The “Break it Down” Blog

Laurence Hartje sends word that SmugMug has rolled out a major new feature months in the making: Islands:

and then the different settings available here (sorry too wide to inline):

The idea of “Islands” came about starting with this 28-page-thread in the SmugMug forums discussing the need for a way to stop making images stored in SmugMug Google-able as well as Keyword-searchable from the main site. The reason for this, as some concerned posters pointed out, is that it made it very easy for strangers (and some perverts) to hop on to Google or SmugMug and search for something like “children” and get back results showing some user’s children.

One concerned poster (I don’t have the link off hand, but it’s in that thread) had noticed an IP address from Germany looking at the same 2 or 3 pictures of his 11-year-old daughter like 20x.

The problem, from SmugMug’s end, was one of the biggest user-based for SmugMug is their professional photographers that rely on the indexability of the site to sell their work and make a living from it. Clearly these folks aren’t going to want to have SmugMug turn off external access completely; so there was a big problem to be solved.

Somewhere over the course of months in that thread, interacting with the community, releasing example implementations to a few select group, the SmugMug crew finally came up with the “Islands” idea of allowing folks to mark their images accessible to everyone, only other SmugMug users or private. Currently SmugMug offers the following “scopes”:

• Public
  • Everyone (Default)
  • Home page only (Just your account’s front SmugMug page)
  • No (Search engines locked out)
• SmugIsland
  • Everyone on SmugMug (Using Smug search)
  • Name Only (Using Smug search, but images are culled)
  • No (People can search once they are on your page, but you need to give them the URL)
  • Lock Down (No searching anywhere, direct links to images is the only way anyone will see your stuff)
• Private
  • Password-protected locked down galleries

The take-away message here is how SmugMug handled it and how they handle their customers in general: The listened. The listened to their customers even though the feature took months to implement, it required a major rewrite of portions of the SmugMug system because it was never meant to allow these features and many thousands in new hardware to support it.

So while SmugMug is a pay-only service, you see where your money goes in about a week of using it.

I’ve been using SmugMug for a little over a year now and loved every bit of it. I couldn’t suggest the service enough to interested parties and I think it starts at $40/year or something like that. If you are interested, signup for the free trial and see what it’s about.

Note: I want to make it clear I don’t work for SmugMug. But in this day of fly-by-night companies with no customer service, or completely outsourced customer service that makes you crazy with rage, it’s nice to see some companies doing it different.