SmugMug: The (Anti) Web 2.0 Company

January 22nd, 2007 at 3:15 am

Now that’s a nice niche. $40 minimum to upload photos??? What I want to know is, “how much is their net profit?”
I should write a little profile on them too…

January 22nd, 2007 at 3:28 am

$ 40 min to upload, why pay that much, with that kind of annual payment a decent website and webspace can be bought.

January 22nd, 2007 at 4:08 am

$40 includes unlimited diskspace and good amount of bandwidth/month for hobbyist photographer, access to print facility, etc. And you do not have to write your own pages.

This is not for geeks that want to write their own pages, manage their own website, etc. Its for photographers that do not want the hassle of managing a website. You only need to manages your photos.

Check out the full list of features and compare that with other offers (blank diskspace)

January 22nd, 2007 at 4:22 am

Actually, in page #5 of their tour they mention the “power of Web 2.0″

January 22nd, 2007 at 4:45 am

I love reading about successful Web companies that charge for their service. This is why I think 37signals rock. To create something that is worth paying for, that people are enthusiastic about paying for is just wonderful.

My girlfriend is a budding photographer, and she shall be signing up to SmugMug as soon as she begins her studio work.

January 22nd, 2007 at 4:45 am

Maybe he will call himself a “web 2.0″ company when web 3.0 arrives?

Even though there is a lot of hype arround the label web 2.0 I think it also a nice explanation what the website is all about: service, online usability and AJAX. Seems ok to me.

Regards,

René
Blogging with WordPress for web 1.0 and X.0

January 22nd, 2007 at 4:46 am

They can deny the label all they want, but that’s rather ridiculous.

For those that actual understand the concept, there is no choice… you either fit into the mold or you don’t. And by the technology, features, and philosophy of their company… they clearly do fit into the “Web 2.0 mold.”

As for their actual service, if I was more serious with photography and if I didn’t already have a Flickr Pro account, I’d use SmugMug in a heartbeat.

January 22nd, 2007 at 5:14 am

This is a great update. I’ve been a smugmug user for some time and while it’s never had the cool factor of Flickr or others, for serious photography display it’s really the only option. And I don’t mean ’serious photographers’: I was after something where I could upload albums, choose from a range of public / private options, and be able to send links to pictures (in various sizes) and albums to friends and family. You ever tried getting anyone over about 40 to navigate Flickr? It’s a nightmare. Smugmug makes it all obvious. The price is absolutely worth it for the ease and convenience of the service.

Don’t I sound like a commercial? Just a satisfied customer. Avoid the vc’s forever more, Dan. Keep it in the family like you have been!

January 22nd, 2007 at 5:49 am

@herbert:

There are lots of Flickr vs SmugMug comparisons out there. Google should be able to dig up plenty.

Both services are great, but they serve different purposes - I love Flickr and recommend it all the time when someone isn’t a great fit for SmugMug. We have plenty of customers who maintain Flickr accounts alongside their SmugMug accounts, too.

Your description makes it sound like you may be a good fit with us - our focus isn’t so much on online social networking, where Flickr excels, but on the viewing experience with your family and friends.

My best advice? Sign up for both services (we have a free trial for 14 days, Flickr has a free account level) and see which one suits you most. Google doesn’t hurt, either.

January 22nd, 2007 at 6:25 am

Nice overall work Don!
How much bandwidth are you guys burning per day?

I’m wondering because in my opinion bandwidth and diskspace at S3 are not cheap at all. The only thing that you are sure to save is the man-power to set up the servers. Of course I’m talking about rented servers and not bought ones since those would mean a high primary cost.

January 22nd, 2007 at 7:15 am

I agree with him about the Web 2.0 terminology…read O’Reilly and you will see what I mean.

