SmugMugReviews 76

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.

I used to LOVE this product and referred it to many people. It was easy to use, affordable, reliable, great customization options. But then, they "Upgraded" and took away ALL my years (11) of customization. I am pretty savvy, but it's not intuitive. Nevertheless WHO WANTS to redo 11 years of customization? EVERY single album and gallery I had (and I have 100's) were customized with themes, wallpaper, color. They took it all away and put it all to brown adn black? I paid for that? Drag and drop doesn''t work, slow as mud. I have also been paying for video uploads, that don't work. I will be finding another product. It's like someone came into my house, ripped all my photos out of all of my scrapbooks and albums, and says, well you still have the photos! (Which is a huge relief, but to be honest, now I am concerned that I could loose them-because I now DON'T trust Smugmug now. I really really don't. Bad taste in mouth.

Just signed up for Pro Account. Seems like the learning curve for site will take a long time. Some of the basic things I needed I had to contact support. So far support has been fast and able to resolve problems I had. They even went into the site and cleaned up a mess I had made. We used a great site (Eventpix) that is no longer in business and allowed self fulfillment for orders that was perfect for the event photography we do. For now hopefully we will be able to steer customers to the Smugmug site to view photos then back to us to order. We tried Smugmug for a year a few years ago and it was more user friendly then now. With any luck they will streamline their business for event photographers who need to get pictures up the same or next day easily. I also noticed that at certain times the site seems slow or not responsive to changes and need to do over.

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.

It's the classic case of a company that over-promises and under delivers. Their site makes the service looks pretty awesome. However--
1. The product is surprising hard to navigate for all but the most basic functions
2. The support for use of the site is pathetic (how hard it is really to do good quality videos to clearly explain the product you make?)
3. If you ever have to call technical support there is no #800 and I'm sure it's because they can't afford to take calls with all the issues this product has
4. When you email Tech Support they simply deny there's an issue. See attached.

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 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

Smugmug appears to have all the bells and whistles of a top-notch site. Beautiful photography, well designed pages, and 23/7/365 customer support. Well, not really. You can email them, but I have only ever had one response. People stole pictures from my site for Christmas presents, but the water marks would not apply, and the no right click does not apply for every device, apparently. You are not secure. I purchased pictures with a printmark, received them without the printmark. What the heck am I paying for. Prints were awful with the wallet sized for one of my clients, color was different top to bottom and some of the prints were off-center, but nothing was done, I was told that sometimes happens. You can pay a lot of money for bells and whistles, only to find that it is smoke and mirrors. So sad.

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!

I have been a loyal SM customer for many years. Their hosting was great until the new version came out. I call it the "New Coke". New look (worse) and leaves you craving the Classic Coke. Converting to it takes months of hard work - which they demand you do for them.

Then they started e-mailing photos of themselves with every support e-mail. NOt just photos of themselves. No, they are so ashamed of how they look, that they paint their faces with religious imagery. I don't appreciate them sending these into my home. I pay them for hosting my photos, not promoting their religion at my expense.

Their support used to be excellent. Their hosting used to be excellent. They used to operate in a professional manner. Those days are gone. Too bad they are wanting to self-destruct.

They need to go on some serious customer support training courses, and learn what corporate professionalism looks like.

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.

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 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 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!