Experimenting with Pictage

bendruckerphoto · August 6, 2010

I'm a ShootQ user and they're running a promotion where Pictage is $30/month for a year. So I decided to try it and was convinced that, despite the fact that after a year I'd be paying $50/month, I might be leaving SmugMug for Pictage.

Pictage has some great features, namely a free album design service, direct interface with Leather Craftsmen, Zookbinders, and a few other album makers, a low fee credit card processing service, and some nice marketing tools. I'd heard bad things about Pictage spamming customers, but it's under new management so I figured I needed to give it a try. End result of a few hours of experimenting? I'm still a SmugMug Pro. Pictage charges through the roof for wholesale prints, so you have to sell a lot more to make up. How do you sell more? By bombarding clients with confusing emails and having an ad-ridden proof interface. My SmugMug site is designed to look identical to my Wordpress site. Pictage is ugly. My brand fits in very nicely with my style of photography, so having a generic white page with lots of ads for Pictage products isn't a good fit for me.

The album design service is really what enticed me. Depending on who you use (i'm shopping around for album designers to get better prices), album design could cost anywhere from $4-$10 per side in an album. If Pictage can do a pretty good job (about as well as a $5/side designer), that potentially saves me $100-$300 per album. That adds up.

It just doesn't add up to enough. SmugMug has great print prices, great support, and is adding features quickly. Pictage is more of a complete solution. But in the end, it's only the best solution for someone who wants to outsource everything. With the combination of SmugMug, some customization, and MailChimp, I can do a lot of what Pictage does. I'm still shopping around for album designers, but I'm confident that between templates and some design outsourcing, I can match the cost of Pictage.

That said, there are some things about Pictage that I wish I could have. I'm going to do my best to replicate some of the features in SmugMug and post in this thread about how I can make SmugMug generate more sales.