However Don’s approach is very strange, he is out of the closet but apparently does not know it………

January 22nd, 2007 at 8:02 am

- Thanks for adding a combo box to comments that makes it easier for users unfamiliar with SmugMug to determine if they are commenting on the photo or the gallery.
- I still think the Title field should move above the photo and should be editable separately (without a page refresh) as the description and keywords are now. Even better, the InlineEditBox (or similar design pattern) from the Dojo JavaScript toolkit (http://dojotoolkit.org/) is an example of how Flickr lets users quickly edit metadata, and I find this very powerful and intuitive
- I like the slide-out drawer for photos since most users don’t care about EXIF information or different sizes 80% of the time
- The biggest improvement is navigating between photos without a page refresh…and at the default photo size! (Flickr only allows me to navigate without page refresh, amongst the thumbnails. Nice work making this happen with URL rewriting and whatever other tricks you are using. I can sympathize with the amount of JavaScript work and browser testing that must have happened to make this feature go live. Great job!
- Still have not addressed moving one photo between multiple galleries? This is probably more of a “re-launch” feature since I’m guessing it would require some changes to the database. Are there plans to address this?
- Permissions are still a big deal, and I’m curious to see if SmugMug plans to add permissions to individual photos, and/or separate permissions for comments.

I’d like to dig in further to new features and will post an article to Pain in the Tech soon.

January 22nd, 2007 at 8:17 am

There’s a point that’s being overlooked here:

In theory, if Don were to approach a VC and say “we’re going to do photo-sharing for $40 p/mo.” he would get laughed out of the room. The obvious retort would be “people will never pay for that service when Flickr and other sites offer it for free”.

I just want to point out that what would intuitively seem obvious (no one wants to pay for a service they can get for free) can easily be wrong with the right type of execution.

I think people (investors, et al) are too quick to write off ideas and assume they know how a user population will react. The best way to test ideas to is to just go to market. Investors be damned.

Nice job, Dan.

January 22nd, 2007 at 8:28 am

“$ 40 min to upload, why pay that much, with that kind of annual payment a decent website and webspace can be bought.”
—————————-

Listen, I used to maintain my own site on my own webspace. That was only because there were no photo sharing sites back then. I put quite a bit of effort training myself to learn how to design in HTML and CSS because I didn’t want my site to look as ugly and broken as so many of the “oh, I’ll just use this cheap webspace” kinds of sites.

But I am a photographer, not a Web developer. I started to see photo web sites doing cool things I had no idea how to code and I didn’t have the funds to pay a custom developer. And cross-browser compatibility was keeping me from trying anything adventurous.

Then sites like Smugmug started appearing, which offered everything I wanted my site to have, but I didn’t have to write the code and do the cross-browser QA. I am so glad to get all that work off my back. Hell, I can’t even write proper JavaScript. They have real programmers who have the experience to add killer features and they have the resources to test it properly and thoroughly across browsers. And on top of that, I could use my own domain name, and customize the CSS. This is a great point: I can customize the CSS so that it looks like my site, not theirs, yet all of the underlying heavy machinery is stuff I don’t have to worry about. It’s the best of both worlds. The annual price of the pro level is a steal because if you took the same amount of money and gave it to a custom developer (or to me), you couldn’t get a decent site built for that amount of money.

January 22nd, 2007 at 8:52 am

Cool I always believed in payment and subscription model. Hope that blog service provders build a payment model into the Blog service so that good work can get noticed and pay otherwise 2 cents.
Say what.

http://blogs.ibibo.com/TechnicalJournal

January 22nd, 2007 at 9:03 am

The CEO of SmugMug is named Don, not Dan.

January 22nd, 2007 at 9:11 am

BlogReader, Les and a few others have it right. Yes you can build your own if you have the skills and yes there are free alternatives, but that isn’t the point. For one, it is obvious that there primary target is the pro or semi-pro photographer that want a really professional looking site for their clients to go to. For the non pro, you get the same features, a professional looking site and unlimited storage.

It has also been shown that while free services start out great, they rarely last, while the pay for service approaches tend to stay longer. Yes, Yes there will be exceptions but it tends to hold true over the long run. Either people are tired of seeing ads, or they feel better about paying for the service because they think the company will care more about them, as Paul mentioned above.

Anyone who has been involved with enterprise software can tell you that paying 6 or 7 figures for such software is more than common, even though in some cases there are free alternatives (even with paid support!) that exist.

January 22nd, 2007 at 9:22 am

I’m not a smugmug fan, I’ll start off with that, and I won’t defend the company, but… For $40 / month you are not only buying online storage, you are buying themed galleries to make your photos look pretty, you are buying the ability to share with other friends and family, you are buying all the fluff that your average user doesn’t know how to create on their own nor wants to bother to learn how. Countless people use Google’s Picassa program along with Flickr and a slew of other sites.

