The SmugMug Blog

SmugMug member Ken Conger is a Virginia State Game Warden. He also happens to be one of the finest wildlife photographers I have ever seen. Take a look at his site and check out any gallery that catches your eye. These are the shots that really impressed me:

I could link a dozen photos here, but I will let you go find your favorites.

We updated some maps features yesterday, and Google has added two more levels of zoom to a lot of their maps (in addition to lots of details in Europe that were missing before). One of the places that got a great level of detail is Las Vegas, which makes this gallery a lot of fun to browse on maps. The pictures were taken by Wally Argus

Click here to see the map.

(My favorite is the satellite imagery of the Luxor, which is the second image in the gallery. Click the second photo on the right when you are on the map page to zoom right to it)

Google updated their Maps API to v2 not too long ago, so we thought it was time to polish and enhance our own offering. Lucky you!

• “Around the World” on the browse page shows a mini-map with the most recent 150 geotagged photos uploaded to SmugMug.
• A similar “Around the World” box is now available on your own homepage to showcase your own photos. It won’t show up fpr your visitors unless you enter your own (free!) Google Maps API key. And of course, you can “remove from homepage” just like all the other boxes. Here’s how to add your own photos.
• SmugMaps got a style & speed overhaul.
• We now use the Google Maps v2 API, which loads faster, leaks less memory, and has extra zoom levels in big cities areas. Best of all, we now have satellite data for places like Europe!
• Much better location searching (thanks to our friends at Yahoo! for a great geocode interface!), including foreign cities and countries. (Yes, that does make this a SmugMug+Google+Yahoo mashup. )
• We’ve tied in our robust search engine so you can now find all photos matching a given set of search terms, and see them laid out on the map (if they’ve been geotagged). Pretty sweet.
• You can also search for photos “near” a given location, and even modify that search with keywords or search terms.
• We AJAXed the loading of the markers so it doesn’t hang your browser quite as much. Google Maps is a CPU hog.
• Two new Themes – The Graduate and Black Arts
• On a little more boring of a note to you non-geeks out there, we overhauled our storage architecture to improve performance and increase reliability. We have some news about a new storage partner that we’ve alluded to a few times, hopefully we’ll let everyone know the details soon.

Along the same lines as the previous entry (about Sand Castles), I found a gallery showing awesome ice sculptures.

Here are a few samples:

Enjoy!

Ian Meissner brings us this gallery of amazing sand castles.

These are from a World Sand Castle competition in Harrison Hot Springs.

Enjoy!

John Gomes has quite a few great galleries of training drills for firefighters in Alaska.

His most recent brings us shots from a drill involving airport fires.

Enjoy!

David Hartcorn was able to travel to Sudan and live among the Dinkas for a time. While there, he took these amazing portraits.

Some stunning examples:

Enjoy!

Despite my numerous biology classes, I don’t actually know that much about frogs… though I do know to avoid the bright colored ones! That bias (against brightly colored frogs), probably comes from what little I know of this type of frog:

That would be the blue poison dart frog, and I am told it is aptly named.

“atomicfish” brings us that photo, along with a whole gallery of frog shots.

I don’t know if these ones are poisonous as well, but they sure are cool looking:

Enjoy!