SmugMug

I hate this company. My college's alumnae network uses it to send out photos, and whenever I forgetfully click on a photo, the winding gyre of death starts and does not stop until thousands of photos are on my poor phone. I am unable to close the window or use my phone's browser. Don't ever click on a photo if you think it might be SmugMug. If you make the mistake of opening it, shut off your phone, and when you reopen your browser IMMEDIATELY close the site. You will have less than a second to do so. Fun stuff.
PS I have iPhone 5

I decided to stop to paid for this services, so for close my account i start to get back my photos, before i deleted on the site and close the account.
The surprise there is no software to bulk download your photos, all the software in the support area are out to date and doesn't work
The solution? Go folder by folder click to zip and get a link from amazon to download your files ( the folder have no the same name as the source so you have to match the download to control that you have all the files)
Send your a link our user for a FTP transfer? Forgetter! No way you need to do so the hard way.
I also have problem with a big folder, i spend more than a week to get the files in segment of course, now one file doesn't work so the supper tech support send me a new set of files, and start all over again.
If you can stay away from this company is a really bad choice!
Today there is a lot of offers to keep your files secure and even free

I'M A WEDDING AND SOCIAL PHOTOGRAPHER BASED IN THE UK AND HAVE HAD A PRO ACCOUNT FOR OVER 10 YEARS. I HAVE 10'000'S OF CLIENTS PHOTOS HUNDREDS OF GALLERIES AND IT'S MY LIFELINE.
I UPLOADED A NUMBER OF NUDE PHOTOS INTO A GALLERY THAT WAS NOT PUBLISHED ON MY MAIN WEBSITE AND I THOUGHT IT WAS PRIVATE. I GET HUNDREDS OF EMAILS A DAY AND I OPENED AND READ AN EMAIL SENT TO ME SAYING I NEEDED TO REMOVE THE NUDE PHOTOS FROM THE GALLERIES. I HAVE HAD LIMITED / NO INTERNET ACCESS AND ON SATURDAY THE COMPANY DELETED MY ACCOUNT. 30,000 PHOTOS GONE OVER 10 YEARS OF BUSINESS GONE. I AM ALSO GOING THROUGH A SEPERATION AND AM BEING FORCED TO SALE THE STUDIO AND HOUSE. TO AMKE MATTERS WORSE I WAS TOLD THAT MY FLICKR ACCOUNT HAS BEEN TERMINATED TO - I KNOW IDEA WHY. AVOID SMUGMUG

Smug Mug knows they have a problem in Safari but won't fix it. Works fine in Chrome which i don't use.

They've no way to restore collections which could waste you hours or days. No point in time complete restore either. Collections are really shortcuts effectively to images in folders, which is the primary way to display and group images together to show on your website with them. So after a folder restore (because it's very easy to delete the folder rather than 1 file in the folder) you need to start from scratch. Say you have a folder(bucket) called USA, and create collections by city, type: landscape, wildlife and go through and select all sorts of files into collections. If ever you deleted that folder and they restore the photos folder for USA, all your images in collections displayed on your site are gone. After restoring support don't advise you of this, you find out. Then you send a nice polite email asking about if they can do a complete point in time restore, or restore everything, and no they can not. Support is fast but you don't get any humanity, hi, thanks for reaching out, it's condescending and feels officiate. Smug tones

I have set up a smugmug site as I read about it having the best looking photos from a viewing point of view. Found it very hard to figure out what to do. I hadn't done a website before. Just wanted a family sharing website. Everything seems round the house to do and you have to spend a lot of time trying things out and repeatedly contacting the help desk.

My suggestion is to look at the Ryan Oakley youtube tutorials. They are pretty good. But they don't go over the various security settings so there is quite a lot of trial and error there, trying to get your head round getting the right settings for your needs. You need to have another browser open as you set up your site and then you can monitor the changes you make on a second browser.

One other thing to note, I found quite a good set of tutorials on the paid learning site lynda.com. I think if I'd found that beforehand it would have helped a lot. It's a 2 hour series of videos done in 2017.

I did persist with this and it's been ok now but it's quite involved to set up your site and you would have to devote time to it and look at the youtube tutorials several times over. I do like the fact that you can link your smugmug site up with apple tv and view the photos on your tv.

It would be good if smugmug did an introductory video tutorial explaining what is involved in setting up a website with their software.

