Let’s make this clear before I begin. I love SmugMug. I have used others like Pictage and my own shopping cart and by far, SmugMug is the best I have ever used. It is night and day against Pictage and WAY less expensive.
I ran into something today, however, that needs to be addressed.
If you look on the bottom of the above image, you will see that there is a folder at the bottom. This little pop-up appears each time you hover over the main image in an album. That save photo command allows the
visitor to download the original, full-sized image from Smugmug – WITHOUT A WATERMARK! Holy crap!!
So, of course, you may ask, “how the heck do I turn that off?” Well here is the answer.
- Log Into Your SmugMug Account -
- Click on Gallery Settings from the Tools Menu. Here is a screen shot.
- Go to the ”Security and Privacy” area in the Gallery Settings panel which looks like this:
- See the word “protected”? Click “Yes”.
Here is where SmugMug needs to address this more clearly. To the right of the word ‘protected’ it says “Right-click protect your photos.” For the past several months, I have believed that this command protected people from Right-clicking and saving my images. However, this command also turns off the save command from the galleries. I had always left it as “no” because I don’t have a problem with people saving a web-quality version of our watermarked images for Facebook, etc. However, I ran upon the save command by mistake and realized that my 300,000+ images have been unprotected from illegal download for 6+ months. Horrification!
Don’t make this mistake with SmugMug. There simply is no way to protect your images from download without clicking the “Yes” button above. You can also click “Yes” in multiple galleries in about three seconds to protect all of your images.
Bill Nixon is a Denver Photographer who shoots weddings and portraits all over the USA.
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