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Everyone needs to check out https://smugmug.com https://smugmug.com - for $40 a year you get unlimited photo and video uploads (yes, RAW files are ok). It's li

by NateDad 11y ago

Everyone needs to check out https://smugmug.com https://smugmug.com - for $40 a year you get unlimited photo and video uploads (yes, RAW files are ok). It's like flikr with no ads, only your own stuff on the pages, super customizable (with a power account - $60 a year - you can point your own URL at your account and no one even needs to know the files are on smugmug. It's a site designed for professional photographers that also happens to have kickass features for casual photographers as well. There's even lightroom plugins to upload directly to smugmug. One of the best features, in my opinion, is the customer support. They respond within a couple hours. They're super nice and knowledgeable. I've had an account at smugmug for nearly a decade, and would never go back to free services. Google photos is nice, but the size limitation is definitely a problem for prolific photographers. (I don't work for smugmug nor do I know anyone who works there, I just love their service.)

georgemcbay 11y ago
As a pretty serious hobbyist photo-taking-guy I'm a big fan of smugmug, my "sharing photos with friends and family" photo website (http://gmcbay.com http://gmcbay.com) is hosted with them, but I don't think of them or use them as a good long-term file "storage"/backup solution. All of the photo-specific type of storage solutions (Google, Amazon, Smugmug, Adobe's CC thing, etc) are kind of flawed for many reasons (some outlined in the OP blogpost) when used as what I think of as "digital negative storage", IMO. I just store all of my (original, RAW-format) photos/videos on giant harddrives inside my desktop computer and have that backed up automatically and continuously via backblaze. Local storage is ridiculously cheap, and so are offsite automatic backups. For people who just deal with jpg files from a phone camera or whatever then YMMV and these photo-specific services may be just the thing, but I've yet to try one that doesn't feel like it is getting in your way if your normal workflow is big RAW files with processing via Lightroom/Photoshop, etc.
- fuzzywalrus 11y ago
  Indeed, I still use an aging 2008 Mac Pro and the benefits of internal storage are pretty profound. I have two Time Machine HDDs (An Internal + an External), which counts for two of my six HDDs. I'm debating going towards a service like blackblaze as I have a decade of photos on my computer.
gingerlime 11y ago
I also use smugmug, and hope it's ok to mention my open-source command line tool for syncing with SmugMug, smugline[0]. That being said, I'm not 100% sure I would recommend them. They do some odd things to images you upload, and more so with videos, where I think they won't store the original version for you, but a processed version. As an example (perhaps related to the syncing functions I need), SmugMug will auto-rotate images based on EXIF data. This is ok most of the time, but it screws up with things like MD5 hashes so hard to detect duplicates. [0] https://github.com/gingerlime/smugline https://github.com/gingerlime/smugline
- onethumb 11y ago
  Thanks so much for writing smugline. :) FWIW, we stopped rotating your Originals (which we did in a lossless fashion back in the day) awhile back, and now preserve them exactly as you uploaded them. Your MD5 hashes and byte counts match, and of course, people can get them back whenever they'd like.
  - gingerlime 11y ago
    That's interesting to know. I suggested it (or at least storing the original MD5 hash) but was stonewalled by Nick from your dev support, saying "I checked with our developers and in the case that we rotate an image, we do not store the original MD5 of the non-rotated image. This is not something that we are going to change at this time.". I've seen fairly recent reports[0] saying this still happens (although, to be fair, your support indicated that it might be a bug). What about videos though? From looking at the (v1.3) API response, I can't be sure that the original file is preserved. Sorry, didn't mean to hijack this, but since you chimed in, I hope to highlight some issues that I saw. Happy to share more from my personal, very limited, experience supporting smugline with you. If you wish to take this offline. [0] http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=1999917 http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=1999917
