SmugMug Review: Is It Worth the Price? A Photographer’s Perspective

SmugMug is a website for photographers which offers a huge range of features and capabilities. In this SmugMug review, I’m going to share my thoughts as to whether or not I think SmugMug is a good option for building a photography portfolio and selling your photos.

As a professional photographer, having a presence on the internet where I can both show my work and sell it to clients is important to me. SmugMug offers both of these capabilities, as well as a range of other features that make it useful for both professional and hobbyist photographers alike. You can see my photo portfolio here.

In this SmugMug review, I’ll share with you everything you need to know so you can decide if SmugMug is right for you. I’ll go through my experiences using it, the key features of SmugMug, and compare it against other photography website tools.

I’ll also share my exclusive SmugMug discount code so if you do decide to sign up, you’ll save money on your first year.

What is SmugMug?

SmugMug is an online platform designed primarily for photographers, which lets users build an online portfolio of their work. It also has e-commerce features, allowing users to sell their photos to clients around the world.

SmugMug handles the end to end process of image sales, from payment processing to printing and shipping. They partner with professional print labs including Bay Photo, WHCC, Fujifilm, and Loxley Colour, so your clients get high-quality prints without you having to manage the fulfilment yourself.

This makes it an excellent all-in-one solution for photographers looking to sell their work, as well as those looking for a portfolio site. SmugMug has been around since 2002, and in 2018 they also acquired Flickr, so they have a long track record in the photography space.

Who is SmugMug for?

SmugMug is aimed at a range of users, from professional photographers through to amateur photographers.

For professional photographers, which includes everyone from travel photographers through to wedding photographers, SmugMug offers a range of features to assist with their business, from password-protected galleries to e-commerce tools.

However, SmugMug works well for amateur photographers too. With unlimited photo backup and easy portfolio creation, SmugMug is a good option for any photographer who wants to share and save their images.

In addition to photography features, SmugMug also allows video uploads, video portfolios, as well as video download sales, so videographers will also find something to love. Do note that video is limited to 1080p (Full HD) rather than 4K.

How Much Does SmugMug Cost?

SmugMug currently offers three main plans. SmugMug does experiment with pricing fairly regularly, so the prices below may have changed by the time you read this. I’d recommend checking the latest prices on the SmugMug website here.

As of April 2026, the plans are priced as follows when billed annually (which I recommend, as it works out much cheaper):

• Direct plan: $20 USD per month (billed annually)
• Portfolio plan: $23.50 USD per month (billed annually)
• Pro plan: $37 USD per month (billed annually)

If you prefer to pay monthly, the prices are higher: $29/month for Direct, $35.50/month for Portfolio, and $52/month for Pro. There’s also an Enterprise plan for studios and institutions, which is priced on request.

You can save 15% on your first year, as well as access a 14-day free trial, if you sign up with this link. The 15% discount applies to new sign-ups on the first billing period.

If you are uncertain, I’d go for the trial option to try it out first. You don’t need a credit card to start the trial, so there’s no risk.

All of the plans allow for unlimited photo and video uploads, as well as an ad-free portfolio website. The main difference between the plans is around the commerce features, with only the Portfolio and Pro plans giving you the ability to sell your photos. There are also more pricing customisation options on the Pro plan, including per-gallery price lists.

We would generally recommend that professional photographers looking for a website through SmugMug would want to consider the Portfolio or Pro plan.

Personally, I use the Portfolio plan which has everything I need.

What are SmugMug’s Main Features?

SmugMug is one of the more premium platforms that allows a photographer to build a website, and as such it has a lot of features.

These features vary by plan, although many of the features such as unlimited uploads and the ability to create an online portfolio are common to all the plans.

Here are the main features that all the plans share:

• Ability to create a custom website for your photos and video
• Unlimited photo and video uploads
• Mobile app for managing your site on the go
• Unlimited traffic to your SmugMug portfolio
• Ability to embed photos on other websites
• Adobe Lightroom synchronisation
• Detailed stats and analytics of your site
• SEO features to help people find your work
• 24/7 support
• Basic site customisation with 26 photography-focused templates
• Easy image management tools
• Private galleries and password-protected galleries
• Sharing support
• The option to order prints and other products featuring your work

The Portfolio and Pro plans also add:

• Ability to sell your photos as prints and digital downloads
• Custom watermarking
• Products available include prints and canvases, as well as keepsakes like mugs and aprons, through to photo books. You can also sell digital photo downloads of your images.
• Support for ten currencies for worldwide ordering

If you’re looking to use SmugMug primarily to back up your photos, sell images, and to share them with friends and family, then the Portfolio plan should have everything you need.

