Smugmug bugs and feature requests #7
darryl
Registered Users Posts: 997 Major grins
Hello all... just signed up Friday and I've already submitted 8 bugs/feature requests. ("Oh no -- one of *those* users." :-)
A lot of the posts I see around here seem to be centered around the Professional side of the site -- customer management, ordering, etc. That's all well and good, but I hope that while that side certainly has the potential to provide a nice fat revenue stream for Smugmug, the founders will stand by their committment to providing a solid *sharing experience* to their non-professional users.
For instance, I saw a request to make the "buy this photo" link more prominent, as one of your sales was down after switching from DotPhoto. I feel your pain, but Smugmug's "about us" page states:
I also welcome all of you other users (pros and amateurs alike) to comment on my suggestions. Thanks!
--Darryl
Bugs (well, in my opinion
- Mac IE 5.2 - Slideshow style. Change "photo refresh" value and hit Enter key, and gallery jumps to beginning, but value does not change.
- Featured Photo should link to that Photo (Elegant styles) or the page of the gallery that Photo appears on (Traditional, Journal styles.) [However *text link* for a gallery should still link to first page, first photo of a gallery.]
- Selecting Slideshow style should *not* reset viewer back to the first photo of the Gallery. Should start with current photo, or first photo of current Journal or Traditional page.
Feature Requests:
- Allow sort by EXIF date.
- Allow inclusion of EXIF date below photo.
- Import iPhoto captions.
- Option to include file size of a movie would be great, since you can't really offer small versions of these files. I manually had to enter it into captions. How inelegant.
- Option to disable autoplay of movies. Some people like this, some people hate it.
A lot of the posts I see around here seem to be centered around the Professional side of the site -- customer management, ordering, etc. That's all well and good, but I hope that while that side certainly has the potential to provide a nice fat revenue stream for Smugmug, the founders will stand by their committment to providing a solid *sharing experience* to their non-professional users.
For instance, I saw a request to make the "buy this photo" link more prominent, as one of your sales was down after switching from DotPhoto. I feel your pain, but Smugmug's "about us" page states:
Here's a quick rundown of the user-oriented bug/feature requests that I've submitted so far. I'd love to hear Baldy (and any other smugmug management) comment on where they might fall on the priority list for your engineers. (And I really feel like some of these would be quick fixes, although there's always QA, yadda yadda.)We founded smugmug in November of 2002 because we couldn't find an industrial-strength site free of clutter for photos, where great sharing is the center of gravity.
While we respect sites like Ofoto, their financial model depends entirely on selling prints. It means they have to limit the size and quality of photos they display, they have to surround your photos with ads, and they must collect the email address of your visitors so they can send them print offers. They cannot allow your family to download your high-resolution originals so they can make prints on their own printers.
I also welcome all of you other users (pros and amateurs alike) to comment on my suggestions. Thanks!
--Darryl
Bugs (well, in my opinion
- Mac IE 5.2 - Slideshow style. Change "photo refresh" value and hit Enter key, and gallery jumps to beginning, but value does not change.
- Featured Photo should link to that Photo (Elegant styles) or the page of the gallery that Photo appears on (Traditional, Journal styles.) [However *text link* for a gallery should still link to first page, first photo of a gallery.]
- Selecting Slideshow style should *not* reset viewer back to the first photo of the Gallery. Should start with current photo, or first photo of current Journal or Traditional page.
Feature Requests:
- Allow sort by EXIF date.
- Allow inclusion of EXIF date below photo.
- Import iPhoto captions.
- Option to include file size of a movie would be great, since you can't really offer small versions of these files. I manually had to enter it into captions. How inelegant.
- Option to disable autoplay of movies. Some people like this, some people hate it.
0
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Yes -- bad form to immediately reply to my own post, but I wanted to put this in a separate note, and also show that I hope I'm not just a complainer, but somebody who wants to try to help:
I moved this to its own thread:
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=1351
And here's a "tip" about sorting by EXIF dates (using iPhoto):
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=13074
it's so cool to have customers like you who really care enough to help make the service even better. i'm making sure right now that your posts are getting into the right hands.
thanks again!
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
Welcome! And many thanks for taking the time to write so clear and detailed a list. We really love to see very actionable suggestions, and especially somewhat easy-to-implement things like you've suggested that make a difference.
On the different needs of the pro and consumer, at one time we thought the differences would be more pronounced than they turned out to be. It turns out that high-90% of their needs are identical. It's nice for us because features/code for one usually works for the other.
