Everyone needs to check out https://smugmug.com - for $40 a year you get unlimited photo and video uploads (yes, RAW files are ok). It's like flikr with no ads, only your own stuff on the pages, super customizable (with a power account - $60 a year - you can point your own URL at your account and no one even needs to know the files are on smugmug.
It's a site designed for professional photographers that also happens to have kickass features for casual photographers as well. There's even lightroom plugins to upload directly to smugmug.
One of the best features, in my opinion, is the customer support. They respond within a couple hours. They're super nice and knowledgeable.
I've had an account at smugmug for nearly a decade, and would never go back to free services. Google photos is nice, but the size limitation is definitely a problem for prolific photographers.
(I don't work for smugmug nor do I know anyone who works there, I just love their service.)
"Everyone needs to check out https://smugmug.com - for $40 a year you get unlimited photo and video uploads (yes, RAW files are ok). It's like flikr with no ads, only your own stuff on the pages, super customizable (with a power account - $60 a year)"
Unlimited storage at a flat rate can only end two ways:
1) Out of business
2) User hostile behavior where only light usage is tolerated
That's it. There's not a third way. If the space is unlimited and the price is not, eventually non-light users will be throttled or otherwise inconvenienced such that the service is not useful for them.
Your interests are not aligned in this scenario - you want to use as much space as possible and they want you to use as little space as possible.
Disclaimer: I'm SmugMug's co-founder, CEO & Chief Geek
I don't have a crystal ball, but we've been offering unlimited storage since I co-founded the company in 2002 with $0 of investment.
13 years later, the company still hasn't taken any outside funding, has been profitable for most of those years, and still offers unlimited storage. We plan to keep this critical feature for the forseeable future. :)
Anyone who's passionate about photography is aligned with our interests. We're photographers and limits suck.
As I was writing this, I remembered a thread from our message forum in 2005 where a customer asked if they could upload more than 2TB of photos under our "unlimited" plan. Remember, this was in 2005.
I am a happy user of smugmug for a long time, because it was the best service I found that could handle 1080 videos. But I believe I'm a different kind of customer. I only want to have my personal backup. I don't want to sell photos. Google Photos has become very appealing as the interface is great to see the pictures and videos. But what I really don't like on Smugmug is that the Android App can't be trusted. It sometimes skip a lot of files and also don't handle duplicate files after the album has apparently more than 1000 files. The result is a messy album. I already reported this to support (by that time I did not realize the 1000 files issue, just the behavior) but I had no response. This is not a complain about the service that I really like. It is a feedback according to my behavior as a user. I am testing Amazon Cloud Drive and I'm really impressed. It lacks the great Google Interface but don't change the quality of my videos.
It's a little weird you didn't correct that unlimited is only on compressed image formats; not RAW and there are video length restrictions, though generous.
Sorry about that, was trying to correct the "They'll go out of business" or "They don't really mean unlimited" comments about our business.
We definitely do not support unlimited RAW uploads, and we do recompress videos for streaming (at insanely high quality, though!). Stay tuned on RAW.
Additionally, we limit photos (JPEG, GIF, PNG) to 150MB or 210 Megapixels apiece, and videos to 20 minutes and 3GB. Those have continued to grow over time as additional devices demand them, and I expect that trend to continue.
As you're on here - will a new alternative to Smugmug Vault surface again soon? As far as I can tell, smugmug doesn't support raw at all for new users at this time?
So far the only real alternative I'm aware of is pics.io.
I should have mentioned that the reason we no longer offer SmugVault for RAW storage is that Amazon has deprecated AWS DevPay, the product we built SmugVault on, and will be shutting it down "soon".
Which means we need to build something entirely new, which I'm happy to do, but we're currently in limbo and gathering feedback.
Personally I need to store RAWs. I don't have any use for a DAM (Digital Asset Management) system that doesn't let me store RAWs (or at least import to DNG with most, if not 1:1, of the information intact).
I'm mulling over implementing it myself, as a self-host solution. Probably aim for ingesting RAWs to DNGs, and have the possibility of losslessly doing some edit/transforms (store the operations outside the DNG files) -- along with export/view/cache as jpeg and jpeg 2000 for web browsing etc.
Somewhat related, I came across dpbestflow[1] again, just now -- and I see they've added some information about (archive) file formats since I stopped by last. I wasn't aware jpeg 2000 had a lossless mode (nor that it generally compressed better than other lossless formats). Nor was I aware a number of archive institutions have standardized their DAM/Archiving on lossless jpeg 2000.
