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.

After using SmugMug (SM) Power Plan for almost a year, side by side with Gphotos (GP), uploading 40k photos and hundreds of videos, and having 20 years web design experience, I feel uniquely qualified to comment on the platform. I must say that I really wanted to like SM as I saw them as the "good guy" when compared to GP.

For starters, it was a nightmare to upload that many photos/videos to the SM system, and it took over 2 weeks using a 50mb fiber connection, so many interruptions and no ability to confirm what was uploaded and what was not (obviously it was their server). GP had no problems. When it comes to mobile, Android worked much, much better than Apple OS uploading and sync. The whole process set the stage for a non-intuitive, pain-in-the-butt experience over the last 10 months using SM, while on the other side, using GP was a rich, fun, intuitive experience.

I was able to setup a functioning site, but in hide-sight, I would have rather just built my own off-platform site. Compared with GP, SM lacks any useful AI such as face recognition and auto grouping, etc. Editing tools and share tools are limited. Depending on where you are in the SM system, sometimes I couldn't directly share, and it was confusing. I constantly felt like I was fighting with the platform when using SM. In short, SM lacks the features GP has, and is clearly overpriced when experienced side-by-side. That said, if you're selling wedding photos perhaps it's a good platform, but for anyone else, it's a fail.

Another troubling issue: When I cancelled two months early, they immediately deleted by account rather than allowing it to exist throughout the prepaid year, bad actor. I did contact SM support several times and they did respond, but were only able to say sorry, that doesn't work right now... no real solutions for my problems. I cannot recommend SmugMug for anyone beyond wedding photographers. Sorry SM, you're a fail.

On the other hand, I upgraded my Google Photos to the 200gb level and I'm happy as a clam.

Of note, SmugMug really is being outgunned by Google and the other Meta companies, and they're slowly dying. Think Yahoo, just the wrong business strategy to keep up with the big boys... So sad. Too bad they waited for me to cancel before they were interested in how I was feeling.

Smugmug permanently lost precious photos of my children in a musical show. I took photos of the rehearsal with my camera and uploaded them. Less than a week later, I tried to upload a semi-professional's photos of the show. But when I tried to upload them, the site refused them, saying they were "duplicates." Since the other photographer did have access to my photos and since I figured his copies might would be better than mine, I clicked "Replace." But when I checked, my precious, unbacked-up photos, were gone. I immediately contacted Smugmug, who assured me (falsely) that they could be recovered the following Monday. But when Monday came Smugmug claimed there was no backup to my original photos. They also revealed that the photos they label as "duplicates" are NOT duplicates at all - they are simply photos with the same number. And worse, Smugmug does not retain backup files - does not even create them - SO WHEN YOU CLICK "REPLACE" YOU PERMANENTLY DELETE YOUR PRECIOUS ORIGINAL PHOTOS. SMUGMUG DOES NOT RETAIN ANY BACKUP COPIES OF YOUR PHOTOS - SO IT CANNOT RECOVER THE REPLACED PHOTO.

Ironically, Smugmug does have some way to recover photos that are DELIBERATELY deleted - but for whatever reason, it has no way to recover photos that end up getting over-written by its false information about duplicates.

Smugmug needs to fix this serious error before more people lose their photos. It needs to invest in REAL duplicate image identification (free on web), immediately add warnings or simply remove the "Replace" option, and start backing up files on a server, so that they can be recovered if a request is made timely - as mine was.

Love the photos by Peter Matthess, just bought one. Great service.

Pics take forever to upload. And I have 6Mbps up and 34Mbps down.