I was looking through support forums and saw a post someplace that said you should not crop a photo before putting in on smug mug, is this correct? Another photographer told me to never put my photos out there that have not been retouched.
Can I crop them before putting on smug mug?

Hi!

You certainly can crop them before uploading, I crop mine all the time for my clients. I think the concern might be if you crop too small, you could limit certain print sizes or functionality.

Regarding print resolution needed, you can go here.

If you crop below 801 pixels on the longest side, you won't be able to watermark them, you can read about that here.

With best regards,
Ryan W.

If your photos are only for web viewing, then by all means, you should crop your photos before uploading to the appropriate framing of your subject.

If your photos are for both web viewing and print orders, then you also want to crop your photos for appropriate framing, but you have to be aware of the need for some extra room to allow for some print sizes. For example, if your camera is the typical 3:2 aspect ratio, then to print an 8x10 (which is most certainly not a 3:2 ratio), the printer will have to chop off some of the long dimension of your images to make it fit on the 8x10 paper. If you cropped your photo very tightly, you may not have any extra content on the long edge and it might be hard to get a good looking 8x10.

So, for images that you want to allow people to order multiple print sizes from, you need to crop a little looser to allow for the variation in print aspect ratios.

When actually ordering a print, you can always specify a little tighter crop for that particular print size if that's what works best for the print size.

Thanks for the info. I will follow your advise!