I suppose one would still need DNG/RAW if one want to keep the door open for being able to "re-develop from negative" on archived photos (jfr. archiving/keeping old negatives, which would be the equivalent for traditional photography).
Anyway, the site[1] might be of interest for those that find this thread interesting.
Hello SmugMug CEO, I've received many emails the last two months about my credit card expiration. The problem is I cancelled my account a couple years ago. I have not gone through a couple of years of bank records to find when/if you kept charging me and didn't send an email.
I liked your service and cancelled because I was in China and couldn't reliably use the service. Every one of those reminder emails I've receive makes me feel like SmugMug is not a good company. I am not in China anymore and don't think I would use the service of a company that can manage to send so many emails to remind me they can't take money out of my bank but don't do so when they do.
First, I'm very sorry. We certainly shouldn't be sending you tons of emails if you've cancelled your account. Mind emailing me your details (I'm just don at) and I can find & fix the bug?
Second, by way of explanation, not apology, we're the keepers of people's priceless memories & creations. We cannot lose them. But at the same time, we can't offer our service for free, or we'd lose everyone's photos. When someone's credit card expires, we've entered the danger zone where, if we're not very careful, we might inadvertently lose someone's photos who actually really wants to pay.
The summary is we hear more than 100:1 from people about "I didn't get that email!" versus "You're emailing me too much about this!". And when it literally means the difference between removing someone's photos or not, we err on the side of trying to get ahold of you aggressively so you can make an informed choice about your content rather than having us make an automated one.
We go to great lengths to ensure even expired accounts don't lose their photos, but there's only so much we can do.
Again, very sorry our policies & systems are annoying you, and would love to fix & improve them. Please do get in touch.
One of the reasons I stopped using SmugMug was that all my videos were re-encoded/recompressed, and I could visibly see degradation. Is this still the case?
One of the great dilemmas with online video is the bitrate at which you compress. The more you compress, the better then deliverability (faster starts + fewer skips, stutters, pauses, etc). But, of course, you suffer quality loss. If you compress less, at a certain point, almost no one can view your videos because the bandwidth requirements are too high.
Every video service ends up deciding what's more important to them. To us, our decision point has been that we should deliver higher quality 1080p video than anywhere else on the Internet, and I believe we deliver that today. Our quality at that resolution exceeds YouTube, Vimeo, and Netflix. As a result, though, fewer people can stream it at 1080p. There are two parts to our bet: 1) Bandwidth continues to increase, so in the future more people will be able to view it at this quality, and 2) our brand promise is that your photos & videos look better here than anywhere else.
But we can't just leave it at that, because people do want to watch these videos. So what we do is compromise on the compression at lower resolutions so they stream quickly and with few errors. At 720p and lower, we're comparable to the other services in terms of quality, bitrate, and deliverability. In the end, it means we can deliver a very good experience to people with ample bandwidth, and a fairly good experience to people without.
If you have some examples, I'd be happy to take a look and make sure we're meeting our goals on both those fronts.
We've increased it a few times over the years, so I'd guess we'll increase it again in the future.
FYI, it isn't constrained technically or for business reasons, but instead is constrained for product reasons. We can see that longer videos simply don't get watched as often. And we rarely get pushback from our customers on the 20 minute limit, probably for this reason - they're making videos their friends, families & customers want to watch, which are less than 20 minutes.
But I'd love to know your use case and what you'd use longer video lengths for. Entirely possible we're off base here and aren't thinking of some great use cases.
I wish you the best of luck and appreciate your style of running a business, but I stand by my analysis.
If your product is storage, and is unlimited at a flat rate, and you continue to scale, you will have to throttle somewhere (speed, "image quality", upload rate, whatever) or you'll be out of business.
So maybe your product isn't plain old storage ? Maybe this doesn't apply to you. Again, cheers and best of luck to you.
Well, you're right that we're not plain old storage. We're not Dropbox or something.
We're unlimited JPEGs, GIFs, and PNGs, and our target market is people passionate about photography. That is a major differentiator, and certainly helps constrain costs.
That being said, we do have some truly giant consumers. But it works. :)
I just think, fundamentally, people don't want to worry about managing their photo storage. I certainly don't. So I built a service that doesn't have that constraint, then figured out how to make money at it.
why would you want to use as much space as possible? the consumer should want to not have to think about storage space, not maximize their usage.