The buy button is a noteable exception and we've wrestled with that. Our solution is to create a commerce style (it may only appear for pro accounts and we may end up with several to choose between). Some pros don't want their customers to be able to display large images and one version of a commerce style could simply make it so the image to the right of Elegant style is not clickable. Also, we can harden right-click protection by saving a blank image on commerce style, so if you defeat JavaScript you still have another obstacle.
On my other reactions, first a disclaimer: I may say something is a great idea and we'll chase it only to find that it creates some unexpected confusion during user testing or one of the engineers points out why no one else has been able to fix that bug in IE or whatever.
But my reaction to clicking on the featured image and being taken to it is, why didn't I think of that? That's exactly the way Google news works and come to think of it, I hate it when I see a featured image (the best ones are usually featured) and then I have to muck around endlessly searching for it. Great idea.
The slide show is a bit of a swamp because we were so determined to use JavaScript and not require a plugin... I mention this because quick fixes to the slide show usually don't turn out to be quick, so we end up having to weigh them against The Big Three. But I'm glad you listed these things and we'll see what we can do.
iPhoto: anything relating to uploading is part of The Big Three and taking the Mac Uploader to version 1.1 and 2.0 is right in the middle of our radar. On the list is not only captions but comments and ratings and the possibility of synchronization, at least 1-way. I don't have a feel for when we can get it done but we're all over it.
(The other two on The Big Three are a revamped print ordering experience, which we're hot on the trail of, and making smugmug "skinnable.") You'll see the new shopping cart before anything else because it's the weakest part of smugmug and far more important to everyday consumers than we ever imagined it would be.
EXIF... Long story short, we think we'll have to use and display two date fields because some camera manufacturers use "date last modified." Ugh. So does Photoshop (it should), which blows away the date taken for some cameras. Deal with it. :cry
The honest answer for movies, EXIF and slide show is your suggestions are probably right on but we think we have to knock down at least 1 & 2 of The Big Three first (#2 uploading: breaking the 100 MB barrier for (Windows-based) uploads, better error detection & recovery for uploads, and the next version of the Mac uploader.)
Your thoughts.
Thanks!
Baldy
P.S.: Okay, I confess: there's a #0, ahead of The Big Three... It's lustre finish prints along with buttons and some bigger print sizes. We don't have much choice on timing because we're tethered to EZ Prints on this, so we're scrambling as we speak.
When I wrote that paragraph about sharing we didn't even offer prints. We still believe it's about sharing for consumers, but you wouldn't believe how many people post new baby and wedding photos, and want prints. Big ones for their walls; lots of them for their albums. Lustre is such a great finish for portraits and weddings.
This thread is a great idea, and I appreciate the willingness of the SmugMuggers to interactively talk about service improvements. There aren't many companies where customers can talk directly to the folks in charge and help steer things (especially the "easy things" that just haven't been thought of yet). Anyway, could someone mark this thread "sticky"?
Last night I used her for the official product shot:
We've had a lot of pros pushing for buttons so it will be nice to check these off the list (there's also a smaller button size).
If security is set at least as low as "medium high" (in Internet Explorer), entering a password on a protected gallery simply returns back to the password screen. This is because cookies are required to be active for this feature. No message is given at all about why they are back on the password page.
I've had two users so far with this problem that I've had to walk through changing their security settings for. What I'd at least like to see is what happens on other sites that require cookies, a message explaining why they ended up back on that password page -- "cookies required for this feature, yada, yada". What would be even better is a link to a detailed, step-by-step explanation on how to fix it in their browser.
Steve Crooks
Steve.Crooks.net
I can't wait for them to become available to us. I recently photographed a Pony Club Rally (http://manevideo.smugmug.com/gallery/118636) with about 150 kids. I'm sure, they would love to buy up a bunch of these buttons.
Thanks for all the hard work everyone has done @ smugmug ! ! !
Erik Olsen
Hey Scrooks,
We have had cookie detection for a while now, but it seems that it only made it to the sign up page and nowhere else. We have updated the other key areas that cookies are needed and they should be out there live tomorrow.
JT
Excellent! Thanks!
Steve Crooks
Steve.Crooks.net
I just checked it out, and it's still not doing anything but showing me the password page again with no information about needing cookies. I'm trying to get into a gallery that is password protected and I have cookies turned off (to simulate being a user who knows nothing about cookies). If I understand you right, you thought this was one of the areas where you recently added in the cookie detection? Maybe you missed this one?
