SmugMug

Smugmug has been my choice for photo hosting - I started off using smugmug to mostly just share my casual photos with friends and family and they all found it very easy to view my photos. I had another professional site where I advertised my services as a photographer, but it was too much trouble to always upload my images so family could see the special events shots. I typically printed my own photos and sold them to clients as I wanted complete control of the entire process. But then a collague of mine told me he was using the smugmug professional services so I checked it out and here is what I thought...

1. The sample websites they show are very well done and it is exactly what many photographers need.
2. Setting up a custom site is not entirely easy and unless you are very web savvy you will need some help.
3. Print prices are fair, not cheap, but fair... quality is pretty good and they provide ICC profiles and calibration prints.
4. They do NOT offer prints on canvas which I think is a mistake if they offer professional printing services.
5. They do offer the ability to sell photos via downloads, which is great.
6. they offer both HD video 1280 x 720 and DVD quality videos on your website, which is perfect as that is often what catches new client's attention. Also great for consumers wanting to show off their photos in a professional slide show video.
7. Easy to upgrade from power user to pro
8. The standard account is NOT FREE... so for the average consumer I do wonder if this is a good deal when other similar services are free. It is advertising free, but I'm not sure the average person cares and would rather have it be free.
9. Complete privacy control over your photos.
10. Unlimited storage for all accounts

I think if you are semi pro or thinking of going pro, then smugmug is a great place to start. If you are purely casual photographer, then you might want to consider some of the free sites out there if you want to save that $40.

Smugmug is the best online sharing photo tool I ever used.
Beside the fact that it stores your photos in full size and that it offers really unlimited storage, it can be upgraded with tons of community tools (upload from right click, …).
It starts at 40$/year for non professional accounts, but even at that price it is really unlimited storage.
Living 6000km from my family, smugmug is a must have to share moments in pictures, also as a part time professional photographer smugmug has been very useful sharing and promoting my work.
You can even use this coupon on the smugmug coupon field in the sign up form to get 5$ off the price: 7Ppmk1PbRiBVQ (https://secure.smugmug.com/signup.mg?Coupon=7Ppmk1PbRiBVQ)
Strengths:
- Full size pictures
- Really unlimited storage
- Great themes
- Easy to use
- Great interface, easy to customize per gallery:)
- Community creating addons (lightroom plugin, upload from right click, screensavers…)
Weaknesses:
- It is not a photo backup tool as you cannot bulk restore photos from galleries, you have to order DVDs from smugmug.

I have been a SmugMug user for several years. I was very excited about the new look and migrated over. I was impressed by the new design layouts and asthetics... until, I had a problem.
I would send customer support an email with 2-3 questions. The response time was usually 12+ hours. And when they respond, they would only address 1 question out of 2 or 3. I would need to send it again and wait another 12+ hours for another response. CUSTOMER SERVICE IS AWFUL.
I "upgraded" for the ability to be able to sell my prints. Turns out that unless you upgrade to their business top tier option, you can only use one price list thru out your entire site.
Bottom line, I started looking at their competitor site and signed up for a trial. Customer service returned emails within minutes in most cases, maybe 15 minutes at most. (not 12 hours!)
The comp also had lower pricing and allows multiple Price Lists and options. (I can price every photo within a gallery at different prices if I wanted to)

I was really happy with the competition... so I started to get nervous about making the switch. Tons of photos to reload, create new galleries, keywords, etc...
GREAT NEWS - I learned that upload junctions migrates everything from SmugMug to the new site in one click!

I even went to the PDN Photo Expo and stopped by SmugMug's booth to tell them about my experience. The "superhero" that I spoke to showed real concern and wanted to discuss my experience further. She took my business card and info and said she would call me back.

Yep, still holding my breath for that call. Meanwhile, switched sites, moved my domain name to the new site and waiting for Smugmug membership to expire.

