I’ve written only recently about SmugMug, and expressed my frustration as a developer who built an open-source tool for their platform. This has led me to try to get my data out of SmugMug as I was considering moving away from it as well… Only to discover that some of my video data is lost and/or not being made available. This applies only for videos. Both the quality is potentially degraded, and the metadata that is available on SmugMug cannot be downloaded or exported out of their platform.
If you upload a video to SmugMug, they don’t actually store the original video for you. Here’s a quote from their official page:
Originals
We don’t keep a copy of the original video you upload. We make high-quality display copies, which are probably altered from what you send us.
I’m not sure what this high-quality display copy means in actual terms, but I won’t be surprised if some quality is lost in the process. For a company that prides itself caring for photographers, where quality and reliability is key, I find it rather vague and disconcerting.
Furthermore, what isn’t mentioned on this page is that if you want to download your videos again, those videos would be stripped-out of the original metadata as well. This metadata includes information about the Camera you used, the date/time of the video, location information etc. All of this data is still stored on SmugMug, but you can’t get it back when you download it. It’s locked-in. For me, personally, this is even worse than losing video quality. My video memories are very tightly linked to the time and location of those original scenes. Without this info, the videos are next to useless. I just can’t find them (without going manually through hundreds or thousands of dateless and location-less videos, that is)
