Carl Hutzler's Blog

I shoot a lot of performance photography (ballet/dance). At the end of a week of shows, I might have several thousand images to go through and upload to my SmugMug.com site for parents/dancers to purchase. I can’t possibly edit every image to prepare them for printing as most images never get purchased and it would simply take way too long.

So what I began doing is uplaoding the raw from camera images to SmugMug and then setting the gallery to have a “7 Day Proof” period. So when a customer comes along and orders, their order is held for 7 days to allow me a chance to fully edit/color corrected, etc the image from their specific order.

This worked just fine except the SmugMug “ Delayed for proofing & touch-up” page was not very easy nor quick for me to use. What I needed was to be able to replace each image with the color corrected image. While there is a “REPLACE PHOTO” button for each image, the process was very manual. Click the button, BROWSE to the color corrected file on my local machine, upload the image (10 seconds), wait until SmugMug was finished processing the new image (maybe 45 seconds), then rinse and repeat.

Even though I usually could edit 20 images in Photoshop for an order fairly quickly, the longest and most tedious part was just getting them re-uploaded to SmugMug. While the original image upload after the shoot is easy (using the MacDaddy uploader), smugmug provides no way to simply REPLACE images in bulk. (I did send them a request for the enhancement)

In my struggles, I did find one cheat which was that you don’t have to wait the extra 45 seconds for SmugMug to finish processing the image. You can use the browser back button to go back to the full list of images and hit REPLACE PHOTO and start on the next one. This did save some time, but it was still fairly manual on my side.

Today I found a fairly good solution to all of this. There is a firefox add-on called FireUploader which allows you to do the equivalent of an FTP upload to a website which may only support HTTP protocols. Some websites work with FireUploader and some do not. But many popular sites like FlickR and SmugMug do.

Once installed, you just activate FireUploader by clicking on the symbol down in the lower right of your FF window. Then you navigate to your smugmug site and into the folder where the images you want to replace are located. If you then upload a new file/image with the exact same name as one that is on the site, it will ask if you want to overwrite the file on smugmug. Click yes (and apply to all) and the process is automatic from there.

The only issue I notice is that the FTP is fairly slow. The file transfer is very quick, but then it sits for that same 45 seconds while it “waits to complete the transfer”. This may be a smugmug protocol thing where it accepts the file but does not answer back with a “completed” until after smugmug has finished processing the new image for thumbnails, etc.

But regardless of the time penalty, this saves me a lot of time as it is completely automated! Yeah :-)