Note: Smuggery is still in development and is not yet publicly available. A public beta will be made available in early December.

Smuggery is a Wordpress plugin that allows users to automate the retrieval of SmugMug content and post it to their blogs. Other plugins exist that assist in this endeavor, but none of them fully automate it. My goal is to provide a system that allows the user to, pardon the cooking cliché, “set it and forget it.”

Why I’m Doing It

I want a way to manage my photos and to make them accessible to all of my visitors. Gallery2 is an excellent software package, but with services like Flickr, SmugMug and Picasa Web Albums readily available and easily accessible, I see little reason to host and manage all of these images myself. I’d rather let the pros take care of that so that I can stick to the things that I’m good at. By writing an integration plugin, I can in effect let them do the work to power my web site. And since Smuggery is open source, you can too.

Why SmugMug?

I’ve found SmugMug to be the most user-friendly and customizable image hosting service around, and I really appreciate that they cater to amateur and professional photoraphers alike (giants like Flickr and Picasa Web Albums are notably lacking in the professional features department). Photography doesn’t pay my bills, but I work hard enough at it that I appreciate a company that does, too.

What Will It Do?

I’m not prepared to announce official features yet, but I intend Smuggery to automate the display of SmugMug gallery content on Wordpress blogs. If you think you might consider using Smuggery and have feature requests (or would like to participate in public betas), please leave a comment on this page with your contact information (email address will not be published).

When Can I Get It?

I expect the public beta to be available in early December. I expect a stable version by year’s end.

Acknowledgments

I would like to personally thank Markham Bennett and Colin Seymour for the help they have provided, both direct in correspondence and indirect through prior work. Colin has written an excellent PHP wrapper for SmugMug (phpSmug), which has made my life significantly easier. I drew inspiration for Smuggery in part from Guillaume Hébert’s kPicasa plugin for Wordpress.

I strongly recommend using Smuggery in conjunction with the lightbox2 plugin for Wordpress.