Dalton C.

I've used Smugmug for about 2 years now for storing photo galleries and even some video footage as well. It's reaelly useful, except for the account creation process. I lost a gallery [eventually my entire account with approx. 30+ galleries and 100s of gb worth of content] because I decided to 'complain' to their service team. Imagine that!

I was fortunate enough to be offered a gift account through my professor. I delivered one gallery to a client but it created a second account when I switched to my personal email due to their very confusing login process. I. E. If you login to an account on any browser you can log out but you are not able to attempt to login to a different account. Even if I knew my account was cloned, I wouldn't be able to access it unless I downloaded a new browser. So I am on this trial account that eventually gets deleted along with a gallery I created. I had all other galleries on my paid-for account so I didn't notice the gallery was missing.

I reached out for support for help and they told me I only owned a free trial account and that the files were deleted. They don't tell you (transparently) your photos will be deleted permanently and instead advertise a safe storage space. This is fine and I understand you can't store everybody's unpaid for content forever, the thing is, my current account stated that it had 2 emails on it under the settings, so I have no clue how on earth a cloned account using the same email was ever possible. And it's because a second email CAN appear on your account but it is under the 'new email' section, so it technically isn't on the account yet. Instead of hearing me out they responded to me with a very 'no' attitude instead of apologizing. Since I have a gift account they made sure to hold that $#*! over my head (See convo below) instead of just apologizing. It's literally so easy to apologize to people. I work in service. Apologize for the inconveniences of your services instead of highchairing it.

I truly wanted to be a fully subscribed customer and was shocked when their laughable customer service They delete content after "a month or so" of not paying, which is fine but they're so weird about it (I really had to pry to get that answer from them). If I could pay to get that lost gallery back I would and continue to use my subscription, but not after this.

For those thinking I am dumb for somehow cloning my account, that's fair, but it's extremely confusing to know if you did or didn't when they both look like they share the same email (but don't).

Edit: I just went to login to my account to get a proof of purchase, but they deactivated my account. Nice job guys. Real helpful! Way to be the bigger person. All I'm doing is complaining about their terrible login system and they take so much offense to it that they deactivate my account and I lose all my galleries. Not even surprised to be honest.