Thoughts on SmugMug???

Having recently been looking into hosting sites where I might be able to sell some of my work online, the one I've taken most interest in so far is http://www.smugmug.com

I was wondering if anyone here happens to have had any experiences (good, average or bad) in working through this site.

I'd also be interested to hear any recommendations of other similar sites that offer the same sort of service insofar as them taking care of all a buyer's needs (e.g. printing, framing, delivery, etc.), while paying the photographer 85% of the net profits and allowing the photographer to spend more time taking photos than dealing with other aspects of online sales.

Any/all feedback on this would be appreciated, thanks in advance :^)

Hi Ashley,
I have a website that's due to expire soon and so have been considering a choice between SmugMug and Zenfolio. At this point I plan to go with Zenfolio. That doesn't mean that I'm recommending that you should do so as well, only that you may wish to consider them. They use Mpix as their supplier.
My son recently went with Photoshelter, but as for me personally, the steep learning curve is more than I have patience for. Again, that's only a personal thing.

Another site you might want to consider is Picaholic. They are within a week or so of launching their new platform and with it they will provide integrated image selling through FOTOMOTO. FOTOMOTO takes care of everything for you from the sale to printing to shipping. I have has a Picaholic site for years and have always been satisfied. Now with the new platform coming out I am expecting it to be even better. Give Picaholic a look if you are still looking for options. Again, the online shopping is not currently available, but it will be within a week or so. At least that is what they have been telling all of their current customers. Cheers. Ron B

Ashley, I have been on smugmug since January, and have been more than pleased with their support and customer service. The lab I use (it is your choice of 2) BayPhoto is top shelf in my opinion. It has many options, and product can be drop shipped to the consumer or personal delivery. Take a look at my site "theoldsouthphotography.com" I sure don't have any experience building a site, but found smugmug easy. Good luck.
Bob

Hi Ashley

I've been using SmugMug for a little over two years. As one who has virtually no skill in website esoterica, SmugMug has been satisfactory for me. Printing is reasonable cost, good quality, fast delivery.

Ashley, I have been using SmugMug for some time now and have been very pleased. Their customer service is first rate. If you want to customize your site, they will guide you along. It's quick and easy to upload your images, move them around, tag them, whatever you want to do. I give the SmugMug Heroes a big thumbs up.

If you want to see how I created mine, you can go to:
www.barbarasammons.com

Good luck with whatever service you choose.

I am absolutely bonkers about SmugMug. Best photographic move I ever made, & have never looked back. (I think my site is in my siggy, so check it out!) I've been with them for (I think) 4 yrs. now. Like others have said, customer service is personal & great. I checked out Zenfolio, but found SmugMug to have much more flexibility, and in constant improvement. I knew nothing whatsoever about html, CSS, web design, Javascript, etc. & yet I was able to get the bulk of my customization of my site done in a couple days with all the cut & paste customization help they have. I could hardly believe it, honestly, and there are so many highly-unique-looking sites on SmugMug. I'm never quite "finished" with my site, & will always be tinkering around with stuff I'm sure. I'd like to have a more unified look to it someday, but haven't taken that plunge yet. (I use lots of different themes in different galleries).

It's nice to have the choice of two different excellent printing company choices. And there are so many ways to configure your galleries for more/less privacy, or more/less sharing ability, or more/less copyright safety. (with various watermarking options, RCP, unlisted or password-protected galleries when needed, and even hidden photos that only you can see, or choosing whatever display sizes you want) SmugMug has partnerships with various companies like Animoto and Blurb, so you can easily do things with a gallery of photos & those companies. LightRoom 3 also has SmugMug compatibility. Well, I could go on and on, but I've gotta get back to work! If you'd like $5 off your membership after your 30-day trial period is over, you're welcome to use my coupon code link: https://secure.smugmug.com/signup.mg?Coupon=HFaUrxtTLo2jg I think once you've logged in with that code (you'll want a site-name ready to go) it'll automatically give you the $5 off when you actually have to pay after the 30 days are up. Or if you've already tried them before, you can just use this coupon code: HFaUrxtTLo2jg in the coupon field at the end of the trial. I have an email contact on my site if you have any questions. SmugMug has some cool things in the works right now that I know will improve the site even more, such as extra category layers & new themes & bigger homepage image- thumbs. SEO is improving all the time too; it recently got much better in terms of Google's Image Search. Ok, must run. Good luck deciding!!

P.S. Yes, http://winsomeworks.com (see below for link) is my SmugMug site. I bought my own domain & put my SmugMug on it. I have slideshows and "badges" (small rectangle full of pop-up photos from a SmugMug gallery) on other sites (and blogs) that link to my site.

I had a trial with SmugMug, used Photoshelter for a year or so and ended up on Zenfolio. IMO both SmugMug and Photoshelter have more difficult interfaces to navigate and set up. Also Photoshelter has built-in Photo Quote pricing for licensing images which makes it more expensive. If you're selling your images to stock buyers that may be a plus for you.

