I’m a big fan of SmugMug and was excited by the SmugShot iPhone application for taking pictures and uploading them to my smugmug account.

I’m sorry to say that SmugShot is a disappointment. I frankly found it to be unusable and a pain in my keester – though it does have a few redeeming qualities. Okay, one redeeming quality and that’s its ability to upload photos to SmugMug from your Camera Roll. This part of the application works fantastically.

Now the bad news. SmugShot’s user interface is a mess. The application is astoundingly slow and it’s way too modal (e.g. you have to do one thing at a time). Just doing normal things like starting up, saving pictures to the Camera Roll, and switching between its many modes is cheesegrater on the eyeball slow. Scrape. Ow. Scrape. Ow. Crap it’s still “Saving Photo”. Scrape. Ow. It really shouldn’t be any slower than the built in Camera application. For fek’s sake, it just can’t get in the way of taking pictures! It just can’t. Mike stomps foot and pouts.

SmugShot really needs a rewrite to iron out the Grand Teton sized wrinkles. I can’t wait until they do but until then use the built in Camera app to take your pictures, and then upload your pictures to SmugMug using SmugShot. That’s actually a decently unsucktacular experience.

Here’s how it should work (in my pretentious opinion):

Scenario 1, setup:

1. Run it.
2. Click “Settings” button (note that the shutter button is already showing).
3. Enter your SmugMug settings.

Scenario 2, picture taking.

1. Run it.
2. Enjoy the super quick startup equivalent to built in Camera App.
3. Click shutter button like Camera App.
4. Go to 3 until done shooting.
5. Click a button on the bottom that takes you to a list of photos you just shot (and they should also be saved in a camera roll).
6. Batch select the ones you want to keep, or better yet, unselect the ones you DON’T want.
7. Click upload.
8. Wait until photos are uploaded.
9. Go play Big Foot Bingo iPhone game.