    - UberMouse 11y ago
      onethumb says here in this comment that they recompress videos for streaming https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9939270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9939270 Now I'm not sure if that means, it's recompressed when it's streamed, or if it's recompressed when it's uploading, for streaming.
rsync 11y ago
"Everyone needs to check out https://smugmug.com https://smugmug.com - for $40 a year you get unlimited photo and video uploads (yes, RAW files are ok). It's like flikr with no ads, only your own stuff on the pages, super customizable (with a power account - $60 a year)" Unlimited storage at a flat rate can only end two ways: 1) Out of business 2) User hostile behavior where only light usage is tolerated That's it. There's not a third way. If the space is unlimited and the price is not, eventually non-light users will be throttled or otherwise inconvenienced such that the service is not useful for them. Your interests are not aligned in this scenario - you want to use as much space as possible and they want you to use as little space as possible.
- unicornporn 11y ago
  You forgot... 3) They start to mine your data to learn more about you... Compared to Smugmug I think OneDrive (Office 365) and Amazon Cloud Drive seems like the better option to me though. With ACD I can store any file type and encrypt it with Arq[1] for $60 a year. [1] https://www.arqbackup.com/ https://www.arqbackup.com/
  - onethumb 11y ago
    Option '3' certainly could be on the list, but I'd guess that's primarily for advertising-driving companies. (Google Photos comes to mind). SmugMug has no ads, so #3 hasn't seemed appealing to us, let alone that I think we already have a great contract with our customers: They pay us right up front, and in return we build the best photo sharing service in the world. Seems fair to me. :)
- onethumb 11y ago
  Disclaimer: I'm SmugMug's co-founder, CEO & Chief Geek I don't have a crystal ball, but we've been offering unlimited storage since I co-founded the company in 2002 with $0 of investment. 13 years later, the company still hasn't taken any outside funding, has been profitable for most of those years, and still offers unlimited storage. We plan to keep this critical feature for the forseeable future. :) Anyone who's passionate about photography is aligned with our interests. We're photographers and limits suck. [edited: typo]
bambax 11y ago
> with a power account you can point your own URL at your account and no one even needs to know the files are on smugmug Really? I use smugmug and am quite happy with it, and I use a custom url, but I never dived into having a custom gallery where no smugmug info would be present. I asked support how to remove the "buy" option and they said you can't have it off by default, although you can turn it off for specific galleries. How do you use smugmug, and do you use it as your portfolio? Would be very interested in learning more about what's possible.
- mpdehaan2 11y ago
  There's a little tiny "powered by smugmug" that shows up in the bottom for mid-level accounts, though the domain is definitely pointable. (example: http://photos.michaeldehaan.net http://photos.michaeldehaan.net) As for the "buy" option, it's pretty easy to turn off - you can save a "quick settings" set of options and then select all your galleries, and then apply the "quick settings" to the batch of galleries. And when creating a new gallery, just pick that preset of "quick settings". This includes more than just the "buy" option, and also things like whether to show EXIF, and stuff like that. The one thing you can't do is change the "quick setting" and then have all the galleries change automatically to match the setting.
