SmugMug Reviews

(based on 8 reviews)

184 of 342 people found this review helpful

I have used many of the photo sharing sites listed over the last 15 years and have settled on SMUGMUG as the best fit for my needs. Sharing thousands of travel and family photos is a major project and SMUG handles that task very well. Here are some of my reasons;

1) Look and feel of the site is very professional (3 levels of service)
2) Sharing pics with others is easy (Facebook or email)
3) Support is responsive and detailed - the best I've found
4) Maintaining pics in a tree-structure is convenient and quick (I have >30,000 currently)
5) Creating the 'look' of your site can be challenging, but it works
6) Tracking usage could be more user friendly or automated, but is workable
7) Additional levels of folders would be appreciated (7 is max)

If I could combine a few features from Flickr(fan support) and FOTKI(structure) with the reliability and look of SMUG I would have the ideal photo sharing site.

In summary, I would recommend SmugMug to a friend.

206 of 347 people found this review helpful

I have been a SmugMug customer in 2011, as I wanted to create a familyalbum to show my familymembers who live on the other side of the world. I tried Smugmug and bought a high user account with unlimited upload quantity. Only 2 months into the year I paid for and SmugMug suddenly changed it and set a cap of 100 GB for the high user account. I had only 2 months to upload the rest of my photos. My emails to Customer services were just answered with : tough luck.

I would not recommend SmugMug as all they are interested in is money.
I now tried JAlbum and please see my review there and am also unhappy with that.
In the end I think Flickr, offering 1 Terabyte absolutely for free may be my best bet.

In summary, I would not recommend SmugMug to a friend.

197 of 399 people found this review helpful

This was my response to SmugMug after I closed my account with them.

"""I left because I asked for help 3 different times and all I got was a link. The 3rd woman gave me a little more info but I was still left confused and she didn't seem to want to break it down anymore for me. I did not know what I was doing as far as changing my domain name, I already have one through Vista Print, I wanted your site but without smugmug in it, I didn't want to confuse my clients by changing, and it was like I had to beg for help and keep telling you I still needed help, over and over and over. Your employees could see that I needed more help and they were not willing to go any further to break it down so I could understand or give me the price for you to do it for me. I guess that she wanted to look, or sound smart. But it ended up with me closing my account with you. When I said I was very unhappy and couldn't understand and then asked her another question, she copied and pasted the... (Read the full review)

In summary, I would not recommend SmugMug to a friend.

227 of 424 people found this review helpful

Before you get too excited by all the Smugmug hype, be careful to check under the hood.

It's clear once you get into the nitty gritty details that this is a labor of love created and maintained by enthusiastic amateurs. This would be fine if the service wasn't being marketed to industry professionals.

Regular engagement of the Support team is necessary because things tend to disappear, change, stop working regularly etc. Response is rapid, but the personnel tend to consider you to be pretty dumb and assume from the beginning that you've done something stupid, without reading your ticket in any depth or doing any preliminary checking. Given most of the users are semi-pro or pro photographers, that attitude can be insulting.

A nice aspect is that you can make up for the lack of useful social engagement on the service by exporting full galleries to Facebook (at a functional low-rez), along with a supporting link to the full-size photo on Smugmug. Although that still limits your gallery's social life to your closed Facebook friend list, which has nothing on Flickr's built-in userbase, it's better than offering only a link to your gallery as Flickr does.

The galleries themselves are able to presented in... (Read the full review)

In summary, I would recommend SmugMug to a friend.

241 of 398 people found this review helpful

I'd be the first to acknowledge I have very limited expertise in tech things, but I'm also not as stupid as this site makes me feel. I bought a pro account, assuming it would be the most complete, as I need to be able to share certain galleries to clients, and be able to sell others. I have spent about 2-3 frustrating hours trying to navigate this thing about a dozen times in the last 3 mos and finally got so fed up I closed the account. You can chat fairly easily with tech support, and all but one were patient & tried to be helpful, but they never seemed to understand they were not talking to a programmer. The 'help' verbiage may make sense to professional IT people, but almost none of it did to me. Even the couple of things I did figure out stopped working because they did some 'updates'. This last update wouldn't even allow me to upload pictures unless I did them one at a time - that was quite a step backward.

There appears to be a very wide range of items that can be purchased with your photos on them, but some were rather... (Read the full review)

In summary, I would not recommend SmugMug to a friend.

208 of 397 people found this review helpful

I've been with SmugMug for over 6 years now and they are by far the best site I've ever found for hosting my photos. I use the Pro account for my business and in the last few years it has become the cleanest and most user friendly system around. My clients comment all the time about how incredibly easy it is to order pictures! And their partners for professional print labs are absolutely perfect. If you are signing up, remember to use a coupon code for $5 off: 7g9e01Kk2OUDM

In summary, I would recommend SmugMug to a friend.

250 of 498 people found this review helpful

I use both SmugMug and Snapfish. I love SmugMug for its security and great looking photo pages. The only criticisms so far is that sometimes it can be less than user-friendly and, I discovered today, you cannot rename a file which is something that I wanted to do to coordinate file names on a photo DVD and SmugMug. Even so, I would highly recommend it. I have not even tapped into many of its features.

In summary, I would recommend SmugMug to a friend.

284 of 529 people found this review helpful

As a professional photographer I use Smugmug not just for my professional shots, but also for family shots. The website is beautifully crafted and is a great way to showcase you work to any prospective clients, as well as share happy-snaps with friends and family alike.

You can set permissions and passwords on different folder to keep family and work albums seperate, and pictures can be viewed (and sold or downloaded if you allow) in a number of different resolutions, which is great as you can set it to view the medium-res shots and sell the hi-res shots to your customers. You can create albums within albums too, so that you can create a hierarchy of photographs to mirror how you store them on your hard drive.

Also, being able to store an unlimited number of full hi-res images online is a great comfort, as it means I won't lose all my photographs should my hard drive break or should my house burn down!

In summary, I would recommend SmugMug to a friend.