SmugMug is a paid image sharing, image hosting service, and

online video platform An online video platform (OVP), provided by a video hosting service, enables users to upload, convert, store and play back video content on the Internet, often via a structured, large-scale system that may generate revenue. Users will generally u ...

on which users can upload photos and videos. The company also facilitates the sale of digital and print media for amateur and professional photographers. On April 20, 2018, SmugMug purchased

Flickr Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and profession ...

from Oath Inc.

History

SmugMug was founded by son and father team Don and Chris MacAskill and launched on November 3, 2002. The company was started without any

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which h ...

funding, and for a time was run out of the MacAskill family home. In a 2007 article, the ''

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the ...

'' wrote: In 2010, two petabytes of photos were stored on the

Amazon S3 Amazon S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service is a service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides object storage through a web service interface. Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its ...

service. On April 20, 2018, SmugMug acquired

from Oath Inc.

Features

SmugMug offers four different account levels, each with a different subset of features.

Privacy and security

SmugMug has options to allow control over the privacy and security of published photos. It has support for both account-level and gallery-level passwords, as well as hidden galleries. There is also a friends and family

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for members of the service to use, which allows for sharing of photos only to people known to the publisher.

Professional services

In conjunction with its print service, SmugMug has a service aimed at professional

photographer A photographer (the Greek φῶς (''phos''), meaning "light", and γραφή (''graphê''), meaning "drawing, writing", together meaning "drawing with light") is a person who makes photographs. Duties and types of photographers As in oth ...

s. Professional accounts have the ability to add custom

digital watermarking A digital watermark is a kind of marker covertly embedded in a noise-tolerant signal such as audio, video or image data. It is typically used to identify ownership of the copyright of such signal. "Watermarking" is the process of hiding digital in ...

s to their photos. They can also sell prints and digital downloads of their photos through the SmugMug interface with their own pricing.

References

External links