SmugMugReviews 76

I placed a good sized order with SmugMug as part of a fundraiser for a local animal shelter. They charged my card right away, never sent a receipt, and never sent the products. There is no way from the website for someone purchasing this way to reach anyone for help. Looks like it's a scam.

We had SmugMug for 6 months. We're not a photography studio, so our business was a bit different. We work with children and needed various password protected galleries. We had over 50 customers complain about how to navigate SmugMug and using passwords. When we reached out to SmugMug for help, they cancelled us! We just wanted some assistance on how to work the bugs out, but customer service and support for existing customers is obviously something they aren't interested in. We just wanted a 10 minute phone call, but that was beneath them. If you're a business looking for support and help, don't use SmugMug

Plain and simple, they are thieves. They advertise one thing, you buy it, get used to using it then they "update" removing some of the key features which were selling points that helped you make your decision. When you contact their support Heros, they just say, sorry it's changed we are aware and we don't know when or if it will be back but here's a long winded way of doing it and no you can't have a percentage of the extortionate amount of money you pay for the service back.

SmugMug seems to be very controlling in their ways to me and has their hands in your pockets a lot. They take a subscription fee and then take commissions on your sales and then basically pay you when they tell you they will... just feels unpleasant to me and way too controlling. I am using them for now because I don't have another option, but when I do I'm gone. Their email support is responsive, but would much prefer phone support anyway of the week to this back and forth email nonsense. It is very simple to setup and get up and running... just the heart of SmugMug doesn't seem to kind and helpful and seems more greedy and controlling which. Gives me a bad taste in my mouth.

Smugmug manages photographs beautifully, displaying them in a high quality that I've not seen other site providers match. It has all the features that a photographer could want, in my experience, if you are building a portfolio-driven website. The customer service is email only but in my personal experience it is excellent. (Really very consistently excellent.). Building a website is a little more tedious than Squarespace or Wix but it's just fine once you get over the initial learning curve. There are videos and help text to assist with that.

As I said, Smugmug is oriented towards portfolio-driven photography websites but it does have many features to assist with sales. There is no blogging feature beyond treating a blog post like any other page to build. There is no built-in integration of calendar, invoice, etc, but you can use external services like Square for that.

On the other hand, if you are ONLY seeking a service for DELIVERY of photographs to clients then Pixieset or Shootproof are more user friendly, but CAUTIONl: I tried Shootproof and quickly backed off because they made my photographs look fuzzy! I work so hard to have sharp photographs! That is an important part of the beauty of my work. I cannot even begin describe how shocking it was that they intentionally reduce the sharpness of my photographs in a manner that is very, very visible. Caveat emptor.

Similarly I tried Squarespace a couple of years ago and they recommended downsizing photographs prior to posting. WTF? Smugmug encourage you to load full size JPEG's and they automatically downsize depending on the circumstances. They also allow your clients to download different sizes for different purposes.

I am going to use Squarespace or Wordpress for my more commercially oriented website, a purely headshot-driven business with calendar and deposits integrated with the website, along with heavy SEO.

My Smugmug website looks gorgeous on my iPhone, by the way, without any additional programming. Highly responsive.

Bottom line is that Smugmug is excellent for photographers that do engage in sales (or not), but nothing is perfect.

They've no way to restore collections which could waste you hours or days. No point in time complete restore either. Collections are really shortcuts effectively to images in folders, which is the primary way to display and group images together to show on your website with them. So after a folder restore (because it's very easy to delete the folder rather than 1 file in the folder) you need to start from scratch. Say you have a folder(bucket) called USA, and create collections by city, type: landscape, wildlife and go through and select all sorts of files into collections. If ever you deleted that folder and they restore the photos folder for USA, all your images in collections displayed on your site are gone. After restoring support don't advise you of this, you find out. Then you send a nice polite email asking about if they can do a complete point in time restore, or restore everything, and no they can not. Support is fast but you don't get any humanity, hi, thanks for reaching out, it's condescending and feels officiate. Smug tones

I have set up a smugmug site as I read about it having the best looking photos from a viewing point of view. Found it very hard to figure out what to do. I hadn't done a website before. Just wanted a family sharing website. Everything seems round the house to do and you have to spend a lot of time trying things out and repeatedly contacting the help desk.

My suggestion is to look at the Ryan Oakley youtube tutorials. They are pretty good. But they don't go over the various security settings so there is quite a lot of trial and error there, trying to get your head round getting the right settings for your needs. You need to have another browser open as you set up your site and then you can monitor the changes you make on a second browser.

One other thing to note, I found quite a good set of tutorials on the paid learning site lynda.com. I think if I'd found that beforehand it would have helped a lot. It's a 2 hour series of videos done in 2017.

I did persist with this and it's been ok now but it's quite involved to set up your site and you would have to devote time to it and look at the youtube tutorials several times over. I do like the fact that you can link your smugmug site up with apple tv and view the photos on your tv.

It would be good if smugmug did an introductory video tutorial explaining what is involved in setting up a website with their software.

Setting up a website involves many complicated and time-consuming steps. Many of these could be made more simple, like adding a home icon rather than instructing the client to go through multiple steps to direct visitors to a home page. Almost every step was fraught with unnecessary difficulties necessitating multiple questions to the help center. They should take a lesson from apple, where doing things is basically intuitive. If I hadn't already done the work to upload photos, I would have started with another company.

Smugmug permanently lost precious photos of my children in a musical show. I took photos of the rehearsal with my camera and uploaded them. Less than a week later, I tried to upload a semi-professional's photos of the show. But when I tried to upload them, the site refused them, saying they were "duplicates." Since the other photographer did have access to my photos and since I figured his copies might would be better than mine, I clicked "Replace." But when I checked, my precious, unbacked-up photos, were gone. I immediately contacted Smugmug, who assured me (falsely) that they could be recovered the following Monday. But when Monday came Smugmug claimed there was no backup to my original photos. They also revealed that the photos they label as "duplicates" are NOT duplicates at all - they are simply photos with the same number. And worse, Smugmug does not retain backup files - does not even create them - SO WHEN YOU CLICK "REPLACE" YOU PERMANENTLY DELETE YOUR PRECIOUS ORIGINAL PHOTOS. SMUGMUG DOES NOT RETAIN ANY BACKUP COPIES OF YOUR PHOTOS - SO IT CANNOT RECOVER THE REPLACED PHOTO.

Ironically, Smugmug does have some way to recover photos that are DELIBERATELY deleted - but for whatever reason, it has no way to recover photos that end up getting over-written by its false information about duplicates.

Smugmug needs to fix this serious error before more people lose their photos. It needs to invest in REAL duplicate image identification (free on web), immediately add warnings or simply remove the "Replace" option, and start backing up files on a server, so that they can be recovered if a request is made timely - as mine was.

In a time when customer service seems to be put on the back burner and trader for automated and other robotic sorts of responses to customers, SmugMug has totally surprised me. I had an issue with an order that could have been a big bust but I emailed them and wishing an hour, I had a response. My customers' order was held while they walked me through the process to correct this issue. On SUNDAY (today), they responded to me to confirm all is good and my client's order will be sent to the lab. Impressive!