Move to gallery is busted for me

jfriend

I've probably posted about this issue five times before, but since nothing gets done about it, I'll post again in the hopes that hearing another story related to this issue will help it sink in and get prioritized to actually do something about.

Summary: A flat list of gallery names with no category or sub-category information as a target for moving photos to does not work at all. It's hard enough when you just have a lot of galleries. It's impossible to use when you have multiple galleries with the same name (in different categories/sub-categories). There appears to be NO WAY to differentiate between like-named galleries in this flat list.

I shoot sports teams. As part of what I produce for a season, I end up with a gallery for each player. The gallery is in a category and sub-category that identifies the team and the year and the season (CYSA soccer has both a spring and fall season). So, I would have a galleries like:

Sports/Barracudas - Fall 2008/Highlights
Sports/Barracudas - Fall 2008/Sara

Now, because I follow many of the same teams over many seasons and I produce a "Highlights" gallery for every season, I have a lot of galleries with the name "Highlights" and I have a lot of galleries with the name "Sara" (happens to be my daughter's name) like this:

Sports/Barracudas - Spring 2008/Highlights
Sports/Barracudas - Spring 2008/Sara

Now, enter the move photos problem. I am paging through some recently uploaded galleries and I realize that a few photos are in the wrong gallery. I figure, no problem I'll just move them to the right gallery. I select "Move to Other Gallery" from the nifty new Tools menu. I pick out the four photos that need to be moved. I go up to the drop-down list to pick the target gallery for the move and I am absolutely screwed. There are five different galleries all with the same name as the one I want to move it to. If I pick the wrong one, it will probably take me 30 minutes just to find where they actually went. I'm screwed. It's faster and more foolproof to delete them, find them on my hard disk and re-upload them to the right gallery. That's how busted the "move photos" function is in this case.

Please, please, please. Get rid of the flat gallery listing with no category or sub-category information at all everywhere you have it. I know it's in move photos and I think I've seen it some other places too.

Best possible solution: give us a hierarchical picker like you use for Add Photos. I've got more than 600 galleries. A flat list of 600 items is never going to be a happy place.

Minimalist solution: Give us category and sub-category information in the flat list so I can at least see which is which as I scroll through a list of 600 galleries.

I hope Smugmug's focus isn't just the newbie photographer who only has 20-30 galleries ever. I've been a long time customer and some of the tools (like this one) need to be upgraded to work with lots of galleries.

Andy

Hey John, thanks for the awesome feature request on the move tool. I've made sure our whole team sees it. In the hopes that your hopes aren't dashed, and that you won't think we're forgetting or ignoring this. As you know from our prior emails, we (our whole company!) are laser-focused on some new print products right now, coupons, getting a new lab going, as well as some awesome additional features for all levels of customers, and some various and sundry odds and ends that Baldy or I haven't talked about yet. This is gonna take us through the holiday season. I can't promise when, but I can promise that we take your suggestion very, very seriously. Thanks again.

jfriend

Andy wrote:

Hey John, thanks for the awesome feature request on the move tool. I've made sure our whole team sees it. In the hopes that your hopes aren't dashed, and that you won't think we're forgetting or ignoring this. As you know from our prior emails, we (our whole company!) are laser-focused on some new print products right now, coupons, getting a new lab going, as well as some awesome additional features for all levels of customers, and some various and sundry odds and ends that Baldy or I haven't talked about yet. This is gonna take us through the holiday season. I can't promise when, but I can promise that we take your suggestion very, very seriously. Thanks again.

I just hope you have a release focused on usability cleanup sometime soon rather than just having nearly everyone focused on new features. I've been asking for this issue to be looked at for "years" now and it never gets the time of day. If you did event photography and had a lot of galleries and a lot of like-named galleries, you'd make them fix this right away. It's just unusable. The design flat-out doesn't work when you can't distinguish one gallery from another. To repeat, this isn't a case of "I wish this feature was fewer clicks". This is a case of "this feature doesn't work in this circumstance." Many would call this a usability bug.

Baldy knows about one of my other favorites in this same vein, a password dialog that doesn't have category/sub-category information either. Someone sends me a gallery link to a password protected gallery and asks me a question about the fourth image in the gallery. I already know the password which is why it isn't passed in the email, but when I click on the link, I'm prompted for a password and it doesn't give me boo about the gallery name, category name or sub-category name. It's just a blank password dialog. For one who has a lot of password protected galleries (almost 500 - every sports or school gallery of K-8 kids gets a password), this happens to me a lot.

Compared to the depth of work involved in the new features you guys are working on, these kind of usability tweaks would be a ton less work and they would pay dividends and could really clean up the user experience. I don't know who decides your priorities, but when this next release gets done, I sure hope you prioritize a least a couple resources onto significant usability fixes and enhancements.

Allen

Move to gallery

jfriend wrote:

Move to gallery ...

John, I know you've seen this before but many might be having the same problem.

I find the simplest work-around is open a new tab and browse to the target
gallery and confirm it's the correct gallery. Quickly edit the target gallery title
by adding an "x" in front. Back on the move page click in "move to" gallery box
and type "x" and it jumps to the target gallery. After the move delete the "x"
in the title.

jfriend

Allen wrote:

John, I know you've seen this before but many might be having the same problem.

I find the simplest work-around is open a new tab and browse to the target
gallery and confirm it's the correct gallery. Quickly edit the target gallery title
by adding an "x" in front. Back on the move page click in "move to" gallery box
and type "x" and it jumps to the target gallery. After the move delete the "x"
in the title.

Thanks Allen. I remember reading about that one before. I thought about it for a moment, but my site was live at the time and I had recently sent out an email to all the parents about new images and I knew from StatCounter that people were viewing them so I didn't really want to be mussing with gallery names. Since it was just four images, I deleted and re-uploaded to the right gallery.

As you can probably tell from my tone, this time it just really ticked me off that this feature is busted, that I've posted about it many times and that nobody cares to prioritize it to get fixed.

A gallery name is not a unique thing and not supposed to have to be, so it's just a faulty design to put all gallery names in a flat list with no category or subcategory info and assume the user can pick the right one. It's just a faulty design that should be fixed.

Allen

jfriend wrote:

Thanks Allen. I remember reading about that one before. I thought about it for a moment, but my site was live at the time and I had recently sent out an email to all the parents about new images and I knew from StatCounter that people were viewing them so I didn't really want to be mussing with gallery names. Since it was just four images, I deleted and re-uploaded to the right gallery.

As you can probably tell from my tone, this time it just really ticked me off that this feature is busted, that I've posted about it many times and that nobody cares to prioritize it to get fixed.

A gallery name is not a unique thing and not supposed to have to be, so it's just a faulty design to put all gallery names in a flat list with no category or subcategory info and assume the user can pick the right one. It's just a faulty design that should be fixed.

Duh I did a move earlier today and added a "z" in front. Then in the
originating gallery reloaded the move page. Guess what? The move to
gallery was in the drop without the "z". Never had that happen before. Think
cache or cookies have anything to so do with it?