hey Queen -
Welcome to dgrin!

smugmug maintains the original size of your photos. If you upload the photo in it's full size, the original is that size. The other sizes are generated for display purposes only, but the originals are used for printing. So you will be able to print as large as your original allows.

If you look at my galleries, you won't see the originals because I have set them to not display. But they are there for printing.

I'd recommend smugmug - but if you want to look further, someone recently posted a comparison of sites here - http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?...mug+comparison.

--- Denise

Originally Posted by denisegoldberg Hey Queen - Welcome to dgrin! smugmug maintains the original size of your photos. If you upload the photo in it's full size, the original is that size. The other sizes are generated for display purposes only, but the originals are used for printing. So you will be able to print as large as your original allows. If you look at my galleries, you won't see the originals because I have set them to not display. But they are there for printing. I'd recommend smugmug - but if you want to look further, someone recently posted a comparison of sites here - http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?...mug+comparison. --- Denise

Hi Denise!

Thanks for the link. I like to support Baldy so if I choose a pay service again it'll be smugmug. I'm just not real tech savvy so I had no idea other sites messed with your photos.

Queen,

What the photo sharing sites do with your photos is one of those things that doesn't get mentioned much. It's one of the reasons I like smugmug. But while I do put photos up on smugmug, and other places, I still keep a local copy.

Photobucket, IMO, is pretty crappy - if only because of how badly they compress photos for display. BUT I hadn't heard of your problem before. Are you certain that you uploaded the full resolution images to them and not just the small version that was displayed in your old smugmug gallery?