Anyone have any thoughts on Smugmug?

I use Smugmug but not for business. It was a big help for me being able to use it to link my pictures instead of trying to comply with POTN's 150kb rule when posting pictures on the site.

I love it very much. I just got it for my photography so customers can get prints. Before that I used it for many years for another business. I stored business pictures and "nonprofessional" images there for customers to get. I could watermark them, and hide them and I have tons of other galleries hidden that I used to back stuff up like logos, flyers etc.

It also let's u host movies, so I would post movies for my clients to see themselves training or competing and evaluate problems. All of this was password protected. I even can upload vids of my class and send to my teacher in another state for critique.

It's a wonderful idea and has tons of use beyond photography. The second one I just use for my photography work.

Does anyone know: can u have someone customize amugmug so that it has individual logins and I can let each person see specific galleries. Ex: person 1 gets a login and can see gallery 1,2,3 and person 2 only sees 4,5,6. The only way I know to do this now is password protect galleries but if someone shares the password it would get out to the rest. Id have no recourse bc the password would be the same for a number of people the way it is now. Any ideas?

I don't know about Smugmug, but what I do on my host, PBase, is I set up a "Main" gallery for each individual that has "private" galleries. The Main gallery is not "visible" to the public. I give the individual the path to their Main and a password unique to that person. The Main gallery then has sub-galleries for each shoot.

I don't know if that helps at all, but that's how I roll!

That sounds pretty good tony but does phase do videos?

And do if I follow u can set up a gallery for cust 1 and for cust 2 and both can see / not see whatever you select?

abbypanda wrote in post #14576613
That sounds pretty good tony but does phase do videos?

And do if I follow u can set up a gallery for cust 1 and for cust 2 and both can see / not see whatever you select?

I'm really not sure if it does videos or not, I've never seen them though. I don't think it does.

As to the password-protected galleries, you can set a gallery to be only visible to a person with the path and password, so that's something I set -- each person has a path/password to their Main gallery and the Main gallery is "invisible" to the public.

Another SmugMug fan/user here as well. Have been a user for around 2 years, and several friends (just casual photographers, no pros) bought their own memberships after seeing it in action. I have had friends and family members order prints through them and they were very happy with the results.

And I agree with mbellot below -- I find their customer service to be outstanding.

I use smugmug as a hosting site, and to show examples of my sessions. If a package allows for digital files also, I upload the full sized image and allow right-click.
For weddings I use pictage.com. The quality of their prints and accessories is unmatched.
They color-correct if wanted, personally inspect photos before shipping, and even design albums for you. Pricey though, but worth it.

I like 500px.

@ab2...
Feel free to check out my Smugmug site.

www.michaelhendersonph​otography.com (hosted by go Daddy). You never see anything about GoDaddy. It simply provided me with a name and Smugmug links to it.

For example, go to Sports, pick a category, view a gallery, pick out several images and choose different size prints (or finish). Crop one or two to see what you will get. Then go to checkout. It will lead you through checkout and give you a final overview before making your purchase. NOTE: Don't enter your credit card info. Stop at that point. This should give you an idea of how a customer will do it.

Credit cards accepted from Visa, Mastercard, Discover and Amrican Express. They don't take PayPal.

Note: My site is simple and straightforward. No fancy stuff.

Hope this helps.
Mike

I love my smugmug site, too. Mine is www.photosbykas.com . I love that folks can buy straight off the website, as I have nowhere to decently print anything (unless you want Walmart pics...)

Because I generally shoot jpeg, I also use my smugmug site as a cloud backup for all my photo files. Unlimited storage for a price that's quite low compared to other cloud storage options.

Have been selling through them for the last 4 years. Not one customer complaint! (and none from me)

I was originally leaning towards smugmug, then in comparison to Zenfolio, it seemed that zen had more theme options that were different… Havent taken the plunge yet, but both look good and the only thing that would cause me to go to one or the other are what they have to offer theme wise.