SmugMug

Easy site creation and excellent image presentation. Support is excellent and always timely. Add the benefit of unlimited storage and you can't find a better option. I give Smugmug a galaxy of stars!

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.

In a time when customer service seems to be put on the back burner and trader for automated and other robotic sorts of responses to customers, SmugMug has totally surprised me. I had an issue with an order that could have been a big bust but I emailed them and wishing an hour, I had a response. My customers' order was held while they walked me through the process to correct this issue. On SUNDAY (today), they responded to me to confirm all is good and my client's order will be sent to the lab. Impressive!

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

Flickr is free but smugmug is worth the price of admission. I am not a pro photographer but I like my photos printed out on quality paper and I want my family to have access to my photos and to be able to print them out as well. I want to control who can view my photos and I definitely don't want my photos tagged all over the internet. For these reasons I am willing to pay the yearly fee for smugmug. Worth it in my book.

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.

Fabulous website - It takes a bit to learn how to navigate once you have joined, but overall we have had the best experience with it.

Very nice.

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.