SmugMug is a paid

image sharing An image or picture is a visual representation. An image can be two-dimensional, such as a drawing, painting, or photograph, or three-dimensional, such as a carving or sculpture. Images may be displayed through other media, including a projec ...

image hosting service An image hosting service allows individuals to upload images to an Internet website. The image host will then store the image onto its server, and show the individual different types of code to allow others to view that image. Some examples are F ...

, and

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

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

Flickr Flickr ( ) is an image hosting service, image and Online video platform, 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 previously a co ...

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 (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to start-up company, startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in ...

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'' is an American Newspaper#Daily, daily newspaper that began publishing in Los Angeles, California, in 1881. Based in the Greater Los Angeles city of El Segundo, California, El Segundo since 2018, it is the List of new ...

'' wrote: In 2010, two

petabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...

s of photos were stored on the

Amazon S3 Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) 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 e-commerc ...

service. On April 20, 2018, SmugMug acquired

from Yahoo (while it was briefly known as Oath.) SmugMug and Flickr are certified

benefit corporations In business, and only in United States corporate law, a benefit corporation (or in some states, a public benefit corporation) is a type of for-profit corporate entity whose goals include making a positive impact on society. Laws concerning c ...

committed to preserving photographic history.

Features

SmugMug offers three 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

social networking service A social networking service (SNS), or social networking site, is a type of online social media platform which people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career content, interest ...

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 uses a camera to make photographs. Duties and types of photograp ...

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.H.T. Sencar, M. Ramkumar and A.N. Akansu: ''Data Hiding Fundamentals and Applications: Content Security in Digital Multimedia'' ...

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