Keyword / Cloud Clarification and Suggestion

encosion

I've got close to 60gb of photos on my account now and have been pretty good at tagging things... But I'm a little unsure how the keyword / clouds stuff works... I use the cloud a lot to drill down to the photo(s) that I'm looking for...

My understanding is that the cloud includes all my photos (if I'm logged in) including password protected and unlisted galleries... Does this include the Hello World / Hello Smuggers options too? The reason I ask, is 'cos I'm pretty sure some photos are missing from the cloud and I can't figure out why...

Another thing bugging me (and may be directly related to my previous question) is that the 'combine with' section doesn't seem to include all the tags that it could / should... Is there a restriction imposed to only show x number of tags to 'combine with'?

Finally, and this is probably a feature request (I'd welcome a string URL hack if there is one), but I'd like to be able to filter the keyword searching via categories and sub categories... It would make finding things much easier! Like... So much easier... Adding a small little link to a filtered cloud for each category / subcategory would be a huge boon in productivity...

Tagging is an excellent feature and very useful... I'm just not sure it's working 100% for me... There have been times when I was expecting someone's name to pop up in the 'combine with' section but it didn't...

Are there any string URL hacks I can use to make the most of it? Thanks for listening - as always!

EDIT: A little more on the keyword / cloud inconsitancy: I have a few photos tagged with "tim", "myu" and "best"... When looking through a keyword search on "myu", it allows me to combine with "tim" or "best"... If I combine with "best" I no longer have the option of combining with "tim"... However, if I chose to combine with "tim" first, I can now combine with "best"... What gives? Why the discrepancy? Smugmug is my backup and organisational tool for all my photos, it needs to work reliably in this area please!

anderiv

encosion wrote:

EDIT: A little more on the keyword / cloud inconsitancy: I have a few photos tagged with "tim", "myu" and "best"... When looking through a keyword search on "myu", it allows me to combine with "tim" or "best"... If I combine with "best" I no longer have the option of combining with "tim"... However, if I chose to combine with "tim" first, I can now combine with "best"... What gives? Why the discrepancy? Smugmug is my backup and organisational tool for all my photos, it needs to work reliably in this area please!

The Smugmug team will need to speak to this as well, but until they do, you can still make all the combinations you want without needing the "Combine with..." links. Just look at the URL that's generated when you combine a few of the keywords. You should be able to modify that and add as many keyword combinations as you want. For instance:

You're probably getting something like this when combining "myu" and "tim".

http://nickname.smugmug.com/keyword/myu-tim

to combine further with "best", just do the following:

http://nickname.smugmug.com/keyword/myu-tim-best

Hope that helps!
-Erik

encosion

Thanks for that Erik! I had already figured that one out actually... It does seem to work well enough too but I wonder if there are any technical restrictions... And it doesn't remind you that you have a picture of "myu" with a "fox" or whatever...

Going back to the inconsistancy... Once I've chosen to show "myu" and "best"... I actually get an option to combine with two more keywords (neither of which is "tim" of course)... But one of them renders no results at all! So I don't know why that one appears when "tim" doesn't...

This is just one example I can use to illustrate my suspicions... I'd really like to know more about the technical restrictions or reasoning behind the flaws / limitations... Obviously I'd like it to work much better!

An idea that I had was to either include a 'combine with' cloud at the bottom of the gallery, showing relevant keywords that could be combined with the current selection - this would give you an idea as to how many results lay behind each option... Or perhaps better yet, leave it as it is up top and instead display the exact number of results in brackets after each keyword:

combine with: myu (17), best (4), photographer (1), fox (1)

Or forget the number in brackets and just put all the options available in quantitative order...

I'd like to see ALL the possible keyword combinations that I could combine with displayed... I know this could be a long list in some cases, but I think it's very valuble (to owners if nobody else) in getting the most out of your photos and the hard task of maintaining keywords!