Archive
Why Pricelists Will Change Your Life
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:
$0.49$0.01 for individual photos and $.99 for gallery downloads, plus a $0.50 fee if your download order subtotal rings up under $10. 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.UPDATE! You can set your profit OR your price. 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!
New Video Downloads: Shoot, Sell and Share
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:
You’ll Look Better with zookie pro Albums
It’s always more fun when someone else does the work for you. And it’s even better when they do it with a smile.
SmugMug’s teamed up with zookie pro and Zookbinders to help photographers get quick, beautiful, no-brainer albums for every occasion. Check out their beautiful work!
The folks at zookie pro really know what they’re doing. You can trust your beautiful photos to these guys, who have been crafting albums since 1995.
How to Make a Gorgeous Album
It’s easy. Tell the design experts at zookie what you want and how many photos you’d like to use. The minimum is 50, but you can do more if you want.


(Photos courtesy of Jared Alvarez Photography)
The pros at zookie will color correct your images (if you wish), then tuck them all into beautiful layouts that show them off best. Within a week you’ll get a digital proof to review and the designers work with you to tweak it to your taste. With your approval they’ll print, bind and ship your albums to you… all in two weeks or less.
This means download to delivery in less than a month. That’s fast!
Variety is the Spice of Life… and Your Business
zookie pro does way more than just albums. Sure, their designs and quality are totally pro, but you get a huge variety of book sizes to choose from, too. You can offer Bigs, Smalls and even magazine-style press books to all of your clients, with great color options and premium leather upgrades. You can also sell pages from the finished album as framed and ready-to-hang prints so their favorite memories are never out of sight.


Check out their full product line here and see a video on how they’re made.
The icing on the cake is zookie pro’s shopping cart feature that lets you set your own markup and branding so you can sell products. (Sound familiar?) Send your client there after you approve your design for a completely custom shopping experience. Click here to try a demo and get a feel for what your clients will see.
Take zookie for a spin and show us all the great albums you’ll be making. You can also get started via your gallery’s Buy button when you’re logged in, under “Design an Album.”
We’d love to see (and hear) your reviews!
New Printmarked and Web Sized Digital Downloads for Pros
Great news for Pro photographers! You’ve always asked us, “Can I sell web-sized photos that my clients can use for Facebook?”
We’ve recently added a few new options to your Digital Download catalog, so the answer is yes!

More Options for Selling Downloads
Open up your custom pricing and click on the Downloads tab. See all that new hotness?

There’s a total of four different download type and four different sizes for Personal and Commercial licenses. Before you had 12. Now you can offer (count ‘em up) 32 versatile download options.
The new stuff includes:
- Web Sized. Fun-sized! These are up to 640 x 480 pixels, ideal for sharing on blogs, forums and Facebook.
- Gallery Downloads. The new and more-accurate name for the feature formerly known as Album Downloads. Since we already use the term “galleries” to refer to your groups of photos on your site, we thought this would make more sense to you. Remember that you can set one price for a gallery’s worth of images and your client can purchase it easily. This gives you the ability to price bulk photos at a discount, making it a powerful marketing tool.
- Printmarked photos. Watermarks for your downloads. Lots of Pros want to add their logo, name or even an event date to their images but as a rule we don’t apply watermarks to digital downloads. Now you can do this by setting up Printmarks in your Control Panel, then apply it to whole galleries in the gallery settings.
Anything Else I Should Know?
Lots of you have given us great feedback about our zip file feature and the speed of which you can typically expect to receive the notification email. When your clients are buying single unmarked photo downloads or Originals they’ll have virtually instant gratification; keep in mind that applying Printmarks and resizing entire galleries requires more juice. This means that it may take just a little longer for your client to get the zip file for large purchases or Printmarked downloads.
Tip: Want Printmarks on your downloads but not your prints? Turn on Proof Delay and remove the Printmarks from print orders as they roll in.
If you have any feedback or questions about this feature, we’re listening. Till then, happy pricing and selling!
Easy Sharegroup Links and Packages That Play Nicely with Privacy Settings
NiceNames for Sharegroups
We made Sharegroups NiceName-friendly. This means that instead of random gibberish, you can pick the URL for any Sharegroup you share. Make sharing your favorite galleries so simple, you can do it over the phone!

Keep in mind that if you don’t want to reveal your SmugMug nickname this way, you should skip this option. Read more about Sharegroups.
Perfecting Package Permissions
Pros have been telling us that they weren’t thrilled with a recent change to how Packages play along with gallery privacy settings. So, we listened! You’ll now see a third button whenever you create or edit a package, under the “Limit the galleries” section:

In the past, packages set for All Galleries were really only visible to your clients if they were browsing and picking a package from a public gallery. So if they were viewing photos in a passworded gallery, they would have only seen packages that you created specifically for that gallery. Now we’ve clarified this with the new All Public Galleries button.
In short, you can choose individual galleries for a package, All Public Galleries (public and non-passworded) and All Galleries on your site (which include unlisted and passworded galleries).
As always, you can just pick specific galleries for your package, but we hope the additional button and the clearer wording will help you sell more Packages to more happy customers.
Coda of Bug Fixes
- While we were mucking with the wires, we also fixed a bug that prevented Packages from loading when they were picked from video galleries. Start selling bunches now.
- We added an additional quick link that lets you quickly view your site’s stats for the past month. Find it on the main Stats page, at the top. See all about Stats here.
New Album Download Pricing for Pros
Album Downloads
You’ve always been able to sell individual photos in three different sizes and two license formats. Your visitors were able to add all images from a gallery to the shopping cart, which was convenient, but the price for that order was a cumulative total that couldn’t be changed.
Now you can set one special price for the full set. This means that you can offer a “package” price to clients who buy the whole gallery.
How it Works
Open up your custom pricing and click the Downloads tab. You’ll see a brand new section under each license type called “Album Downloads”:

Price them just the way you’d price anything else and remember to save it. This price is the one that shows when your client hits the Buy button and chooses All Digital Downloads:

They pick the download type and size, and can then continue to check out.

