SmugMugReviews 76

I have had Smugmug for about 5 years now, and I have wanted to complain so many times. The main reasons for this is the unfulfilled promises the company makes, especially with SEO. There is absolutely NO SEO used at Smugmug, and they make little or no effort to promote photography websites subscribed to their service. Number 2 is the e-commerce side of their service is also absolutely useless. That is if you are willing to make literally pennies for your published work. In general, Smugmug has been cleverly running on greed and lack of quality they state they have. Again, in general, even though I am a successful workshop leader; the Smugmug platform has added absolutely nothing to my product.

I'M A WEDDING AND SOCIAL PHOTOGRAPHER BASED IN THE UK AND HAVE HAD A PRO ACCOUNT FOR OVER 10 YEARS. I HAVE 10'000'S OF CLIENTS PHOTOS HUNDREDS OF GALLERIES AND IT'S MY LIFELINE.
I UPLOADED A NUMBER OF NUDE PHOTOS INTO A GALLERY THAT WAS NOT PUBLISHED ON MY MAIN WEBSITE AND I THOUGHT IT WAS PRIVATE. I GET HUNDREDS OF EMAILS A DAY AND I OPENED AND READ AN EMAIL SENT TO ME SAYING I NEEDED TO REMOVE THE NUDE PHOTOS FROM THE GALLERIES. I HAVE HAD LIMITED / NO INTERNET ACCESS AND ON SATURDAY THE COMPANY DELETED MY ACCOUNT. 30,000 PHOTOS GONE OVER 10 YEARS OF BUSINESS GONE. I AM ALSO GOING THROUGH A SEPERATION AND AM BEING FORCED TO SALE THE STUDIO AND HOUSE. TO AMKE MATTERS WORSE I WAS TOLD THAT MY FLICKR ACCOUNT HAS BEEN TERMINATED TO - I KNOW IDEA WHY. AVOID SMUGMUG

I ordered a picture to support a friend who is an entertainer. The price was okay (under$10). The order was delivered fairly fast. But the photo in hand was not clear. It appeared to show my friend better online than in the actual photo! That, I will not do again. Photo was too dark in person!

This platform may be good for the photogs but trying to access and place photos in your cart is incredibly difficult. I hate this. So much. Not user friendly at all.

I am not joking I am $#*!ing fuming right now. SmugMug literally sucks so bad. I am a photographer, and hadn't used the app in a while, I try to log back in and my account has all the sudden been $#*!ing closed?!?!?!? Well I have been contacting the support center for months and they have been so extremely unhelpful. I will never get those pictures from that account back, they have deleted my account and pictures. They $#*!ing suck please do not waste your money on this good for nothing peice of $#*! app, they are scamming and taking advantage of new photographers. This is literally $#*!ing bull$#*! im begging you please do not use this app. There is no support and no real person I can even ask about my account just a $#*!ing robot over email that barely even responds. If you give a $#*! about your pictures and your presentation when sending out edited photos do not use this app. I really am so mad right now. $#*! YOU SMUGMUG YOU PEICE OF $#*!ING UGLY $#*!

My photos came in a broken and bent box, and the portrait photos inside were crushed. It took forever to even find a way to correspond, and now I have to wait another two or three weeks for the photos, if they even replace them. No reason to put photos unprotected in a flimsy, flat box.

I'll probably skip them next time.

Stuart Skalka photographer is an unethical a business person. He enters into business transactions then attempts to defraud the other party by threatening to make false claims and leave bad reviews if they don't pay him money or give him deep discounts posthumously. He did this to us. He will buy expensive stuff on his credit card then make up false claims to dispute the charge.

Stuart Skalka photographer is an untrustworthy con artist with a nasty vindictive streak. He actually targets business with intentions of doing them harm as personal favors for friends. You should not do business with him ever or risk getting scammed like I was.

As a photographers website Smugmug falls well short. No blog or linked 3rd party options, prints cannot have a border added. Limited framing, printing and size options yet their print labs offer options. Smugmug is just lazy i guess and won't add them to their websites shopping cart. Basic printing takes weeks. Plus the overall look of their platform and templates are outdated. Not worth the 400+ dollars for business accounts.

Extremely disappointed I bought Springtail from them. They ended up having a parasitic fungus that killed off all my hissing cockroaches hundreds of dollars down the drain reached out to them through Facebook. I was blocked not once not twice but three times reached out through Instagram immediately blocked.

I'm seriously thinking about choosing an alternative because I've been complaining for some five years now about the excessive P&P charges which most consumers would not pay, £3.45 for a 99p print or two. I get between 1-2k viewings per day and yet I've had less than 50 purchases in five years. But it has to be said that the print quality is superb but definitely not worth the P&P charges.

I've used Smugmug for about 2 years now for storing photo galleries and even some video footage as well. It's reaelly useful, except for the account creation process. I lost a gallery [eventually my entire account with approx. 30+ galleries and 100s of gb worth of content] because I decided to 'complain' to their service team. Imagine that!

I was fortunate enough to be offered a gift account through my professor. I delivered one gallery to a client but it created a second account when I switched to my personal email due to their very confusing login process. I. E. If you login to an account on any browser you can log out but you are not able to attempt to login to a different account. Even if I knew my account was cloned, I wouldn't be able to access it unless I downloaded a new browser. So I am on this trial account that eventually gets deleted along with a gallery I created. I had all other galleries on my paid-for account so I didn't notice the gallery was missing.