If you are looking for a gallery site where clients can preview your work prior to ordering, and you’re going to handle the printing, shipping and payment yourself, then this plan will also work.

We would also suggest checking out our guide to photo backup options to see if there’s a better fit if backup is the main reason you want to use SmugMug.

In terms of pricing, as well as the monthly fee, you also pay 15% of the markup on every sale, something you will want to keep in mind when you set your pricing.

One thing to be aware of is that SmugMug doesn’t support self-fulfilment. All print orders go through SmugMug’s partner labs. If you have an existing relationship with a local print lab or do your own fine art printing, you won’t be able to use that with SmugMug’s built-in store. You could still use SmugMug for the portfolio and handle printing separately, but the integrated sales workflow won’t apply.

SmugMug Review

I have been using SmugMug as a portfolio and sales site for my photos, and I wanted to share my thoughts on how I have found using the platform. You can see my portfolio here.

I first used SmugMug back in 2014 for a couple of years, then went for a period of time without having a portfolio. However, as I kept having requests for image sales, I relaunched on SmugMug in 2020 with an updated set of images.

As a bit of background, I am used to building websites. I put together this blog as well as our Independent Travel Cats blog, both of which run on WordPress.

I also put together my Travel Photography Course website, which is an e-commerce store also built on WordPress. I’ve also created sites on Blogger and SquareSpace.

I’m therefore quite familiar with the challenges that building a website presents across a variety of platforms, as well as the additional challenges that adding e-commerce to a website can present.

So first off, let me just say how nice and easy SmugMug is to use for building a great looking portfolio. I didn’t need to use any coding knowledge – I just picked the theme I liked, edited the text, and within minutes my website was live.

Then all I had to do was upload some images, set my pricing, and my store was ready to start selling. The whole process took less than thirty minutes, and most of that was taken up with picking photos!

Compared to setting up my own website and store on WordPress, a process which took days and days, this was refreshingly simple. I’m pretty sure that anyone could do it, and you definitely don’t need any coding or website building experience.

In terms of adding images, this was also really easy. What I really like about SmugMug from an image management perspective is that they have a Lightroom plugin.

I use Lightroom for my end-to-end photography workflow, from managing my photos through to photo editing.

The SmugMug Lightroom plugin takes away a lot of the challenges I traditionally have with managing an online photography portfolio. I can create my SmugMug galleries entirely from within Lightroom, add and remove photos, and adjust various SmugMug features entirely from within Lightroom.

The galleries I create within Lightroom are automatically uploaded to my SmugMug gallery, with a small size image for preview purposes, and the full size file available to be sent to the print lab when an order is made.

Even better, if I decide to tweak a photo, those edits are synchronised to my gallery. So it’s really easy to keep my portfolio up to date and looking its best, without having to manually upload new versions of images.

SmugMug also has integrations with other popular photo editing tools. There’s a Capture One plugin (macOS only at the time of writing) that lets you publish directly from Capture One to your SmugMug galleries. ON1 Photo RAW also has built-in SmugMug integration, and Luminar Neo has supported direct SmugMug sharing in previous versions (though I’d check the current version’s feature list to confirm).

None of these integrations are quite as tight as the Lightroom plugin, which offers full gallery management and two-way sync. But if you use Capture One or ON1 as your primary editor, you won’t be stuck manually exporting and uploading files, which is good to know.

I also appreciate the various features that SmugMug has to help protect my images. For example, I can add a watermark to my photos simply by enabling that feature. It’s also possible to disable right-click protection, to stop folks downloading my images.

However, the main protection that I appreciate is that SmugMug only shows users a small preview of any image. The full-size image is stored on the SmugMug server, and only used if someone decides to order a product, at which point the full-size image is sent to the print lab.

Personally, I don’t have the watermarking feature enabled as I think it’s a bit distracting. I am happy that just serving low resolution versions of the images is sufficient protection.

SmugMug does have a number of other features that many will likely find useful, however I don’t take advantage of them. These include streaming of photos and videos to Apple TV, unlimited photo backup, smartphone apps for gallery management and the option to be listed as a photographer in a search service that allows clients to find you.

For me, the main benefits of SmugMug is how easy it is to create a professional looking website, worldwide sales support for my images, and the easy integration into my workflow with Lightroom.

