smugblog: Chris MacAskill

In big-time consumer press, you’d think the big brands with big PR departments would steal the show.

But what if the little, family-owned company with only 200,000 paying customers had something completely unique that really mattered?

Fortunately, thanks to our customers, we do: themes & customization.

Many thanks to families like Lee Shepherd’s, who designed several awesome themes and made their family site a model of great customization — and the Wellmans, Jenny C, Dan Porter, and the Knoll Family, whose sites convinced understandably skeptical editors that we should be listed among the biggest names in photo sharing.

And thanks also to customers like Mike Lane, who has been a huge help with themes & customization. We would have used Mike as an example, but it was a consumer magazine who wanted consumer examples.

Making cool 1-click customization available to consumers isn’t easy and my hat’s off to everyone who made it so great.

Once upon a time I founded Fatbrain.com (because great minds think a lot), took it public, and later sold it to Barnes & Noble. It sold books to geeks, along with other stuff geeks needed like Sun and IBM manuals, training CDs, etc.

What made Fatbrain as good as it was is that Amazon was the mother of all competitors, mainly because Jeff is an animal — a very talented one. We had to give it our all to compete.

You might think SmugMug and Amazon to be strange bedfellows after all that competition in my past… Actually, it makes us great partners because I know up close and personal just how great they are.

I’ve been using Amazon S3 for my own personal hobby, Adventure Rider — a forum with 3 million posts and 1500 people online at any time. Why set my own server on fire serving images when we can set Amazon’s on fire? They’ve been incredibly reliable and fast.

Which is why Don has had so much luck putting S3 to work on SmugMug’s 500 million images.

Oh. My. Gosh. If you haven’t tried Dan’s Chocolates, you haven’t tasted True Decadence.

A wonderful customer suprised us with a Dan’s box with this message:

You can send a photo on the box top, so they lifted our photo from the Aboutus page:

A note from Dan warns of conspicuous consumption. It happened to me before anyone else knew the chocolates had arrived…

I have no connection to Dan’s Chocolates other than I’m newly addicted.

First, the good news: the note attached to your photos called EXIF, which contains stuff like the time your photo was shot, can also contain location info. Cool.

The bad news: unless you have a high-end Nikon attached to a GPS, your camera is clueless about location.

You could buy a Ricoh with GPS card like I did, but it sucks. The GPS card goes where the memory card normally goes, so you’re left with 8 MB of built-in memory. Not many photos… And it isn’t a good camera but costs a lot.

However! You can buy Robogeo to sychronize the time stamps between your GPS log and photos. If the GPS says you were on the Golden Gate Bridge at 8:13 PM and you took a photo around that time….you get the idea.

Some camera phones have GPS and you can get a GPS card for a Treo 650, which has a decent camera. But I haven’t figured out whether they embed the location info into the EXIF. Anyone know?

Sometimes the location reported by your GPS is not what you want in your photo. If you stand on the Brooklyn Bridge and shoot the Empire State Building, you might prefer to have the location be the Empire State Building.

For those exceptions, you can look up latitude and longitude using Google Maps: find the spot on the map and double-click it. The map centers. Now click the Link to this page link. An URL will appear in your browser address bar. The first two numbers you see in it, reading from left to right, is the latitude and longitude. Copy and paste them to Robogeo and you’re set.

Easier by far is to use Smugmug’s Edit Geography tool. You find the location and it fills in latitude and longitude for you. But it does not yet burn it into the EXIF of your photo.

What’s your experience?

We didn’t say too much about our new home page with all the, erem, loud colors — but we were sure we’d hear about the hot pink, the green that clashes, the button that’s lighter pink than the rest…

But all we’ve heard is good so far… If you hate it tell us why!

The main thing we’re concerned with is does it work, as measured by the conversion % of people who click through from Google ads and then sign up. If the only real problem is to be ignored, doesn’t seem like we’ll have that problem.

Why are we the only photo sharing site with black pages?

The current postcards are photographs glued to postcard paper stock.

They are changing to an offset-printed product, printed directly on postcard stock. I’ve seen them and they look excellent.

They’ll cost a dollar more for a 4×6 but they sell 10 and 25-packs which are cheaper per card.

Erem… I sprinkled some water on the canvas print samples we received and discovered the ink/paint/whatever it is on the canvas is water soluble… Is that common with canvas prints? I sent an email to EZ Prints asking about this. Don’t think we want to offer them for sale until we understand this issue better.

I submitted some examples to EZ Prints for canvas prints. So far, so good. Lots of detail in them. I have to do lots more testing to see how color, contrast, etc., compare to paper prints.

EZ Prints offers two options: rolled and stretched on a wooden frame. I can’t believe how much more they are when mounted on a frame… Almost three times the price. My inclination is to offer both.

It looks like our prices would be competitive with the likes of Shutterfly, whcc, etc. There are some discount photos-on-canvas places, but I dunno about quality…