Gourt Home::Gourt :: Smugmug
SmugMug is a digital photo sharing website. Founded by a father and son team in 2002 with an emphasis on ease of use and style. SmugMug is well known among the press, bloggers and web forums for having exceptional customer service.Review - PC Magazine Editor's Choice, Mar 16, 2004.Sharing your Digital Photos - Chicago Tribune May 1, 2004You ought to be in pixels - New York Times, May 9, 2004Soldiers download war onto Web sites - San Francisco Chronicle, Jan 10 2005Pixel perfect store - San Francisco Chronicle, May 23 2005Sharing vacation photos is as easy as aim, shoot and upload - Los Angeles Times, May 29, 2005Make your images last - Macworld, Jul 7, 2005SmugMaps goes live - Tim O'Reilly, Aug 18, 2005Review - PC Magazine Editor's Choice, Sep 14, 2005.Mapping the Web's Future - Forbes, Sep 21 2005Smugmug: Digital Pictures —troubleshooter.com, Jan 12, 2006.Review - Jupiter Research, Feb 2 2006
History
Chris MacAskill (father) and Don MacAskill (son) started the original company to build a new video game-oriented web service in February 2002. By August 2002, though, their focus shifted. A small portion of their video game website was spun into a full-blown photo sharing service called SmugMug, which officially launched in November 2002.
Prior to SmugMug, Chris was the founder and CEO of fatbrain.com, which he sold to Barnes and Noble. His son, Don, was the first non-founding employee at Best Internet, where he designed the networks that hosted Hotmail, eBay, and fatbrain.
Features
- SmugMug isn't free. There are three levels of membership, Standard, Power and Pro. Power and Pro level users can customize their site, while Pro users can mark up their prints for sale, with a commission going to smugmug.
- SmugMug allows the upload of an unlimited number of photos for all account types.
- Includes a published API which allows programmers and hackers to create new functionality themselves.
- An email upload interface to allow camera phones to upload images.
- Keyword tagging for searching and categorization of photos.
- Enables Google Maps integration for photos with GPS.
- Viewers can 'thumbs up' and 'thumbs down' photos to select the most popular photos using PhotoRank.
Privacy and Security
SmugMug has options to allow control over both privacy and security published photos. They have support for both account-level and gallery-level passwords, as well as hidden galleries.
There's also a friends and family social networking interface for members of the service to use, which allows sharing of photos limited to people known to the publisher.
Printing
SmugMug conducted a blind test of a variety of consumer and professional grade printing labs before choosing EZ Prints. The results of this test are here.
They offer a selection of both prints and gifts, including various print sizes, t-shirts, mugs, mousepads, and the like.
Professional Services
In conjunction with their print service, SmugMug has created a service aimed at professional photographers. Professional accounts have the ability to watermark their photos and add additional forms of image protection. They can also sell their photos through the SmugMug interface with their own custom pricing.
See also
References
External links
"Smugmug"