New Feature: Gallery Downloads for Your Visitors

We’re excited to announce that we’ve added one more card to the digital-file delivery deck: Gallery Downloads for your viewers. You’ll now be able to give friends, family, or clients the power to quickly and easily download an entire gallery of full-quality photos themselves.

Have a set of birthday party photos that you’d like grandma to have, or a prepaid photo shoot to deliver to a client? No more need to send a disc or thumbdrive, or request the gallery download yourself and then forward the link.

Simply set this up in the gallery settings and remove yourself as the middleman in your digital-file deliveries.

You’re in control of whether or not this feature is available within a gallery, as well as who can use it—you can even set a password for the download process if you wish.

Combine Private Sharing with Visitor Gallery Downloads to create a personal, powerful, and private photo-delivery experience for your adoring fans. Private Sharing allows you to send a unique invitation for a gallery to specific guests. If you’ve got a SmugMug Portfolio or Business account, you’ll be able to customize this experience even further with your Client Area.

Of course, all our other digital-file delivery tools still exist. As the account owner, you’ll always have peace of mind knowing you can recover your original files from any gallery by clicking the download icon in the Organizer. SmugMug Portfolio and Business accounts can sell gallery downloads and individual photos by adding them to their Pricelists.

Learn more about Visitor Downloads, selling digital files, and Private Sharing from our help center.

A New and Improved Way to Add Prints to Your Cart

Over the years we’ve gotten so much great feedback from you, our customers, about buying and what your fans have reported back about the buying experience. So today is big news for you: we’ve remodeled the Add to Cart step to make it cleaner, simpler, and smoother for all!

To check it out, navigate to any photo you have for sale on your site and click Buy Photos > This Photo.

Instead of this:

Shopping on Old SmugMug, AKA: “Where are my glasses?”

You’ll see this:

SmugMug’s new Add to Cart layout. Ah, much better!

What Changed?

We’ve completely revamped the first half of the shopping process, when you’re adding photos into your cart. Here’s what’s new:

• You’ll see a larger, prettier preview of your photo on the left. You’ll know for sure which pic you’re viewing.
• There’s now an easier-to-follow item selection pane on the right. All the same products and options are there, and it’s much easier to drill down to what you want.
• You’ll now adjust cropping in that same window as soon as you choose your print size. With borders and boundaries bigger and easier to see, there’s less chance something vital will get cropped out in your print.
• All of this automagically scales to fit smaller screen sizes, making shopping on-the-go as easy as just a few taps.

Crop and adjust without changing screens.

How Do I Get It?

You’ve already got it! The updated design is already sparkling up all accounts on New SmugMug. So add a photo to your cart to see it in action.

Tip: Be sure to try it on an updated browser. If you have Internet Explorer 9 or below, you’ll still see the old design.

Click through to choose your print. You can step back at any time.

Speedy shopper? Look below to add a previous print size, lickity-split.

Shoppers on Old SmugMug sites will also see the old shopping design, so Preview your site in New SmugMug to check it out and use it yourself. However, you’ll need to Publish your New SmugMug site to let your fans and customers use it, too.

More Help & Info

The checkout part hasn’t changed with this release, but we knew you’d ask. 🙂 It’s in the works, and of course we’ll share as soon as we’ve got something ready to show you.

For more info about what’s changed and how the new process works, check out our updated help pages. And if you have any additional questions, reach out to our fabulous 24/7 Support Heroes. We always love to hear from you.

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Link Roundup:

• How do I buy prints?
• What’s owner buy?
• Can I crop photos during checkout?
• Preview the new SmugMug
• Pro Tip: Top 7 Reasons You Just Lost a Sale
• How to price and sell on SmugMug

Pro tip: Sell Downloads and Don’t Leave Money on the Table

Hey there, Portfolio and Business photographers: We’ve heard that a lot of you didn’t know that you could make money selling digital files on SmugMug. And maybe there are those of you who did know, but still weren’t sure about how to get  going.

Your photo clients may not always be looking for just traditional paper prints. So we’re here to show you that with just a few extra clicks, you can start selling digital photos and videos in addition to your usual physical print items.

Our latest pro article spotlights this commercial conundrum. We discuss why digital sales are essential to most any photographers’ businesses… and how you can get set up so that you’re not leaving money on the table.

Read the full article now on SmugMug Academy >>

A Penny for Your Downloads

Over the last few months, we’ve gotten so much feedback from our Pros about the $0.49 base cost for digital downloads. (Thanks!) So we put on our thinking caps, made a few espressos and dreamed up a better way to make this work.

How it Works, Now:

We’ve made the new base cost for individual digital downloads one penny. Why? More Pros than we expected loved this price point when offering many downloads to customers, so we took our cues from them. You can still add a reasonable markup, without bending your customers’ wallets out of shape. Gallery downloads still have a base cost of $0.99.

To cover our costs of processing and distributing your digital files, we’ll add a single $0.50 processing fee to the shopping cart when:

• The order’s subtotal (after Coupons) is less than $10

AND

• The order contains at least one digital download

In English: More money for you. You get the most control over the pricing and still take home a sweet profit.

What’s not to love? Tell us. We’re listening.

P.S. If you’re a Pro who uses % markup, you may want to log in and give your Pricelists a quick review. Just sayin’.

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:

http://macaskillphotography.smugmug.com/Families/The-Bean-Family/18600446_LB4ZWB#1480258798_md8t4Tb

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:

• Learn the Secrets of Storytelling on the Get in Motion Tour
• 7 Steps to Memorable Stories with Photodex and Proshow Web
• How to price digital downloads
• Troubleshooting video uploads
• SmugMug’s Partnership with Photodex
• Action! on Digital Grin

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!

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!

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