The SmugMug Blog

There’s no coy way to announce this, so we’ll just say it:

SmugMuggers can now offer pricing for prints, gifts and downloads in one of five international currencies.

That’s right! Your visitors now get to pick their own currency when they buy stuff from your site.

How does it work?

Run (don’t walk) to your galleries and click the Buy button to bring up the shopping cart. At the top you’ll see a fresh new drop-down menu that translates your pricing to the five following flavors:

• USD – $
• CAD – CA$
• AUD – AU$
• GBP – £
• EUR – €

You can click through each one to see pricing in the shopping cart change. We’ll remember the currency that’s chosen and display it consistently when you view our catalog, as well as throughout shopping and checkout.

I’m a Pro. Will I make less money when the exchange rate changes?

No, your profits are safe. We talked about this when we debuted Pricelists, and this is one reason why SmugMug’s custom pricing is centered around profits, not the final price.

Market crash? No prob… you’ll still earn that $100 on those MetalPrints (as long as you’ve priced them that way).

What currency will I get paid in?

We’ve been paying international SmugMug Pros in various currencies since last May. Look here to see how it works so you can get paid in whichever moolah you love best.

Anything else I should know?

Here’s the quick list:

• SmugMuggers of all account levels don’t have to do a thing to start showing the five currencies on your site. We do the conversion automatically for each and every visitor that buys from you.

• The price your customers see on your site will adjust along with the exchange rate. This could happen daily if the market’s feeling feisty.

• Pros: Your customers will see the currency they’ve chosen while shopping and during checkout, but for now you’ll still have to set your prices in USD. We’ll be adding currency support to features like Pro pricing, Coupons, Packages, etc., so please hang tight and we’ll tell you when those are ready.

Whoopee! Now, where can I sell?

In case you were just too shy to ask, you’ve always been able to sell to anyone, anywhere in the world. We hope the new currencies will help your fans get a better idea of how much things cost.

If you want to see the full list of countries we ship to, take a look at this page here and bookmark our handy shipping info page.

What if I have an order problem?

We stand loud and proud on our 100% guarantee on all orders, and, as you know, we’ll refund you – or your customer – if we can’t make it right.

But if your sale doesn’t work out and it was purchased in a foreign currency, please remember the refund may not be the same dollar amount due to the exchange rate differences at the time of checkout and return.

Now, it’s your turn to grade us.

Questions? Comments? Feedback? You’ve asked for this feature for such a long time, we wanna know how we did.

This addition is just Part 1 of this year’s international goodies. We know that SmugMug Pros are dying to set prices in other currencies, too, so stay tuned! We’re building that next.

Calling all Adobe fans! We’ve heard that Lightroom’s built-in SmugMug uploader has been one of your favorite ways of getting photos into your sites. So we thought we’d let you know about our most recent update.

What’s New in the Latest Version

• Previously, syncing went in one direction only: from Lightroom over to SmugMug. Now it’s a two-way street. Lightroom will find any images you’ve previously uploaded to your SmugMug galleries and match them to existing images in your library. Synchronicity, baby!

• Pros who use Events will find that their clients’ Favorites get pulled into into a separate Collection in Lightroom.

• Movie shooters: You can now also upload video files in addition to still images.

• Finally, we’ve heard your cries about how your innovative, snappy image titles were getting left at the door. You now have the option to publish your Titles or Captions (or both) in the SmugMug image caption field for all to see.

No plugin? Get it now

If you’re coasting on an older version and want to upgrade to the shiniest version, look here.

Or, just click this link to start the download and follow the instructions on our help page to get started.

Enjoy!

It’s that time of the year again.

We rock it in Vegas for WPPI and we know you do, too. As per Sin City’s traditions, we don’t talk about what happens in the booth, but we have pictures to prove that we love meeting Pros like you.

Come visit. Talk to us. Tell it to us straight.

Plus, the event gives you the chance to pick the brains of amazing greats like SmugMug Pros Bambi Cantrell, Scott Robert Lim and more.

Why should this year be any different?

Photo Courtesy of Fotocabina.net

"You better come party with us."

Photo Courtesy of Fotocabina.net

Snag a Discount

Option 1. If you’re not the chancy type, go ahead and grab a discounted pass for just $95. Use the coupon code: WFREGR

Option 2. Want to skip the lectures and just say hi? Click here to get a free pass to the trade show floor.

