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Simon Yeo

I’ve shut down my photo site

Nov 27, 2016 | online publishing | 1 comment

I’ve shut down my photo site

URL of simonsphotosite.com screenshot

For over two years I’ve had a dedicated personal photo website.  It had the unimaginative name of “Simon’s Photo Site” with the URL of simonsphotosite.com  I haven’t used it much lately, but it was still costing me to keep it online, so when both the hosting and domain registration renewals arrived this month I decided it was time to end that project.

Since 2007 I’d shared much of my photography on Flickr (the free photo sharing site from YAHOO!).  Flickr was going through a lot of changes in 2014, upsetting many users, including myself, so I decided to look elsewhere.  I really liked what SmugMug was offering – a highly customisable personal site, with unlimited storage of full resolution photos and videos with a custom domain name.  I tinkered with Simon’s Photo Site for months, learning the SmugMug user features as I went, but once I was happy with the layout, I didn’t use it much more after that.  Sure it had hundreds of photos proudly displaying online, but it turned out to be more of a novelty.

After learning so much about SmugMug, I opened another account with them to host photos for my Vic Pics project.  Which now meant I was paying for two SmugMug services.  I couldn’t justify to myself paying for two accounts, so I decided to shut down the personal site.  The Vic Pics Gallery survives as the host and market site (by SmugMug) for my Vic Pics blog (which admittedly I have neglected recently, but plan to start spending time on again soon.)

Some pages from simonsphotosite.com can still be viewed on the Internet Way Back Machine.  The domain name registration has expired, but for now is re-directing to the Family Gallery page of this blog.

I may explore other options for a personal gallery in the future, such as 500px or the free options included with my Adobe Creative subscription.  Meanwhile, I have continued to post a few pictures onto Flickr – www.flickr.com/photos/smjb.  

Below is a couple of screenshots from Simon’s Photo Site before it went off line. 

Simon's Photo Site homepage screenshot

New look to my Photo Site!

May 24, 2014 | Post imported from Blogger, Simon's Photo Blog | 0 comments

I haven’t done much photography lately, and certainly haven’t had a chance to go out on a photo shoot anywhere, so today I looked for some inspiration at home.

This week was my son Brad’s 11th birthday, and he had some new Lego to build.  Once he had the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle set constructed, I asked him to set up a few scenes for me to photograph.

After processing the photos and uploading to Simon’s Photo Site, I started thinking about the layout of the site.  I looked around at a few other SmugMug sites for inspiration, and decided it was time for a change.  The Menu now sits at the top of the page, rather than on the left, which gives me more screen width for the landscape photos, while also giving me more space for extra menu options.

Below is a screen shot of the new layout, showing the Lego Gallery of photos I shot this morning.

 

 This blog post was originally published on simonsphotoblog.com

UPDATE: November 2016
I’ve shut down Simon’s Photo Site (so some images that were hosted there will no longer show).
Read more in this blog post – simonyeo.id.au/shut-down-my-photo-site 

Flickr V 500px

May 10, 2014 | Post imported from Blogger, Simon's Photo Blog | 1 comment

If you’ve read my early posts on this blog (from January this year), you may know that I used to love Flickr, and had uploaded 1000s of photos and enjoyed the online community of photographers from all walks of life.  However, in October last year, the site’s owners – Yahoo! – started making changes with their “New Photo Experience“, which in reality actually made it worse.  They were slow to act on user feedback, and slow to keep users up to date with the ongoing changes.  Even today it has been over a month since an update to users on the site’s (hard to find) forum.  They’ve made some recent upgrades to their mobile apps and blog, but users still get different Flickr experiences depending on their device, browser and language.

The mess Yahoo! made of Flickr drove me away in frustration, I tried the other major photo sharing site, 500px, but ended up going to SmugMug to make my own photo site.

Now I read on the 500px blog that they are making some major changes to their site too.  It’s going to be interesting to see how the 500px site evolves, it certainly wont be too hard for them to do a better job than Yahoo! is doing with Flickr.

The war of the photo sharing web sites is heating up.  I will be keeping an eye on both services, but will be concentrating on my own photo site, hosted by SmugMug, and blogging about my photography here on my photo blog.

 

This blog post was originally published on simonsphotoblog.com

at this URL simonsphotoblog.com/2014/05/flickr-v-500px

SmugMug Academy

Apr 12, 2014 | Post imported from Blogger, Simon's Photo Blog | 0 comments

If you’ve been following this Photo Blog, or my Photo Site, you may have read that when Yahoo! started making drastic changes to Flickr, I started to look around for somewhere else to share my photography.  I experimented with a few different services and settled on Blogger for this blog and SmugMug for my Photo Site.

I’d been running a few other blogs with Blogger for a while, so it was pretty easy to set up this blog.  SmugMug however, involved a pretty steep learning curve, and it’s been a work in progress ever since.  I’d been helped by some of their YouTube tutorials, but I recently found the SmugMug Academy with many tips, not only about managing your SmugMug site, but about photography in general.

If you have your own SmugMug site, check out the SmugMug Academy…  school.smugmug.com

One of the tips I wish I’d found earlier was “How to Make a Photo Blog” using SmugMug.  It didn’t even cross my mind that a blog would be possible on the photo hosting and sharing service that is SmugMug, but it seems it would have been easier with the blog incorporated with my photo site.  The only minor drawback would have been no separate domain names for the blog and photo site, like I do now.  Never mind, I’ll keep this Blogger blog going, and continue to experiment with content in my SmugMug Photo Site, maybe try some mini-blogs to add commentary to a series of photos.  I’ll be sure to let you know when I do, here on my Photo Blog.

This blog post was originally published on simonsphotoblog.com

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SmugMug Academy