SmugMug is a premium image hosting and
photo sharing website founded by father and son Chris and Don MacAskill in
2002. The Company was created based on the duo’s love for the Internet and
digital photography. It is a great site that facilitates selling of print and
digital media for amateur and professional photographers. It is a fantastic
service for people who want a website that can customize their photos, and the
prints can be sold to their clients or fans. The Los Angeles Times described
SmugMug as a family focused business, where seven members of their close joined
circle aged frm 26 to 63 started SmugMug Inc. with an idea to share some
smiling captured moments of each family online. Don MacAskills, the company CEO
with his employees, started their office in their five bedroom home but now
they have their office in Mountain View, California. The company now employs 28
people including mainly MacAskills family friends and SmugMug customers they
hired in five countries. The MacAskills have signed up more than 100,000 paying
subscribers despite mounting competition frm free service websites with their
family-friendly approach. Since 2002, passionate amateurs, snap-shooters, and
pro photographers have uploaded more than 225 million photos to SmugMug, and
now it’s the largest independent, profitable photo sharing site, with more than
350,000 paying customers, the company continues to grow twice the size every
year. SmugMug has become the trustee for the priceless images of amateur and
professional photographers all over the world, due to the company's serious
sense of responsibility for the photos stored on the site.
What are the features of SmugMug?
SmugMug offers a simple and effective site
for those who wish to protect their pictures, have a customized portfolio that
makes you money. Its features open up a platform for photographers to have
online presence. It offers photo editing, printing and even selling them to
make a living or just for their fan base. SmugMug offers various types of plans
fitting different needs of different photographers. Each of their packages
offers some common, awesome features like:
•
Unlimited Storage
•
Image editing
•
Image publishing
•
SEO assistance
Whichever package you choose the storage
option for all subscribed plans is same. They offer four amazing packages that
are called Basic, Power, Portfolio, and Business. All of these offer a
customizable website, responsive design for a laptop, mobile apps and even
tablets, zero ads and spams, gorgeous full-screen galleries to display your
photos beautifully. All plans offer to upload up to a maximum photo size of 150
MB and a video size of 3GB with 20 minutes of clip length. The two upgraded
package, portfolio, and business additionally offer E-commerce, Branding and
marketing thus allowing users to purchase your work. In the business plan, they
give a customized logo to your shopping carts with branded thank you cards and
custom logo stickers in shipped orders. One feature that makes this plan just
wow is that photographers can create their custom coupon for their work
promotion.
SmugMug helps keep your priceless memory
safe and secure even if your drive crashed, and you lose all your devices. They
will still be there with a backup in the cloud. Not just that every picture we click
we want it to be protected that includes password protecting a client’s gallery
or watermarking the award winning shots etc. So, you don’t have to worry as
SmugMug will take care of them at all times.
SmugMug uses API 2.0 allowing third party
developer to use their API, which offers a very good documentation giving
features like free business account for one year. They also give powerful
customization that has dozens of designs that you can choose frm. All designs
are fully customizable with colors, fonts, content blocks and the like. Their display or organizational section helps
to get some exciting editing and tweaks; they offer some amazing editorial
tools to brighten the eyes, add more makeup or anything creative you wish to do
with that picture. You can even download a plugin like Lightroom to work on
that directly frm their website. There is a staggering variety of finishes,
sizes, and frames for producing the prints, like you, can get a basic glossy
print of your work, or you can get the 36 x 36 metal prints. This is when
having the most expensive account pays off. You can still purchase your items
with the low-tiered subscriptions, but only the Business and Portfolio plans
have the marketing options like package options and custom coupons. Their help
and support services offer contact email addresses, user and support forums,
FAQs page, live chat and popup tips available for photography and site help.
What is exclusive in SmugMug?
Another exclusive feature that sets SmugMug
apart frm other photo sharing services is the online backup. The SmugMug Vault
is an extra service that you can add to any account. This feature gives PDF,
PSD, RAW, TIFF, and even Excel and Word documents a safe home. Use the
"Vault" to upload the original high-quality original versions of the
edited photos, as a backup, in a safe online location.
It stores your photos in full size, offers
unlimited storage, and it can be upgraded anytime, with an option to choose
frm tons of community tools (screen savers, upload frm right click, Lightroom
plugin).
Making that extra money frm your creative
work is so much easy on this cool website. You can charge people to download
the digital version of your photo and can price them differently as per their
professional or personal use. You can set prices for prints, size of the image
and file types also and sell a whole lot of merchandising. Even if photography
were just your hobby, you could use those photos to get sold here, and you get
85% commission while SmugMug takes 15%. Isn’t that a profit? You can set prices
to whatever you wish. The store-front on the SmugMug website offers an
extensive list of ways you can print your photographs. Customers can even order
your artwork or photograph on museum-quality canvas, mugs, stickers, photo
greeting cards and other merchandising items.
You can access SmugMug frm any device and
even use their mobile apps to browse your images. The portfolio that they offer
is so responsive even in IPhones, tablets and a huge monitor. The responsive
design of the site is pretty impressive since it moulds itself according to any
mobile device. But for all these exclusive service you have to get SmugMug Pro
account but, believe me, it’s worth paying.
Smugmug Coupons and Deals
Some discount in the most featured upgradation
plan or a coupon deal that will save some penny to get that beautiful photo
book for someone special or a free shipping promo code. SmugMug has a variety
of options for users as well as photographers to make some savings. Their
special featured customized coupon creation is a hit among all professional
photographers. Anyone with their business package can create their coupon as a
marketing strategy to attract more users. There's no extra charge for creating
coupons, and you can create as many as you want. To start off, you must possess
a valid credit card on file. If you're using the free trial period, you'll need
to upgrade to a paid account before you can create a coupon.
They offer five types of coupons -
Amount Off: This coupon allows the customers to get a
discount for a certain dollar amount of the pre-shipping total.
Percent Off:
This allows a percentage of discounts off the pre-shipping total amount
At Cost:
This allows the lucky person who uses the code to order images on its cost.
Print Credit: This function is just like a "gift card" for a single
customer. If a customer does not use with an order, the balance will remain to
use on future orders.
Free Shipping: This provides free standard shipping or free airmail shipping to
customers if the order is international. If the customer chooses the faster
shipping option at checkout, then the amount equal to standard shipping charge
would be deducted frm the shipping total.
You can apply the desired coupon code at the
time of payment info and checkout.
Payment Mode in SmugMug
SmugMug accepts the following online
credit/debit cards: Visa / Master Card / American Express / Discover card
As an alternative, you can use Amazon
Payments to make the payment for your subscription. The site also allows you to
use a bank account or a credit card of your choice.
Customer Service
Their team of customer service is called
“Super Heroes.” They actually make their staff paint their faces with all those
superheroes’ masks and face paint. Thankfully not every day! Though being a family owned business, they
still have most professional and friendly staff who will resolve all your
queries very efficiently and on time.
Email:
[email protected]
SmugMug does not offer Phone support, and
so you cannot find any phone number on their entire page but as they insist on
emails and written feedbacks, ideas, and suggestions, you can drop in at least
to their office and meet the team
SmugMug Office Address
67 E Evelyn Ave
Ste 200
Mountain View, CA 94041
Social Links
If you want to join the discussion on
features, bugs, or tips for using SmugMug, head over to their Social links.
They also look forward to feedback and suggestions. For their video tutorials
on Photo privacy or learning how to customize a theme for your portfolio
subscribe to their youtube channel.
Have you found a working SmugMug coupon that you’d like to share? Submit it here to help millions of other shoppers save at the checkout.
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