See you in Vegas, baby!

A quick note just to announce that the Sorcerers of SmugMug have finally staked their claim on a place to totally geek out. Check out SmugMug’s new engineering blog right here:

http://sorcery.smugmug.com/

From the comments you guys leave here, we know that there’s a lot of you who will find it interesting and, hopefully, useful.

Here’s to SmugMug’s Sorcerers!

In protest to SOPA and PIPA, we’re rallying for action on our homepage and shuttering ADVrider, one of the largest motorcycle hangouts on the web.

We, like so many sites on the web, feel very strongly about web censorship. Today’s blackout could be a taste of things to come if you don’t take action now.

Congress has the power to kill the internet and all of your favorite sites: places that we all swap ideas and share opinions every day. Read about the Stop Online Piracy Act here.

If you value free speech, the internet, ideas and entrepreneurship, please take ten minutes out of your day today to contact your local representative. Visit SOPAstrike.com to see the many ways how:

  >>>>> http://sopastrike.com/ <<<<<

Ever wish you could just talk to a Support Hero?

Now you can!

Our new chat system is perfect for getting quick questions answered fast! Got something more involved like a gnarly customizing problem? Don’t be afraid to send us an email like usual.

To get started, visit our help portal and look for the little tab in the bottom corner. Then just sign in and start chatting away.

Just one tip: In order to prevent a log jam, be sure to have all of your info ready to go: order numbers, links to your homepage or problem images, anything that will help us help you faster.

It’s really easy to use, so give it a try and let us know what you think.

See you soon!

It may just sound like a breakfast item to you, but hash bang is something we did to your gallery URLs to improve your SEO. Sitemaps was one, but we’ve tinkered with your gallery links to make it even more powerful.

Confused? Let’s start from the beginning.

Why the change?

To help Google index your gallery pages and get you found. Our old URLs made it easy for search engines to list the gallery, but not the individual image links due to the way they were dynamically created.

Our newest update makes it easier for Googlebots who are trying to crawl your site to index your gallery images on search engines. (Better indexing for AJAX-based pages, for you tech-minded folks.)

If you’re feeling daring you can check out the Google specs here and see exactly how and why this works.

How do I make sense of the new URLs?

Pull up your favorite gallery and zoom in on the URL. You used to see something like this:

http://cmac.smugmug.com/SmugMug/Support-Heroes-painted-faces/2504559_TrBCmb#131487110_FdKeW

Now you’ll see this:

http://cmac.smugmug.com/SmugMug/Support-Heroes-painted-faces/2504559_TrBCmb#!i=131487110&k=FdKeW

Note the new “i” for image and the “k” for the image key. Those numbers and scrambled letters still mean the same things:

• Album ID: 2504559
• Album key: TrBCmb

• Image ID: 131487110
• Image key: FdKeW

Opening the lightbox looks just a little different, too, but see if you can spot the “lb”:

http://cmac.smugmug.com/SmugMug/Support-Heroes-painted-faces/2504559_TrBCmb#!i=131487110&k=FdKeW&lb=1&s=A

And if you click to another page in the gallery, you’ll see a couple of additional things in the URL:

http://cmac.smugmug.com/SmugMug/Support-Heroes-painted-faces/2504559_TrBCmb#!p=1&n=20

• P: Page number (page 1, here)
• N: Number of images per page (20 images, here)

If you get a direct image link, you’ll see that it looks pretty much the same as it did before:

http://cmac.smugmug.com/SmugMug/Support-Heroes-painted-faces/SuperheroGroup/131487110_FdKeW-L-5.jpg

Will my old page links break?

No way, José! We’ve made sure that your site, images and your business remain unchanged for smooth sailing through the week. If you do notice anything funny with your site, be sure to ping our Support Heroes and send us the deets.

What changes will I see in the coming weeks?

Better indexing, possibly more traffic and fanfare from new clients. Now that we’ve made all these changes, we can start cooking up even more exciting URL-based improvements to help folks who use SmugMug on Chrome, Firefox and Safari. All modern browsers that we love.

Don’t want your site to be found? Just like before, you can always enable SmugMug’s many privacy options and be left out of search results, search engines and Google Images.

