Beer or Coffee – 12/2/16

Welcome to December! Last week might have been a holiday here in the United States, but we still kept busy, launching some awesome new features and fixing a few unfortunate bugs. Tune into our Facebook Live show, or just skip below to read all about it.

• The big feature I’m most excited about personally is the ability to generate a new watermark simply by typing in the text you want. No longer are you constrained by your ability to generate transparent PNGs in Photoshop — now you can generate anything you want right in our watermarking tool. Learn more about watermarks here, or just dive right in and give it a try!
• Our AppleTV app has been exceptionally well received, but we did have a few minor bugs pop up. You’ll be happy to know we are on the case, and have released a new version to address the issues we are aware of!  
• We know how important Coupons are for running your business, so we’ve continued to polish the interface even after the recent facelift. Everything should work even better now.

Next week, we won’t be having our normal live show. Instead, we have something very special planned. Please tune in right here on our blog, I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Beer or Coffee – 11/18/16

Happy Friday!  We might have only shipped a single major feature this last week, but it was definitely worth it.  If you haven’t checked out our AppleTV app yet, get moving!  You don’t have an AppleTV yet you say?  Well you are in luck, we are partnering with SLR Lounge to give away 3 of them. Hop on over and win one!

Join us on our Friday morning Facebook Live show to hear us talk about what you can do with our new app.

Beer or Coffee – 11/11/16

It’s Veterans Day, and we’d like to sincerely thank all of those who have served and continue to serve. We’ve been lucky enough to have veterans as coworkers, and also to work with spouses of active duty servicemembers. For more than a decade, we’ve been privileged to have thousands of active duty customers. Families have used SmugMug to bridge the distance between family members overseas and those left at home.  We’ve witnessed photographically the sacrifices being made by these brave men and women. On this day especially, we thank you all for your service.

For SmugMug specific activity, tune into our weekly Facebook Live show, or continue reading below.

New this week:

• Upload directly from Google Photos or Flickr!  We know your photos often live in lots of different places. It’s even easier now to upload them directly to SmugMug. Read all the details here!
• We changed the way watermarks are applied and removed in your gallery settings. Now, when you choose a watermark to apply to the gallery, we will automatically make sure it gets applied to every photo in the gallery. Likewise, when you decide to remove a watermark we will remove it from all photos in that gallery. This will make your entire gallery consistent.  Should you want to add or remove a different watermark from your settings, you can still use the watermarking tool in the organizer!
• With the changes to the gallery settings, we’ve also updated the way the Bulk Gallery Settings works with watermarks. You can now apply, change, or remove watermarks across lots of galleries at once. Changing the watermark setting here will automatically process all images in those galleries. Just be aware that if you try to add, change, or remove a watermark from the galleries already processing, you’ll have to wait till the first job is finished before setting the change. This is especially powerful if you’ve updated your watermark recently, and want to use the new one instead of the old and dated one. With a few clicks, we’ll queue up all your photos for reprocessing. Hooray!
• A few weeks ago, we introduced a new feature that intelligently auto-crops your thumbnails. When possible, we try and avoid cropping out faces so that your thumbnails are more relevant. When we launched that, it only worked on 1:1 ratio images. We’ve now expanded that to all the other aspect ratios we provide for thumbnails. 1:3, 2:3, 3:1. You name it, it works!

You asked. We listened. The SmugMug Apple TV app is here.

SmugMug knows that your memories and milestones are bigger than life to you. So instead of looking at photos on small screens, why not view your captures on a large screen to give them all the life and love they deserve? Recognizing this desire to experience your photos in a really big way, we’re happy to announce our new SmugMug Apple TV app.

With the new SmugMug Apple TV app you can:

Display your photos. Our app beautifully displays your photos in high definition, showcasing them in all their glory.

Play a slideshow of a gallery. Share your vacation photos or your child’s birthday pics in the comfort of your own home without ever having to leave the couch or click “next” on a remote.

Follow friends, family or photographers you admire. Never miss another graduation, milestone or celebration. Just follow your loved ones through the Apple TV app and get notified when they upload new photos and galleries. And, with the holidays approaching, now is a great time to help your loved ones always have your photos available on their TV by gifting them a new Apple TV.

