Best Of

You folks did well. I like the clean design. I rather like having the title/caption/keyword and basic photo information up all at once. Having the copyright immediately visible is very welcome.
But there are always niggles
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• To the extent possible, I'd prefer never having text on top of the image. Is there some way to move the title (or the VIEW PHOTO DETAILS message when there is no title) off the image, to the side, above, or below, when there's space? User custom CSS can probably do something here, but it won't be trivial to have it adapt to where the available space is.
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• Along the same lines, I look forward to having the buy button as part of the list of lightbox controls at the far left. Hiding it via CSS is a likely option for me too.
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• The solid background on the buy button is a design element that is totally unlike any other on the page. If it can't move, a transparent background would be much more in keeping with the rest. That one's easy in user CSS, of course.
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• Yes, do make it more obvious how to close the big information sidebar.
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• I can only test the mobile lightbox via Firefox's Responsive Design tools, but while things look good in portrait orientation, the situation in landscape orientation seems inferior to the current mobile lightbox. While I don't love the current approach of text overlaying image, the new approach of toggling between an image display and a text display seems worse. Is that really what's going to happen or is that an artifact of Firefox's tool?
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• I too miss the sizes button, although I recognize I'm one of the very few who worries about the sharpness difference between display copies and browser-scaled images.

Any idea when this will go live?

I come from the IT world but have been doing photographer here for a long time, some opinions:

Smugmug should be a display for you, NOT a storage location.

Smugmug should NEVER be a point of coding or organization; metadata such as captions, titles, keywords; organization such as files and folders should be done on your own computer (or cloud or where-ever you control), and not Smugmug. Smugmug should just parrot what you do elsewhere. The key here is "one version of the truth" or think of it as "one master copy" -- and it isn't Smugmug.

I say all this not because I think Smugmug is untrustworthy or going away, but good data practices is never cede control of your data to someone else. By using Smugmug as a repository -- not just a display mirroring your own data -- you are giving over not just control, but in a real sense ownership. I am not suggesting Smugmug is making a rights grab, but you may be simply unable to retrieve ALL the data you store there if you decide to move (much less if they shut down, or had an accident, or were hacked). Metadata in particular on Smugmug is very difficult to retrieve and re-associate with a local copy of your images.

It's one reason I like Lightroom and Smugmug's plugin together -- everything except order of galleries in folders is preserved on my desktop (which I keep backed up). If Smugmug disappeared, I could quickly push the same structure to some competitive service, or even my own web site, with all the data intact.

It's worth noting I know Smugmug was working on two way sync -- to use that plugin to pull data from smugmug to lightroom. I do not know where that stands (I personally had no interest, even negative interest for reasons above). If you have stored lots of data on Smugmug, it may be work looking into.

Smugmug is a display -- a temporary gallery if you will. Not an attic.

Opinions only, I know a LOT of people think of Smugmug as a backup or even a primary store, and no offense intended to you. Lots of people have lots of ideas I disagree with.