And here’s further reading:

• SmugMug’s sitemaps feature
• SEO and how to get found on SmugMug
• Full specs from Google on making crawlable AJAX sites
• Google’s blog post about the hash bang proposal
• Guide for webmasters
• FAQ about making AJAX pages crawlable

Support Hero Josh Lawson is our resident rock star. He leads a double (really, triple) life working for SmugMug, being a musician and acting as agent at our print labs. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s hear the man himself. You’ve probably met him if you’ve ever written to our help desk with an order problem, uploading issue, or pretty much anything else.

Spotlight on Josh

What’s your hiring story?

After college I started working for Kodak/Qualex doing tech support for one-hour photo machines, Kodak Picture Makers, and Kodak C-41 and RA-4 chemical process control.  In 2005, my girlfriend decided to go to graduate school out in Santa Cruz, so we packed up and headed west from North Carolina to California.

I ended up working customer service for Bay Photo for the years we were there.  In 2009 we decided to move back east, but I kept working remotely for Bay Photo part-time, just a few hours a week.

That winter, Bay asked me if I’d like to work the WPPI trade show with them. An all expenses paid trip to Vegas for a (mostly) unemployed guy?  I jumped on it.  And I’m so glad I did.

I met a bunch of Smuggers there at a party.  Larry from Bay Photo put in a good word for me, and Andy asked me if I was interested in being a hero. It sounded like an awesome job description! I started ringing Andy’s phone off the hook.

About a month later I got an interview and the rest is history.

How does music fit into your life?

During my stint in Santa Cruz, I decided to try a career change and did a trade program for luthiery (stringed instrument repair and construction). While I was working with Bay Photo I also landed a job at the Santa Cruz Guitar Company, building guitars.

Now I play drums for Wild Order and you’d have to pry my Korg MS-20 analog synthesizer out of my cold, dead hands.

Most Smuggers collect cameras and glass. I collect vintage drum machines and synthesizers, and that’s one of my faves.  A beaut from 1978.  It does sounds from hard techno to smooth 70′s fusion jazz to bizarre drones. Lots of knobs to twiddle, and endless sonic possibilities.

We affectionately call you the SmugMug Lab Rat. Why’s that?

I’m a great lab contact because I know first hand how a lab operates from the inside, how each product is physically created, and I know how to spot a potential issue when I run across one. I collect feedback from all the heroes (and thus our customers) and relay it to the labs so that we can keep the quality of our work top notch. I have phone meetings with each lab every week, and email various people at both labs daily in management, operations, and customer service.

I also do things like keep the flow of orders transmitting between both the labs. And lord knows that’s no small task, as there are thousands of orders sent to the labs every day. Communicating with the lab IT people, sometimes hacking up a bit of XML to get an order to process, repairing corrupt jpgs, etc. I keep a close eye on my order babies to make sure they get to the lab and process quickly. I keep track of orders that are late and do things like upgrade shipping when something is lagging behind.

Sometimes I feel like the Wizard or Oz pulling levers behind a curtain to keep the order machine well-oiled and finely tuned.

Shout one tip from the rooftops to SmugMuggers!

Proof & Retouch:  USE IT!  We make it easy to place orders, but it’s *always* helpful for Pros to review their clients’ orders before they’re sent to print.

Customers may not always crop their photos properly, so reviewing orders before they print is something I recommend to all Pros.  An ounce of prevention….

—

Check out these features Josh mentioned:

• How to get perfect orders at SmugMug
• Cropping your SmugMug orders
• Bay Photo, SmugMug’s pro lab
• See SmugMug at WPPI

Hey, SmugMug Pros! We’ve revolutionized the way you do pricing with our new feature: Pricelists.

Traditionally, SmugMug pricing has been done on a gallery-by-gallery basis. It worked OK if you wanted to copy pricing over from one gallery to another, but changing it later (across your hundreds of galleries) was a different story.

But first, our co-founder and president has something to say:

What are Pricelists?

In short: Each Pricelist is like a bucket, into which you can easily drop galleries to price and sell your photos.

Start by choosing products that you want to sell, tell us how much profit you want to make, and then add your galleries (or photos) to that Pricelist. Done.

Isn’t it a thing of beauty?

Why the change?

