SmugMug - Store & Share Photos Ratings and Reviews

Auto backup of iPhone pix a breeze

As a casual, non-pro photographer, I’ve been a Smugmug user since the company launched. It’s an intuitive tool for uploading images from my “big” camera to share with family and friends. The desktop interface is easy and sensible and you can tell the UX is thoughtfully created by photographers for photographers. The iOS app is equally easy and the BEST feature for my busy mom life is automatic iPhone photo uploads. I don’t even have to think about it...it just works.

I find that smugmug is far superior to dropbox, which isn’t designed for photography by any stretch and chokes when a folder has too many images.

I’ve also recently discovered that iCloud back up deletes photos in the cloud if you delete them from your phone, creating a problem if you’re trying to free up space on your iPhone. However, with smugmug, once you’ve uploaded a photo, it’s there until you delete it. Smugmug’s iPhone back up organizes images by month into a private folder that only you have access to until you change the upload folder’s settings. No display lags or choking despite the thousands of selfie pix and vids your kids load onto your phone. A few times a year, I open the smugmug app and bounce it onto our Apple TV for an old school family photo night, cracking up as we take walks down memory lane.

I love this pragmatic and feature-rich tool. Thank you smugmug! Thank you! ❤️

Almost there

I was a long time Flickr and Google Photos user. I have to say that Flickr is probably the best, I just don’t feel secure with Flickr being around a long while. This is my first time giving Smug a shot. It has potentials. It’s nice to have the ability to use templates to create photo sites and galleries. I even find it a tad faster to upload batch photos than Flickr or Google Photos.

If Smug can figure this out, they would be perfect! I would love to have the ability to double tap with a single finger to zoom in. I’m a pixel peeper and it’s important. Also would be nice to swipe down on a full photo view to return back to the gallery view. And I’d like to view the exif data without having to reach my thumb far up to the more icon in the upper nav bar. These are basically the mental model that users have towards photo apps. But for some reason, I either have to use two fingers to zoom in and zoom out or at times it doesn’t even let me zoom in at all. Please update this and you’ll have a paying member for life. And I’d actually open the app a whole lot more.

Otherwise, I’m currently paying for storage and a slightly improved upload speed more than anything else.

Locks up constantly & IOS auto back up won’t work.

The app is very frustrating and for what we pay yearly I expect so much more from the app. IOS Auto back up does not work. Nothing backs up from my phone newer than 2018 but it says my backup is up to date and complete. Can only back up one iPhone so my husband is out of luck as well as my teenage daughters. Also have never understood why they limit video size. Sometimes stopping in the middle of something important like graduation isn’t an option but I would really like to still back up these to my site to be able to share with family. Uploads freeze constantly on mobile devices and time out or won’t upload at all. So many errors. It’s extremely frustrating and makes backing up your phone impossible. After you have to scroll through thousands of photos to manually back your phone up it gets tedious and you give up and never complete the back up. I expect more from the Smugmug app but would be happy if it would just work. The prices are increasing but the reliability and ease of use are not. Please fix IOS Auto Back Up. Please allow all family members to back up their phones too. Please fix the upload and crash problems.

Developer Response ,

We appreciate your updated feedback! Please reach out to us at help@smugmug.com - our team would really love a chance to talk to you about auto upload with multiple family members and the other troubles you mention.

Great for our photo business

For our business Annnd…Action! Photo Booth, LLC in Los Angeles, we needed a home to display our photo booth photos to clients. We do not sell the photos, just have them for viewing and download. The SmugMug platform and the app have been amazing to allow us to peek into our galleries during an event; to change passwords if needed - and add snapshots. We even sometimes have time to set up new galleries in advance while we’re busy at the current event. The app has been a time saving game changer. All of the recent updates have just made life easier. We can only imagine if we were roaming or studio photographers how much more valuable the platform would be. As is, we are SmugMug fans since 2016 and SmugMug app fans too. Thanks! Keep the improvements coming.

“Offline” content has a SERIOUS problem

...are you aware of this?

You offer a way to keep images on the device, for display when the network is unavailable. Good idea ... flawed implementation. I have this option set on most of my galleries. I discover some images display “thumbnail” resolution when in full-screen display.

I watch the progess of the download (the little green “thermometer” bar; the eventual grey circle checkmark) ... I think “good, that one is downloaded” ... I open that image, and it is full resolution. I move on, and then come back to that same image ... the grey circle checkmark is gone, and the black space for the green progress thermometer is there again. I wait and watch it all happen again ... green thermometer, then circled grey checkmark ... high resolution photo ... then, the process repeats! I cannot rely on this offline storage. I cannot afford to display my professional artwork this way!!! This happens to the same images, time amd time again, yet does not happen to other images. I note no pattern to this problem.

