Sneak Peek: Publish Your SmugMug Photos to Facebook Albums
Hey, Facebookers! 
You already know that you can post a pic, but we’ve heard that you really, really wanted to be able to export your SmugMug galleries over to albums on Facebook. Our Sorcerers have been hammering away at this feature and we’ve got something we’d like you to see.
Opt In and Check It Out
To begin, check out our Goodies page:
http://www.smugmug.com/goodies
Look for the “Publish to Facebook” feature and help us test it out while it’s in beta. Just click ‘Join’ at the top and we’ll activate your browser (not your account) to display a new feature in your gallery’s Share button, shown at right.
Power or Pro Smuggers with a custom domain: You’ll need to hit that link on your custom URL, too. (Example: http://www.moonriverphotography.com/goodies)
Only you as the logged-in owner will be able to see and use this exclusive new feature. Try it now and see for yourself.
How to Publish
Visit any of your galleries and hit the Share button. You should see a new “Publish to Facebook” feature under the Owner Only options. This will let you push a set of photos from any gallery on your site to an album on Facebook, and you can do this as many times as you wish.
1. First select a few (or all) of the photos in your gallery.
2. Next, pick an existing Album over on Facebook or create a new Album altogether. You can also adjust the Image size, Caption and Link settings to totally tweak how your friends interact with your pics.
3. Hit Publish and we’ll send them right over.
Pros: If you use our Watermarking feature to put your name or logo on your photos, the published images will include them.
Tip: Right now it’s only possible to post to your personal pages, not your business fan page, but we’ll look into options as they become available. Really want to put those pics on your fan page? Publish to your personal account, then ‘Share’ it on your business wall. Voila!
Publishing is an opt-in only feature, which means you must visit our Goodies page and click the green ‘Join‘ button before you can play. After we work out the kinks and get your feedback, we’ll release this like our other great tools for all SmugMuggers to use.
Tell Us What You Think
Had enough? Go back to the Goodies page and click the red “Leave” button. We’ll remove the “Publish to Facebook” feature from your Owner Share options, but you can keep the Facebook albums for as long as you want.
We’re eager to hear what you’ve got to say, so play around and publish as much as you like. And don’t forget to share all of your ideas, rants, raves and bug reports in this thread over at Dgrin, or as a comment to this post.
PS. If you feel daring, try out the new Gallery Style that you’ll see on the Goodies page, too. We’re loving what Dgrinners have to say about it so far, so keep the feedback comin‘.
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Wow! Terrific implementation!
Will this work for both fan pages and personal pages?
Very nice, love the link to a buy page +10
Samir, it only works publishing to personal albums. They don’t have API support yet for fan page Albums.
Wow – impressive – love the new look, clean, sleek, straightforward – awesome work smugmug.
Love it! It posted to my personal page. Will it have an option to post to my fan page?? That’s what I’d really use it for. Thanks!
http://www.facebook.com/JillLangNorthCarolinaPhotography
Hobbyists and people sharing photos of family and friends probably don’t care, but if you’re a serious photographer, make sure you’re aware of FB’s terms of service before you blindly publish your photos. You may be sharing more with Facebook the company, than you bargained for.
What are you referring to, Rich?
The specific Facebook policy is this: “For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.”
I don’t have a problem with this. I publish small versions that are watermarked and I only share with Friends. Facebook is only covering their backside with this in that your photos could end up on lots of people’s walls that you don’t know if you use the Public setting when you post, so this policy gives them the right to publish them where ever they end up in the Facebook world. I look at Facebook as a way to get my name out there, not as an entity that wants to steal my photos.
hey, i am concerned about the copyrights when publishing photos to facebook!
Will it publish full size photos or web-sized ones? I don’t like to upload full size to facebook with its new “download” feature.
You have control over that… thumbnails to larges, pick what you want to send.
Agreed with previous comments. I’d love to use it for my fan page!