Choosing a web home for your photos is a lot like the "What's the best camera?" question. What's best is the one that best fits your individual needs. For me that was Zenfolio.

I love Zenfolio! I hate their templates but was able to get a look that I liked for my site my using their customization features. For the price, it is an incredible level of service and options. I have not sold my work through the site, but plan to set that up and think that the options will work very well for me. I recommend Zenfolio without reservation, but do go into it knowing that it is not a perfect system (for example, you have to manually add images to more than one gallery - all small stuff). If you use Lightroom, there is a great free uploading plug-in that makes that process fairly easy. There is also a service available to integrate Facebook and Zenfolio so that your full portfolio appears on Facebook (you can see how it works by going to my Facebook page - linked below - and clicking on image gallery on the left). I also tried SmugMug and found Zenfolio to be MUCH, MUCH better.

I have used Smugmug for a few years now. Good customer services and enough options if you are willing to put the work in to explore how to do it. You do need to learn a few basic skills (which can be picked up on their support site) if you want to bring it beyond the basic look. Great value for the relative low cost. My site is at www.EwertNaturePhotography.com.

Good luck.

My issue with smugmug is that they all look the same. Sure you can make your site purple and green if you want (not sure why you would) but in the end they just don't have much personality to them, you can tell it's smugmug as soon as the home page loads. But if a cookie cutter site is all you need it probably will due.

Many thanks for all your valued feedback Nancy, Ron, Robert, Buck, Barbara, Anna, Jim, Sarah, Daniel, and Brad :^)

I'm now looking into Zenfolio, Photoshelter and Picaholic/PHOTOMOTO.

I had a brief look at all of your personal sites (very impressed with the quality of all photos I've seen BTW!) and even checked out some of the prices you guys at SmugMug are asking for respective prints. This is another point of interest for me - what can I realistically price my images at without pricing myself out of the market so to speak? - and I was surprised to see that everyone is using very different price scale for their work ranging from (taking the smallest size: 4 x 6 Print - Lustre as an example) $0.21 up to $4 and anywhere between.

Being that I'm looking more toward a site that will create the greatest opportunity for generating an income, rather than simply a place to post my work up for others to view and (hopefully!) appreciate online, I guess my decision will be based more upon feedback I'm hoping to receive from others as to what kind of monthly or yearly income they've been able to make by way of their preferred host.

Working on the assumption that this kind of information is something most would rather not post up on public forums, I'll take the liberty of contacting a number of you by personal email ;^)

Many thanks again one and all, and wishing each of you a wonderful weekend ahead :^)

I don't think the host is going to make much difference as far as making an income, at least at the Pro level site you're (I think) speaking of. (For instance, SmugMug has 3 different membership levels with Pro being the highest, and I assume most of the other sites mentioned have similar levels as well.) The question of income is going to be answered by these factors much more than the host site itself: Quality of the photography; time spent; marketing skills; links from other sites; constant work locally or through travel doing photojournalism, events, weddings, sports or portraiture; or selling prints at art fairs or galleries. I imagine many of these sites could work as the print-fulfillment area for some of these pursuits. And many of them could work as excellent display sites for whatever your work is. I make most of my income selling stock, so my own photo site is more of a place to display and sell everything else (many of my stock images are on my site as well, but there's a whole lot on my SmugMug site that wouldn't sell as stock, yet I want to display it & offer it as wall art or whatever).

So the price variations you see on SmugMug, for example, reflect the highly individualized methods of pricing, depending upon what that person's main photographic thrust is. I leave a lot of my family snapshot galleries open for downloading and set my print prices quite low in those galleries so that family can purchase them reasonably. My "art photo" galleries have a whole different pricing scheme. I got the Pro-level site because it's so amazingly reasonable & I can have an absolutely unlimited # of jpgs. I also have SmugVault back-up, which gives me the ability to store my TIFFs, PSDs & Raw files at very low cost with the peace of mind of backup in several states. The Pro-level site also gives me any pricing option I want, and all the security features I mentioned earlier. But how one person uses their Pro site is going to be completely different from how the next person does it.

