How do I integrate my blog with my SmugMug site?

Question

I have a blog from Blogger, Wordpress, etc. and I want to integrate it with my SmugMug site. How can I do that?

Answer 1

When looking at integration between SmugMug and a blog, consider a couple factors:

Display of Photos/Video on the Blog

There are a variety of ways to display photos and videos (hosted at SmugMug) on your blog. The most straightforward involve grabbing code by clicking on the "Share" button that appears above an item, choosing "Get a Link" and then the "Embeddable Links" tab. At the top of this screen are three chunks of code which can be dropped into a blog (or any website) for small, medium, or large images.

For blogs hosted on WordPress.com, or a self-hosted WordPress blog (with Settings->Media->Auto-Embeds enabled), you can embed a SmugMug photo or video simply by placing a link to the SmugMug image on a line all by itself. For example:

This is some blog content here

http://gallery.hockleyphoto.com/Other/AaronHockley/i-qV52xSh/0/M/AH048484950tonemapped-M.jpg

Here is more of my content

There are also WordPress plugins available which will allow you to browse and embed SmugMug content from within the WordPress admin interface. Search for SmugMug in the WordPress plugin repository.

Making the Look & Feel of SmugMug Match Your Blog

For a consistent user experience between your SmugMug site and your blog, you might want to have the site look the same. Users will find it a pleasant experience if things like colors, font styles, and navigation options are consistent.

This will require a bit more work, but the general recipe involves using consistent CSS styles and HTML code between the two sites. With a Power or Pro level SmugMug account, you're able to edit this code on SmugMug. You'll want to use similar design elements in the custom layout for your blog.

If writing code isn't your thing, look into hiring a SmugMug customizer. See the list of certified customizers.

Answer 2

They'll never run on the same server, so that level of integration is not possible.

What you can do, if you have your own domain name, is to give your smugmug site a subdomain name. For example, I have http://reinout.vanrees.org for my blog and http://photos.reinout.vanrees.org for my smugmug site. That helps a bit regarding URLs.

There are easy ways to get smugmug content in your blog.

• Click on the share button in smugmug and you can get html snippets that you can insert in your blog. They show the image and upon clicking, take you to the photo site.

• Use one of the widgets that smugmug provides, like an animation of recent photos. You could include that in your blog's sidebar.

And if you want to go all the way, you could use smugmug's API to build up complete pages inside your weblog, but that goes a bit far for a blogger/wordpress site.

Answer 3

Matching a blogger blog to a smugmug site is relatively straightforward, although yes, it does require copying code.

In most cases you need the code for your banner and navbar. If you used the SmugMug Advanced Site-Wide customization the code can be copied from there. If you used the Easy Customizer, you will need to use a tool like the Firefox Web Developer Extension to see the CSS for your banner and navbar.

Copy the CSS for your banner, navbar, and (if you have one) the element that surrounds the banner and navbar. Place that in your blog's CSS. And yes, you do need to expose and edit the code on blogger.

Copy the HTML for the same elements, and place that in your blog's code. Note that in blogger the CSS and HTML is in the same place. Scan through the code on Blogger until you see the switch from CSS to HTML. Look for the tag and start experimenting with placement after that. In my blog, I put my navbar and banner code before the outer-wrapper and content-wrapper entries.

If you're using one of the newer (more modern?) blogger templates, look for the entry and place your banner / navbar HTML right before that.

Keep in mind that Blogger will not allow you to save your template if you have any unclosed code. Every start tag needs a corresponding end tag.

Answer 4

I have personally seen Smugmug websites and a blog seamlessly integrated with each other. I can't remember a sample site, but they indicated on their site they'd used one of the certified customizers to accomplish it. Basically the blog and Smugmug sites were customized to where there was no real way to tell them apart except for those experienced with web design recognizing the sites. If I come across another site soon, I'll update this with a link. You can definitely do it with their help.

Answer 5

I currently link my wordpress blog posts to my smugmug galleries. I do this by providing a link to the appropriate gallery in my wordpress blog post. I haven't tried the opposite linking my galleries on smugmug to my wordpress blog. I have used the share button on smugmug to get the html snippet and inserted that into my blog. I have also used the badge widget on smugmug and inserted that html snippet in my website. Its a fun way to animate photos from your smugmug galleries on your websites.

Answer 6

I use a Wordpress plugin called "Smugmug for Wordpress" that does a decent job of pulling album and image data out of Smugmug so you can both manage and display your photos on the Wordpress blog. Cannot link, unfortunately, as my site is still very much under construction and all photos are protected by a password.

My only concern is that the plugin author seemingly has lost interest; no updates since September or so and support questions in his forum go unanswered. But the code works and it's free so definitely worth a try if you are blogging in Wordpress.

Answer 7

I used Fastline Media www.fastlinemedia.com and they did a great job integrating my blog into SmugMug. Check out what they did for my blog.. www.frankiefoto.com. They charged about $300 for it.

Answer 8

I went to a SmugMug Meetup Group (SMUG) and saw a presentation by Photography Blogsites, http://photographyblogsites.com/. They offer Wordpress and SmugMug integration, custom or pre-made templates, SEO optimization and more.

Answer 9

Zenfolio now has an integrated blog feature. Too bad they don't have dynamic collections or anything even close.