What isn’t told up front is that the “pro” side of things, aimed at weekend warrior photographers who want to offer online ordering for the clients, is a total rip off. They usually take upwards of 20% off your retail prices plus the print price. Say you sell an 8×10 print for $10, smugmug will take $2 + $2.99 for the cost of the 8×10 print (which isn’t even a completive price compared to mpix.com or whcc.com). That leaves you the photographer with $5 profit from a $10 retail item. Subtract out the $150 you need to pay yearly and it looks a lot less attractive. Most pro labs (local and internet) offer similar services that don’t double dip into the retail profits of the prints.

The other scary thing for the “pro” aspect, smugmug processes the credit card transactions of your customers and keeps email addresses of them. This is the same as similar company pictage.com, who will continue to spam your customers with specials and sale items, even if you don’t discount any of your items.

For your average home users, smugmug may make sense. For anything more then that, look to host your own, most cpanel web hosts have gallery and coppermine in one-click installs.

January 22nd, 2007 at 9:47 am

I haven’t read all these comments but I do want to say that I am one happy Smugmug camper. They provide exactly what I needed/wanted. I hate coding, and can’t remember most of it anyway.

Smugmug provided me with a simple solution. The incredibly customizable templates makes your site look so professional (my site is a personal family site, not for selling my photos). It’s also so much easier than my old hand coded site to update.

I pay for the professional level - and I think the money I spend is worth it.

The support forums are also incredible. ANY help you might need - can be found in the forums.

If anyone asked me who they should sign on with, I tell them to check out Smugmug.

January 22nd, 2007 at 9:53 am

Mike,

You shouldn’t force the “Web 2.0″ label on SmugMug because frankly, “Web 2.0″ is an un-definable, nebulous businessman term that adds nothing to the conversation. I would also take offense at being lumped-in with a volitile group of companys, many of which have no clear path to profitability and are merely riding the “Web 2.0″ buzz wave. It’s an objectionable and potentially dangerous term - bravo to Mr. MacAskill for being level-headed enough to recognize that.

January 22nd, 2007 at 10:08 am

Wow Thomas, not one plug for Zooomr?!

January 22nd, 2007 at 10:21 am

Paul:

I used to hand code my pages the hard way. When ever I uploaded new photos I had to edit all the old pages (didn’t know how to do a database driven site).

Smugmug makes it 1000% easier for me.

And yes, you can sell prints off of your site. I’m pretty sure you can alter the photo prices so YOU make money - this isn’t a feature I use though. I don’t sell my photos.

If someone has a smugmug site, they can let you have a coupon to save YOU $5.00 if you sign on (mine is QWn2117U1UdpM if interested). Not only do you save $5.00, I do too (assuming that you sign up and use the code, and assuming I renew - which I will be).

January 22nd, 2007 at 10:26 am

@Dan

Grats to you on taking the road less traveled, FWIW I dont get it either but sometimes traditional shoes (community building) come back in style (Web 2.0) and if they fit well…..just keep on wearing them.

@ m3mn0n

“For those that actual understand the concept, there is no choice… you either fit into the mold or you don’t. And by the technology, features, and philosophy of their company… they clearly do fit into the “Web 2.0 mold.”

OTOH sometimes people are just mouldy……

What I mean is because someone subscribes to the premises of the current PR/Marketing trend, if they have no product, no revenue stream and no demand then they are full of shit or they are trying to leveredge some useless idea to get financing at the expense of legitimate companies…..or both.

There is a choice, you can adopt what your community finds desirable, what grows that community and what works for your organization and throw out the rest without using the flavor du jour, or you can use the flavor du jour and drop it later, (rebrand), however what you cant do is marry yourself so closely for the sake of acceptance, that it impedes your business as a whole, otherwise you will have nothing left to rebrand later……

Just a little FYI from a 1.0 refugee….

January 22nd, 2007 at 10:54 am

I actually like tabblo.com better. check it out.

January 22nd, 2007 at 11:04 am

Dan MacaSkill seems to have the right idea. He’s not relying on some fancy next big thing model. He’s making serious money and offering a great service in the process. More web 2.0 startups should look at his model and try and make their start ups profitable and sustainable before they bubble.

January 22nd, 2007 at 11:10 am

Of course the site has 2.0 features and yes, it should continue to charge, but maybe lower the rate as I see it being a bit steep. Good for them for continuing forth on their own and ‘making it’.

January 22nd, 2007 at 11:39 am

revision to #48.
GAH! sorry, that was supposed to be Dan, not Don.
I’ll go ingest more coffee now.

January 22nd, 2007 at 12:05 pm

I agree about the spam - I have never, ever EVER received any spam from Smugmug.

January 22nd, 2007 at 12:11 pm

@Jon:

You know, I think it varies from company to company. But I do think it often does more damage than good - SmugMug would not be the great place it is today if we had had cash early on. Eating corn flakes and ramen for a few years taught us to focus in on the customer like nothing else could.

But not everyone wants to grow their business the way we have, and not everyone’s businesses can be grown as cheaply as ours.

And let’s not forget how many people in the Valley have take-over-the-world-itis. We don’t - we’re fine with other brands being #1 in our space as long as we have our slice.

January 22nd, 2007 at 12:18 pm

Yeah, I too am confused about teh web 2.0 thing….regardless I think that the photos really do look nice on their site.

John
http://www.monomachines.com

January 22nd, 2007 at 12:36 pm

“$ 40 min to upload, why pay that much, with that kind of annual payment a decent website and webspace can be bought.”
—
I think the exposure alone would more than adequately cover the fee to join Smugmug - $40 may buy you hosting and a domain name - but likely with limited bandwith PLUS you would have to pay for advertising to get the traffic to your site.

I think $40 is a steal.

I have a flickr account but I’m thinking I may have to give you guys a shot.

very cool site.

January 22nd, 2007 at 1:10 pm

So do they have a flash based fullscreen slideshow where pictures can fade in and out? I would be sold on that feature.

January 22nd, 2007 at 1:13 pm

Thats a great idea. It must be nice having membership fees. I am not sure why he is so anti-2.0.

I would love those members to post their pictures to http://www.grapheety.com so I can see them…

January 22nd, 2007 at 1:41 pm

I think smugmug is improving daily but it’s still an odd mix of web2.0 with and web1.0 interfaces and it just doesn’t have an overall clean look/feel, they really need a complete overhaul and a brand new UI developed from the group up! Zenfolio.com is a good startup too with a cleaner overall layout and totally AJAX, but they need to start adding more features to be competitive. Sometimes though there are ultra cool solutions are never noticed or even mentioned, one service that is quite impressive (if it wasn’t so damn niche market) is Solomodels.com (http://www.solomodels.com). Their flash websites are very cool but they only allow fashion photographers which doesn’t make any sense to me.

January 22nd, 2007 at 2:05 pm

Smug Mug certainly looks like a good service but what is with that crazy logo? A very professional setup apart from that comic sans alike font and the 3rd grader happy face. (yes I am being ridiculous)

January 22nd, 2007 at 2:43 pm

@Andy Atkinson:

Sorry, somehow overlooked your comment earlier. My bad!

- Glad you like the comments box.

- We do let you edit the Caption field via AJAX and have for years. I believe you can also put it above the photo OR below, at your choice, using simple CSS in your customization area.

- Slideout drawer rocks. BTW, it’s also customizable if you would rather have it slide out below the photo, so as not to obscure it.

- RE: no refreshes. Thanks, we’re pretty thrilled ourselves.

- We don’t really have plans to have a single photo in multiple galleries right now. We beta tested it awhile ago, and our customers got way too confused. Got upset when they’d crop in one gallery and it would crop “a different copy of the photo” in another gallery. They didn’t get it. We also almost never get asked for the feature. It’s not an architecture limitation, though.

- We’re not planning to add permissions to single images, no. No plans for comments either. Neither of these are requested features, and we have a massive # of features that are requested frequently.

Thanks for posting, can’t wait to see an update on your blog.

January 22nd, 2007 at 3:47 pm

There’s a site that already does all I need it to with photos. It’s called Flickr. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?

Oh, and it’s cheaper than this smugmug malarkey, too.

January 22nd, 2007 at 6:56 pm

Smugmug is good, the new interface is pretty neat. But there are other sites offering comparable service. I use Snapgalaxy (http://www.snapgalaxy.com). Apart from unlimited storage and sharing they provide great quality prints at reasonable prices (best one is 5×7 at 35 cents).

January 22nd, 2007 at 8:43 pm

if you have a web hosting account, VPS or dedicated server sitting somewhere, try Gallery 2 - http://gallery.sf.net/ - a we-based, open-source photo management platform. supports video too, the upcoming 2.2 release (still in testing) looks promising.

