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!

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

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

At SmugMug, we have a 100% guarantee that covers ALL orders, no strings attached. If there’s a problem with your order for any reason whatsoever, we’ll fix it, replace it or refund it. We don’t care if it’s because you ordered the wrong size, printed a typo or if your dog ate the mailman.

But we know that shopping online gets scary when you can’t feel or touch the products that you (or your clients) are buying. To help you better visualize our goodies, we sprinkled some short, easy-to-digest product videos around our catalog, like this one:

See Before You Spree

You can poke around the different pages or take a look at specific examples like:

• Box Framed Prints
• Lustre Prints
• Giclée prints
• Mounted Canvas Prints

They’re great for showing your clients what to expect. So don’t be afraid to tell them about it, too.

Tip: View Everything We Sell

You can see everything we sell and the prices you pay as a pro, here:

Full catalog, with pricing: http://www.smugmug.com/prints/catalog/ABP

When your customers or visitors need to see the catalog, the links in our footer will show them only the products, not the prices. Here they are:

Our full catalog with both labs: http://www.smugmug.com/prints/catalog/AB
Catalog with just EZ Prints: http://www.smugmug.com/prints/catalog/A
Catalog with just Bay Photo: http://www.smugmug.com/prints/catalog/B

Happy shopping (and selling) this holiday season!

What’s new with Publish to Facebook?

We’ve had some great feedback from Smuggers about the Publish to Facebook feature that we debuted a little while back. The number one request we heard from you was that you wanted to publish not only to personal sites, but to business pages, too. Your clients need to see the good stuff.

Hey, guess what?

Publish To Your Facebook Page:

If you’re new to our beta features, first check out SmugMug’s Darkroom:

http://www.smugmug.com/darkroom

Click the green Join button next to “Publish to Facebook.” Remember if you use a custom domain on your site, just add “/darkroom” to the end of your domain to cookie yourself in like this: http://www.example.com/darkroom

Once you’ve done this, click the Share button in your SmugMug galleries and click Publish to Facebook. You’ll get the choice of publishing your photos to a Facebook album on your personal profile, or to a Facebook Business Page that you own.

Make a new gallery for your photos, or just use an existing one.

Remember that you can choose up to 200 images from your SmugMug gallery to publish. If it’s a lot of photos we’ll publish them in the background and shoot you an email once it’s done.

Stay Safe, Secure and Sellable.

“Safety” is our middle name. You’ll be asked to set the maximum image size before you publish, and everything links back to your SmugMug gallery so fans will know it’s you. We’ll also include any watermarks you’ve applied to your photos.

Juicy Pro tip: Hook up a Buy Link and make buying downloads and prints a piece of cake. Don’t forget to tag your clients in your Facebook photos too so they get notified about your albums and spread the word!

We hope you love the new feature and that it gives your Facebook friends (and clients) ammunition to go viral.

And sharing is caring, too, so let us know what you think! Chatter away in our official Dgrin thread here or send up smoke signals. We’re listening.

Don’t miss:

• The SmugMug Darkroom
• SmugMugTab for Facebook
• Be Social on social sites
• SmugMug on Facebook

Hey, Smuggers! Pros can now sell video downloads just like prints, cards and the whole shebang:

You’ve asked for this for a really long time and we were busting at the seams waiting to tell you about it. We hope you love this new feature (and all the cha-ching! it brings) as much as we loved building it for you.

While you’re soaking up the good news, let’s go over the basic deets about video on SmugMug.

How to Upload Your Videos

You probably already know that you can upload an unlimited number of HD video to every Power or Pro SmugMug account in addition to unlimited photos. Since most cameras have video functions baked right in, you’ve probably got quite a collection already.

Put your videos into your SmugMug galleries exactly the same way you already do with your photos. You can upload a slew of photos and videos at the same time if you’d like. We always recommend our easy-to-use browser based uploaders, but you can use whatever works best for your workflow.

There’s lots of different video formats out there and we accept a huge range of codecs to make it simple. In the rare case that we don’t recognize the format, write to our Support Heroes for help or try converting it to a different one.

How to Sell Video Downloads

Price them just like you would price any other digital download. If you’re not sure, look here for full details. Open up your pricing settings, click on the Downloads tab and go nuts.

You can offer up to 5 different sizes of video downloads in both Personal and Commercial licenses. Here’s what they are:

• Web: up to 320 x 240
• iPod/DVD: up to 640 x 480
• Mid-Def: up to 960 x 540
• Hi-Def: up to 1280 x 720
• Full HD: up to 1920 x 1080

Your fans can then add the video to their cart and check out. Video downloads are available immediately. Instant gratification!

A note about that “Save Movie” link: If you’ve not priced any videos, your visitors will continue to see that link in the lightbox header. It’ll disappear when you start pricing videos in that gallery, or when you enable Right-Click Protection in your Gallery Settings.

Similarly, your fans can’t download video sizes that are equal to or larger than the video sizes you’ve priced. So, for example if you’ve priced the Mid-Def size in a gallery, they can only save the Web and iPod sizes from the mouseover photo bar.

One last FYI: Video files will be included in your Gallery Downloads zip files, so make sure you price them accordingly.

Be on TV, Your Computer or Your Phone

Did you know that visitors using an iPhone or iPad, AppleTV, PlayStation (or any device that can play industry-standard h.264 videos) can also play SmugMug videos? Being tied to a computer is so 2006.  Just give your fans a link to the video in your SmugMug gallery and they can watch it from virtually anywhere.

