I’ve finally gotten around to uploading my photo collection. I’ve decided to pay for a subscription to Smugmug.com and so far I’m happy with it. I chose not to use Flickr or other options because I wanted a site which I could use as a private one-to-one backup of my personal store of photos. I can make albums or photos public using other services or through Smugmug. I also wanted to be able to synchronize tags and metadata between the on-line store and my digikam-managed local version. If I ever lose my local copy, I should be able to download a full copy of everything in its original form. Smugmug appears to be able to do all of that (and has other good features, too).

To do the synchronization, I’m using the php uploader found here. It seems to be working, although I had some trouble at first pointing it at the right directory on my system. Running the upload program is simple:

php /path/to/multi-album-upload.php /path/to/pictures

NOTE: I initially had a little trouble because I was pointing to the wrong level in the hierarchy of my picture directory tree. The program assumes an arrangement something like this:

home
user
photo_library
category
album
image.jpg

My reading of the instructions implied that you could point to “/home/user/photo_library/category” but that doesn’t work. You need to point to “/home/user/photo_library.”