Of course, not everything is perfect. There are a few downsides to SmugMug.

First, the price. SmugMug has a relatively high price, and when you add on the 15% commission on every sale, it is definitely one of the more expensive platforms for creating a photography website. However, I would argue that the pricing is in line with the major alternatives to SmugMug.

Of course, features vary across the various products out there. SmugMug definitely has a great set of features and its worldwide capabilities are excellent. However, if you are only planning on selling locally or nationally, you might find another solution is more cost effective.

Second, there’s no built-in blog. If you want a blog alongside your portfolio (and many photographers do for SEO purposes), you’ll need to run that separately. I use WordPress for my blogs, which works well, but it does mean managing two platforms rather than one.

Third, while SmugMug has 26 templates, they’re all photography-focused (which makes sense), and customisation beyond the provided options can be limited unless you’re comfortable with CSS. The templates look great for displaying images, but if you want a highly customised design, you may find the options a bit restrictive.

Overall I would definitely recommend comparing the features that SmugMug has, and deciding if it’s best for your needs. Here’s a quote from my photography course student Aneta Zimnicki, who had the following to say on why she chose SmugMug:

“After reviewing the top photo selling sites, SmugMug hands down was the best for me. It’s designed for photographers and their customer service is amazing. Custom photo pricing and print size control is great. I can publish prices in my own home currency CDN (I was very disappointed in some other sites, they assume everyone is US based!).

Also the printer vendor relationship with the site was very important to me. I was looking for reliable, consistent good quality prints. The cost for the site is more than other sites, but I see the reason.

Cons: The printers (for Canadian customers) are in the US, and so far, shipping across the border to Canada is slow. The printer wholesale cost is a little more than my local vendors.”

Another thing to note is that whilst SmugMug offers unlimited photo backups, these do not include RAW file support as standard. You can upload and back up RAW files to SmugMug, but this comes at an extra cost (starting at $10/month for 1TB, then $6/month per additional TB). Depending on the size of your image library, this may or may not work out to be good value. You can see full pricing and more details on the SmugMug RAW storage page.

Personally, as I have quite a large image library, I use a different backup solution which covers all my other files as well for a very reasonable annual fee. For that, I use and recommend BackBlaze, which offers great value unlimited backups. However, if you don’t have many terabytes of images as I do, then SmugMug might end up being more convenient.

Overall though, I think SmugMug is a great option for photographers looking for an easy-to-use portfolio website which supports worldwide image sales. Customer support is excellent if you ever need help, and the platform has all the features you need to start making an income from your photography.

If you’re interested in giving SmugMug a go, this link will let you try the service for 14 days for free. In addition, if you sign up, you’ll get 15% off the subscription price for your first billing period.

Frequently Asked Questions About SmugMug

How much does SmugMug cost?

SmugMug has three main plans. On annual billing, the Direct plan costs $20/month, the Portfolio plan is $23.50/month, and the Pro plan is $37/month. Monthly billing is more expensive ($29, $35.50 and $52 respectively). There’s also an Enterprise plan priced on request.

SmugMug does change their pricing fairly regularly, so I’d recommend checking their plans page for the latest prices. You can also get 15% off your first billing period as a new customer with this link.

Does SmugMug have a free plan?

No, SmugMug doesn’t have a free plan. All three plans are paid. They do offer a 14-day free trial on the Pro plan, which gives you access to all the features so you can decide if it’s right for you before committing.

Is SmugMug worth it for photographers?

It depends on what you need. If you want an all-in-one platform for a portfolio website, image sales with print fulfilment, and client galleries, SmugMug is one of the best options out there. I’ve been using it since 2014 and it does all of those things well.

If you only need photo backup, a dedicated cloud storage service like BackBlaze will be cheaper. And if you want a general-purpose website with more design flexibility, something like Squarespace gives you more templates and customisation options, though you’d have to handle print fulfilment yourself.

What is the SmugMug commission on sales?

SmugMug takes 15% of your markup on every sale. So if a print costs $10 from the lab and you sell it for $30, SmugMug takes 15% of your $20 markup ($3), and you keep $17. This is on top of the monthly subscription fee. This is on top of the monthly subscription fee, so it’s worth factoring into your pricing calculations, especially for lower-priced items where the margin is already thin.

Can I use SmugMug with Capture One or Lightroom alternatives?