Pros have told us that doing gallery-by-gallery pricing wasn’t working out so well once they had lots of galleries to manage. Our goal was to make it super-simple and super-fast for all Pros to easily price their stuff and get photos sold.

The new look is clean and modern, and this renovation makes it easier for us to add shiny new features down the road… like new products and foreign currency support. (*hint, hint*)

What does this mean for me as a Pro?

We can think of four big benefits for you right off the bat:

1. Manage all of your pricing from one place.
2. Manage your pricing across hundreds of galleries with a few clicks.
3. Easily maintain different pricing for weddings, sports, or family photos.
4. Decide how much profit you make on each sale.

What do I need to do?

If you’re a veteran Pro with existing pricing, we’ll ask you to migrate to the new system.

Migration is quick and painless. We’ll comb through the pricing on all of your galleries and fold them into Pricelists. The whole process takes just a few minutes and we’ll email you when we’re done. Here’s a new help page (with video!) to help you do it.

During the migration you won’t be able to make any changes to your prices, but your current pricing will remain live and your customers will continue to have the ability to purchase your images at your current pricing.

After migration, your pricing will appear unchanged to your customers, but you’ll have more power to edit them, behind the scenes.

Upgrade to Pricelists in 3 Steps:

1. Log in and visit your Control Panel.
2. Look under the Pros tab > Pricing > Set Prices.
3. Choose “Migrate My Existing Pricing.” That’s it!

You can choose to start over and just build new pricing from the ground up. Or you can delay your choice a little longer. On March 1st, 2012, we’ll migrate everyone over to use the new system automatically, keeping your current pricing structure but giving you instant access to Pricelists.

Anything else I should know?

We thought you’d have questions. Here’s some answers.

• There’s almost zero risk of accidentally selling something with no gain to you. In the old days (like, uh, yesterday), you had to price something at $0 to remove it from your cart, and unpriced items were sold at-cost. Now you manually add in each item you want to sell.

• Digital Downloads now have a minimum cost: $.49 for individual photos and $.99 for gallery downloads. Want to offer these for free? Enable Originals in your gallery, create a backup file to share, or create a Coupon to nuke the charges at checkout.

• You determine your markup, not the final price shown in the cart. You can set a general percent increase over the whole Pricelist, or you can fine-tune the amount for each product you offer. We also give you the option of rounding up your pricing to make the displayed cost easy on the eyes.

• Choose between Bay Photo and EZ Prints the moment you create the Pricelist. If you change your mind on an existing Pricelist, you’ll need to create a new one with the lab of your choice. Need to compare the two labs to make a choice? Check out the full catalog.

If you still have questions about migrating your pricing over to Pricelists, look right here and check out the video tutorials. And for everything else, check out our pricing help page that’s been updated with a video series on all the details.

So go migrate, play and sell some prints. As always, we’re hoping to add to and improve this feature as 2012 rolls in, so tell us what you think and how it’s working for you.

Merry money-making Christmas!

Big news today for people who love to make photo cards: We’ve brought you a more powerful, more flexible card builder that lets you edit designs before you buy.

Build Your Cards

Try it now right from your galleries. Find the first photo you want to use, then click Buy > Create a Card.

It’s so simple to pick a design, then click and drag in the photos you want. You can even edit the images by zooming, aligning, or even doing a quick conversion to black and white:

Next, type in whatever text you want. In many cases you can even edit the font, which you couldn’t do before.

When you’re done, you can hit Save to stash your progress, or just choose how many you want and add it to your cart.

Edit Your Cards

One of the most-requested requests we’ve gotten about cards was for you to be able to edit them. Now you can.

When you clicked “Save” in the card builder, we stashed your project in your “Cards” gallery. Simply find it and click Tools > This Photo > Edit to open up the card creator:

Make as many edits as you wish and when you’re ready, add it to your cart. Voila!

Check out our help page here to guide you through the new process. Remember that Pros can still set a custom price for all of our 4×8 and 5×7 card options, so their customers can design and order their own holiday greetings and make you money.

Enjoy! Got any feedback, ideas, or just have a question? Let us know.

More ways to spice up your holiday with SmugMug:

• Make more money with products and partners
• Make your photo-friends happy: Give the Gift of SmugMug
• Photo books make great gifts: New stuff from Blurb