Sharing Photos with
SmugMug Review
Upload and share your priceless photos in a style you want, while every original is safe and secure.
Don't let Social Media sites reduce the quality of your brilliant images!
There are 4 user account tiers; Basic, Power, Portfolio & Pro. I cover the best features below.
Features
- Unlimited Storage - Up to 150mb/210mp each.
- Fully Customisable - Easy drag & drop user interface.
- Responsive Layout - Also magic on tablets & mobile devices.
- Custom Domain - Use your own domain name.
- Simple Organisation - Drag & drop user interface.
- Easy Sharing - Share to social networks & forums.
- Always Live, Always Fast - 99.97% uptime (monitored over 3 months).
- Awesome Apps - Built by SmugMug, integrates with SmugMug.
- Safe & Secure - Amazing infrastructure with AWS.
- HD Video - Up to 3gb in size, 1080p.
- Privacy at Your Control - Password protect galleries, or your whole site.
- Commerce for Professionals - Essential one-click shopping, branding & watermarks.
- Client Area - Client login & unique page for your clients.
- Super Hero Support - Just send them an email.
- Forum Community - Digital Grin Photography forum, passionate users & support heroes.
Unlimited Storage
All user accounts
Exactly what it means, unlimited uploads & storage. Though, SmugMug does say "within reason". Accepted file types are JPG, GIF, and PNG. The current size limitations are 150 megabytes and 210 megapixels. Anything over, they will try to resample it.
Fully Customisable
Power, Portfolio & Pro accounts
Basic users can customise their homepage, but not full freedom customisation like Power plans and above. The super simple drag-and-drop system makes it very easy to design without any code. There is no 3rd party Javascript, but add as much custom css as you like.
Custom Domain
Power, Portfolio & Pro accounts
Use your very own domain name, up to 50 characters max. It's as simple as setting up a CNAME and domain forwarding with your registrar. Take advantage of the new generic top-level domains (gTLD), such as .pics .photo .photos and .photography.
Responsive Layout
All user accounts
A passive feature. Up to half of your traffic will be from a mobile device these days. A responsive website is imperative to provide all visitors an optimal viewing experience.
Easy Sharing
All user accounts
Share to various social media sites, a forum, or simply get a link for any image, album or folder. Share a photo/album via email from your SmugMug account, that includes read and click statistics. Displaying certain geotagged photos or albums on an interactive map is a great feature.
Simple Organisation
All user accounts
Simply drag and drop photos, folders or galleries within the organiser, just like your computer. There's many sort options, or just click and drag the order you want. You can have up to 5 levels deep of folders, though I haven't gone past 3 levels with well over 5000 photos.
Always Live, Always Fast
All user accounts
I signed up for a Standard Pingdom account for 3 months (Dec 2013 - Jan 2014) and had it monitor various sites, on various hosting platforms. SmugMug was consistently the best, outperforming sites on expensive VPS plans. Pingdom reported 5 minuscule outages with 99.97% uptime and 873ms average response time.
Safe & Secure
All user accounts
Amazon Web Services (AWS) stores and backs up every image and video, with multiple redundancy. Content is delivered with Amazon Cloudfront CDN for added speed. SmugMug is much more reliable than backing up with removable media. It's easy for owners to download original photos or whole albums at any time.
SmugMug App
All users with an iPhone, iPad or Android
A great addition to use with your SmugMug website. Upload all your photos and videos for sharing and secure backing up. Save galleries for offline viewing or mark them as favourites for quick access.
Apps for all devices
All users with appropriate macOS, Windows, or Apple TV
From your laptop or desktop, create folders and galleries, then upload to multiple galleries at the same time. If there's connection issues, it'll sort itself out and restart any files.
HD Video
All user accounts
Supports true HD, 1920 x 1080 pixels. Can be up to 20 minutes in length and 3 gigabytes in size. They don’t store the original uploaded video, they create a high quality display copy which is "probably altered" from the original. The playback hasn’t been that great in my experience (speed 7-9mb/s). SmugMug often had YouTube hosted video on their own homepage, not a great look if they host video themselves.
Privacy at Your Control
All user accounts
Password protect any folder, album or even your entire site. Use different passwords with password hints. An easy question that all your friends would know is a great way to keep out most strangers if that’s a concern. Right-click protection is a neat feature, but is only available for power users and above.
Commerce
Portfolio & Pro accounts
Not my forte I must say, but I reckon you won't be disappointed if that's your thing. Supposedly used by thousands upon thousands of professionals worldwide. Why would you pay an expensive web design company when you could easily do it all yourself? Pro users also get custom price lists, and can setup a password for an assistant that has less account privileges.
Client Area
Portfolio & Pro accounts
This premium private sharing feature allows you to create a fully customisable page for all of your clients. Send a private invitation and they create a SmugMug account to view their unique client page on your site. Don't bother messing around with various private links and passwords you send them.
Super Hero Support
All user accounts
Their support staff are called 'Support Heroes', and have avatars to suit. There is no support dashboard, all you do is email 1 standard help email address. Their response times are honestly outstanding 24/7, and quality of support is quite good. Though once or twice when they didn't quite read my email properly at first.
Forum Community
Available for everyone
Digital Grin, or dgrin.com forums has been around almost as long as Google. Mix with other photographers and share your gear, finishing techniques, photos, website etc. Also great for SmugMug support, especially SmugMug customisation.
Pricing
| Basic | Power | Portfolio | Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| $48/yr | $72/yr | $180/yr | $360/yr |
| $6/mo | $9/mo | $24/mo | $42/mo |
Summary
Obviously I think SmugMug overall is pretty awesome. They did hit a rough patch in August 2012, when they increased prices for some customers by 67% then released the long awaited 'new' SmugMug some 11 months later. I'm sure they've learnt some lessons during that fiasco. Anyway, SmugMug was founded in 2002, that's a wealth of time and experience delivering photos on the web.
Since the release of the 'new' SmugMug, I believe it's been nothing but popular. They've left no stone unturned, and I'm still finding nifty little features in the back end. I was a basic user for years, but recently upgraded to Power for deep customisation and a custom domain, without paying for the commerce options I'll never need.
I give SmugMug 4.5 out of 5.
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