Very nice. Thanks guys for constantly adding new features. ;-D
Any way to maintain the right click to download protection ?
nice feature, I will be glad to use it when it can post to my studio page and not just my personal account
I like the ease of publishing but would like to have the option to publish to my Fan Page or my personal page or both.
This is awesome!
Don’t we give FB rights to our photos if we publish them to FB?
Brittany: You can select which size images you publish to Facebook albums
Larry: Unfortunately we can’t enforce right click protection on Facebook. When you publish images outside of Smugmug we don’t have control of that
About Copyright issues: Please do read and take into consideration Facebook terms and privacy policies when using the feature.
I have no desire to do this due to rights issues and the fact that FB mashes the quality of the images. I just post a link to my gallery, no need for images to be in 2 places.
nothing works on my one
Did you opt in on the http://www.smugmug.com/goodies page? Also if you use custom domain you have to opt in on your custom domain for example http:://www.example.com/goodies
+
Bummer. Thank you for the quick reply!
This is fantastic. It will save me so much time!
I don’t see any buttons under image selection (Chrome, OS X 10.5.8).
This is the same browser that gives problems, just to post to my wall. No buttons there neither
Chrome detects 9 Javascript errors. I can send some screenshots of the error reports if someone is interested
Please do sent me the errors. @smugmug.com Thanks!
miikka@smugmug.com that is
Sweet! I love it. It works great – really fast too. Nice addition, thanks!
it would be nice if this could also set the privacy level of the album when creating a new one, but i’m not sure if that’s possible?
You guys know that I’m tough to impress but this new feature is very, very slick. But…I’d add this feature to be an option for somebody cruising my galleries. Nice work!!!!
I really like this feature so far. Now… make me REALLY happy and do the same thing for Google+ galleries.
Works perfectly on my end. Great job, SmugMug!!!
Haven’t tried it yet but would be interested in it. What settings must I have on my side to make it work? As in, my privacy settings are quite restrictive — I at least allow gramma to find me from the SmugMug page but I specifically do NOT allow my pictures to be searchable from Google.
After working out the “join” with having a custom domain, the rest was easy and effortless. Due to the great “right click” protection on SmugMug, I don’t usually watermark my photos, but I do on facebook. It would be great if the watermarking could be added while it was being published, to keep the photos on SmugMug watermark free. Thanks for the great addition.
This is ok for non-professionals, but I won’t be using it.
I’m hesitant to use this because of copyright issues, but also when I share a photo on FB (instead of POSTING it), it links back to my site for the enlargement. This pushes people to go to your website, thus pushing up your stats.
The original request was for the ability to TAG photos, not to PUBLISH them. So, for example, if I SHARE a photo on FB, I’d like to be able to TAG that photo link with friends’ names so it will show up on their pages for THEIR friends to see.
I don’t WANT to publish my photos to FB. I can do that already very easily by using iPhoto’s easy share features. I was delighted when it became possible to LINK my SmugMug photos to my FB site.
This feature DOES NOT offer a solution to the original request.
I have used it for the first time today – looks very slick. It is taking hours to post to facebook (I am doing 16 photos, about 9 are done so far). I have not received an email saying it is done, so I assume the product is still working. Is it still working.
Also – any change you could upload keywords. Tagging would be extremely helpful.
I have to “Opt In” everytime I looking into my account… Should it be like that?
Hi Jarl-Erik, since the feature is enabled via cookies, you may want to be sure that you have enabled third party cookies in your browser. Look here: http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93251-viewing-problems-
Drop us an email if you still can’t get it to stick: help@smugmug.com
What if I want to use this with a different facebook page? How to I change those settings
Hi Tracie,
You should revoke Authorization with Facebook in your Control Panel, then be sure to do the same and revoke SmugMug in your Facebook settings too. From there, try the Publish feature again and you should be prompted to log in at Facebook and authorize the connection.
But if you’re talking about publishing to a fan page instead of your personal page, we’re sorry but that feature isn’t available yet. As per the above comments, this is something we’d love to add, too.
Tried to use it today and I do not get the prompts listed in your instructions.
