Guests and registered users can browse the photos at SmugMug in various ways including by keyword and author. Photos are displayed in galleries with no apparent way of downloading them to the local computer system. The right-click is blocked by default. Advanced Internet users know that this is little protection as there are numerous ways of downloading the photos despite this. To mention two: Photos are saved in the web browser’s cache which means it is possible to simply copy them from the cache to another directory. Another option is to look at the source code which contains the direct link to the image hosted at SmugMug.

More comfortable than this is a software program that can download complete albums more or less automatically. One of these applications is Album Fetcher which can be used to download albums as a guest or registered users. All that needs to be done is to enter a user ID as a guest in the application’s interface. The program will then automatically fetch all albums by that user and display them in the interface.

A few options are available for changing the download directory, photo size, enabling video downloads and importing IPTC data. Album Fetcher is easy to use and compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. The developer mentioned that users have reported that it is also working under Wine in Linux and Parallels in Mac OS computers.

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The digital photo software will automatically recognize new digital photos that get added to monitored directories on the computer system. This is an excellent way of monitoring the default locations that photos from the digital camera get synced in. All photos will be displayed by default in the interface as thumbnails. It is possible to enter a full screen view mode for images by double-clicking them. Other options that are accessible from the interface are image rotation and deletion.

Two interesting additional features of the photo software are photo groups and the extensive filters that are offered. Photos can be added to groups by the user. Groups can be created freely by the user to add photos to them. Possibilities include parties, holidays and basically anything that the user can think of.

The extensive filter list makes it possible to filter the digital photos in various ways including time, orientation, photo content, dominant colors, textual filters or location based. The detailed view contains some additional features like Flickr, Picasa or SmugMug upload capabilities, setting images as wallpapers or printing photos. All in all a very clever great looking photo software.

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A click on a preview thumbnail will open a preview window containing additional information like size, title or format of the selected image. Size buttons on the bottom will load the image in different sizes. These size buttons are automatically adjusted depending on the original size of the image. The same toolbar contains buttons to save the image to the local computer, view it in the original context (which will open the image in the default web browser), set it as the desktop background, copy or share it.

Ginipic is an excellent image search engine that can be used to search for images on multiple image search engines including some of the best places to download wallpapers like Deviant Art or Flickr. The application is a bit heavy on the resource usage but since it does not have to be running all the time in the background it does not matter that much.

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The process obviously requires authentication and that’s the first step in the process. After picking one of the available image hosting sites the user has to enter his login credentials to for authentication purposes.

Once the credentials have been supplied Migratr begins to download all photos from the selected image host to the local computer. Another authentication is required to be able to export the photos again to the new image hosting site.

And thus the authentication process begins anew. After that it’s just a matter of selecting the folder where the photos have been saved into and hitting the Start Export button. The software works pretty well and I did not experience any problems while using it.

It provides a nice way to backup your photos from those image hosting sites if you just complete the first three steps of the procedure.

Migratr requires the Windows .net framework 3.5 and should be running on pretty much every Windows NT compatible operating system. Tried and tested on Windows XP where it worked fine.

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I’m going to use the Firefox extension Batch Download to download the pictures from a site like Smugmug. The CEO of Smugmug said that it was intended behavior that the private pictures at Smugmug were still publicly available which I do find a little bit odd but who am I to complain ?

Install the Batch Download Firefox extension and restart Firefox afterwards. Open the options of Batch Download afterwards, this can be done by right-clicking a blank space in Firefox and selecting Batch Download from the menu.

The Base Url is the url of the photo directory at Smugmug, in our case it is http://www.smugmug.com/photos/(*)-M.jpg. The Wildcard is the numeric part of each image that changes with each unique image. We define that part below. Since it consists only of numbers we use the numbers from 1 which would be the image 1-M.jpg to 10000 which would be image 10000-M.jpg.

Batch Download would now scan the directory photos at Smugmug for all images between 1-M.jpg and 10000-M.jpg, which means a total of 10000 images will be scanned. If an image is found it will be downloaded to the directory you specify at the bottom in the form entitled Download Folder.

The numbers that you enter are arbitrary. You could start by 10000 instead and end at 96000. It takes of course longer to download the images if you select huge numbers. This technique can be used for many different websites who save their images – or other files like videos – this way. It is furthermore possible to start over at a certain number where you stopped.

There are some ways of blocking Batch Download. The easiest way would be a referrer check which would ensure that only visitors from the same website would be allowed to download the files.

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The real problem arises because files are named sequentially at Smugmug which means that anyone with just a little bit of technical knowledge will be able to download all images from all galleries set to public and private. The only galleries that are not accessible are the password protected ones obviously.

The urls for the galleries can be accessed by opening a url starting with http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/*, for example http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/1000, http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/1001 in your browser. Pictures can be accessed directly by loading http://www.smugmug.com/photos/*-M.jpg in your browser where * is a number between 1 and x. So, everyone can access pictures like http://www.smugmug.com/photos/1000-M.jpg, http://www.smugmug.com/photos/10001-M.jpg and so on.

Google Blogoscope who discovered this loophole contacted Smugmug and received a reply that was not that satisfactory. According to CEO Don MacAskill this is the intended way it should work:

First of all, we view security and privacy as two separate, but related, issues. Security is like locking your front door (no-one can get in with out a key) and privacy is like closing your window drapes (no-one can look in from the outside, but you can tell people where you live and they can visit without a key).

At SmugMug, the feature you’re talking about, private galleries, falls under the privacy umbrella, not security. It’s intentionally designed so that you can “tell other people” about your photos (share a URL in an email, embed or hyperlink on your blog or message forum, etc) without having to share something like a password. Only people you’ve shared this URL with can find the gallery and/or photos in question.

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