I will admit I have always used flickr for my online photo experience. I pay for the Pro Account and have been enjoying it. They add new features now and then and the community is huge. SmugMug is a company I had heard about and thought was pretty cool (I subscribe to the CEO Don MacAskill’s blog and really enjoy it) but had never really given it a chance to see what it was all about.
Then this past weekend, the LA Times a great article titled “A Focused Family Business“. It was all about the MacAskills and the business over at SmugMug they are running. It is a great read and I invite all of you to head over and check it out. I was totally impressed by how they have stayed innovative and at the same time kept the company small, agile, and even better, family friendly. They really seem to “get it”, not take things too seriously and continue to just have fun. They call their engineers “sorcerers” and the customer support staff “support heroes” and they once traded a lifetime SmugMug membership to a couple in Scottland for a sheep ….
In more ways than one, SmugMug has defied conventional business wisdom from inception. Undaunted by the prospect of starting a company amid the ruins of the Internet crash and rising competition from major players including Hewlett-Packard Co. and Eastman Kodak Co., the MacAskills set out to build a site they would want to use. That meant sending no spam, running no ads next to people’s photos, offering unlimited storage and taking great care to protect photos from unwanted viewers.
What I love to see and hear and what makes me the most jealous is the culture they are cultivating. Each employee gets 401k matching, stock options, fully paid medical coverage, and they even get a $500 allowance to decorate their cubicles. How cool is that? There is no time clock, they set their own schedules.
After I read the article I went over to give SumgMug a good look. I was totally impressed. They offer three levels of service, all cost, but for what you get it is well worth the price. If it is Flickr you are looking for, don;t look here. But if you are looking for a no nonsense photo site with a great interface and awesome tools, then SmugMug is for you. They have a great Pro plan for people to be able to leverage the SmugMug framework to make great customizable web sites to display and sell their artwork.
What I loved was while the site is clean and streamline, it doesn’t take itself too seriously. When I logged in today, there was a note on my homepage saying that Don, the CEO was daring people to email him their phone number and he would call them to get their take on the site and what could be better. That is awesome. One of the funniest things was when I signed up. They asked if I wanted to import my photos from another site. They have a FF plugin called Smugglr, and it is all in pirate talk about stealing your booty of photos from the other site. I installed it and within 15 minutes all my Sets, photos, even tags were all imported into SmugMug. The have a fantastic forums and do a lot for their customers. It is great to see and I am glad to have found them. I hope to upgrade my service and get the full amount I can out of the site and have fun and learn while I am at it.
Make sure to stop by and give them a try, they have a 14 day free trial to look around to see if you like what you see. Believe me, you will.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey, thanks! Posts like this mean a lot to us.
Definitely holler if there’s anything we can improve on or fix for you – our business is built on customer feedback.
Take care, and Happy New Year!
I’ve been a big fan of and evangelist for Zooomr for a long time, but recent issues there have caused me to consider looking elsewhere. SmugMug has definitely been on my radar – it seems like a great site for would-be photographers like me. Thanks for this post – now I am even more interested.
Oops – sorry about that last comment – forgot to close my link