Linking to photo page very cumbersome?

yggdrasil

Hi there - I'm brand new here, just started up a trial account, but so far I think smugmug will do basically what I want. I'm an *extremely* dissatisfied picasaweb user at present, but picasaweb offers one feature that I so far can't seem to find on smugmug - easy linking to a photo page (within a gallery) with a thumbnail.

I'm attaching a screenshot of what I'm talking about - the attached appears on every individual photo page (on picasa web albums), and allows me to very, very easily copy the text that includes the link as well as the thumbnail image source. This is how I build my nigh-daily blog posts, so it's very important to me.

As far as I can tell, on smugmug I have to click the "link" link, then activate the flash (whut?!) because I have flashblock and hoo boy am I not going to deinstall THAT anytime soon, then click the text to copy it, THEN go back to the photo page, copy the URL for that, and manually assemble the link. This is pretty onerous for a very simple task.

I use wordpress and was hoping that a plugin would help me out here, but the existing plugins are either much more than I want (embedding entire galleries; very complicated forms), not really being developed, or not what I want (I do not need a sidebar widget.)

Also, why in the world is the text-copier thingy in FLASH? That's bananas.

I love the access control, love the customization, love lots of what I'm seeing so far, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to go with a Pro account once I've had a few more days to feel my way around here, but this is kind of sticking in my craw. Making links easy to generate and copy oughtn't be a real tough thing to develop, from the software standpoint (I'm a web developer by trade), and I'm totally flummoxed by the choice to go with Flash as well.

Am I missing something here? Is there a really easy-peasy way to do this that I have not spotted?

jfriend

You've already found what Smugmug offers for linking. You can make it easier on yourself if you exempt your own Smugmug site from the flash blocking. Smugmug doesn't do any ads on your site and they do use flash for some controls so I think you only have upside to allow your own Smugmug site to use flash. You should be able to "whitelist" your own site without changing the blocker's behavior on any other site. If you can't with the tool you are using, there are better tools that will allow that.

As for "why flash", it has to do with the complication of copying text to the clipboard in a cross browser compatible way. I'm not saying they couldn't have done it differently, just that it's not a trivial problem to solve and flash was one way to solve it.

FYI, all Smugmug slideshows use flash and some advanced editing tools use flash too.

yggdrasil

I don't mind activating a flash movie for flash content, such as a slideshow. A text field is a much more appropriate venue for text than a flash movie.

The linking features, then, are pretty inadequate, to be honest. I love all the stuff that I can do within the site and the galleries, but I'm not asking for the moon over here - simply an href/img tag combo that can be easily and within a reasonable number of clicks (ideally, one) generated for any individual photo.

As for making it easier on myself, whitelisting still reduces the number of clicks by only one, and does nothing to change the generally cumbersome nature of the process.

jfriend

yggdrasil wrote:

I don't mind activating a flash movie for flash content, such as a slideshow. A text field is a much more appropriate venue for text than a flash movie.

The linking features, then, are pretty inadequate, to be honest. I love all the stuff that I can do within the site and the galleries, but I'm not asking for the moon over here - simply an href/img tag combo that can be easily and within a reasonable number of clicks (ideally, one) generated for any individual photo.

As for making it easier on myself, whitelisting still reduces the number of clicks by only one, and does nothing to change the generally cumbersome nature of the process.

I'm just a volunteer here letting you know what options are available. Nothing more I can do.

Andy

yggdrasil wrote:

The linking features, then, are pretty inadequate, to be honest. I love all the stuff that I can do within the site and the galleries, but I'm not asking for the moon over here - simply an href/img

I agree, they're lame

Stay tuned for some cool new stuff along these lines, hopefully soon. Can't say when, but you're not alone, and we've been listening to our customers in this regard.

aktse

A slight work around ---- StarExplorer, but it's not free, but not expensive, and it's a windows app. However, it's the best way to upload images, even if you have to run it on a vm.

If you upload the images with S*E, you can get a list ready for drgin with a few clicks. Go to the images tab, select the photos that you want, hit the img button, and you have a list. I haven't checked if it's flash based when it copies to the clipboard, but you can copy and paste it to your thread.

If you need some other wrappers, contact Nikolai in his thread... he can be convinced to add a blog wrapper. (Beer, good wine, and maybe money might help speed things along )



This works until smuggy comes up with something better.

yggdrasil

Andy: that's great news...if you need a beta tester for such a feature set, please let me know! I'm bugging my husband to make a bookmarklet that will let me do what I want on an individual photo page, but I'm not sure when or if he'll get the time (he's a much harder-core developer than I am - I do more front-end stuff.)

Aktse - Thank you for the info. I'll check it out, but other than the fact that I'm on a Mac and it wouldn't run natively, there's also the fact that one of the things I'm really happy about with smugmug is the Aperture plugin, since that's my photo management software of choice, and it's been working great so far.

ygg