Get all the details about digital downloads, licenses and how to offer them to clients here.
Happy selling!
Guest Blogger: Why Andy Marcus Loves SmugMug
Today’s guest blogger is Andy Marcus of incredible, lick-the-screen-delicious Fred Marcus Photography in New York. He’s been a Smugger since 2009 and we had the privilege of gabbing with him on the way to WPPI. Here’s what he says about SmugMug and how his Pro account has given their world-class business an edge in the digital age.
Photos by Fred Marcus Photography
Pro Features for Pro Photographers
We use SmugMug at Fred Marcus Photography because it’s one of the easiest and most effective tools to market our business. We’ve been around for 70 years and have made a name for ourselves, but I find that our venues are constantly being bombarded by dozens of other photographers vying for recommendations and attention, too. How do we stand out and make our studio the one that the venues remember?

After each event we create a SmugMug gallery for the venue so they can share and use them for their own marketing purposes. SmugMug has made watermarking our images so easy: I can upload high resolution files and be confident that no matter where they end up, our studio name will be on them. I would normally never share files that could be printed to our clients, but with watermarking it’s a win-win situation for both the vendor and our studio. They get great photos and we get the advertising.

Just the other day a popular wedding blogger got a link to our SmugMug site and shared more than a dozen of our images with her 2,000 followers. Within minutes of her publishing that story our website received dozens of hits from people curious about our work.

It has gotten to the point now where our vendors can’t wait to log onto our SmugMug site and see images of their events. The cake designers want their cake photos, the lighting and staging companies want the images we shoot of the décor and ambience. The florists want shots of the floral décor and bouquets and the party planners, coordinators and caterers want shots of everything.

Luckily for me and my staff all the functionality SmugMug builds into their “Share” button makes their wait very short. I can send our vendors an email containing links with just a few clicks of a mouse. SmugMug also generates easy embed codes for all our images, so I can show them off on a blog or a forum with no hassle. Not to mention the ease at which I can connect to a number of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.
I always like to be one step ahead of my competitors, and SmugMug helps me stay there.
- Andy Marcus
How Digital Downloads Can (and Should) Work For You
Earlier this week, USA Today talked to SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill at WPPI about the importance of digital downloads. Take a look at the article and watch the interview here:
If you haven’t yet discovered how digital downloads can rock your business, then keep reading. This blog’s for you.
Why Downloads are Awesome
Pros can sell up to 6 different digital download types and make bank on each one:
Offer three sizes for flexibility. The Low-Res 1 MP download is roughly 816×1224 pixels, about big enough to print as an 8×12 . The Hi-Res 4 MP version is twice the size, weighing in at around 1632×2448. It’s big enough to make a 30×40 print, or most of our largest catalog offerings. View our minimum requirements chart to see how we came up with those numbers.
Originals are just that: If you upload a 23 MB file, that’s what your customer will receive when they buy it. Note that we never upsize and just offer the resolutions that we can make.
Example: If your original file is 3 MP, we’ll only show the 1 MP and Original options for sale.
They’re quick and convenient. Downloads are a great way to offer easy, reusable, unwatermarked files to your clients. They can use them for Facebook, blogs, Craigslist ads, digital scrapbooks, Wanted Posters and tons of other creative places. No muss, no fuss and no stalking the mailman. They’re available immediately after checkout (and won’t expire if you forget).
Direct links for download are included in your order confirmation emails as well as on the online order page. Best of all, folks who buy four pics or more can retrieve them bundled in a zip file.
Sell them by the piece or by the pound. If all photos in a gallery are priced for downloads, your clients can add one of everything to their cart by hitting “All Digital Downloads” in the Buy button. Of course, they can just buy individuals by looking for the blue “Downloads” tab in the shopping cart.

Finally, remember that downloads are available immediately after purchase, so they don’t qualify for Proof Delay. Keep this in mind as you tweak your workflow.
We hope you Pros learned something new or picked up a couple of tidbits to perk your sales.
Vive la revolución digital!
The SmugMug Family
Save a Tree: Electronic 1099s for Pros
Taxes are rarely referred to as “fun” or “exciting” but we certainly hope that this year you’ll call them “easy.”
In 2010 we launched electronic payments, getting you your money quicker, safer and faster. To come full circle we’re doing the same for your 1099 forms.
If we paid you $600 or more this year and you’re a U.S. Pro who is not a corporation, LLC-C or a non-profit, you’ll receive a 1099. We’ve notified all qualifying Pros this week and included instructions on how to consent to, download and unlock the PDF form 1099. Please check your email or any spam folders if you don’t recall seeing this important message from us.
Still no love? Visit your Control Panel > Pros tab and look under Electronic 1099 Access.

Please do this as soon as you finish reading our email… or right now if you were putting it off. It takes just a few clicks and we need you to make sure that all the information on it is correct. Accurate info means faster filing, which means you can be done with your taxes and out the door.
Strange things afoot on your 1099? Contact us right away. We can help.
More questions? Check out our reporting help page for all the bits and bobs.
We know the buck won’t stop here. Cheers to you and a prolific 2011!
The SmugMug Family





