samch 11y ago
Except that it doesn't appear as though new users can upload RAW images anymore [1]. Oh well. It seemed like a good service for a minute there. [1] http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93324 http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93324
ValentineC 11y ago
> Everyone needs to check out https://smugmug.com https://smugmug.com - for $40 a year you get unlimited photo and video uploads (yes, RAW files are ok). Did they recently change their offering? It's not clear on their website. I just had a look at their help documents [1], and it says that only JPG, GIF and PNG files enjoy unlimited uploads, while RAW files still require a SmugVault (which isn't open for signups anymore) [2]. [1] http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93278-what-types-of-files-can-i-upload-to-smugmug- http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93278-what-... [2] http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93324-what-is-a-smugvault- http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93324-what-...
- lloydde 11y ago
  I came to comment the same thing. A few months ago I revisited photo storage for my professional photographer spouse and without competitive raw storage smugmug isn't a replacement for our current multivendor storage stack.
- NateDad 11y ago
  Sorry for the confusion... I had smugvault and it didn't occur to me to look to see if it still is available. My bad.
acdha 11y ago
SmugMug is great but one of your comparison points just changed – Flickr just announced that Pro members will not see ads: http://blog.flickr.net/en/2015/07/23/hey-there-flickr-pro-nice-to-see-you-again/ http://blog.flickr.net/en/2015/07/23/hey-there-flickr-pro-ni...
Stratoscope 11y ago
(See update below...!) Speaking of Flickr, I'm pretty annoyed with them right now. I have a paid Flickr account (and a paid SmugMug account - I was experimenting with both). I was recently looking over the shoulder of a friend who was viewing my photos. After clicking the right arrow a few times, Flickr displayed an interstitial ad! On a gallery I paid for! I tried it myself in an incognito window, and sure enough, same thing. They don't show me ads when I'm logged in, but when anyone else views my photos, Flickr inserts random ads. Some of which are rather questionable - one was bordering on an upskirt shot. This is very much not OK. Sure, put all the ads you want on a free account. But on a paid account? Needless to say, I'm canceling my Flickr account and moving everything to SmugMug. I'm pretty sure they don't do this - or at least I hope they don't! Update: Well, this is interesting timing. Five minutes after writing this, I got an email from Flickr saying that my "Flickr ad-free account" is now a Flickr Pro account which includes "Ad-free browsing and sharing" (emphasis added). And I just checked from an incognito window - the ads do appear to be completely gone! So forget my complaint... :-)
- delgaudm 11y ago
  I thought Flickr premium accounts were so that YOU didn't see ads when logged in, not so people viewing your pics didn't see ads. Did they change that somewhere along the lines? IIUC I think anonymous / not logged in people will always see ads on your pics regardless of your account status.
  - colordrops 11y ago
    Maybe that's the case, but if so it still doesn't make sense. Facebook puts ads on your content because it's a free service. If you are paying for Flickr, they really shouldn't be putting ads on your content, regardless of whether it's you or another user.
    - hsod 11y ago
      It makes perfect sense, you just don't like it.
java-man 11y ago
smugmug.com uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is unknown. The server might not be sending the appropriate intermediate certificates. An additional root certificate may need to be imported. The certificate is only valid for secure.smugmug.com The certificate expired on 4/9/2015 16:24. The current time is 7/23/2015 17:43. (Error code: sec_error_unknown_issuer)