Yes. SmugMug has a Lightroom plugin (which is the most fully featured integration), a Capture One plugin for macOS, and ON1 Photo RAW also has built-in SmugMug support. Previous versions of Luminar included direct SmugMug sharing too, though you’d want to check the current version. For any editor without a direct plugin, you can upload through the SmugMug web interface or their desktop uploader app.

SmugMug Alternatives

Whilst SmugMug is a capable and fully featured platform that offers pretty much everything a photographer might need, we appreciate that it might just be overkill for some users. As such, I wanted to recommend some alternatives to SmugMug that you might want to investigate.

• Zenfolio – probably SmugMug’s closest competitor and a great option for wedding and portrait photographers. Zenfolio offers a calendaring and booking service for sessions, unlimited storage with RAW support, and 4K video uploads. Prices are roughly equivalent to SmugMug, and they charge a 7% commerce fee on sales rather than SmugMug’s 15%.
• PhotoShelter – a good option for photo sales and portfolio management at a lower price point, although it doesn’t have as much image storage in the lower priced plans.
• Format – a popular portfolio builder owned by Zenfolio, with a clean interface and good template selection. More focused on portfolio presentation than e-commerce, so a better fit if selling prints isn’t your priority.
• Darkroom – a great low-cost option for those testing the water. You can sell your photos for free (with a 15% markup). There are definitely fewer features than SmugMug but it’s a good starter option.
• Squarespace – a popular portfolio website for photographers, SquareSpace makes building websites easy and has some of the best-looking templates around. However, you would have to handle all the printing and shipping yourself.
• Bluehost – If you’d rather build your own website from the ground up, then we suggest starting out on Bluehost which offers great value WordPress hosting for low traffic sites.

For more options, check out my guide to how to sell your photos online. If you are planning on self-hosting using WordPress, see my guide to choosing a WordPress host.

Further Reading

That’s it for our SmugMug review! We hope you found it useful in helping you make an informed decision about whether or not this is the right photography website for you.

Before you head on, I wanted to share some more photography content that I think you’ll find useful, that I’ve put together based on my years working as a photographer.

• For more options for sharing and selling your work, see our guide to selling photos online, which has a number of other platforms you can try out.
• We have a guide to how to use a compact camera, how to use a DSLR camera, and how to use a mirrorless camera. We also have a guide to how a DSLR works.
• Knowing how to compose a great photo is a key photography skill. See our guide to composition in photography for lots of tips on this subject.
• We have a guide to what depth of field is and when you would want to use it.
• We are big fans of getting the most out of your digital photo files, and to do that you will need to shoot in RAW. See our guide to RAW in photography to understand what RAW is, and why you should switch to RAW as soon as you can if your camera supports it.
• Colour accuracy is important for photography – see our guide to monitor calibration to ensure your screen is set up correctly.
• We have a guide to the best photo editing software, as well as a guide to the best laptops for photo editing for some tips on what to look for.
• If you’re looking for more advice on specific tips for different scenarios, we also have you covered. See our guide to Northern Lights photography, long exposure photography, fireworks photography, tips for taking photos of stars, and cold weather photography.
• If you’re looking for a great gift for a photography loving friend or family member (or yourself!), take a look at our photography gift guide.
• If you’re in the market for a new camera, we have a detailed guide to the best travel cameras, as well as specific guides for the best cameras for hiking and backpacking, the best compact camera, best mirrorless camera, best bridge camera, and best DSLR camera. We also have a guide to the best camera lenses.
• If you want a camera or lens, but the prices are a bit high, see our guide to where to buy used cameras and camera gear for some budget savings options.
• We have a guide to why you need a tripod, a guide to choosing a travel tripod, and a round-up of the best travel tripods.

Looking to Improve Your Photography?

If you found this post helpful, and you want to improve your photography overall, you might want to check out my online travel photography course.

Since launching the course in 2016, I’ve already helped thousands of students learn how to take better photos.

The course covers pretty much everything you need to know, from the basics of how a camera works, through to composition, light, and photo editing.

It also covers more advanced topics, including astrophotography, long exposure photography, flash photography, and HDR photography.

You get feedback from me as you progress through assignments, access to webinars, interviews and videos, as well as exclusive membership of a Facebook group where you can get feedback on your work and take part in regular fun photo challenges.

It’s available for an amazing one-off price for lifetime access, and I think you should check it out. Which you can do by clicking here. It’s also available as a gift if you know someone who is interested in getting into photography.

And that’s it! If you have any questions or feedback on using SmugMug as a photographer, I’m here to listen and do my best to answer. Just pop them in the comments below and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.