Plenty of scouts have years of work sitting in SmugMug, organised by gallery, with the location details in the gallery names and descriptions. This brings that across as locations rather than as loose photos.
Connecting
- Go to Settings, then the Import tab
- Click Connect SmugMug Account
- Authorise LocoBase
Access is read-only. Nothing in your SmugMug library is edited, moved, or deleted at any point, and you can revoke access from SmugMug or disconnect from the same settings panel.
The import wizard
Start large-scale import is the path to use for most libraries. It runs on the server rather than in your browser, so you can close the tab and come back; the button changes to Resume background import while a job is running.
It goes through these stages:
Scan. LocoBase walks your whole SmugMug tree and counts what is there, reporting albums, folders, and total photos as it goes. On a large account this takes a while, and it shows an estimate of how much longer.
Pick. You get the folder tree and choose which branches to import. There is a filter box and a select-all, so taking everything is one click and taking three folders out of ninety is also easy.
Deduplicate, before importing. The wizard looks at your selection for galleries that are probably the same place, the ones called "Hillside House", "Hillside House 2" and "Hillside House final". It groups them into clusters and asks you to confirm each one. A cluster you accept becomes a single location holding the combined photos with duplicates removed, rather than three near-identical locations you have to merge later. If it finds nothing, it says so and moves on.
Settings. Give the import a project name if you want the locations filed into a new project, and set a default environment. There is also a default address, used only for albums with no GPS coordinates of their own, since SmugMug photos that were geotagged already know where they are.
Import. Locations are created in the background with progress reported as it runs.
Deduplicate, after importing. Once it finishes, the wizard offers a second pass, this time against the locations already in your library. This is the one that matters if you have imported from SmugMug before or added some of these places by hand. It shows you the matches it found and you decide, per match, whether to merge or keep both.
Two dedup passes rather than one because they answer different questions: the first is about duplicates inside the batch, the second is about collisions with what you already had.
The legacy CSV route
Under Use the legacy CSV export instead there is the older path: configure an export, download a CSV, then run it through Batch Import Locations on the Locations page.
It is the better choice for a small library, under about 100 albums, and for anything where you want to edit the data before it lands, since a spreadsheet is easier to fix in bulk than a set of created records. It has no deduplication, and it does not run in the background.
Before you start a big one
- Gallery names become location names. A pass over the naming in SmugMug first pays for itself, because it is faster to fix there than across 300 imported records.
- Gallery descriptions get read. Access notes, contacts and quirks in the description come across, so they are worth adding before rather than after.
- Try one folder. Import a single branch, look at what the locations came out like, then go back for the rest.
- Check your plan limit. Imported locations count like any other, and a free account allows 15. A SmugMug library of any size needs a paid plan. See Plans, Limits, and Image Reads.
If something goes wrong
The scan will not start, or stalls. Confirm you can log into SmugMug directly, then check LocoBase is still authorised in your SmugMug account settings. Reconnecting from the Import tab clears most of it.
Private or password-protected galleries come through empty. Read-only access covers what your account can see through the API, and some protected galleries are not included in that. Making them visible to your own account resolves it.
Photos are missing from a location. Usually the pre-import dedup merged a cluster you did not expect, and the photos are on the location it merged into rather than absent.
The job seems stuck. Check the Import tab, which shows the current status and item for any active job. A long silence during scanning on a very large account is normal rather than a failure.