Rick, first be sure that your browser is set to accept third-party cookies, since this feature is cookied into the browser you’re using.
http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93251-viewing-problems-
Other issues? Please write us: help@smugmug.com
I personally don’t like using Facebook – at all. I will wait for you to do this for Google+.
I tried it first with Chrome and then Safari and couldn’t get past the log in button. Then I tried Firefox and it worked, and then after that the others worked as well. Sorta weird! But anyway, I love it and don’t mind that I can’t post to my biz page yet, but do hope it will be an option someday. For now I’m happy to just Share the album with my biz page. I have to say, I’ve tried just linking to my album on Smug, but I just don’t get the views that I get when I actually publish pics to my Facebook albums. So this is great. And for you that are worried about copyright issues, don’t. What can anyone do with a 700×700 watermarked photo? And the rumor that Facebook now owns your photos is pure bunk. I love the fact that this app posts a link right back to my shopping cart. I’m really psyched about that. It will be interesting to see if I get any sales from my Facebook users.
Does not work for me. Only allows a link to my gallery. I don’t get the promt “publish to facebook” under the “share” tab. I need to be able to tag people! I have allowed 3rd party cookies but no luck!
Geoffrey, I forgot to mention, I had this same problem when I turned on the new gallery style option. I turned it off and was able to use the Facebook option. Turning the new gallery style back on gave me the same result, so I guess right now you cannot use both. I like the gallery style too, so I hope they get it fixed to be able to use the Facebook option at the same time.
Thanks Colleen. I don’t see how to turn it off and on. I’ve been through all my setting pages. Today in fact, the theme reverted back to the way it’s been for months all by itself. I’ve sent an email to the help desk. Even so, I never had the option to publish to facebook.
Also, I’d have to agree with the poster above, this is not an ideal solution. I would really like to see the ability to tag people on facebook while still only posting a link to my photos. I really need to be able to tag people to draw them to my site.
Hi Geoffrey and thanks for sending an email in to our Support Heroes. It sounds like a cookies issue but they’ll find out for sure. Thanks for your feedback, too.
Geoffrey – it is not in your personal settings: While logged into your account, go to http://www.smugmug.com/goodies and turn on the Facebook option. Try having the New Gallery Style turned off. Then go to one of your galleries and look under the Share tab. The last option should be Publish to Facebook. If this doesn’t work, then there may be some cookie issue.
I’m trying it now, great timing..!!!
If you look at the legal wording, and think beyond the current box, this allows fb to use your images to create a stock-service, on billboard advertising or anything else. This is a very, very broad agreement. Compare this to SM’s TOS to see the difference between one designed for just web display.
Until fb releases a way for images outside of the fb open graph to be tagged, the only way to tag a photo is to have it in fb. This is the only way to accomplish this at this time. And I don’t think fb will ever dilute one of their key features by opening it up to the entire world.
A 700×700 photo is good enough for television commercials and a lot of commercial print. As well as selling as part of a stock service. Forget rumors and heresay, just look at the legal agreements that are part of their TOS to see what they can and cannot do.
Is there a way to look at your queue? Seems that it did not upload several of the pictures to a few Albums I created. It did create the albums, but only a few pictures showed up. After a few hours I tried again and that seemed to get the rest, but it would be nice to see if the queue was empty and/or failed uploads…
Can’t wait to see this on FAN Pages!
Hi John you’re in luck. This post was the first one of its kind but we’ve since added the ability to publish to Fan pages, too: http://news.smugmug.com/2011/10/24/publish-to-your-facebook-business-pages-too/
Is this working yet?
Hi Ajira, this feature sure is working when you enable it, and you can also publish to your business pages, too: http://smu.gs/u88wcA
my owner share does not have a “publish to facebook” . I am logged into my facebook account. Is there something I have missed?
Hi Roy – Be sure that you’ve opted in to use the feature, first:
http://www.smugmug.com/darkroom.com and also at http://photos.royabramson.com/darkroom , since you have a custom domain set up for your site. That way you should be able to see the Publish to Facebook option whether you use your SM domain or your custom one.