2020 was a challenging year for photography. For many, the global pandemic brought fewer sessions, fewer new clients, and fewer opportunities to get out and take the perfect shot. However, you prevailed and can look forward to 2021 with a sense of hope. Brighter days are ahead, and with them, more opportunities to preserve, share, and sell your images — easier than ever.
During the past year in 2020, we worked to improve selling and mobile experiences and heard your calls for better photo management, organization, and sharing tools. That’s what 2021 is all about here at SmugMug, plus a healthy serving of visual improvements so that the experience surrounding your photos is a true compliment to the spectacular images you capture.
Without further ado, here’s a sneak peek into what we’re excited about in 2021.
Goal 1: Make it easier to organize, find, and share the photos from your ever-expanding library.
SmugMug continues to be the best place to keep your full-resolution photos, so we are setting off this year to improve our photo library and search experiences. Your libraries are continuing to grow and finding those favorite shots from years ago is getting more difficult. With high-performance cameras in our pockets, it’s easier than ever to capture that perfect moment even when we don’t have our favorite kit on us.
No matter your kit, you’re piling up hundreds of thousands of photos and multiple terabytes of data. We want to make sure you can find and share them all.
Goal 2: Improve how your photos look on SmugMug.
SmugMug has always been the place where your photos are protected in full-resolution, byte for byte. We also want the experience your photos live in to be something you want to show off to your friends, family, and clients. To that end, we’re working on improving the visual experience of SmugMug, from fonts to colors to accessibility. This ensures you and your photos look better here. This new visual experience will make your photos stand out and continue to be a place you’re proud to show off.
Goal 3: Make it easier to share with clients.
We are working to make it easier to engage with your clients through SmugMug. Working with photography clients can be exhausting. Once the session is done, there’s getting the photos onto the computer, selecting the best of the bunch, uploading them, sharing with the client, waiting for the client to select their favorites, editing the best, and sending them back to the client for final review before the hand-off. While our client hand-off and event photography tools are powerful, we want to make them even more powerful.
Goal 4: Make the mobile apps even easier to use and more powerful.
Last year, we made the SmugMug apps more powerful for pro photographers to manage their photo sites. This year we are continuing to make the mobile apps more user-friendly for an even bigger photography audience. If you are a passionate photographer, SmugMug’s photo apps are a way to access, find, and share photos from your collection from anywhere, at any time.
These are some of the highlights of what we’ve got planned for the year. We look forward to getting these new or improved tools into your hands and hearing your feedback. Whether you are a passionate hobby photographer or a professional selling photos or photography services, SmugMug is the home for your photography.