I reached out for support for help and they told me I only owned a free trial account and that the files were deleted. They don't tell you (transparently) your photos will be deleted permanently and instead advertise a safe storage space. This is fine and I understand you can't store everybody's unpaid for content forever, the thing is, my current account stated that it had 2 emails on it under the settings, so I have no clue how on earth a cloned account using the same email was ever possible. And it's because a second email CAN appear on your account but it is under the 'new email' section, so it technically isn't on the account yet. Instead of hearing me out they responded to me with a very 'no' attitude instead of apologizing. Since I have a gift account they made sure to hold that $#*! over my head (See convo below) instead of just apologizing. It's literally so easy to apologize to people. I work in service. Apologize for the inconveniences of your services instead of highchairing it.

I truly wanted to be a fully subscribed customer and was shocked when their laughable customer service They delete content after "a month or so" of not paying, which is fine but they're so weird about it (I really had to pry to get that answer from them). If I could pay to get that lost gallery back I would and continue to use my subscription, but not after this.

For those thinking I am dumb for somehow cloning my account, that's fair, but it's extremely confusing to know if you did or didn't when they both look like they share the same email (but don't).

Edit: I just went to login to my account to get a proof of purchase, but they deactivated my account. Nice job guys. Real helpful! Way to be the bigger person. All I'm doing is complaining about their terrible login system and they take so much offense to it that they deactivate my account and I lose all my galleries. Not even surprised to be honest.

Smugmug has some serious flaws especially when trying to share a gallery with a featured graphic to a FB posting. I got very little help from support and I am still unable to complete this project for a client.

After using SmugMug (SM) Power Plan for almost a year, side by side with Gphotos (GP), uploading 40k photos and hundreds of videos, and having 20 years web design experience, I feel uniquely qualified to comment on the platform. I must say that I really wanted to like SM as I saw them as the "good guy" when compared to GP.

For starters, it was a nightmare to upload that many photos/videos to the SM system, and it took over 2 weeks using a 50mb fiber connection, so many interruptions and no ability to confirm what was uploaded and what was not (obviously it was their server). GP had no problems. When it comes to mobile, Android worked much, much better than Apple OS uploading and sync. The whole process set the stage for a non-intuitive, pain-in-the-butt experience over the last 10 months using SM, while on the other side, using GP was a rich, fun, intuitive experience.

I was able to setup a functioning site, but in hide-sight, I would have rather just built my own off-platform site. Compared with GP, SM lacks any useful AI such as face recognition and auto grouping, etc. Editing tools and share tools are limited. Depending on where you are in the SM system, sometimes I couldn't directly share, and it was confusing. I constantly felt like I was fighting with the platform when using SM. In short, SM lacks the features GP has, and is clearly overpriced when experienced side-by-side. That said, if you're selling wedding photos perhaps it's a good platform, but for anyone else, it's a fail.

Another troubling issue: When I cancelled two months early, they immediately deleted by account rather than allowing it to exist throughout the prepaid year, bad actor. I did contact SM support several times and they did respond, but were only able to say sorry, that doesn't work right now... no real solutions for my problems. I cannot recommend SmugMug for anyone beyond wedding photographers. Sorry SM, you're a fail.

On the other hand, I upgraded my Google Photos to the 200gb level and I'm happy as a clam.

Of note, SmugMug really is being outgunned by Google and the other Meta companies, and they're slowly dying. Think Yahoo, just the wrong business strategy to keep up with the big boys... So sad. Too bad they waited for me to cancel before they were interested in how I was feeling.

I've been using the paid "Power" plan of SmugMug for 6 months now while simultaneously using Google Photos. While neither are perfect, the clear winner for me is Gphotos. I'm an experienced web designer for over 20 years and have amassed 40k photos and videos of my life. The plan was to upload all these files to my SM account to sort and display the best of the best. I used a custom domain name and put together sharing albums, and it looked good. However, all the ticks in the system were a constant fight and irritating. When I would email CS they were responsive, but never had a solution. Even asking how much space do my photos use on the server were beyond their ability. I didn't find it as intuitive as Gphotos, the AI is first gen, the phone apps have issues, and it just isn't worth committing to the long term with their platform. I wanted to like SmugMug, but I don't.

I used Smug Mug for over a decade but am switching over to Shutterfly but thoroughly enjoyed my experience with Smug Mug. They make really good prints and even great blown up prints as well. Good Bye Smug Mug!

Was with them for years but they only offer good deals for new subscribers. My renewal was rubbish compared. Emailed them and they basically said "bye". Fine with me. Go elsewhere, these guys are so far behind these days.

Smugmug is a great photo site but only allows payment by saved credit card numbers. They don't notify you when your card is going to be charged. They don't give you an option for other forms of billing.

Smug Mug knows they have a problem in Safari but won't fix it. Works fine in Chrome which i don't use.

Iv had a paid account on SmugMug for years. All of a sudden they are saying I violated their terms and terminated my account. They just cut it off with no notice. I never changed any settings in my account! They say it was public when in fact it was private and unlisted and the only way to find it is if you had the link. The woman who emailed me abut this is Jenny she does not know how to do business. The email said I had 72 hours to tend to this but the next day it was closed. There was no details on what the issue was and now they are ignoring my questions and concern about the matter. I never had any issue until this woman got involved in my account. Instead of fixing the problem, if their even was one. On their own and letting me know what is going on they just cut off my entire work. They have my card info and personal photos. They had no problem charging my card every month and raising the price but their customer service is trash. I'm glad they terminated my account who wants to support and trust a website that treats their customers like this. Very unprofessional. So rude. 2 stars because if their were smart employees in charge they would have more business.