SmugMug Automatically Scales Photos and Video, Supports High Definition Video

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1. Sandra
   

   December 6th, 2007 at 9:12 pm

   Nice PR article, Mark. I like Smugmug but this is not a review, this is advertising.

2. 113.com
   

   December 6th, 2007 at 9:16 pm

   Superb product and services, respectable for not taking any outside money - supported by solid products as services.. very respectable.

3. Don MacAskill
   

   December 6th, 2007 at 9:24 pm

   Slight correction: We have 450,000 paying customers, not 45,000.

   Hopefully everyone loves the new features, though - I know I’m thrilled!

4. EJ
   

   December 6th, 2007 at 9:29 pm

   I just switched from Flickr.

   Flickr browses pictures at 500px wide, which looks pathetic unless your monitor is still 1024×768.

   @Sandra: This is a big salvo fired at Flickr, so it’s pretty relevant, although the writeup really fails to mention how this bests Flickr.

5. drew olanoff
   

   December 6th, 2007 at 9:32 pm

   This is one of those true success stories that you like to hear. Yeah, we know that Facebook pissing off users is fun to read, but these guys have been doing a great job at keeping their community happy. Great job SM.

6. Mark D
   

   December 6th, 2007 at 9:35 pm

   As a paying Smugmug customer, formerly with Flickr, I can honestly say this isn’t just advertising. A Smugmug advert would be even MORE glowing than this. Awesome Smugmug service is just the norm.

7. Rajeev
   

   December 6th, 2007 at 10:31 pm

   Looks like some forward looking steps by the Company. Esp HiDef Support may migrtate high end customers of YouTube to SmugMug.

   http://tekno-world.blogspot.com

8. Mark Hendrickson
   

   December 6th, 2007 at 10:34 pm

   #1 - Sandra: What, because I’m actually impressed by what a company’s doing, that makes me PR? Pah-lease.

   #4 - EJ: Flickr doesn’t host videos, nor does it automatically resize photos and thumbnail galleries. No other photo sharing site does that, as far as I’m aware.

9. Robert Scoble
   

   December 6th, 2007 at 10:36 pm

   Mark, wait until they see the video I did over at SmugMug (should be up in the next few days). Then they won’t call your writeup advertising anymore. SmugMug’s new UI blows away its competition. I totally agree with you, but you gotta see it demoed on two 30-inch monitors vs. all the others to see just how it blows it away.

   This is one place where video would have been far more effective than a screen shot. Unfortunately I’m in London so don’t know when my video will go up.

10. Mark Hendrickson
    

    December 6th, 2007 at 10:50 pm

    #9 - Robert: Cool, let me know when it’s up and I’ll link to it from the post or embed it if possible. I agree with you that this image resizing feature is most impressive on large screens, which I suppose professional photographers are more likely to own than normal users.

11. Steve Ballmer
    

    December 6th, 2007 at 11:08 pm

    SmugMug, hmmmm, I like that name.

    http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

12. Robert Scoble
    

    December 6th, 2007 at 11:53 pm

    Mark: they tell me it will be up at http://www.scobleshow.com shortly after midnight (Pacific Time) tonight.

13. Robert Scoble
    

    December 7th, 2007 at 12:15 am

    Here’s the video: http://www.podtech.net/scobles.....and-videos

14. Robert Scoble
    

    December 7th, 2007 at 12:52 am

    Mark, sorry that the embedding isn’t working right. Here’s the right code to embed:

    Your browser does not support JavaScript. This media can be viewed at http://www.podtech.net/home/46.....and-videos

15. Robert Scoble
    

    December 7th, 2007 at 12:53 am

    grrr, click on “Playlist” first, make sure you select the right video, then copy the code out of that.

16. IanDanforth
    

    December 7th, 2007 at 1:07 am

    I know the family behind this service personally and I just want to vouch for how cool these guys are. Smart, hard working, super nice, and they always offered me chocolate milk when I came over to watch a movie.

17. micfo.com
    

    December 7th, 2007 at 2:42 am

    Sound good about video resizing and other features of photo editing, seems inspired by flickr+picnic.

18. Parul Bindra
    

    December 7th, 2007 at 2:52 am

    Looks like this release by SmugMug is a successful attempt to cement itself as a first-rate photo sharing website.
    Great Job !

    Parul
    http://www.bhopu.com

19. Vinod
    

    December 7th, 2007 at 3:20 am

    Shows how well Amazon Cloud scales.

20. jccodez
    

    December 7th, 2007 at 7:18 am

    eeehhhhhhgggghhmmmmm…. ok, all you glitterati gtf out of here. I like smugmug, its a cool site, but I don’t need the glitterati ruining my vibe. Smug mug blows away all the rest, and has paying customers. Intuit should take them out for a bil.

21. tribeless
    

    December 7th, 2007 at 9:15 am

    Don, reading this prompted me to check in on the always entertaining smugblogs.

