SmugMug founder Don MacAskill has announced a new service from SmugMug. Named SmugVault, it’s basically a place to store anything. The storage is actually held on Amazon’s S3 service and the pricing is listed below.

The idea is simple and could be a great way to boost SmugMug even further up the charts. How many times do you upload a jpg file but have a raw file as well. What about videos that you compress for uploading but want to store the uncompressed raw files somewhere. This is what SmugVault is all about. Any file type can be stored on SmugVault including document files. They have created a Web interface for browsing the files stored in the SmugVault.

Pricing for SmugVault is as follows:

• Storage costs 22 cents per gigabyte per month. If you upload the contents of a 2 GB memory card, you’ll be out 44 cents/month for storage.
• There is a $1/month recurring charge.
• Data transfer in is 30 cents per gigabyte. Data transfer out is 51 cents per gigabyte.
• Monthly addition to your home electrical bill: Zero.

The issue I see with this program is that now I have to maintain another account with Amazon. Why not hook it up into the SmugMug account? Will the average mainstream Internet user want to go through the hassle to open up an Amazon account? SmugMug is all about easy but this seems like a small pain in the neck.

On FriendFeed Zoomr co-founder Thomas Hawk notes, "I don’t think storage in the cloud is yet economical for most heavy photographers. Even someone with only 500GB of images would still have to pay $110 per month which is an expensive cost. Better (and faster) to back up your images yourself on drives and give them to a friend to hold for you offsite. You can also remotely network drobos now to have one at your home, one at an offsite location and sync them for much, much, less money." There seems to be a bit of pushback from some of the commenters for this new program.

This is something Flickr should have been offering for a long time - it’s another reason why Flickr and Yahoo haven’t been integrated together past the basic login information.

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"I’ve never met a person whose face didn’t light up when they saw their photos and videos crisp and SmugMungous," said SmugMug President Chris MacAskill. Robert Scoble says regarding the new version of photo and video sharing site SmugMug, "The UI here BLOWS AWAY all the other photo sharing sites." Mark at TechCrunch has a good overview of the updates.

In the press release with all of the details, SmugMug goes on the attack against YouTube. They say, "For those who don’t want to see their videos dinky and pixilated on YouTube, SmugMug introduced SmugMug Video." And from what video blogger Scoble says they have beaten YouTube on quality. But then again, who hasn’t? Almost every video sharing site I come across today has YouTube beat on quality. What they all forget is that for 90% of the cat videos on YouTube, no one would care about better resolution. In fact, you have to shoot the best to watch the best and most consumers aren’t using the best.

Here’s Robert’s video with the SmugMug team: