Disclaimer: I'm SmugMug's co-founder, CEO & Chief Geek
I don't have a crystal ball, but we've been offering unlimited storage since I co-founded the company in 2002 with $0 of investment.
13 years later, the company still hasn't taken any outside funding, has been profitable for most of those years, and still offers unlimited storage. We plan to keep this critical feature for the forseeable future. :)
Anyone who's passionate about photography is aligned with our interests. We're photographers and limits suck.
As I was writing this, I remembered a thread from our message forum in 2005 where a customer asked if they could upload more than 2TB of photos under our "unlimited" plan. Remember, this was in 2005.
I am a happy user of smugmug for a long time, because it was the best service I found that could handle 1080 videos. But I believe I'm a different kind of customer. I only want to have my personal backup. I don't want to sell photos. Google Photos has become very appealing as the interface is great to see the pictures and videos. But what I really don't like on Smugmug is that the Android App can't be trusted. It sometimes skip a lot of files and also don't handle duplicate files after the album has apparently more than 1000 files. The result is a messy album. I already reported this to support (by that time I did not realize the 1000 files issue, just the behavior) but I had no response. This is not a complain about the service that I really like. It is a feedback according to my behavior as a user. I am testing Amazon Cloud Drive and I'm really impressed. It lacks the great Google Interface but don't change the quality of my videos.
It's a little weird you didn't correct that unlimited is only on compressed image formats; not RAW and there are video length restrictions, though generous.
Sorry about that, was trying to correct the "They'll go out of business" or "They don't really mean unlimited" comments about our business.
We definitely do not support unlimited RAW uploads, and we do recompress videos for streaming (at insanely high quality, though!). Stay tuned on RAW.
Additionally, we limit photos (JPEG, GIF, PNG) to 150MB or 210 Megapixels apiece, and videos to 20 minutes and 3GB. Those have continued to grow over time as additional devices demand them, and I expect that trend to continue.
As you're on here - will a new alternative to Smugmug Vault surface again soon? As far as I can tell, smugmug doesn't support raw at all for new users at this time?
So far the only real alternative I'm aware of is pics.io.
I should have mentioned that the reason we no longer offer SmugVault for RAW storage is that Amazon has deprecated AWS DevPay, the product we built SmugVault on, and will be shutting it down "soon".
Which means we need to build something entirely new, which I'm happy to do, but we're currently in limbo and gathering feedback.
Personally I need to store RAWs. I don't have any use for a DAM (Digital Asset Management) system that doesn't let me store RAWs (or at least import to DNG with most, if not 1:1, of the information intact).
I'm mulling over implementing it myself, as a self-host solution. Probably aim for ingesting RAWs to DNGs, and have the possibility of losslessly doing some edit/transforms (store the operations outside the DNG files) -- along with export/view/cache as jpeg and jpeg 2000 for web browsing etc.
Somewhat related, I came across dpbestflow[1] again, just now -- and I see they've added some information about (archive) file formats since I stopped by last. I wasn't aware jpeg 2000 had a lossless mode (nor that it generally compressed better than other lossless formats). Nor was I aware a number of archive institutions have standardized their DAM/Archiving on lossless jpeg 2000.
I suppose one would still need DNG/RAW if one want to keep the door open for being able to "re-develop from negative" on archived photos (jfr. archiving/keeping old negatives, which would be the equivalent for traditional photography).
Anyway, the site[1] might be of interest for those that find this thread interesting.
Hello SmugMug CEO, I've received many emails the last two months about my credit card expiration. The problem is I cancelled my account a couple years ago. I have not gone through a couple of years of bank records to find when/if you kept charging me and didn't send an email.
I liked your service and cancelled because I was in China and couldn't reliably use the service. Every one of those reminder emails I've receive makes me feel like SmugMug is not a good company. I am not in China anymore and don't think I would use the service of a company that can manage to send so many emails to remind me they can't take money out of my bank but don't do so when they do.