    I noticed your dad’s post on 7-16-06 has you all at 200,000 paid customers.

    So, you all more than doubled your customer base in the last 17 months?

22. Lin
    

    December 7th, 2007 at 9:28 am

    I was a smugmug customer for about 9 months year and found it lacking.

    Despite having high speed broadband, Smugmug was often slow moving — making it difficult to move around. Numerous people on numerous occasions told management that there were problems (on their forum), but all SMUGMUG did was ask you to run speedtests and tracenet. But nothing ever improved.

    I canceled just to be done with SMUGMUG (despite having paid for a year), moved to Flickr and have been very happy at Flickr. Not to mention it’s cheaper and I got more comments on my photos on a week at Flickr than I did in months at SMUGMUG.

    So good luck with SMUGMUG. All those features sound nice on paper but don’t mean diddly if their website is underpowered.

23. Don MacAskill
    

    December 7th, 2007 at 9:44 am

    @tribeless: Faster than that, actually, but yes.

    @Lin: I’m management, and I take speed *very* seriously. Our website is hardly underpowered. I’m terribly sorry if we let you down, but I promise, we try very very hard to keep the site snappy and fast.

    I’ve blogged on the subject recently: http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2.....d-matters/

    As far as we can tell, measured from locations all over the world (and supported by customers all over the world), we’re faster than most of the other large photo sharing sites out there. (It’s easy to be fast when you have few viewers and customers - obviously it gets much harder when you have as many as we do).

    That being said, we’re not perfect. We blow it sometimes with a bad code release, or find a pocket of the world that just can’t get to us quickly for whatever reason. I think everyone has these problems - and they’re often incredibly difficult to track down and identify. Is it a networking problem? Your ISP? One of ours? Anti-virus software on your PC? Some virus or something in your PC? A bug in our software? The list is long.

    I’m terribly sorry we let you down, and I’d love to give it another shot with you, if you’re interested. If not, if we’ve lost your trust, I completely understand. Flickr is a great service - enjoy it!

24. Eddie
    

    December 7th, 2007 at 10:32 am

    http://www.zenfolio.com had the photo features for over a year. It actually looks like smugmug took a bunch of ideas from zenfolio. I still think that zenfolio has a way cleaner/more professional UI. Maybe it doesn’t have videos and all of these useless comments and ratings, but as far as making your photos present well, they had it in the bag for a while. Not sure why you guys still haven’t reviewed them.

25. Mark Hendrickson
    

    December 7th, 2007 at 11:03 am

    Whoops, embedded the wrong video - fixed now.

26. pau
    

    December 7th, 2007 at 11:31 am

    How come there are 450.000 users @ $40 minimum per annum fee and revenues are only $10M per year?

    Numbers don’t add up…

27. photod
    

    December 7th, 2007 at 11:46 am

    I have been using smugmug since they launched (I have no relation to the company) They are hands down the best photo sharing site I have come across for those who care about their photos. Since they charge a fee, there is no advertising or gimmicks, just great display and organization of photos. They allow viewers to download the full file size so it is easy to do photo transfer. It is worth $40 for me to have solid photo storage and great UI.

28. roger jones
    

    December 7th, 2007 at 11:52 am

    Mark, I know that bloggers find it easy to both wear and shed the “journalist” title when it’s most convenient for them, but step away from your article for a second and read this sentence:

    “SmugMug has released a set of new features that further cements itself as a first-rate photo sharing website.”

    Then consider that 4 of the comments are from Robert Scoble and ask yourself whether TC has jumped the shark.

29. MIk
    

    December 7th, 2007 at 12:09 pm

    What nonesense! Smugmug is a nice site but this is hardly anything to boast about. All it does is to show one of 3 different sizes depending on the browser window. Flickr’s flash based slideshow does this and much better, it perfectly sizes it to the exact browser window! Even zenfolio.com has been doing this for sometime.

    Lets get some real stories instead of rehashing the same old blurb over and over.

30. --verbose
    

    December 7th, 2007 at 12:13 pm

    HD video is also interesting for screencasts (e.g. video tutorials for a specific software). As far as I tested, the usual video sites (even instructional video sites) cut down the resolution in a way that makes recorded screen content almost unreadable.

31. Alex
    

    December 7th, 2007 at 12:42 pm

    “There are no free accounts on SmugMug…”

    Not entirely true- They offer free lifetime pro accounts if you develop software that utilizes their API… Which is an incredibly developer-friendly system.

    I’m not sure that photo-resizing justifies its own post, but I do find SmugMug to be a first-rate service, definitely one of the leaders in the online album space.

32. Phototouille
    

    December 7th, 2007 at 1:26 pm

    TechCrunch would do all its readers a huge service by validating information before publishing a blatant PR blitz.