If you're actually in Thailand now and need print fulfillment there, and need to be able to have transactions in certain currencies, you should also be checking into which sites will be compatible with that. I don't know how they compare. SmugMug has a lot in the works with international improvement, but I don't know about the others. I think Zenfolio sites all look too similar & I don't like their layout much. It seems like there are few templates. I know black is the most popular background for sites, but I'm frankly sick of all-black photo sites all over the place. To me they just all look the same in my mind. All-white does me no good either. But anyway, the biggest questions to ask yourself is what purpose is your site for? Selling prints is only going to happen if you have lots & lots of inroads through all the sales methods I mentioned above, no matter how great your work or site is-- that's reality. One question I haven't really tackled is whether to eventually separate my personal/family galleries from the more "art photo" work. There are many ways to do that on SmugMug, besides simply getting a second site. But here's another reality: many (or most) of my print sales have come from family or friends who are there on the site for personal reasons, and at some point decided to buy prints for their walls after they'd already gotten small prints of the family reunion. So that's one more thing to consider when answering that question. Well, better not give you anymore to think about than you've already got, so again... good luck!! --Anna Lisa

Anna Lisa, that is great information. In trying to find images to identify things (plants, insects, anything) I've realized even more than I did before how many people there are with beautiful images on websites all over the world/Internet -- maybe tens of thousands of people if not more. Your statement that "selling prints is only going to happen if you have lots & lots of inroads through all the sales methods" you mentioned just has to be so very true. It must be like so many things, too, that happen because of word of mouth, and that requires getting that first customer or two or six, I think.

I used SmugMug but it left for Zenfolio. For me, Zenfolio had a better user interface. Also, I could tell a SmugMug site before I even saw the logo at the bottom of the page. At the higher cost levels Zenfolio, has quite a bit of customization as well that can be employed. So in reality, it is all a matter of user interface. I believe both have a free trial for 30 days. So try one or both. BTW - I have sold images as well as licensed images for publication on the web and for printing through Zenfolio. Very easy to sell with your price lists (Pro level) as well as set up licenses.

Thanks for taking the time to contribute your thoughts and opinions on this subject Anna Lisa (once again), Barbara and Eva.

I have plenty to think about and things to weigh up between each of the web hosts mentioned here.

Perhaps the main insight I've picked up from all this is that success from a webpage or website is going to be much more reliant on one's own ability to find ways of drawing people's attention to it than relying on any particular web host to do this for you, which I guess kind of makes sense.

Thanks again one and all for your time and valued feedback :^)

I have a smugmug site and have sold zero through my web site. However, it is nice to have a web site where my work is at least "out there" and it's not too pricey so I'm not out much. I work a demanding full-time non-photo job and I just don't have the time to properly market my work so the fault is mine, not the web site's.

I do not agree that all smugmug sites "look alike." There are tons of customizations you can do (not just changing backgrounds to purple and green), very easily, and I've seen many sites that don't jump out at me as smugmug. In fact, NPN member Steve Sieren has a smugmug site and it certainly is not a cookie-cutter site. Heck, if it's good enough for him, it should work for me.

You've gotten a lot of good info here, so whatever you choose, I'm sure it will work out fine for you. Good luck!

if any of you want to try zenfolio at other than the free entry level which limits the image size you can upload, feel free to use the code: Q62-QT7-JZZ. This will save you a bit of money.

Carol

Thanks for your valued feedback Angela and Carol, much appreciated :^)

Angela: Just took a look at Steve Sieren's site, and WOW! Not only is he a great landscape artist, but he's sure set himself up with a wonderfully uniquely styled SmugMug page. Though I tend to think he has a fair bit of experience with customizations that helped him with this, which I don't and not sure I'd be able to afford the time to learn. If I'm wrong with this assumption, however, please feel free to set me straight ;^)

Carol: Thanks also for the discount code for Zenfolio. Still giving this more thought, although leaning more in the direction of Zenfolio over SmugMug right now, for the simple reason I feel the look of their pages are more unique in general compared with those I've seen at SmugMug ... that is, unless Angela can convince me that designing one like Steve's is actually a lot easier than I'm currently thinking it is ;^)

Thanks again to the both of you :^)

Ashley, smugmug has an entire forum dedicated to customizing. They have tutorials showing you how to do many simple customizations. I've found the forums helpful. Most of the customization is simply a matter of cutting & pasting certain code onto the page, all of which can be found on the forums. If you can't find what you need, start a new thread and many helpful folks will point you in the right direction. My page isn't as elaborate as Steve's (and my photography is certainly not anywhere near as good as his), but getting it to look like it does was really easy. My day job is a paralegal so I'm certainly no guru when it comes to html coding. Let us know what you choose and give us a link so we can see the finished product. Good luck!

Many thanks again for your time in response Angela :^)

With five days still left of my 2-week trial version over at SmugMug, I'm pleased to say I now have a page up that I'm pretty happy with. Still have a few more tweaks to make and pages to add (e.g. bit of a bio and, once I've sorted everything out, details of photography field trips I'll be offering here in Thailand as well as Borneo), but by the beginning of next week I'll be a fully paid up Pro account member at SmugMug :^)

If you're curious and wish to take a quick look, here's my address: http://www.ashleyvincent.smugmug.com

Many thanks again one and all for your helpful advice and suggestions, very much appreciated.

Wishing you all a wonderful weekend :^)

Ashley

I like it, Ashley!

Thanks for taking the time to check it out and real pleased you like it Barbara :^)