There has recently been a crop of services online which allow people to upload and share their photos with others. This is no doubt related to the recent proliferation in digital photography, stemming from the technology and market advances that have made digital photography both cheap and highly accessible. Some of the most popular photo sharing sites are free, and operate on the same business model as free email accounts do: that is, they offer free space and are supported by ads. With these services, people have ads interspersed with their photos.
An alternative are sites like smugmug and fotki.com. For the more serious user, sites like smugmug and fotki.com offer pay accounts that allow the subscriber to do away with advertising on their photo pages. Smugmug also offer more space then is traditionally associated with the free accounts.
Smugmug and other pay sites offer are meant for more serious foto sharing types who require large amounts of space. Foto sharing of the sort undertaken by amateur photographers would be the type of market that Smugmug and the like are targeting.
As with all foto sharing sites, smugmug offers the user many easy ways to organize their photos for online display. Smugmug also regular displays photos that users mark as 'public' and the best one can receive a large amount of hits. This provides an opportunity for the amateur photographer to gain a little exposure and attention while collecting and displaying their photographs, something that is unlikely, of course, to occur when exchanging digital photos in the traditional fashion of emailing to selected friends.
It is apparent now, and has been for a few years, that digital photography will eventually replace traditional film photography for all but niche markets. There will always be certain professionals and amateurs who for one reason or another desire the qualities associated with traditional color or black and white film. For the vast majority of users, however, there are simply too many benefits to digital photography to pass it up. Once the initial cost of buying the digital camera has been overcome, digital photography ends up costing almost nothing: there are, of course, zero developing and printing costs. In the early days of digital photography a user might have to incur some printing costs in order to show their digital photographs to others, but now with services like smugmug springing up this is less of an issue.
Smugmug and services like it fill an important gap in the digital photography world, and in doing so make it more practical for everyday people and serious photographer alike. While many may initially balk at paying for a service like smugmug, when they consider the money they are saving due to not having to print their photos to show them to friends and family, the cost starts to look more like a savings.
It is clear that smugmug and similar photo storage and display sites are the way of the future. And while it remains to be seen whether smugmug or one of its competitors will ultimately rule the online photo sharing world, the fact that online photo sharing will soon replace traditional photography almost entirely is certain.