SmugMug Terms Of Use
I thought when I signed up for smugmug, my photos would be available online forever (or at least as long as smugmug was in business). I probably didn’t read the terms of use carefully enough, because I received a renewal notice recently, from which I quote:
We know how important your photos are so we’ll do our best to reach you
before your account is made inactive or any photos are deleted.
Technorati Tags: Smugmug
September 9th, 2006 at 10:57 am
Hi Doug,
I’m the CEO & Chief Geek at SmugMug.
I’m sorry for any confusion that message may have caused you, and would like to figure out how we can avoid causing any confusion in the future. Maybe our wording is off? Anyway, here’s the scoop:
First of all, we will do our best to keep your photos online forever - as long as you pay your subscription fee. I’m afraid we’re not in the business of providing unlimited free storage forever for everyone.
We’re so sensitive to the fear of losing your photos, we’ll keep your account online and your photos active so you can save them long after you’ve stopped paying us, though. There are accounts at SmugMug that are more than two years overdue and we still haven’t closed the accounts or deleted their photos.
Eventually, though, we’ll have to do it - we’re losing money on those accounts and at some point we’ll just have to realize that they’re not our customer anymore and hope they have copies of their photos somewhere else.
(During this period, they cannot add any new photos, but they can view, save, and archive their existing photos - or pay the subscription fee to have their account fully enabled again). Also during this period, we’ve made every attempt we know how to make to contact each person and let them know that their photos may be deleted and they should make copies.
At SmugMug, we consider it a core value to make it easy to leave our service. We provide multiple ways to get your photos back out of our system, so you’re free to retrieve the photos and stick them somewhere else at any time. They’re your photos, not ours, so we’re not going to hold them hostage.
See: http://blogs.smugmug.com/onethumb/2005/07/06/vendor-lock-in-sucks-making-it-easy-to-leave-smugmug/
I hope that makes sense. Now, knowing that, I have a few questions for you:
- Does this sound fair and reasonable? If no, why not?
- If it does sound fair and reasonable, do you have any pointers for how we can change our message to make it more clear that there’s no nefarious agenda here to delete your photos without notice?
Thanks,
Don
September 9th, 2006 at 12:32 pm
It seems fair and I wasn’t complaining, just saying I was caught off guard. I probably didn’t read something presented to me carefully or at all, I basically signed up because Gord and Zoe did and the price seemed right.
I did have some photos dissappear without warning off one of your competitors sites, so I am a little sensitive to that issue. I certainly don’t feel I indicated there was a nefarious agenda to delete photos without warning - my post after all did indicate that I received a warning.
What concerns me a little is that photos might dissapear that have been linked from blogs (i.e. the medium and small sizes available from smugmug for blogging purposes, like
). One would hope these URIs would be permanent along with the resources they represent, and I do think its within reason SmugMug would make those available permanently even if you don’t keep the full resolution ones around.