Discover new inspiration through our Featured Photographers. Check out some of the best photographers in the world, whose work will leave you breathless. And yes, one day there will be the possibility of you being a Featured Photographer on the SmugMug Apple TV app!

Watch a SmugMug Film. At SmugMug, photography is our passion. SmugMug Films is a celebration of the photographers who inspire and amaze us. From surfing in the arctic to climbing glaciers, to walking the neon-lit streets of Tokyo, our films showcase incredible photographers and adventures. See every single one of our award winning films the way they were meant to be seen and never miss a new release!

Just one more thing…

To celebrate our new Apple TV app, we’re partnering with SLR Lounge to give away 3 Apple TVs! Each winner also receives a SmugMug business account and a SmugMug prize pack. Entering is fast and easy, so head over to their website now. Good luck to all!

Our new SmugMug Apple TV app, available only for 4th generation Apple TVs, is in the App Store this very second. The wait is finally over. Got questions? Check out our shiny, new Help Page to get you up and running with our new app in no time. Also for our customers using these, check out SmugMug on Roku, Amazon Fire TV and Chromecast.

The future of photography is here. And it’s smiling  ;D

 

We like to move it, move it. Transfer your photos directly to SmugMug with ease.

Unless you started taking photos yesterday, chances are you have photos stored all over the place, online and off. The way photography has changed over the last decade even made that chance almost a foregone conclusion. For many, their first digital photo was probably no bigger than a megabyte. Now, for many DSLR or mirrorless photographers each photo’s size has ballooned up to 30 or even 40 MB apiece. You can now get an SD card that will hold a terabyte. Heck, your phone probably shoots jpegs that easily clock in at 6-10 MB or more! So where do you put them all?

For most, it’s on your computer or an external hard drive. For others, it’s a combination of photo sites or cloud storage like DropBox or Flickr. Some even opt to dump them all on Facebook despite the risk of losing them or being down-rez’d so much they lose most of their luster. For even more, it’s some combination of these making it a ridiculous project to track down specific images for certain occasions. Looking for that childhood Christmas photo for your daughter’s upcoming rehearsal dinner slideshow? Good luck! Want that epic sunset from your first camping trip? Not here, try again!

Point is, finding and storing your photos shouldn’t be a difficult thing, and the number of places your photos can live is enough to make your head spin. But we have a better way. Besides giving you a beautiful home for your photos where you can organize, print, share, and even sell them, we know that your photo home needs an easy door to walk through.

We’re introducing an exciting new set of integrations for our SmugMug subscribers that will help take all that guess work out of making sure your photos are organized, protected, and easy to find when you need them. We’ve added a quick, simple way to directly transfer your photos from Google Photos and Flickr straight to your SmugMug site. Since we launched these integrations with DropBox last year, we have helped our customers move millions of photos to SmugMug. Now, instead of downloading all your images to your computer or a hard drive, then uploading them to SmugMug, you can transfer them directly from these services right to SmugMug. That means all your photos will not only be safe, but also be displayed brilliantly in a single, awesome home.

Now what was I looking for? Ah yes, that perfect photo of my dog taking a nap.

Learn more here!

Beer or Coffee – 10/28/16

Happy Halloween weekend! I hope your weekend is full of ghosts, ghouls and copious amounts of candy.  Halloween’s proximity means you have precious few days left to enter our Halloween contest.

Didn’t watch our Facebook Live?  No problem, here’s what we released this week:

• We’ve made some big updates to uploading in our iOS App. We’ve added a robust upload queue, showing you all the details of your existing uploads. Multiple images will now upload simultaneously, dramatically speeding up uploads in general. You can also upload to multiple galleries at once, and we’ll do our best to keep your uploads running in the background if needed. In short, getting your photos from your iPhone or iPad has never been easier!

• There were a few minor bugs surrounding the features that allow you to brand your packages for your customers. Your customers will get flawless Thank You prints and branding stickers on their packages, making sure your personal brand is presented in the best possible way.

• Mid-Gloss Metal Prints are now available through Bay Photo! This is my personal preference for finish on gorgeous metal prints; I highly recommend adding them to your pricelists today.

