SmugMug is a paid

image sharing Image sharing, or photo sharing, is the publishing or transfer of digital photos online. Image sharing websites offer services such as uploading, hosting, managing and sharing of photos (publicly or privately). This function is provided through ...

image hosting service {{internet hosting, right 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 i ...

, 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 professional ...

from

Oath Inc Traditionally an oath (from Anglo-Saxon ', also called plight) is either a statement of fact or a promise taken by a sacrality as a sign of verity. A common legal substitute for those who conscientiously object to making sacred oaths is to gi ...

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 ha ...

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 Un ...

'' 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 unit ...

s 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 e- ...

service. On April 20, 2018, SmugMug acquired

from

Oath Inc. Traditionally an oath (from Anglo-Saxon ', also called plight) is either a statement of fact or a promise taken by a sacrality as a sign of verity. A common legal substitute for those who conscientiously object to making sacred oaths is to giv ...

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

social networking service A social networking service or SNS (sometimes called a social networking site) is an online platform which people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career content, interests, act ...

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 language, 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 photographe ...

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 inf ...

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