In the early stages of our Photo Booth company, we decided to use SmugMug to host all of our event galleries. It was a fantastic platform and worked great. Then in 2013, SmugMug decided to roll out the “New” SmugMug. At first it was optional, then everyone was forced to go with the “New” look.
In my opinion, there isn’t much of a difference to the viewer, but the dashboard is much nicer. With these “New” changes came one glaring change: JavaScript is no longer allowed in SmugMug. They say it has the potential to slow their site. Maybe it does, but prohibiting the use of JS limits the design of the site.
My day job is Web Development, I can tell you there isn’t a day that goes by where I don’t write a script. Regardless of what SmugMug tells me, JavaScript makes the internet better. It’s an indispensable tool to a web developer. If there’s a website built without Java, it’s likely to be an old outdated site.
Countless threads can be found where customers complained about the JavaScript restrictions. I personally e-mailed SmugMug back in 2013 to discuss this along with other options. If I were able to just pull my images to my website (as opposed to using their site) I wouldn’t have a problem. Very simply, I want to put my images wherever I want. So what could be a solution? How about a WordPress plugin? All of the websites I have made over the last 5 years have been WordPress. And about 30% of ALL websites are WordPress. When I asked about a plugin in 2013, their response was something along the lines of “We can’t give you a timeline on when we will develop a plugin”.
Despite these limitations, moving 4 years of event galleries wasn’t an intriguing option to me, so we compromised our site design and built our event gallery page without JavaScript. We were able to make it work, but the lack of JavaScript meant that our navigation wasn’t responsive. That’s a fundamental no-no. SmugMug is only a small part of our website. No one should have to limit their design based on the limitations of one single page.
Recently, I decided to revamp our site. Guess what? NOTHING has changed. We still can’t use JavaScript despite the customer demands. Still no WordPress plugin to speak of. I e-mailed SmugMug support to ask if they are working on it. Their response was “A WordPress plugin is on our engineer’s radar, but we cannot give a timeline”. Basically the same response from 5 years ago. Even worse, they have failed to even realize that they have failed their customers. After reviewing other options, there are third party plug-ins that can pull SmugMug images. Not that everyone didn’t already know, but an official SmugMug plug-in isn’t impossible. Either the development team is incompetent (unlikely) or upper management doesn’t care (more likely).
SmugMug has made it clear that they don’t have much interest in catering to the needs of businesses. We have stayed with them for nearly 10 years expecting things to get better, but they haven’t. We are now looking into more viable options. Zenfolio was one of the services we compared when we signed up with SmugMug, and it looks like we will be moving over to them. It’s a shame that SmugMug couldn’t get this right.