SmugMug Automatically Scales Photos and Video, Supports High Definition Video

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

The first of these constitutes just a user interface upgrade, but a very attractive one at that. SmugMug realizes that users often change the size of their browser windows – and switch between devices with differently sized screens – so it has implemented dynamic resizing of photos, a feature it’s calling “SmugMungous”.

Change the size of your browser window and the photo that you are viewing will automatically get bigger or smaller while preserving its quality and resolution. The rest of the page’s interface will accommodate the new size as well, with thumbnails appearing or disappearing dynamically to fill the additional or remaining space. SmugMug’s not only about photos, though; videos hosted by the service will now also resize automatically in response to changes in the browser’s window size.

There are a few other new features related to video in particular. High definition video encoded in H.264 and with a maximum size of 1280×720 can now be uploaded to and played through SmugMug using Quicktime (and, soon, Flash). When you upload high resolution video, it will automatically be encoded in a variety of sizes (“Web”, “iPod/DVD”, and “HiDef”) so you can play it back in a variety of settings.

Video collections that you share publicly can now be exported to iTunes as podcasts so that family members and friends can watch up-to-date videos on their computers and play them on their Apple handhelds. And finally, SmugMug’s iPhone interface now supports video so you can browse and play videos through Quicktime on your phone.

SmugMug, a family-run business that will celebrate its fifth year anniversary this Friday, says it has over 450,000 paying customers and makes over $10M in revenue per year. There are no free accounts on SmugMug; users must pay a minimum of $40 per year, but they have access to unlimited storage and bandwidth. The company has yet to take any outside money, and seeing how well things are going, probably won’t.

Update: We’ve embedded Robert Scoble’s video coverage of SmugMug and this announcement below. Footage of the actual release doesn’t start until around the 12-minute mark.