by NateDad 11y ago

georgemcbay 11y ago

As a pretty serious hobbyist photo-taking-guy I'm a big fan of smugmug, my "sharing photos with friends and family" photo website (http://gmcbay.com http://gmcbay.com) is hosted with them, but I don't think of them or use them as a good long-term file "storage"/backup solution. All of the photo-specific type of storage solutions (Google, Amazon, Smugmug, Adobe's CC thing, etc) are kind of flawed for many reasons (some outlined in the OP blogpost) when used as what I think of as "digital negative storage", IMO. I just store all of my (original, RAW-format) photos/videos on giant harddrives inside my desktop computer and have that backed up automatically and continuously via backblaze. Local storage is ridiculously cheap, and so are offsite automatic backups. For people who just deal with jpg files from a phone camera or whatever then YMMV and these photo-specific services may be just the thing, but I've yet to try one that doesn't feel like it is getting in your way if your normal workflow is big RAW files with processing via Lightroom/Photoshop, etc.

fuzzywalrus 11y ago
Indeed, I still use an aging 2008 Mac Pro and the benefits of internal storage are pretty profound. I have two Time Machine HDDs (An Internal + an External), which counts for two of my six HDDs. I'm debating going towards a service like blackblaze as I have a decade of photos on my computer.

gingerlime 11y ago

I also use smugmug, and hope it's ok to mention my open-source command line tool for syncing with SmugMug, smugline[0]. That being said, I'm not 100% sure I would recommend them. They do some odd things to images you upload, and more so with videos, where I think they won't store the original version for you, but a processed version. As an example (perhaps related to the syncing functions I need), SmugMug will auto-rotate images based on EXIF data. This is ok most of the time, but it screws up with things like MD5 hashes so hard to detect duplicates. [0] https://github.com/gingerlime/smugline https://github.com/gingerlime/smugline

onethumb 11y ago
Thanks so much for writing smugline. :) FWIW, we stopped rotating your Originals (which we did in a lossless fashion back in the day) awhile back, and now preserve them exactly as you uploaded them. Your MD5 hashes and byte counts match, and of course, people can get them back whenever they'd like.
- gingerlime 11y ago
  That's interesting to know. I suggested it (or at least storing the original MD5 hash) but was stonewalled by Nick from your dev support, saying "I checked with our developers and in the case that we rotate an image, we do not store the original MD5 of the non-rotated image. This is not something that we are going to change at this time.". I've seen fairly recent reports[0] saying this still happens (although, to be fair, your support indicated that it might be a bug). What about videos though? From looking at the (v1.3) API response, I can't be sure that the original file is preserved. Sorry, didn't mean to hijack this, but since you chimed in, I hope to highlight some issues that I saw. Happy to share more from my personal, very limited, experience supporting smugline with you. If you wish to take this offline. [0] http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=1999917 http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=1999917
  - UberMouse 11y ago
    onethumb says here in this comment that they recompress videos for streaming https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9939270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9939270 Now I'm not sure if that means, it's recompressed when it's streamed, or if it's recompressed when it's uploading, for streaming.

rsync 11y ago

"Everyone needs to check out https://smugmug.com https://smugmug.com - for $40 a year you get unlimited photo and video uploads (yes, RAW files are ok). It's like flikr with no ads, only your own stuff on the pages, super customizable (with a power account - $60 a year)" Unlimited storage at a flat rate can only end two ways: 1) Out of business 2) User hostile behavior where only light usage is tolerated That's it. There's not a third way. If the space is unlimited and the price is not, eventually non-light users will be throttled or otherwise inconvenienced such that the service is not useful for them. Your interests are not aligned in this scenario - you want to use as much space as possible and they want you to use as little space as possible.

unicornporn 11y ago
You forgot... 3) They start to mine your data to learn more about you... Compared to Smugmug I think OneDrive (Office 365) and Amazon Cloud Drive seems like the better option to me though. With ACD I can store any file type and encrypt it with Arq[1] for $60 a year. [1] https://www.arqbackup.com/ https://www.arqbackup.com/
- onethumb 11y ago
  Option '3' certainly could be on the list, but I'd guess that's primarily for advertising-driving companies. (Google Photos comes to mind). SmugMug has no ads, so #3 hasn't seemed appealing to us, let alone that I think we already have a great contract with our customers: They pay us right up front, and in return we build the best photo sharing service in the world. Seems fair to me. :)
onethumb 11y ago
Disclaimer: I'm SmugMug's co-founder, CEO & Chief Geek I don't have a crystal ball, but we've been offering unlimited storage since I co-founded the company in 2002 with $0 of investment. 13 years later, the company still hasn't taken any outside funding, has been profitable for most of those years, and still offers unlimited storage. We plan to keep this critical feature for the forseeable future. :) Anyone who's passionate about photography is aligned with our interests. We're photographers and limits suck. [edited: typo]

bambax 11y ago

> with a power account you can point your own URL at your account and no one even needs to know the files are on smugmug Really? I use smugmug and am quite happy with it, and I use a custom url, but I never dived into having a custom gallery where no smugmug info would be present. I asked support how to remove the "buy" option and they said you can't have it off by default, although you can turn it off for specific galleries. How do you use smugmug, and do you use it as your portfolio? Would be very interested in learning more about what's possible.

