These are the people in your neighborhood

August 30, 2005 2:17 PM

smugMaps, photo-sharing mixed with Google Maps, allowing you to associate your photos with geographic locations. See the mysterious lost mountain city of Machu Picchu, the spectacular, lonely landscapes of Iceland, and an apartment building in St. Louis. They can't all be glamorous, folks.
posted by Gamblor (11 comments total)

So many photo sharing sites...
Which is best? If so why? (I like the 'look' of this one..)
posted by tbonicus at 2:38 PM on August 30, 2005

cool. someone should make one for Flickr.
posted by geeky at 2:44 PM on August 30, 2005

Geobloggers works with Flickr. The interface is still a little flakey though.
posted by bwilms at 2:53 PM on August 30, 2005

After much debate and research (ie. google "flickr vs smugmug"), I recently decided to go with smugmug. Most people who used both seemed to like smugmug better, though the "community" features are not as great.
posted by anonetal at 3:03 PM on August 30, 2005

Here are the map/pictures for Glen Heggstad's currently in progress motorcycle ride "around the world". He somewhat recently finished riding around Borneo, and it seems likely he's the first person ever to do so.

He also wrote the book Two Wheels Through Terror about a rather adventurous trip through South America. I've heard about THAT adventure while following his current one, but havn't read the book. I ought to...

The smugmug maps page seems to be a little out of date, but he's been posting well written and thoughtful updates here pretty consistently. He plans to publish a book about this trip as well, and much to my dismay has recently stopped posting full ride reports dues to publisher pressure. He's promised to continue sending photos and providing more descriptive captions, though.

As a side note, the only place I see smugmug users is on the advrider site, and the site owner seems to be an active member there.
posted by flaterik at 3:05 PM on August 30, 2005

Cool idea. Hopefully in a year or two it'll have the community to be awesome.
posted by Edible Energy at 3:06 PM on August 30, 2005

This is really the only feature I can think of that's missing from Flickr, and I don't doubt that it will arrive in time - probably integrated in some way with Yahoo maps rather than Google maps, but that's fine, a little diversity never hurt anyone.
posted by Jimbob at 3:27 PM on August 30, 2005

The strange thing is, for me, the grouping of map points seems to vary over time. When I first viewed the site, almost all the points were in Western Europe. Then it was the East Coast. Now it's the Midwest. It would be nice to see all of the points, or at least choose the area to display the points in.
posted by Gamblor at 3:53 PM on August 30, 2005

Ah, Iceland. How I miss you. Sort of. I miss the way you look in these photos. I do not miss the way you look at 9 o'clock in the morning in December. No sir.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 10:11 PM on August 30, 2005

I've been using Smugmug for a few months now and am very happy about it. One nice thing is that they have a public SOAP API, which you can read more about via their hacking page.

I'm looking forward to the WebDAV support that they're working on, where you will eventually be able to have a virtual drive on your machine that will mirror your on-line albums. It is currently in a pre-beta stage and is only read-only; but is planned to eventually support writing to your online albums as well.
posted by mach at 11:07 PM on August 30, 2005

Sorry, said SOAP; meant XML-RPC.
posted by mach at 11:11 PM on August 30, 2005