January 22nd, 2007 at 9:44 pm

I’ve used smugmug (and many other photo sites) for years. It’s hands down the best site for photographers. From world-class printing services to exceptional customer service, it can’t be beat.

In addition, I have a huge number of 8mb+ files in my account. Unlimited storage means unlimited storage…

5/5 stars.

January 22nd, 2007 at 10:57 pm

I’ve belonged to Phanfare for over a year and just signed my business up with their services. I looked into Smugmug, but prefered the clean interface of Phanfare and its professional/ad-free albums. They constantly upgrade their services. I’ve uploaded over a thousand images and multiple videos to Phanfare without a hitch. After their recent upgrade of services, you can download entire albums as well as individual images. I highly recommend their service.

I think both SmugMug and Phanfare offer a lot over Flickr, especially for the professional.

January 23rd, 2007 at 3:07 am

I have always wondered why Smugmug doesn’t have a lifetime membership.

January 23rd, 2007 at 5:22 am

I’ve seen a few quotes referring to Smugmug’s “$40/month” fee. Guys it’s $40 PER YEAR.

Actually only $35 as referral codes are easy to find - just google it. don’t worry I won’t spam mine. When I signed up I used the code of one the guys who had patiently and promptly answered my stupid questions in the forum during my trial period.

Great community

January 23rd, 2007 at 10:06 am

I had never intended to stick with this service past the initial 14 day trial, but found, even with their previous user interface, that it was worth a go. As part of my job I have posted in and out of just about every sharing site on the Net. SmugMug, especially with the latest update, captures what I think are the best set of features and services geared for the photo-enthusiast (being me) up to the Pro Photographer (definitely not-me). I now find myself motivated enough to take on the task of consolidating my paid for service with pbase.com to Smugmug.

Great job!

John T. Byrne

January 25th, 2007 at 9:46 am

As a professional photographer, I’ve experimented with quite a few of the options out there. The SmugMug suite sold me about a year ago…and the recent upgrade just tickles my toes The product itself notwithstanding, the customer service makes me feel taken care of in a way I’ve never experienced with any online company. If SmugMug were a restaurant, they’d hover over you, filling your half-full water glass, scraping the crumbs from your tablecloth… They answer all emails within an hour, but more likely within minutes. Even if the person can’t answer your question, they’ll say so and then inform you someone else will be contacting me shortly. It’s small-town, old-school service to a global community, and in my opinion is the hallmark of successful companies in the web 2.0 world, whatever the heck that means!

P.S. I have almost 40,000 photos on my smugmug site(http://goodeye.smugmug.com) and the print and digital download sales more than pay for my annual subscription, I actually make pretty decent money this way!

February 5th, 2007 at 1:30 pm

Well, Flickr isn’t exactly free as other commenters suggest. You’re limited to a maximum of 3 “albums”, and the user interface for managing photos and sets is terrible. With Smugmug, the only thing I don’t like is that for $40/year the default account setting should at least keep my photos out search engine indexing. It’s disturbing to see my photos and descriptions showing up on a search query with Google, for example. I had to manually set each gallery so that they don’t show up on an index. I really hate hack feeds.

But, on the whole Smugmug is easier and simpler to use, a little pricey, but I think I can afford that.

March 5th, 2007 at 8:07 am

I am a faithful Smugmug user and I absolutely love Smugmug. The tech support is awesome! I always receive an answer almost immediately. Smugmug is easy to use and I love all the extras features they offer. I have cutomized my photography website to suit my needs and I can protect my photos which I never could do as a Webshots user. (Never did like the fact that someone could download my photos and not know who that person was.)

Once I used Smugmug for a few months, I then dropped Webshots completely! I hope the guys at Smugmug never sell the company! Its the best!!!!!

March 10th, 2007 at 6:56 pm

I am an almost-one year subscriber to SmugMug. I notice almost no commenter here mentions the user’s TIME invested in creating online albums, be they with SmugMug or anyone else. MY time is valuable to me. The annual subscription fee is peanuts in comparison. My fear is not about annual fees being oppressive, as much as the possibilty of some day, logging on to SmugMug, and being greeted with a “Sorry, we are out of business now.” WOW! All my hours of time in creating my many SmugMug albums would be ‘down the tube’!

Don, tell me you ain’t gonna let that happen!