SmugMugReviews 76

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.

First, I been with Smugmug for two years. Initially, I had trouble creating a design that I like, you just need to be a website designer to be able to do it. But they have plenty options already pre-made. However, after everything was set and go, I just do my job, upload my pictures, and they do the rest saving me money and time by not needing to contract an employee to manage, sell, accounting, for the pictures I sell. They have great professional printing with many options; I would like more options on professional art paper, but 90% of my business printing is done through them. Because their cost on printing, my personal printing is mostly done with other companies.

SmugMug's customer support is AWFUL. If there is a problem with their software, they would rather blame their customers and tell them they're "doing it wrong" than offer to have a SmugMug engineer troubleshoot an issue (which is not at all user error). To make matters worse, just try contacting customer support by phone. They do not have a phone number for their customers to call! At all. It's email-only customer support. If you have an issue with a support rep, good luck getting a response from a supervisor. They do not believe in speaking with human beings by phone. As for their software, their "Download All" link is supposed to result in an email being sent to your email address with a link to a zip file of your photos. What has been happening, repeatedly, is that when clicking this link one time (and one time only), SmugMug begins to download all of your gallery photos. If you have hundreds of images in a given gallery, we're talking over 1 GB of images easily. When you have a client who wants to download their images, they need the link to the zip file. SmugMug is awful, unprofessional, and their customer support stinks. Give your money to another business that has more respect for its clientele.

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.

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.

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.