I've been quite happy with Smugmug, and (almost) all of my photos are hosted there. I use the "Pro" account level, which has the most flexibility and features, but it's worth the upgrade. (â¦says the person who won a free lifetime account.)
From a print perspective (which I don't do) there are two different labs that they use, both of which seem good but I wasn't blown away by the quality of the ones I've seen. I see that as being an option to offer cheaper lab prints, ordered online and paid for by credit card, as well as offering artist-approved and signed prints at a higher price.
Th print labs that Smugmug uses are in the USA, which means USD pricing and international shipping. Maybe not a problem, but then you'll get odd people (like myself) who aren't so thrilled at the idea of needing a foreign currency to buy something from someone in my own city. Buyer and seller both get dinged on the exchange, too.
Smugmug will let you host really large files for best print quality, but can restrict the largest size available to view on-line.
You can watermark your files through the gallery service, meaning that they automatically appear on the web-served images but not on prints, and you can update the watermark at any time. I change mine occasionally, and the effect is retroactive to include photos that are already in the gallery, including all of the ones that are hotlinked elsewhere.
You can have as many galleries as you like, and name them what you like, but the URLs are horrible. Spend the extra $15-20 a year on your own domain name and forward it to your smugmug page.
Smugmug galleries are incredibly easy to update - easier than Flickr - but aren't particularly interactive for your visitors. It's a showcase more than a social site.
If your visitors have even a small amount of web-savvyness and curiosity, it's easy for them to find any of your public galleries, even if they're sorted in different 'categories'. The other extreme is to hide everything and/or require passwords, and there's very little in between. This makes it tough to use for different functions (i.e., a professional portfolio site as well as family snapshots) without restricting one or the other, or both. Navigation through web pages also isn't that easy.
You can have a look at my "work" site:
www.matthewpiers.com. It's a basic front-end for my smugmug pages, which I've tweaked to keep a consistent look. If the url reads "photo.matthewpiers" then what you're looking at is on Smugmug. It's nothing fancy, and I never update it the way I should, but it shows a bit of what's possible. I also have about 15-20 galleries (hidden) that support my blogs, forum posts, family photos, and ones set aside for various commercial clients.