Steve Crooks
Steve.Crooks.net
How about an option on the email options page for getting a notification whenever a sale is made? I get tired of checking out the action manually every day.
Steve Crooks
Steve.Crooks.net
Here's a test gallery: http://scrooks.smugmug.com/gallery/131261
The password is "password".
I used IE and set my cookie protection to HIGH. I entered the password and it just bounced back to the same password screen, exactly the same, no error message. I dropped my cookie protection to MEDIUM HIGH, entered the password and got right in.
Steve Crooks
Steve.Crooks.net
The issue is your header is replacing ours and the cookie notification. Here's how it should work:
http://cmac.smugmug.com/gallery/132913
(The password is password)
Hi @ll,
First of all thanks for putting up such a nice support platform and very quick responses from the smugmug team. That's something rare nowadays.
I'd like to make some suggestions:
1. It would be nice to customize time zones incl. daylightsaving to my needs like here in the dgrin forum, because not everybody is familiar with timezones and that can be confusing. For example when I took a picture here in Germany from a nice sunyn day and in the gallery somethink like 4:00am pst is displayed. Also most of my friends are actually from Germany.
2. I resize all of my pictures for the galleries with my image database IMatch (the author hadn't time to look into the problem), but somehow it does somethink to exposure time and focal length in exif what smugmug doesn't like. Here is an example:
http://rainforest1155.smugmug.com/gallery/105368/1/3728025/Medium
I know what happened to exposure time: original: 0.005s (1/200)
resized: in Irfanview: 5368709/1073741824 s --> that's roughly 0.005s, but not exactly which results in this silly fracture.
Maybe you can add something to round these useless fractures. It's not your fault, but I don't know when the IMatch author has time to look into it, he's doing a one-man-show...
The focal length seems to be right in Irfanview, so I don't know why it isn't displayed in smugmug.
Here is the same picture resized with Irfanview where everything is ok:
(link not valid anymore)
I also would like to see a comma dividing the byte size of pictures every three numbers: instead of 297017 I would prefer 297,017.
3. I was searching in my original backup (password protected galleries - one for a month) in order to look up a picture from which I knew the name, but I had to browse through all pages in order to find it. The search function seemed only to return pictures from public galleries which were not password protected. So maybe you can add an advanced search function for the owners which allows to specify where (normal galleries, password protected, not public, select one or more galleries) and what (filename, caption, time and/or extracted iptc info) to search.
Wheee, pretty long post. I hope you get the idea of what I wanted to say! *grin*
That's it for now. Have a nice weekend and greetings to the smugmug team and their superb support!
Sebastian
SmugMug Support Hero
Hi,
I just was a littlebit shocked to see one of my galleries in a category of the mainpage. I didn't know/realized that until now that it's so easy to find any of my public galleries.
I thought having turned that off by selecting no community in the category customization dialog.
Looks like this option has another function, but a confusing one.
I would like to have an option to restrict displaying my galleries and searching through them only to my gallery page and not the whole smugmug community. I don't want these galleries to be private, because my friends (and everyone I give my adress to) should have the possebility to come along and have a look at all the stuff, without any restrictions.
I'm awaiting your comments.
Ciao,
Sebastian
SmugMug Support Hero
Many thanks for taking the time to write these up. I'm going to respond to your second post now and do some more thinking about the first one, and return to it later.
Perhaps we can consider a global option to keep your smugmug pages out of the browse and search options. That way someone would have to know your nickname and type it in (or you'd have to send them a link) to find your list of galleries and bio.
To be 100% honest, I'm only aware of hearing a request like this from two other customers. I can imagine others who want it and haven't spoken up about it, because we have some customers with all private or password-protected galleries.
I only mention the few requests not because it doesn't sound like a good idea, but only because we're still in the situation where we're trying to prioritize according to the things we hear about from the most people. I didn't want to sound enthusiastic about your idea but then give false hope about when we would start work on it.
Thanks,
Baldy
thanks for your detailed answear. That would be an idea, but I like that fact that my nature/landscape/animal pictures can be easily be hit by many people.
I'm just aware of pictures involving other people and using a password or private gallerie complicates it especially for party pictures were you don't even know everybody, neither have all their email-adresses to mail them gallery links or describe how to manage password protected galleries.
However I would like a option to decide for every gallery if it should be listed in the global pages. I like to be flexible.