Smugmug manages photographs beautifully, displaying them in a high quality that I've not seen other site providers match. It has all the features that a photographer could want, in my experience, if you are building a portfolio-driven website. The customer service is email only but in my personal experience it is excellent. (Really very consistently excellent.). Building a website is a little more tedious than Squarespace or Wix but it's just fine once you get over the initial learning curve. There are videos and help text to assist with that.

As I said, Smugmug is oriented towards portfolio-driven photography websites but it does have many features to assist with sales. There is no blogging feature beyond treating a blog post like any other page to build. There is no built-in integration of calendar, invoice, etc, but you can use external services like Square for that.

On the other hand, if you are ONLY seeking a service for DELIVERY of photographs to clients then Pixieset or Shootproof are more user friendly, but CAUTIONl: I tried Shootproof and quickly backed off because they made my photographs look fuzzy! I work so hard to have sharp photographs! That is an important part of the beauty of my work. I cannot even begin describe how shocking it was that they intentionally reduce the sharpness of my photographs in a manner that is very, very visible. Caveat emptor.

Similarly I tried Squarespace a couple of years ago and they recommended downsizing photographs prior to posting. WTF? Smugmug encourage you to load full size JPEG's and they automatically downsize depending on the circumstances. They also allow your clients to download different sizes for different purposes.

I am going to use Squarespace or Wordpress for my more commercially oriented website, a purely headshot-driven business with calendar and deposits integrated with the website, along with heavy SEO.

My Smugmug website looks gorgeous on my iPhone, by the way, without any additional programming. Highly responsive.

Bottom line is that Smugmug is excellent for photographers that do engage in sales (or not), but nothing is perfect.

I noticed that The Terms of Use and Privacy Policy do not state in what time frame the company permanently deletes the user's data from their servers and vague on what data the staff can access. So I emailed the questions to the company. After a chain of emails I got 'Deleted files are not totally deleted from the servers for a period of time', 'if you need files to be removed from the server immediately after you delete them, we're not the right service for you', 'I am unable to share this information with you', 'It's longer than a day and less than 10 years'. I don't understand why the information regarding users' privacy and personal information has to be so vague. As a consumer I want the company to take responsibility for removing my content in a reasonable amount of time. I want to know that it complies with the legislation on Protection of Personal Information, but the company refuses to provide me with specific answers. After reading this site, I wonder if the company chooses to keep the data for as long as they can afford in hope that the user might want to pay to access the data at a later time, which I believe shall not be allowed without explicitly stating it in the Terms of Use. In addition, I learned that 'Yes, our Heroes need to be able to access all sections of an account. We can't see passwords or credit card numbers. But we can see all content in a gallery and all comments, titles, captions and keywords.' I wonder what is the need for that access and if the access to my comments and titles is necessary to provide The Service. What 'make me an island' setting even means if the employees can browse through my data at their leisure without my awareness. On the positive note, I appreciate that the company extended my trial period and allowed me to tests the features that I wanted to use. I found the service quick and reliable during that time. I did not use commercial options, though, so cannot comment on that. However, I feel dispirited and violated at the thought that my content can be accessed by the employees without my explicit permission and that my data can be stored for an unknown period of time even though I requested it to be deleted. It puts my personal information in jeopardy because it might expose it to hacker attacks at the time when the data shall not even be in the company's servers. I noticed that the company did not reply to reviews on this site, but I hope that the owners of this family owned business will care enough to make changes to their policies and be transparent on them with their customers. I hope that this review will help them to improve the service, which is a great idea for family archives.

Smugmug - a culture of sorcery.

I love SmugMug... or did. I have been a Pro customer there for many years. The features of the site up until now have been excellent. (the jury is still out on the "new" format) I have been advertising for them since day 1. On photography sites, forums, and blogs, I have been encouraging people to try them out. I was spending a lot of time promoting their site - and expecting nothing in return.

I have been having an on-going issue with the so-called "sorcerers" at SmugMug. For those unfamiliar with SmugMug, they dress up like sorcerers, paint their faces like demonic junkies, and then send the photos to you whenever you submit a service ticket. For what purpose - I have no idea. I don't want to see their religious imagery, and it adds nothing to their service - in fact it demeans people of Godly faith.