Answer 10

I use drupal as my blogging platform. But you can do the same with Wordpress...

Text, blah, blah

Then from the smugmug site > Share > Get a link > Embeddable link > Blog large: which gives me:

<a href="http://photos.foto-biz.com/People/Photographers/16543273_GHCzXW#!i=1717986641&k=nBFxvXv&lb=1&s=A" title="I really like this older lady photographer I really like this older lady photographer. She is Japanese. She uses a Canon 400D, that's a 10 megapixels Rebel XTi if I'm not mistaken, with a Canon 100-400mm f/4-5.6 L lens. I like her because she is fearless. She must be in late 60s, early 70s. She came all the way to Canada from Japan as part of some tour.Notice her left arm, she supports the 100-400mm lens and carries a fully loaded hand bag at the same time.I'm sure that I won't like her photos. I will even like a lot less the tall girl's photos. One does and held and the other one has a great tripod fully extended.The old lady is around 5ft to 5ft1 (around 1½ meter) and the younger girl is around 5ft6, 5ft7 (around 1.7m.) Take a look at my perspective. Take a look at their perspective. I'm on one knee. My right knee is on the ground and my left knee half bent. Rocks, gravel… My secret, I wear a carpenter kneepad on my right knee. I bought it for less than half price at Home Depot. Somebody stole the other kneepad and they were left with half of the set.Sometimes, it's OK to take photos from higher up if you are going after some special effect. Most of the times it doesn't work, they look squashed.BTW, take a look at the photo tour leader in the background, just to her right, sitting on the bench. Boredom…reifel-20120211-2606.jpg — ©2012 Syv Ritch -- foto-biz.com: http://www.foto-biz.com/usageterms "><img src="http://photos.foto-biz.com/People/Photographers/i-nBFxvXv/2/L/reifel-20120211-2606-L.jpg" title="I really like this older lady photographer I really like this older lady photographer. She is Japanese. She uses a Canon 400D, that's a 10 megapixels Rebel XTi if I'm not mistaken, with a Canon 100-400mm f/4-5.6 L lens. I like her because she is fearless. She must be in late 60s, early 70s. She came all the way to Canada from Japan as part of some tour.Notice her left arm, she supports the 100-400mm lens and carries a fully loaded hand bag at the same time.I'm sure that I won't like her photos. I will even like a lot less the tall girl's photos. One does and held and the other one has a great tripod fully extended.The old lady is around 5ft to 5ft1 (around 1½ meter) and the younger girl is around 5ft6, 5ft7 (around 1.7m.) Take a look at my perspective. Take a look at their perspective. I'm on one knee. My right knee is on the ground and my left knee half bent. Rocks, gravel… My secret, I wear a carpenter kneepad on my right knee. I bought it for less than half price at Home Depot. Somebody stole the other kneepad and they were left with half of the set.Sometimes, it's OK to take photos from higher up if you are going after some special effect. Most of the times it doesn't work, they look squashed.BTW, take a look at the photo tour leader in the background, just to her right, sitting on the bench. Boredom…reifel-20120211-2606.jpg — ©2012 Syv Ritch -- foto-biz.com: http://www.foto-biz.com/usageterms " alt="I really like this older lady photographer I really like this older lady photographer. She is Japanese. She uses a Canon 400D, that's a 10 megapixels Rebel XTi if I'm not mistaken, with a Canon 100-400mm f/4-5.6 L lens. I like her because she is fearless. She must be in late 60s, early 70s. She came all the way to Canada from Japan as part of some tour.Notice her left arm, she supports the 100-400mm lens and carries a fully loaded hand bag at the same time.I'm sure that I won't like her photos. I will even like a lot less the tall girl's photos. One does and held and the other one has a great tripod fully extended.The old lady is around 5ft to 5ft1 (around 1½ meter) and the younger girl is around 5ft6, 5ft7 (around 1.7m.) Take a look at my perspective. Take a look at their perspective. I'm on one knee. My right knee is on the ground and my left knee half bent. Rocks, gravel… My secret, I wear a carpenter kneepad on my right knee. I bought it for less than half price at Home Depot. Somebody stole the other kneepad and they were left with half of the set.Sometimes, it's OK to take photos from higher up if you are going after some special effect. Most of the times it doesn't work, they look squashed.BTW, take a look at the photo tour leader in the background, just to her right, sitting on the bench. Boredom…reifel-20120211-2606.jpg — ©2012 Syv Ritch -- foto-biz.com: http://www.foto-biz.com/usageterms "></a>

Much of the text is the same as the blog post and this significantly improves the SEO.

Now I change at the beginning from:

a href="http://photos.foto-biz.com/People/Photographers/16543273_GHCzXW#!i=1717986641&k=nBFxvXv&lb=1&s=A"

to

a href="http://photos.foto-biz.com/People/Photographers/16543273_GHCzXW#!i=1717986641&k=nBFxvXv" 

by removing the &lb=1&s=A at the end. This changes the link from the image itself, to the image within the gallery.

Now when the person clicks on the image, it will take them to that image within the gallery (not just that image), but the image is large and they can see more...

You can see it in action at: http://www.foto-biz.com/Photos/I-really-like-this-older-lady-photographer