Use Smugmug to host and sell staff photos – 50% off first year

Posted on 25. Oct, 2011 by Aaron Manfull in Photography, Tips

If you’re looking for an easy way to create online photo galleries and make those photos available for the masses to purchase, give Smugmug a look. You can set how photos are displayed, what you want to charge for photos and you can even right-click protect them. Mention me and this post and get 50% off your first year with them.

My staff has used Smugmug for a couple years now. I’m a fan of them for a variety of reasons.

1. The staff no longer has to make prints/cds for parents who want photos. They simply direct them online where parents can purchase the photos they want. We used to sell the photos out of the room and that was one more thing we generally didn’t have time for. This frees up quite a bit of time for the staffers to do actual work for the publications.
2. You can set your own prices. Smugmug lets you know how much they keep each time a photo is purchased, you get to set whatever price you want above that and keep whatever profit you earn.
3. Smugmug is an easy program for students to upload photos and create galleries. Staffs can tailor how photo galleries look and easily embed badges and slideshows of photos on their websites with supplied HTML.
4. While there are other photo hosting sites like Flickr and Picasa where staffs can upload their photos, Smugmug is one of the few where staffs can actually get a portion of the profits. Smugmug has three levels of membership with different pricing and different benefits. Notice in the lowest level, staffs can’t earn revenue.
5. Photos can be right-click protected and/or watermarked if you would like to prevent people from grabbing a photo from your gallery.
6. Analytics tracks visitors to your galleries and you can even integrate your current Google Analytics account with it.
7. In the three years my staff has worked with them, we have had nothing but great customer service. They respond to emails promptly and have helped when there has been an issue and they have an extensive Help area on the site.

While it does cost a little up front to use ($75 the first year with the 50% discount), it should be one of the options staffs consider when deciding what to use for galleries. As a side note, it’s always good to check with places to see if they have discounts for nonprofits, most do.

Whether you decide to go with Smugmug or another hosting service, uploading the photos is just part of the battle to make revenue, the other deals with promoting those galleries in a variety of ways. But that’s a post for another day…

For now, if you’re interested in exploring Smugmug more, checkout the site or email Kevin Wilson who is their VP of Nonprofit accounts to get signed up.

Related posts:

1. Sites that host photos and allow you to sell them
2. Posting photos to the web easy, necessary
3. 5 Things I Learned Using Google Docs for Staff Applications This Year
4. How to Easily Resize Your Photos for the Web Using Resizeyourimage.com
5. You don’t need permission to run photos in your web news publication

Tags: photo gallery, Smugmug