mpdehaan2 11y ago
There's a little tiny "powered by smugmug" that shows up in the bottom for mid-level accounts, though the domain is definitely pointable. (example: http://photos.michaeldehaan.net http://photos.michaeldehaan.net) As for the "buy" option, it's pretty easy to turn off - you can save a "quick settings" set of options and then select all your galleries, and then apply the "quick settings" to the batch of galleries. And when creating a new gallery, just pick that preset of "quick settings". This includes more than just the "buy" option, and also things like whether to show EXIF, and stuff like that. The one thing you can't do is change the "quick setting" and then have all the galleries change automatically to match the setting.

samch 11y ago

Except that it doesn't appear as though new users can upload RAW images anymore [1]. Oh well. It seemed like a good service for a minute there. [1] http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93324 http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93324

ValentineC 11y ago

> Everyone needs to check out https://smugmug.com https://smugmug.com - for $40 a year you get unlimited photo and video uploads (yes, RAW files are ok). Did they recently change their offering? It's not clear on their website. I just had a look at their help documents [1], and it says that only JPG, GIF and PNG files enjoy unlimited uploads, while RAW files still require a SmugVault (which isn't open for signups anymore) [2]. [1] http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93278-what-types-of-files-can-i-upload-to-smugmug- http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93278-what-... [2] http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93324-what-is-a-smugvault- http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93324-what-...

lloydde 11y ago
I came to comment the same thing. A few months ago I revisited photo storage for my professional photographer spouse and without competitive raw storage smugmug isn't a replacement for our current multivendor storage stack.
NateDad 11y ago
Sorry for the confusion... I had smugvault and it didn't occur to me to look to see if it still is available. My bad.

acdha 11y ago

SmugMug is great but one of your comparison points just changed – Flickr just announced that Pro members will not see ads: http://blog.flickr.net/en/2015/07/23/hey-there-flickr-pro-nice-to-see-you-again/ http://blog.flickr.net/en/2015/07/23/hey-there-flickr-pro-ni...

Stratoscope 11y ago

(See update below...!) Speaking of Flickr, I'm pretty annoyed with them right now. I have a paid Flickr account (and a paid SmugMug account - I was experimenting with both). I was recently looking over the shoulder of a friend who was viewing my photos. After clicking the right arrow a few times, Flickr displayed an interstitial ad! On a gallery I paid for! I tried it myself in an incognito window, and sure enough, same thing. They don't show me ads when I'm logged in, but when anyone else views my photos, Flickr inserts random ads. Some of which are rather questionable - one was bordering on an upskirt shot. This is very much not OK. Sure, put all the ads you want on a free account. But on a paid account? Needless to say, I'm canceling my Flickr account and moving everything to SmugMug. I'm pretty sure they don't do this - or at least I hope they don't! Update: Well, this is interesting timing. Five minutes after writing this, I got an email from Flickr saying that my "Flickr ad-free account" is now a Flickr Pro account which includes "Ad-free browsing and sharing" (emphasis added). And I just checked from an incognito window - the ads do appear to be completely gone! So forget my complaint... :-)

delgaudm 11y ago
I thought Flickr premium accounts were so that YOU didn't see ads when logged in, not so people viewing your pics didn't see ads. Did they change that somewhere along the lines? IIUC I think anonymous / not logged in people will always see ads on your pics regardless of your account status.
- colordrops 11y ago
  Maybe that's the case, but if so it still doesn't make sense. Facebook puts ads on your content because it's a free service. If you are paying for Flickr, they really shouldn't be putting ads on your content, regardless of whether it's you or another user.
  - hsod 11y ago
    It makes perfect sense, you just don't like it.

java-man 11y ago

smugmug.com uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is unknown. The server might not be sending the appropriate intermediate certificates. An additional root certificate may need to be imported. The certificate is only valid for secure.smugmug.com The certificate expired on 4/9/2015 16:24. The current time is 7/23/2015 17:43. (Error code: sec_error_unknown_issuer)