It seems to me there are three major factors here:
* the annual fee
* the price of storage at their scale
* the average amount of storage used per customer
It seems to me entirely possible that these factors could have values such that true unlimited storage is sustainable, barring a malicious actor.
3) They start to mine your data to learn more about you...
Compared to Smugmug I think OneDrive (Office 365) and Amazon Cloud Drive seems like the better option to me though. With ACD I can store any file type and encrypt it with Arq[1] for $60 a year.
Option '3' certainly could be on the list, but I'd guess that's primarily for advertising-driving companies. (Google Photos comes to mind).
SmugMug has no ads, so #3 hasn't seemed appealing to us, let alone that I think we already have a great contract with our customers: They pay us right up front, and in return we build the best photo sharing service in the world. Seems fair to me. :)
Speaking of Flickr, I'm pretty annoyed with them right now. I have a paid Flickr account (and a paid SmugMug account - I was experimenting with both). I was recently looking over the shoulder of a friend who was viewing my photos. After clicking the right arrow a few times, Flickr displayed an interstitial ad! On a gallery I paid for!
I tried it myself in an incognito window, and sure enough, same thing. They don't show me ads when I'm logged in, but when anyone else views my photos, Flickr inserts random ads. Some of which are rather questionable - one was bordering on an upskirt shot.
This is very much not OK. Sure, put all the ads you want on a free account. But on a paid account?
Needless to say, I'm canceling my Flickr account and moving everything to SmugMug. I'm pretty sure they don't do this - or at least I hope they don't!
Update: Well, this is interesting timing. Five minutes after writing this, I got an email from Flickr saying that my "Flickr ad-free account" is now a Flickr Pro account which includes "Ad-free browsing and sharing" (emphasis added).
And I just checked from an incognito window - the ads do appear to be completely gone! So forget my complaint... :-)
I thought Flickr premium accounts were so that YOU didn't see ads when logged in, not so people viewing your pics didn't see ads. Did they change that somewhere along the lines?
IIUC I think anonymous / not logged in people will always see ads on your pics regardless of your account status.
Maybe that's the case, but if so it still doesn't make sense. Facebook puts ads on your content because it's a free service. If you are paying for Flickr, they really shouldn't be putting ads on your content, regardless of whether it's you or another user.
I bought and paid for something called an "Ad-Free Account".
It doesn't make "perfect sense" to me that an "Ad-Free Account" would deliver ads to anyone. The name strongly suggested that the visitors to my gallery would be free from ads. That's exactly what I wanted and what I was happy to pay good money for.
Sure, you could say it's my fault for not reading the fine print. But you have to admit that the very name of the account was highly misleading.
I'm glad they changed it so now my visitors are free from ads as the original account name led me to believe. Still, it sucks that they used such a misleading name in the first place.
By your logic a company should not consider anything but maximizing revenue for every single product decision. While some successful companies follow this strategy, like Comcast and 90s era Microsoft, it only frustrates and angers customers until they wish for your demise. It's also a very cynical way of looking at the world. It's possible to both profit and make the world a better place.
Good point, perhaps I just misunderstood the terms of the account. Also I thought I had a "Flickr Pro" account but apparently it was just an "Ad-free" account which is now being converted to Flickr Pro. So the whole thing may have been confusion on my part, but it sure caught me by surprise.
Flickr has just changed their policy on this. They are re-introducing pro accounts and will not show ads when anyone is viewing those accounts. Unfortunately, they also doubled the price of pro.
As a pretty serious hobbyist photo-taking-guy I'm a big fan of smugmug, my "sharing photos with friends and family" photo website (http://gmcbay.com) is hosted with them, but I don't think of them or use them as a good long-term file "storage"/backup solution.
All of the photo-specific type of storage solutions (Google, Amazon, Smugmug, Adobe's CC thing, etc) are kind of flawed for many reasons (some outlined in the OP blogpost) when used as what I think of as "digital negative storage", IMO.
I just store all of my (original, RAW-format) photos/videos on giant harddrives inside my desktop computer and have that backed up automatically and continuously via backblaze. Local storage is ridiculously cheap, and so are offsite automatic backups.
For people who just deal with jpg files from a phone camera or whatever then YMMV and these photo-specific services may be just the thing, but I've yet to try one that doesn't feel like it is getting in your way if your normal workflow is big RAW files with processing via Lightroom/Photoshop, etc.
Indeed, I still use an aging 2008 Mac Pro and the benefits of internal storage are pretty profound. I have two Time Machine HDDs (An Internal + an External), which counts for two of my six HDDs. I'm debating going towards a service like blackblaze as I have a decade of photos on my computer.