When I asked nicely that they not send the inappropriate photos, they literally laugh, and flat out refuse. They say that it is their "culture" there. A culture of sorcery. Which is fine - they can do whatever they want in their own time - but they should not be forcing their chosen culture on their customers. Especially when it is demonic in nature. They should be respecting other people, and other cultures, not forcing theirs on people who don't worship evil.

I sent a letter to the management, begging them to stop sending the inappropriate photos, and even they didn't care. Their "culture" is also one of arrogance and apathy. They honestly don't care at all about who they offend. This must be a highly valued religion for them, to demand to force these photos on people.

For those who have had real life experiences with the occult and the principalities and powers of darkness - you would question the wisdom of creating a culture of the occult to operate a business from. But amazingly - that is what they have chosen to do. They have no respect for anyone with values contrary to their own. They don't care how many people are harmed by the occult, they just want to force it on everyone.

You can only imagine that the leadership is very immature and totally ignorant of the very occult that they embrace and promote. They claim to be focused on the customer, when in fact they ignore and mock them.

There are some very nice support people there who do respect us when they e-mail, but they are very rare. They were able to provide excellent service for years without this nonsense. Perhaps they are too big now to care about their customers.

So I will be leaving... no matter what the new system looks like. For every person that complains about something - there are many more that will say nothing.

It is very unfortunate that people there just don't care about others. Selfishness is such a pitiful thing. They would otherwise be a fabulous site. As they were in the past. I don't want to fund their culture of hatred and disrespect for others.

I signed up for the "all features included" free trial. Not to test their storage features, but to actually sell something and see how smooth this goes.

My first visual impression wasn't really good. Everything looked somewhat amateurish and navigating through the page was way less intuitive than I know it from other similar websites. I would describe the look and feel of the page as outdated, but I guess one can get used to it.
After setting up a gallery and sharing the link with my buyer, she placed an order and everything went it's way: my buyer ordered and payed, As usual SmugMug subtracted the printing costs as well as their own processing fees from the amount she payed. So I went ahead and filled in my information so I can get my share. However, I never received a payment. No money, no note from SmugMug, nothing, just silence.

I contacted SmugMug support to notify them about the missing payment. Here is the answer I got:

"... Let me explain: your account is a trial account that has never been paid for. In order to get paid, you need to sign up and pay for your account so we can then send you your profit..."

I went back to the Terms of Use to read them again and see what I've missed before signing up, but couldn't find anything about that. I signed up for an "all featured included" trial during which I was able to sell and was able to fill in my payment information. I earned money during the trial, and now SmugMug is sitting on my money unwilling to give it to me unless I give them $20 or whatever such a pro account costs. However, during my trial I decided that I don't like it, so why should I sign up?

I strongly disagreed with them and started a longer email discussion during which they defended themselves by telling me that the information about the required pro account is given on their help page. While trying to explain to them that

- it is not okay to hide costs on a help page and not mention it in the Terms of Use,
- they should disable the sales features for trial members,
- they could at least implement a warning on their website, letting a user know when leaving the free trial area,
I kept getting arrogant lines like this:

"Please be sure to check out the complete Pro section of our Help section. It is loaded with easy to understand information."

How do you dare doing this while sitting on someone else's money?
After spending hours writing emails to SmugMug and defending my point, they told me that I would receive my money after waiting for it for 4 months.

My common sense tells me to stay away from anyone who acts like this, and I recommend you to do the same. It just leads to trouble sooner or later. This was a very insightful trial.

I have had Smugmug for about 5 years now, and I have wanted to complain so many times. The main reasons for this is the unfulfilled promises the company makes, especially with SEO. There is absolutely NO SEO used at Smugmug, and they make little or no effort to promote photography websites subscribed to their service. Number 2 is the e-commerce side of their service is also absolutely useless. That is if you are willing to make literally pennies for your published work. In general, Smugmug has been cleverly running on greed and lack of quality they state they have. Again, in general, even though I am a successful workshop leader; the Smugmug platform has added absolutely nothing to my product.