Beer or Coffee – 10/21/16

I hope you all have weekend plans already, because Friday is upon us again! I’m out of town today, but I’ll leave you all in the very capable hands of Jen and Evan for our Facebook Live show.  They’ll be previewing another new product coming soon from Bay Photo!

Don’t have time to watch? Here’s what we have been working on lately:

• We’ve made some very significant improvements to our Coupons feature. We’ve given the feature a much needed facelift, but we’ve been working on functionality as well! You can now edit the coupon code, discount amount, and currency type of the coupon up until it has been used the first time. We’ve also improved the wording around restrictions or limitations on coupons to make it easier to get everything just right. Perhaps most exciting is the unseen benefits, the underlying technology has been upgraded to allow us to do some exciting new things with coupons in the future.
• We’ve also launched a Halloween photo contest! If you haven’t entered yet, you still have another week to  submit your best Halloween photos and possibly win some big prizes!

Beer or Coffee – 10/14/16

It’s Friday again already! While this week has been relatively quiet, we still have some really fun stuff to talk about. Tune in to our Facebook Live show to see us tease some unreleased products from Bay Photo that you’ll be able to sell very soon! In case you missed it, we’ll be live every Friday morning at 11 AM Pacific. Join us there, or watch it here!

 

If you don’t want to watch, here’s what we released this week:

• We’ve overhauled our Jobs Page! Come join the family, we have 8 amazing jobs open right now.
• Our native iPhone, Android and Lightroom uploaders are now accessible directly from our default web based uploader. Getting your photos on SmugMug has never been easier!
• We had some minor bugs with the navigation at the top of our pages for Guest Accounts. Your invited guests can now move around the site without any glitches.
• New accounts will now be able to choose a Site Design to get started, making sure their site looks beautiful right from the start. For the rest of us, we can still change designs right from the top of the page!

Beer or Coffee – our new weekly roundup!

Happy Friday!  Even though we are only a week into posting these updates, we’re already making them better.  I’ll be jumping on Facebook Live every Friday morning at 11am Pacific with awesome guests to talk about the exciting things we’re working on.  Watch replays right here on our blog!

Don’t want to watch the video? No worries, I’ll keep writing the updates too. Here’s what we have released in the last week.

• Upload directly into your settings pages!  Need to change your profile photo? Or maybe create a new watermark? Now you can upload the new photo right there in the settings page, instead of finding it hiding in one of your many galleries.
• We’ve dramatically improved the underlying code in our Dropbox integration. Now it’s easier than ever to get all of your photos on SmugMug.
• If you use our awesome Lightroom plugin (you should), you’ll now get smart auto-cropping of thumbnails. When we have to crop a thumbnail down to a square, we are analyzing for faces and doing our best to not lose the good parts. Pretty cool stuff. EDIT: This feature also works with any camera that stores facial recognition in the image itself! Your iPhone, Android, and even fancy cameras will all help us intelligently crop your photos.
• Did you know we sell Photo Aprons? We do, and they now have an updated and accurate picture of the current aprons!

PS- Did you see the Halloween promotions we are running?

Don’t get lost in translation. Introducing SmugMug’s Google Translate widget!

We all know the saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” but while photography may universally speak to us, language can often be a barrier. With potential customers from all over the globe finding your work online, we wanted to make it easier for you to share it without barriers. Now it’s easy to share your photos in more than 100 different languages with our new Google Translate widget.

Once installed, our Google Translate widget allows your guests to select virtually any language, and your entire SmugMug site will be translated to that language. Customers only have to select their language once, as all subsequent SmugMug pages they visit will be translated to that language. This includes translating gallery titles, picture descriptions, and more. It’s simple and fast to install and allows you to expand your business, or share with friends and family around the world, with just a few clicks.

With the widget installed, customers can choose their language from a drop-down list.

In the blink of an eye, your website is translated!

Ready to take your SmugMug website to an international level? Here’s what you have to do:

1. Select “Content and Design” from the “Customize” tab.

2. Under the “Add Content Block” > “Services” section, drag and drop “Google Translate” on to your page.

3. Hit “Publish,” and you’re done!

Don’t believe that it’s really that easy? Watch below:

While you may not parlez français, now your SmugMug site does!