SmugMug's customer support is AWFUL. If there is a problem with their software, they would rather blame their customers and tell them they're "doing it wrong" than offer to have a SmugMug engineer troubleshoot an issue (which is not at all user error). To make matters worse, just try contacting customer support by phone. They do not have a phone number for their customers to call! At all. It's email-only customer support. If you have an issue with a support rep, good luck getting a response from a supervisor. They do not believe in speaking with human beings by phone. As for their software, their "Download All" link is supposed to result in an email being sent to your email address with a link to a zip file of your photos. What has been happening, repeatedly, is that when clicking this link one time (and one time only), SmugMug begins to download all of your gallery photos. If you have hundreds of images in a given gallery, we're talking over 1 GB of images easily. When you have a client who wants to download their images, they need the link to the zip file. SmugMug is awful, unprofessional, and their customer support stinks. Give your money to another business that has more respect for its clientele.

Last year this company automatically renewed my account, causing over draft fees from my bank out the butt. At this time of year I haven't started work for the summer and generally don't have money in my bank account. There was nothing my bank could do. I talked to the company and was ensured that my automatic renewal was turned off after being walked through how to turn off automatic renewals.
He said after the end of the year my account would expire. End of story.
But not really. I recently accrued even more over draft fees again. This time the bank is disputing it because of my previous experience. I logged in for the first time in months to find that now there isn't an option of manual renewal so they just decided to switch me back and renew me. They sent me an email on my old email account, one I don't check, because I didn't think this was an issue anymore.
I just pray I can get my 100 plus dollars back because otherwise my first paycheck is down the toobs. If I were you I would not sign up for this service unless you have a steady cash flow. I may change my opinion if they cooperate with my bank.

SmugMug just went to a new design, if you are thinking about using it, don't! The new SmugMug is full of bugs and getting any meaningful help is useless. The help techs don't seem to know the system, there is no continuity, you get a different tech each time and you have to re-explain the problems over and over. The techs don't answer you specific questions but just tell you to do either stuff you have already done or they blame it on you browser or computer or domain server etc. There is no phone number so you can't talk to anyone and they don't seem to have the ability to screen share to help you with your problems. I say problems because there are many of them with new ones popping up everyday. The new site looks slick but when you try to do something you have already done with no problems, like create a page, all of a sudden it won't work, or it works while you are logged in but when you go out to see your site like a common viewer, what you have created will not be there or will only partially be there. Some of you images will not render in your galleries and you have to go off site and back on and then maybe they will render. There are far too many problems with SmugMug!

They didn't make it clear that they would delete my photos unless I purchased within 14 days. When I asked where all my photos were that I worked so hard to upload, I was told that they had been deleted. Not even NICE! Had I gone to the BBB Online first and seen the many complaints, I wouldn't have bothered at all with them. LIVE & LEARN.
By the way. The person I was dealing with, Shay Nicholson, even had the nerve after telling me my photos were deleted... to say, HAVE A GREAT DAY. Like "... in your face." Nice.

I have been a Smugmug customer for a while and have generally liked the site. But then suddenly, they went to a new version of their photosharing site and that is when the troubles started. The problems with Smugmug are twofold:

USER INTERFACE
A horrible, utterly counter-intuitive user interface that makes you waste time doing simple tasks. For instance, sharing photos is a common basic operation that one would presume be prominent on the site. On Smugmug, that does not happen. You need to click on "ORGANISE", the choose the gallery, then a specific photo, look for the tiny rectangle with the arrow, click it and then choose different sharing choices. Convoluted & Confusing in other words. More than anything else, it is the user interface that sucks. The wording of many tabs is mis-leading, it is hard to find features hidden away in the menus, there is no help available upon hovering above a menu item etc. etc.

2. BUGGY SOFTWARE
The software is buggy, behaves differently on different browsers, the online photo editing module PicMonkey is erratic etc.

I made the terrible mistake of recommending the product to several colleagues and friends based on a more positive experience on the previous version of the software. And now I am stuck with giving them tech support on behalf of Smugmug.

Pathetic that in 2016 firms do not give priority to the user experience and UX.

I ordered two photos from Smugmug.com for a gift. The website said I could receive them in two business days for an extra $10.99 for "2 Day UPS Air", so I paid the extra to get it in time for our Christmas get together. The gift was for my mother, and it was a picture of her great grandbaby. When it didn't arrive as promised, I tracked the package on the Fedex website, which stated the package would arrive two days late. The Fed Ex rep said it would have come sooner if the shipper had checked the box for Saturday shipping (Apparently Smug Mug can choose a different shipper than what you ordered and paid for). Since my mother did not receive her Christmas gift as a result, I requested a refund fromSmugmug for the $10.99 2 day "expedited" shipping. The Smugmug representatives are aptly named, as they smugly told me I didnt pay enough attention to the fine print (untrue), and didnt even deign to offer an apology for the "misunderstanding". Needless to say, I will not be using their services again, nor will I recommend them to anyone. Very appalling customer service and disreputable company!