Or, try embedding videos instead. We provide easy embed codes that you can drop into your blog, forum posts or any other external site. To get it, click on the Share button in any gallery (or Owner Share if you’ve disabled it to your viewers) and choose Get a Link. Video embed codes are under the “Embeddable Links” tab.  Copy and paste that code into your site and prepare to blow them away:

Tip: WordPress bloggers have it even easier. Just copy the URL for the video from the gallery and drop it into your blog editor, like this:

We’ll automatically fit the video to size:

Anyone Can (and Should) Make Movies

Even if you don’t dream of Hollywood, you can shoot and share all kinds of video that make you smile. At SmugMug, we see videos for everything like weddings, birthday parties, product reviews, music videos, demos, real estate tours to just fun, everyday clips.

But if “keyframes” and “transcoding” don’t mean much to you, we have two friends in the video biz who can get you gorgeous movies in minutes: Animoto and ProShow Web. Log in and find them in your gallery’s Buy button, then choose the “Create a Video” option. They’ll slurp in your SmugMug photos and create beautiful, engaging slideshows set to your favorite music. You can customize them, too.

The Nitty Gritty Details

As you enjoy creating, making and sharing moving pictures, keep these few bits in mind:

• Videos can be embedded into pages in two sizes: 425×240 and 640×360. If you want your fans to see the full HD version, include a direct link to the video so they can view it in your SmugMug gallery.

• Please keep your videos family-safe and don’t post any copyrighted material that you don’t have the rights to. This includes background music.

And of course, check out more information on our video feature on our help pages. If you’ve got questions, feel free to write us at the help desk. We’re always happy to help.

Links you’ll love:

• Learn the Secrets of Storytelling on the Get in Motion Tour
• 7 Steps to Memorable Stories with Photodex and Proshow Web
• How to price digital downloads
• Troubleshooting video uploads
• SmugMug’s Partnership with Photodex
• Action! on Digital Grin

Once upon a time in a galaxy not-so-far away, you just needed a website.

Then blogs were all the rage. And now in this modern era of technology, you have to also consider social tools like Twitter and Facebook. If your business has offshoots, each with its own site and blog, you could have four of more different places to log in and update… and your social media sites, too.

It’s time to pause and start thinking of these as pieces of a single web presence. Your main website should be your hub, not your headache.

The Secret Behind Beautiful, Cohesive Online Presence

Our new friend, Photography Blogsites, offers a new way for you to keep it straight, together with SmugMug. Check this out:

Our new seamless integration lets you sync your SmugMug site with your Photography Blogsite, slurping over your galleries and settings and (best of all) pushing your customization from your Blogsite back to SmugMug instantly, with a click. What better way to unify your unique web presence between your portfolio, proofing galleries and your blog?

They’ve even built in a safety feature that lets you restore your old SmugMug customization if you change your mind.

All in One Site Powered By WordPress

The inspiration for the design of Photography Blogsites stemmed from years of working exclusively with photographers to brand and create custom sites. Their strategy was to make pros’ lives easier, boost SEO and give them the power to manage their own online brand.

Their all-in-one portfolio websites are ready-to-go 30 seconds after you sign up and are powered by WordPress, CSS and HTML. This means that your site looks perfectly beautiful and beautifully perfect across all computers and mobile devices. And it’s easy to customize.

Bonus features: Share and Buy

You know that SmugMug already comes fully-equipped with share features, but if you use your Blogsite as your main portal, don’t worry about losing those tools. Their ‘Blaze’ social media tool lets you quickly share and re-share any gallery via Facebook and Twitter. People following those links view the gallery on a re-sharable page, too. Go viral!

While your fans are browsing, they can buy, too. Simply dig into your Blogsite settings and turn on SmugMug’s Buy links so your fans can add items right to the shopping cart. As usual, our print labs will print and ship the orders and all you have to do is collect your profits.

Special Pricing for SmugMuggers

If you’re thinking about setting this up for your business, you’re in for a treat. They’re offering SmugMuggers special discounted pricing at just $29/month or $299/year. (Regular pricing is $39/month and $399/year) Sign up here!

Or if you never want to worry again, try their Lifetime Deal at $499 which includes full access to all of their themes, hosting, support, maintenance, upgrades and so much more. The price is valid until September 15, 2011 and you’ll get no additional charges, ever. If you want peace of mind, act now because this deal won’t stick around for long.

… and a Giveaway for Two Lucky Pros

To celebrate our new partnership and synchronization with Photography BlogSites they are giving away 2 Lifetime Memberships. (Value: $499, no hassle) Here’s how to enter:

1) Like us at Facebook.com/smugmug

2) Like them at Facebook.com/PhotoBlogSites

3) Reply to this post with a link to your SmugMug site.

One entry per person, please. Winners will be picked randomly and announced Friday July 29.

Enjoy your site!

_________

UPDATE: WINNERS!

Wow, we are pumped to see so many folks enter this giveaway. Alas, there can be two winners, and here they are, picked randomly: Lance of Gym Star Photos and Amy of LMZ Photography. Congrats guys! You each win a Lifetime Membership to Photography Blogsites.

Thanks to everyone who put their name in for this giveaway. SmugMug customers get special pricing for a limited time, so even if you didn’t win this giveaway, you can still walk away a winner.

Stay tuned for more fun news and giveaways.