First, I'm very sorry. We certainly shouldn't be sending you tons of emails if you've cancelled your account. Mind emailing me your details (I'm just don at) and I can find & fix the bug?
Second, by way of explanation, not apology, we're the keepers of people's priceless memories & creations. We cannot lose them. But at the same time, we can't offer our service for free, or we'd lose everyone's photos. When someone's credit card expires, we've entered the danger zone where, if we're not very careful, we might inadvertently lose someone's photos who actually really wants to pay.
The summary is we hear more than 100:1 from people about "I didn't get that email!" versus "You're emailing me too much about this!". And when it literally means the difference between removing someone's photos or not, we err on the side of trying to get ahold of you aggressively so you can make an informed choice about your content rather than having us make an automated one.
We go to great lengths to ensure even expired accounts don't lose their photos, but there's only so much we can do.
Again, very sorry our policies & systems are annoying you, and would love to fix & improve them. Please do get in touch.
One of the reasons I stopped using SmugMug was that all my videos were re-encoded/recompressed, and I could visibly see degradation. Is this still the case?
One of the great dilemmas with online video is the bitrate at which you compress. The more you compress, the better then deliverability (faster starts + fewer skips, stutters, pauses, etc). But, of course, you suffer quality loss. If you compress less, at a certain point, almost no one can view your videos because the bandwidth requirements are too high.
Every video service ends up deciding what's more important to them. To us, our decision point has been that we should deliver higher quality 1080p video than anywhere else on the Internet, and I believe we deliver that today. Our quality at that resolution exceeds YouTube, Vimeo, and Netflix. As a result, though, fewer people can stream it at 1080p. There are two parts to our bet: 1) Bandwidth continues to increase, so in the future more people will be able to view it at this quality, and 2) our brand promise is that your photos & videos look better here than anywhere else.
But we can't just leave it at that, because people do want to watch these videos. So what we do is compromise on the compression at lower resolutions so they stream quickly and with few errors. At 720p and lower, we're comparable to the other services in terms of quality, bitrate, and deliverability. In the end, it means we can deliver a very good experience to people with ample bandwidth, and a fairly good experience to people without.
If you have some examples, I'd be happy to take a look and make sure we're meeting our goals on both those fronts.
We've increased it a few times over the years, so I'd guess we'll increase it again in the future.
FYI, it isn't constrained technically or for business reasons, but instead is constrained for product reasons. We can see that longer videos simply don't get watched as often. And we rarely get pushback from our customers on the 20 minute limit, probably for this reason - they're making videos their friends, families & customers want to watch, which are less than 20 minutes.
But I'd love to know your use case and what you'd use longer video lengths for. Entirely possible we're off base here and aren't thinking of some great use cases.
I wish you the best of luck and appreciate your style of running a business, but I stand by my analysis.
If your product is storage, and is unlimited at a flat rate, and you continue to scale, you will have to throttle somewhere (speed, "image quality", upload rate, whatever) or you'll be out of business.
So maybe your product isn't plain old storage ? Maybe this doesn't apply to you. Again, cheers and best of luck to you.
Well, you're right that we're not plain old storage. We're not Dropbox or something.
We're unlimited JPEGs, GIFs, and PNGs, and our target market is people passionate about photography. That is a major differentiator, and certainly helps constrain costs.
That being said, we do have some truly giant consumers. But it works. :)
I just think, fundamentally, people don't want to worry about managing their photo storage. I certainly don't. So I built a service that doesn't have that constraint, then figured out how to make money at it.
I don't have a crystal ball, but we've been offering unlimited storage since I co-founded the company in 2002 with $0 of investment.
13 years later, the company still hasn't taken any outside funding, has been profitable for most of those years, and still offers unlimited storage. We plan to keep this critical feature for the forseeable future. :)
Anyone who's passionate about photography is aligned with our interests. We're photographers and limits suck.
[edited: typo]