The website we selected for our online River City Rumble tournament photo gallery is http://www.stlmsbl.smugmug.com. We selected this site for lots of reasons.

    1. You do NOT need to register with the site in order to view our photos.

    2. You can view the photos as you wish &ldots; even as a slideshow.

    3. You also don't need to order photo's from them (although you can if you choose &ldots; at their cost as our league gets no markup on the photos).

    4. You can copy and save the photos to your own computer if you wish.

    5. We chose to pay a small annual fee so that you don't have to view lots of ads.

    6. Easy URL addresses.

If you find you like the site and would like to create your own site, fee free to use our code to get a $5 discount on the first year's fee. Just cut & paste the coupon ID "uru4fbHlII3bg " on the signup form at www.smugmug.com. You upload your pictures, arrange them into albums. Other people come look at the albums, get a closer look at the pictures that interest them, and either download those pictures or order prints. Very simple.

Granted, all else being equal, free is better. But, they don't have to show lots of ads to pay for the site (your picture of your girlfriend won't appear on a page with a viagra ad), nor do they have to push the pay services like printing.

Once the pictures are uploaded, you can rearrange them, add captions (very long captions), move from one album to another, even crop and rotate pictures online.

Below every picture is an "order prints & gifts" button. You can order prints in a wide variety of sizes, from wallet sized to 20x30 inch (depending on the resolution of your picture). Or, you can have the picture printed on T-shirts, mugs, aprons, puzzles, and more. This is great for family reunions or the like...take the pictures, upload them, and then those that want prints can just take care of it themselves. Smugmug does not do the printing themselves, they tested the various print services for quality and EZPrints came out on top, so the service is provided by EZ Prints.

There's also a share button below pictures. One option is sharing by email--enter an email address, a message goes out saying "So and so says you should look at this picture here->" Nicely done, but nothing special. What is special is that you can also get the URL to the picture for inserting into other webpages, whatever. This is called image hosting, and very few services do it. You can choose between large, medium, small, thumbnail, and tiny versions of the picture. Here are some thumbnails, coming from my smugmug account.

Pricing is reasonable. The basic fee is $39.95 per year. For it, you can upload as many pictures as you like, add captions, organize them into albums, all of the various picture editing tools available on the site. Bandwidth is limited to 2 Gigabytes per month, which means that people can view about 30,000 pictures per month on your site. You can even see how much your pictures are being viewed.