Great workflow - I came up with a very similar one except I keep 'all pix' in a separate hierarchy named "Archive".

And the list of gripes is also very accurate. The only other topic to complain about are Maps. The maps feature is cookie, limited to 200 pix, takes a lot of space on a page, etc. But overall Smugmug is great and their engagement with you is yet another proof that they are great!

I am not getting that many errors when publishing - the plugin seems very solid on my end.

Here's a cool additional SmugMug hack: I recently purchased a used iPad off of eBay. I loaded the new(ish) SmugMug app onto it. In LightRoom, I've tagged over 1,000 pictures of Devina, which I am hosting on SmugMug as I describe above. The app allows me to start a slideshow of those pics, which I have running passively on my desk next to me at work.

It makes my day really enjoyable to glance over and see a random picture of Devina + family on the screen.

Sadly, iOS the app is relatively unstable. I've reached out to SmugMug to see if they can improve it. I did find one hack for the instability, though: If I choose "save pictures offline" in the app, I'm able to then run the iPad in airplane mode and still play the slideshow. This makes the app much more stable. There's something about having an internet connection that makes the app die.

And if anyone at SmugMug sees this, another feature request: I'd love to be able to a) change the timing of the slideshow, b) randomize the order of the pics, and c) run it on a loop -- it currently stops at the end of the 1,000 pics and I have to re-start it. Note: iOS actually has "slideshow" settings in the general settings area, but it seems they don't apply to the app, only to photos kept in the camera roll (or now, I suppose it'd be called the Photos app).

Above is a pic of what the setup looks like.

Here is the ACDSee version 2.0 (PC but I run on Parallels) if anyone is interested....

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zk3p0t77mgs7s4j/acdseepro-mac.dmg

I think for $5 or $8 per month the SmugMug Pro deal is actually looking better and better - I may be eating my words D!

https://secure.smugmug.com/endtrial.mg

Disclaimer: as a pro photographer, I may have different needs than some of you b/c I have to have galleries password-protected and I need to make sure that no one can download the photos. That said...

Ok, where to begin...I break down post-production into 2-3 categories:

1) Downloading, editing, renaming, categorizing, etc the pix

2) Posting/publishing them & backing them up (which could be one category or two depending, but cloud based back-up seems more reliable then hard-drives)

Obviously, one would want this to be one seamless process so I will have to do a time test w/D's method to see which works best...his probably does but I will still list the reasons I like my program better than LR.

1) I really, really, really dislike Lightroom (that's one dislike before hate). I find it a big, bulky program that most pro photos don't even need (like PS), I agree w/D's post above w/all the 'can't do this can't do that.' I also hating 'importing and exporting photos' in a native program. Total pain.

I found something years ago that I personally think is a lot better than LR. It is called ACDsee (random name, I know). They made this great program in version 2.0 (PC unfortunately) and then went on with each version to make it more and more like LR (ugh). I have version 2.0 which I run in Parallels/Mac. I will post the link in my next post to the program since they don't sell it anymore. It is BY FAR, the FASTEST (really, really impt for me) & easiest tagging, editing and categorizing system that I have found in years. I have not done research on finding a new one in a while, but every pro photog that I show it to uses it now exclusively for the post-production work.

For publishing/backing up, I still haven't found a great solution to that yet but dislike SmugMug for a number of UI reasons. Their Pro stuff is a little better but not great. I had been starting to use Snapixel but they are now out of biz.

So, I am using DigiLabs (based out of Palo Alto) and they are great for selling and p-word protecting but might not be what you are looking for in terms of being notified if someone uploads a new picture, etc. It's not cheap, cheap, and back-up is not great at all, so I am looking forward to seeing what you all are doing. I will also start doing some research myself.

That's all I know - I'm sure there are younger/smarter folks out there who will teach me a much more efficient way to do all this...

So, bring it on! :-))

BTW I'm having a convo w/ the Lightroom product manager about the points above. I've asked him if he's willing to let me publish some of the back & forth here so others can share their opinions.

BTW the CEO of SmugMug responded and put me in touch w/ his API developer, so we're working through some of the bugs. It turns out that Adobe gives very restrictive access to Lightroom plugin developers, so many things on my wish list are on SmugMug's wishlist as well. I'll see if some folks over at Adobe care to comment on this; maybe we can work together to give better dev access to plugin devs. As a consumer I would sure appreciate that.

Also, here's one HUGE wishlist item I didn't mention before:

When I originally set this approach up, I put my Lightroom catalog on Dropbox, the idea being that I could access it from multiple computers. My nirvana would be to keep my 3TB hard drive connected to a computer at my house, and use it to upload large photo sets overnight.

But when I accessed my LR library on the second computer, none of the SmugMug configuration edits I'd made were there!!! I was surprised by this; there's something computer-specific about the setup. I'd just assumed that it would be tied to the catalog file itself.

So SmugMug: Is there some other file I also need to sync between laptops for my specific SmugMug setup to sync between computers?