Developer Response ,

We use the Offline feature all the time so we can have photos readily avialable whenever -- it's one of our favorite things about the app; we'd love to know more about your issues. Would you be able to email us at help@smugmug.com so we can further troubleshoot?

Missing a bunch of essential features

I had high hopes for this app. The UI is decent but functionally, it's very lacking compared to the website. For example, the uploader lacks basic retry for failed uploads so if you tags a ton of photos for upload and your connection is flaky, you get a bunch of errors and instead of just tapping to retry, you have to manually figure out what photos failed to upload from the tiny thumbnails. There should absolutely be a retry-one and retry-all button to retry failed uploads. Tapping a failed upload should trigger another upload attempt. Also, there are no security and sharing setting accessible from the gallery settings! That's just insane. If I want to create a gallery and set it up with detailed settings, I have to use a full computer with a browser to add things like guest upload capability. Cmon, smugmug! My subscription isn't cheap. The app should allow me to do nearly everything I would do with a browser on a computer!

Developer Response ,

Thank you for your feedback! We greatly appreciate you taking some time to share your concerns. We're always looking at what is important to our customers to be improved within, and added to, the mobile apps we offer. The visibility and access settings are available, but correct, there are other security/sharing settings that have to be accessed within the web login. We'll keep these concerns in mind as we continue to improve and thank you again for reaching out!

Nice to have, but lacking

I have used SmugMug for over a decade and love it. The app is nice to have but has a few critical features missing that limit it mainly to a uploaded/viewer for already created galleries. The main feature missing, and honestly can’t believe it’s still not an option, is the simple ability to set the folder/gallery feature image that displays the thumbnails. PLEASE add this simple setting to the app. Second, for whatever reason, when setting up a new gallery, even though I select a defined preset that includes full res display, image downloads, etc, it doesn’t actually apply those settings and I have to go correct it in the browser version (which I have to do anyways to set the feature image mentioned above 🤦‍♂️).

Basically just allow me to edit the same setting options on the app as I can on the web version so the app doesn’t feel as redundant, then it’ll be 5 star.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for the feedback, we appreciate hearing what you would like to see possible within the app!
Regarding the new galleries, please reach out to our support heroes at help@smugmug.com so we may troubleshoot this with you further.

Photo storage and a very slick website.

I just subscribed to Smug at the Power level. Paying the annual fee instead of monthly installments gave me a generous discount. Thank you! With iOS, there is an option to auto-upload your photos into your library which made it a breeze to back-up my photos. Setting up my galleries was easy and now my photos are organized beautifully. I thoroughly enjoyed setting up my new photo site using one of the offered templates. I tried out a couple until I found one I liked the best. Further customization made it perfect. My new website is contemporary, highly professional looking and showcases my images beautifully. I am extremely pleased and I’ve only been a member for a little over 24 hours.

Love Smugmug - Two Fixes Needed

I absolutely love smugmug and the capabilities as a videographer/photographer! The two gripes I have is when sending the unlisted links to clients.
First, I would love for there to be a way when someone clicks on a smugmug link in messenger to have the “open in app” feature available. The app is way more user friendly than the mobile web browser version.
Second, regarding web browser on mobile, I would love for their to be an easier way to “save to camera roll”. Most of my clients get confused because they have to “download” the content and then figure out how to save it to their camera roll.

Overall I love smugmug as a content creator! If those two issues were fixed I would never use Dropbox again!

Ok app if you are willing to lose locally saved photos and data from it periodically

Once again, SmugMug has once again managed to be the only major developer with nothing except a complete loss of locally saved info and images as a fix for a failed app update.

I have been a SmugMug user (Web) for over 15 years. I think it’s a fantastic Web service, and have always considered the SmugMug Heroes (support team) to be top notch.

As the app gained features, I added it to my daily routine, and have come to count on it. As with any important system I use, I back up my mobile device data regularly (iCloud daily, with occasional backups to a Mac). Unfortunately, that’s of little use when a developer ‘improves’ an app, and causes the saved data to be useless.

The iOS app currently works for new installations, but appears to be completely dead for many existing users. The only fix offered by SmugMug isn’t something like a rollback that would allow us to keep downloaded files and favorites, but rather “Uninstall the app, reboot the device, and reinstall the app,” which results in the permanent loss of anything saved locally.

If you use the SmugMug app casually, and don’t mind occasionally losing everything you save locally on your iOS device, then it’s a good app. If you use it for business, then I urge you to reconsider. No amount of backing up will save you from poor development choices.