Smugmug unhappiness

wt21

Hall of Famer
I tried out Smugmug, starting earlier in the year. Over the summer, they got really slow to process my photos, and I'd get pics stuck in processing. When I contacted their help desk, they told me it wasn't happening (even though it was right in front of me).

I cancelled my pre-paid annual service today, and they will not give me a refund on the balance. It wasn't much money. I'm not even sure that's legal in terms of subscriptions, though likely I agreed to it in a click-through TOS.

I would not recommend them.
 
I had Smugmug a few years ago, had some issues and they were non-responsive. I've been nomadic since then, settled a little with Flickr, but then the overhaul came and I blew out of there... right now I'm with Smugmug again on a per-month basis, not sure if I'll stay.
 
I wound up shutting down my Smugmug account.

They had trouble charging my CC - I don't know why, I copy/pasted the info from my account file. Tried "updating" my account with the same info, no joy. 2 emails to customer service - Smugmug calls 'em "heroes", lol - and got no response.

After closing my account, I emailed them about my experience. Again, no response.

So, 2 attempts with them, 5 years apart... unbelievably sh*tty service, given that they are a pricey operation and supposedly pride themselves on the customer experience.
 
I signed up at Flickr just so I could view the photos from people on this site and others. But I haven't posted anything there myself. Is Flickr the best from a selection of mediocre options right now? After Hurricane Sandy, I've thought more about using online storage to augment my own local hard drive storage and printed hard copies. But who is the best these days - or perhaps the least bad?
 
You need to establish what you want from an image hosting site. Do you want it purely for storage/backup/organisation/presentation? Do you want to create a portfolio for professional purposes?

For the first I'd see flickr as probably the best option particularly given their storage allowance. In terms of presentation of and viewing your own images there are many alternatives other than flickr's own layout which are provided by third party websites that access the flickr database like fluidr.com and flickriver.com. These alone plus the pain of shifting wouldn't have me looking elsewhere.

For the second you'd probably best off looking elsewhere, and likely designing your own site.
 
I know there are some bad feelings around smugmug at the beginning of this post. I'll just be a bit contrarian and say I've had nothing but great experiences from smugmug and their services.

Granted, I use smugmug for a slightly different purpose. I use it mainly for my off-site backup of vital photos. Virtually limitless storage and a redundant backup to my local backups. I don't use smugmug to do any sharing or selling, and I've always had responsive help (even if they weren't always able to solve the issue like staying up-to-date and supporting the latest adobe camera raw DNG versions.)

Sorry you had a bad experience.
 
I'm not sure what I'll do - if anything. The social aspect of photo-sharing means absolutely zilch to me, and even hosting to display my photos doesn't mean much, as I seldom care if anyone bothers to look... /shrug

Anyway, I just wanted to post a follow-up to my post from a month ago, and also to show that wt21 is not alone in his experiencing worse than poor customer service from SM.
 
I'm not sure what I'll do - if anything. The social aspect of photo-sharing means absolutely zilch to me, and even hosting to display my photos doesn't mean much, as I seldom care if anyone bothers to look... /shrug

Anyway, I just wanted to post a follow-up to my post from a month ago, and also to show that wt21 is not alone in his experiencing worse than poor customer service from SM.

If you dont care about the social aspects, you could do worse than take a look at Zenfolio then. I found them very good, but I needed to go free.
 
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