Smugmug.com
Today I spent about an hour figuring out how to link my photography business home page to a site where customers could order prints without having to involve me directly in the transaction. I had some choices, primarily between Shutterfly.com and Smugmug.com. Both offer professional packages where you can sell your prints to customers with a mark-up which you get to keep (well mostly) as profit. I have been looking to do this for some time now and was close to working with Shutterfly. But I never did it because Shutterfly just was not quite what I was looking for….they were missing some things that I wanted. They also seem to bury their “professional” offer down in the bottom of the page. It just looked half-hearted to me.
I learned about smugmug.com by chance during a discussion with a fellow photographer at my daughter’s ballet class. He uses smugmug and his gallery page looked very polished and professional. I saw an article on techcrunch.com the other day that sang the praises of smugmug.com again, so I went investigating this morning and was very pleased with the features.
For $150 a year you can upload as many images as you want and also have as much traffic as you want (limited to one petabyte…I can only hope to get to that!) - shutterfly is $200. Their wholesale print prices are competitive with everyone else. They take a 15% cut of your profit (in addition to the $150 a year). Not bad considering they handle the credit card fee (~2%), shipping, customer service, the site itself, data centers, etc. I think it is a great deal for me and certainly is making some money for them. So far so good. Oh, and no Ads!
But that is just the price difference. Smugmug is totally geared to professional photogs as opposed to Shutterfly which is mostly geared to the retail side. Why does this matter? Well smugmug’s whole existance is catering to the pro. And their new site (just relaunched) reflects it amazingly well. With these guys I can:
- Create a subdomain (like purchase.carlhutzler.com) and point the cname to smugmug. Then I configure that URL in smugmug and it makes it look like the smugmug site is just another page on carlhutzler.com!
- I can customize the look and feel of the page via templates. But I can go a lot farther (if so inclined) and include my own CSS formatting for everything! I am not a CSS expert yet, but this is very cool. For now, the included templates are great.
- The site is mostly “ajaxy” in that you don’t need page reloads all the time to do common, repetitive functions. The designers/software developers have done a very good job with the UI. They obviously care deeply about the usability. This is one of the best interfaces I have used. Shutterfly is also a great UI company. Put together one picture book on their site and you will know that they are good too!
- I can put my copyright on the back of my prints. I can watermark the images on the site.
- I can allow for printing, digital downloads, or neither…and set prices for each type very easily.
- I can have public and hidden albums and even password protected albums
Oh, and I had a tech support question today so I sent an email in…and a real human answered me within an hour or two six minutes! (see update below) That is great! Now they did not answer my question 100% so I had to follow-up, but they did try. We will see what the next reply has :-)
The list of positives goes on. The only thing I have found that is a little nit is not being able to change the capitalization of your smugmug “nickname”. So if you do signup, make sure to choose the capitalization correctly in the first place (I chose carlhutzlerphotography and should have picked CarlHutzlerPhotography).
To be fair, not everything that I list above in the positives is unique to smugmug, but they seem to have just about everything I need, covered. Check it out if you like, directly from my site at http://carlhutzler.com/ And if you do sign-up, you can use my cdh@carlhutzler.com email address to get $5 off (if I remember that correctly). I think I get $5 too, for referring you. Whatever, enjoy :-)
UPDATE: The tech support guy at smugmug actually responded to my question within 6 minutes! I went back to check after Chris (one of smugmug’s co-founders) lefty a comment on this blog. In reality, I think it took ME an hour to get back to my screen and READ the response as I was away doing other stuff. Kudos to smugmug for responding to email so quickly.
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Hi Carl.
Many thanks for giving SmugMug a try. I’m sorry we didn’t answer our help email faster — we usually try to get back to you in 15 minutes.
When you run into things you think we need to improve, don’t be a stranger.
All the best,
Chris
Wow, you guys are good :-)
And I went back and checked and you were right! It was only 6 minutes. It must have been me being slow to READ the response. I will update my post.
Impressive.
(still haven’t heard back on the follow-up though :-)
If you are interested, my question was, is there anyway to change the capitalization of a nickname? I tried to change it but it errors and says “someone else already has that nickname” which of course is me :-)
Hey Carl,
I’m sure you got an answer by now, but just change your nickname to something different… like wombat. Then, change it CarlHutzlerPhotography.
You’re always welcome to change your nickname, but because visitors can type in http://carlhutzlerphotography.smugmug.com and get to the same place as http://CarlHutzlerPhotography.smugmug.com , we treat them as the same nickname. A capitalization change sends off warning flags.
As I mentioned, just change it to a different nickname and then back to the capitalization you want displayed. :)
-Anne
I did hear back but was essentially told that I can’t do what I want to do.
“Our system does not recognize capital letters as being any different. So trying to change your username to just using a capital letter will not work. The system sees them both the same.”
So I figured I was stuck. I had considered doing what you suggested, but I was not 100% sure if I could get the original name back….my old company (AOL) like many others, hold previously used nicknames (screennames) for a period of time….weeks to months to even years….before a “new” person can reuse that nickname.
Are you sure I can jump back on CarlHutzlerPhotography if I switch to another subdomain for a minute or two?
Absolutely positive. Give it a whirl, or I can do it from my end if you prefer. :)
I’m sorry about the misinformation. Looks like Barb hadn’t picked up on this trick yet. I let her know.
-Anne
Carl,
My co-worker teased me just now for choosing “wombat” as an example of a nickname you could change to… well, I just checked and there already IS a wombat.smugmug.com .
Better pick something else, I guess. How about cassowary? ;)
-Anne
I went in and tried your suggestion and it worked! Yeah :-)
I thought about trying this in the first place but was scared that you all (like AOL and many other online sites) might prevent me from re-using carlhutzlerphotography right away and that I might have to wait weeks or months to get it back. For example, you can’t get an AOL screenname (sorta like a nickname) for 6 months minimum after someone else cancels it.
Anyway, it worked. Thanks for the suggestion. SmugMug help support has been great. One more reason to go with this company over the others.
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