SmugMug

Somehow about one in three of my posts end up having to do with photography or digital imaging. Well, I guess that's natural because it's my main hobby. This time, the topic is SmugMug. I'm mixed on the name, but sold on the service. SmugMug is a Web service where you can host your photos for others to come and see.



There are lots of other services like SmugMug, but SmugMug offers a few things above-and-beyond for professional or semi-pro/serious amateur photographers (more on that in a bit).

(side note: here's an interesting article about the family that started and still runs SmugMug. I love this country!)

People browsing your photos can order prints directly from SmugMug. The rates for prints are comparable to other services such as Shutterfly. This is a great feature for, say, posting a bunch of photos you took at your family reunion this summer. Just tell everbody your SmugMug address (mine is vincedistefano.smugmug.com) and they can order whatever prints they want and choose from a huge variety of print sizes, papers, etc). It sure beats trying to send out email attachments and figuring out what everbody wants - or worse, doing the printing yourself and dealing with shipping, etc.

Visually, SmugMug offers numerous layouts and templates and you can tweak lots of settings. It's pretty easy to browse and its galleries are attractive. It has a ratings system and a comments feature, for people to chat back and forth about photos.

Now, for pros and serious amateurs, SmugMug offers some very unique and useful functionality:

• You can set your own prices above the SmugMug defaults, allowing you to price your material for its true artistic value. SmugMug takes a cut of your profits, but considering they handle the printing, credit card processing, and shipping, it's not a bad deal.
• Along those lines, you can also offer digital downloads of your files with a commercial rights license. Very, very convenient.
• You can set up private galleries for your clients for proofing, password protected so that only they can view the photos. You can have it automatically watermark images upon upload. This helps protect your images from theft. And from a workflow standpoint, it's great because you don't have to keep a separate collection of photo files on your hard drive (one set of originals, one set of watermarked).
• You can set your gallery so that people can't do the ole' right-click and "save as..." or drag images to their desktops. Another protection mechanism.
• You can configure your own domain to point to your SmugMug site - for example, I configured photos.vincedistefano.com to be my SmugMug address.

There is a BUNCH of other stuff to mention, but I'll stop here. If you're interested in this sort of thing, go have some fun exploring SmugMug. Info on the three levels of service is here. If you're not, I guess 10 more bullet points really aren't going to make much of a difference anyway.