Do sculptors like many sculptures they see? Do chefs like many dishes they eat? Do people who work in car manufacturing plants like many cars coming off assembly lines? As someone who has spent his entire professional career developing software, I sometimes feel awkward that I like so little of the software that is produced by our industry.

But every once in a while, when I find software that’s really good, it’s such a joy. Yesterday I started using SmugMug and I really like it. Our three-year old deleted some pictures off our Mac a few weeks ago and I decided that it would be a good idea to start backing our photos up to one of the web-based photo services. My wife has pictures on the Mac. I have pictures on my laptop. We needed a central place to store our family photos. Congratulations to Don MacAskill and the team at SmugMug. They’ve designed and developed an elegant software application for storing, managing and sharing photos. It’s a terrific web-based application. So what do I like about it?

1) The user interface is clean and elegant.

2) I was able to be productive without any training or reading any tutorials.

3) There are different options for people of different backgrounds and abilities. You’d think they would have one or two ways to upload, but SmugMug has five different ways.

4) There’s an API that has resulted in 3rd party tools having been created. For example, I installed the "Send to SmugMug" Windows Explorer shell add-in and it works great.

5) It’s viral. SmugMug makes it easy for me to share photos - by email, posting to a blog, etc.. By being so easy, I’m sure it helps SmugMug market itself to new customers.

There are a lot of things to like about SmugMug. If you need a place to back up and share your photos, I suggest you give it a try. They offer a 14-day trial and after that it’s $39.95 per year for the basic version.

When I find software that I really like, I like to think about why I like it and hopefully emulate those positive attributes in the software we build. So much of what makes software great is less about what it does and more about how it does it. If someone likes blist a lot, I’d hope they’d write a post about it on their blog, so that’s what I’m doing here today for SmugMug. I like their software and I’m telling you about it.

Have you found some great software? Tell us about it.