    It is one thing to like a successful business model (I am with you on that), but reposting marketing statements written with an unhealthy doze of self-importance is hardly worthy of blogging. Their numbers always seem to be all over the place, just do a search for the past 12 months, you will find numbers quoted by management ranging from 100k users to now 450k users and revenues quoted from $10mln to $30mln for the same time period, go figure.

    Smugmug was the service to use until two years ago when Zenfolio (www.zenfolio.com) was launched. Zenfolio had dynamically sized images and page scaling since day one, and smugmug is just now playing catch-up. In fact, smugmug has been playing catch-up to Zenfolio on almost all the new features, and they still don’t get them right.

    And video support requiring all Windows viewers to download and install QuickTime (with now mandatory iTunes), and not keeping original video files is hardly worthy of news.

    The Flickr comparison for sites like smugmug or Zenfolio is not a useful one, there is very little overlap in functionality while catering to different needs. I use both Flickr and Zenfolio and think they are a great combination. In fact, getting the two synchronized would have been a really useful feature.

    Please tell us something worthy to read, as we have come to expect from a site like TechCrunch.

33. Lin
    

    December 7th, 2007 at 2:28 pm

    Regarding Smugmug, #27 says: They are hands down the best photo sharing site I have come across for those who care about their photos.

    Now that’s chutzpah. As if the folks on Flickr don’t give a damn about their photos. That’s merely your OPINION — one not necessarily shared by a lot of other folks.

    Next TechCrunch will be telling us how fantastic Zoomr is. Scoble spends all his time shilling for THAT mediocre photo site. Zoomr has been reinventing the wheel (i.e., reinventing Flickr)…and constantly gets praised for it by Scoble since he’s friends with one of the Zoomr owners.

    What a joke a lot of these tech review websites have become!

34. Lin
    

    December 7th, 2007 at 2:33 pm

    BTW, Sandra at #1 was right on the money. You go, girl. Call them like you see them.

35. Scott Alden
    

    December 7th, 2007 at 3:47 pm

    Nice video interview there Don. I’m glad to see your Sin cartoon - I need one of those framed too.

    I find it quite interesting that you developed SmugMug while working on video games - good move getting out of that. It seems you really got something with the photo sharing site that emphasizes looks over your ad space revenue.

36. Sandra
    

    December 7th, 2007 at 5:31 pm

    Mark:

    1. I like Smugmug myself - esp. the fact that they care so much, but also for the many features, their continued dedication to developing new features - this is both rare and awesome!

    2. #1 notwithstanding - well, I don’t think you need to hear this from me but since your question might be not as rhetorical as “What, because I’m actually impressed by what a company’s doing, that makes me PR? Pah-lease” may sound - here you go - I start every semester by asking my students about the difference between PR and journalism - and if you wish:

    The difference between journalism and PR is that a journalist has an obligation to report facts IMPARTIALLY and OBJECTIVELY and does not pass JUDGMENT on the subject in question. The goal of PR is to present your CLIENT in the best light, disregarding and deemphasizing facts if you have to.

    To this point: Phanfare.com has had a wonderful full screen video for a long time (and wonderful PR in the form of “articles”), Pbase has had an awesome album solution with original size photos, etc.

37. Len Schneider
    

    December 13th, 2007 at 9:51 pm

    Hmm… Zenfolio had the dynamic resizing and other cool features for quite some time, and their layouts still look way better!

38. Sam
    

    December 22nd, 2007 at 11:44 am

    I’ve used Smugmug for a couple of years now and simply love it.

    They offer a free 14-day trial and you can save $5 off a new membership by using this coupon code: Tm1HMVMcu3q0k in the ‘Referred by’ field.

    Hey, it’s free, and you don’t even need to provide a credit card. Why not give it a try?

    I’ve tried trial versions of about a half-dozen photo sharing/storage sites and Smugmug is by far the best. There are numerous reasons why I love Smugmug which I’ve listed below. The age old saying is you get what you paid for. In the crowded field of online photo sharing services, Smugmug has been everything I’ve ever needed and then some.

    Things I love about Smugmug and why I chose it over other competing services:

    * They allow you to try the service free for 14 days. You can try EVERY feature they offer without any restrictions
    * Your photos are safe and secure. They keep 4 backup copies of each photo in 3 states so you’ll always have access to them
    * You can lock galleries with passwords to keep them private
    * Smugmug doesn’t send you SPAM and there are NO ADS on the site
    * You can share your photos with friends & family without them having to register with Smugmug
    * A+ customer service. It’s fast, friendly, and professional
    * Basic account offers UNLIMITED storage
    * Prints can be ordered right from Smugmug. No need to get them ordered with a different company
    * Comments, tags, keywords, and compatibility with blogs and forums - very convenient!
    * Video clips are allowed with a Power User account
    * Very helpful and friendly forum called “Digital Grin” who can answer just about any photo related question you can think of
    * The company is FAMILY OWNED and not run by some internet conglomerate like Yahoo or Kodak
    * Company has always been profitable so there’s no risk of them going out of business then you lose all your files