I also use smugmug, and hope it's ok to mention my open-source command line tool for syncing with SmugMug, smugline[0].
That being said, I'm not 100% sure I would recommend them. They do some odd things to images you upload, and more so with videos, where I think they won't store the original version for you, but a processed version. As an example (perhaps related to the syncing functions I need), SmugMug will auto-rotate images based on EXIF data. This is ok most of the time, but it screws up with things like MD5 hashes so hard to detect duplicates.
FWIW, we stopped rotating your Originals (which we did in a lossless fashion back in the day) awhile back, and now preserve them exactly as you uploaded them. Your MD5 hashes and byte counts match, and of course, people can get them back whenever they'd like.
That's interesting to know. I suggested it (or at least storing the original MD5 hash) but was stonewalled by Nick from your dev support, saying "I checked with our developers and in the case that we rotate an image, we do not store the original MD5 of the non-rotated image. This is not something that we are going to change at this time.". I've seen fairly recent reports[0] saying this still happens (although, to be fair, your support indicated that it might be a bug).
What about videos though? From looking at the (v1.3) API response, I can't be sure that the original file is preserved.
Sorry, didn't mean to hijack this, but since you chimed in, I hope to highlight some issues that I saw. Happy to share more from my personal, very limited, experience supporting smugline with you. If you wish to take this offline.
Yeah, not only do we preserve the MD5 of the uploaded file for photos, we preserve the uploaded file itself fully intact. So getting the Original back will result in exactly the same bytes and thus the same MD5 hash. (You're correct that we used to apply some transformations to the photos that didn't materially change the pixel content, but changed bytes and thus the hash. We don't anymore).
For videos, we don't preserve the uploaded video for a variety of reasons, but the primary being that our intent is to support Internet-deliverable formats & filesizes. Customers regularly upload videos that vastly exceed Blu-ray bitrates (literally hundreds of megabits-per-second) that just aren't Internet-useful.
That's different from a JPEG, GIF, or PNG where the original file is Internet-useful, deliverable, and makes a meaningful difference. That file is very useful for sharing, which is what we do - we share.
We don't consider ourselves to be a backup service, and there are lots of great backup services out there to choose from that would love to take a 3GB 5 minute video. We take extraordinary care with our customers photos & videos, but we're a photo & video sharing service, not a backup service.
> Everyone needs to check out https://smugmug.com - for $40 a year you get unlimited photo and video uploads (yes, RAW files are ok).
Did they recently change their offering? It's not clear on their website.
I just had a look at their help documents [1], and it says that only JPG, GIF and PNG files enjoy unlimited uploads, while RAW files still require a SmugVault (which isn't open for signups anymore) [2].
I came to comment the same thing. A few months ago I revisited photo storage for my professional photographer spouse and without competitive raw storage smugmug isn't a replacement for our current multivendor storage stack.
> with a power account you can point your own URL at your account and no one even needs to know the files are on smugmug
Really? I use smugmug and am quite happy with it, and I use a custom url, but I never dived into having a custom gallery where no smugmug info would be present.
I asked support how to remove the "buy" option and they said you can't have it off by default, although you can turn it off for specific galleries.
How do you use smugmug, and do you use it as your portfolio?
Would be very interested in learning more about what's possible.
As for the "buy" option, it's pretty easy to turn off - you can save a "quick settings" set of options and then select all your galleries, and then apply the "quick settings" to the batch of galleries. And when creating a new gallery, just pick that preset of "quick settings". This includes more than just the "buy" option, and also things like whether to show EXIF, and stuff like that.
The one thing you can't do is change the "quick setting" and then have all the galleries change automatically to match the setting.
smugmug.com uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is unknown. The server might not be sending the appropriate intermediate certificates. An additional root certificate may need to be imported. The certificate is only valid for secure.smugmug.com The certificate expired on 4/9/2015 16:24. The current time is 7/23/2015 17:43. (Error code: sec_error_unknown_issuer)
It's a site designed for professional photographers that also happens to have kickass features for casual photographers as well. There's even lightroom plugins to upload directly to smugmug.
One of the best features, in my opinion, is the customer support. They respond within a couple hours. They're super nice and knowledgeable.
I've had an account at smugmug for nearly a decade, and would never go back to free services. Google photos is nice, but the size limitation is definitely a problem for prolific photographers.
(I don't work for smugmug nor do I know anyone who works there, I just love their service.)