Keep up the great work,
Sebastian
SmugMug Support Hero
I would use such a global option and feel much better about turning off the passwords on all my galleries.
Steve Crooks
Steve.Crooks.net
So from a post three weeks ago (ack -- can actual post dates be enabled?) Baldy wrote (and I'm adding the numbers) that the current priorities were:
#0 Let's see -- lustre finish, buttons, and bigger prints are here, right?
#1 Ok, let me speak for the 5 Mac users in the audience. Nevermind the iPhoto sync, captions, comments or ratings. Seriously. We're used to being marginalized, and hey, I already found a workaround for the captions. Anyways, it's 5% of the market. Nevermind us.
Yes, get the Windows uploader fixed. And error detection and recovery. But really really -- nevermind the Mac. We're fine -- the uploader works great right now! We can workaround any minor limitations (captions).
#2 Ok, I guess you're still working on that, and it's a revenue source, so yeah, stay on that.
#3 Wait -- this is one that the kids are really excited about, right? C'mon -- skinning is something you do with your WinAmp MP3 player. Does any adult really care about it? You allow us plenty of customization via CSS + headers and footers. Please make this a lower priority.
Of course I have selfish reasons to want you to take a closer look at those priorities. Because many of my bug requests haven't been fixed. :-}
But right now, I could care less about the slide show and movie view quirks. And yeah yeah, EXIF dates are screwy and inconsistent -- I have a workaround for that too. I just want this one, tiny, but really annoying thing fixed:
- Featured Photo should link to that Photo (Elegant styles) or the page of the gallery that Photo appears on (Traditional, Journal styles.) [However *text link* for a gallery should still link to first page, first photo of a gallery.]
As you said: (Oh, and fixing the back arrow bug would be nice too, but even that's really minor.)
Re: the Mac users. I really honestly believe that you're better served focusing on the Windows upload issues. In the 4 weeks I've been using Smugmug w/ the Mac Uploader it's been very solid. I don't see the point of wasting any more time (or resources, as the case may be) at the moment. (Yes, I know all of you guys are Mac users too, but seriously... 5% market share.)
Re: skinnability, you wrote :
But but... you spent so much time perfecting your site design that you even got props for it:
So why do you want to ruin that by allowing people to "skin" the thing to death? And anyways, what percentage of your users will even use this function? I think your current customization offerings provide plenty of flexibility without screwing up the good core page design you guys have obviously spent so much time perfecting.
*Maybe* if it were easier to "crib" somebody's header/footer HTML (just put some comment tags into the source showing where the header starts/ends!) that'd be nice. But I really don't see why this needs to be a priority beyond the fact that it's "cool". :-}
I think you'll find that #2 and #3 are related. Many people selling their photos want to customize the experience to make it specific to their business. Ultimately, I think many sellers would like it if the customer didn't even have a clue that there was a third-party (Smugmug) involved (although I personally don't feel that way). Additionally, there are some customization items that would be very handy for those of us trying to sell our wares -- things the current "CSS + headers and footers" stuff doesn't cover at all.
So while #2 is at the very top of my list and I eagerly look everyday to see if it's here yet, I'd also be happy to see #3.
Steve Crooks
Steve.Crooks.net
No worries about coming off as a jerk — I didn't sense that at all. The best customers are usually the most passionate.
And I like the way you think about how many people it affects.
Here's the update:
JT is slaving away almost full-time on the shopping cart and we've been user testing various scenarios. This is going to sound like a sob story, but it's become a very complex piece of code and that partly explains the time it's taking. The hard thing is alerting customers to cropping issues and then giving them the power in an intuitive way to do something about it.
Mac customers are far larger than 5% of our users because nearly half of pro photogs use them. A better estimate is 20% of our normal and power accounts, and higher for pros.
We're working on a new Java uploader first before the ActiveX one, largely because it works on more browsers and platforms than IE on Windows. It's in progress but I don't know how long it will take.
Aside from the new shopping cart, easy customization and pre-made style sheets really are the biggest thing we're asked about. When someone declines to continue with our trial and chooses a different site, it's nearly always (I hedged by saying nearly, but as far as I know it's always) either related to the shopping cart or customization.
Once you get past those big things, the list is incredibly long.... This week we knocked down one I didn't mention before — making statistics available over the months instead of just the current month, and making the reports faster. It's not live yet because the database is still building. But that one's been on our list for a year and I hate to think how many requests we had for it....
Thanks,
Baldy
And it's also not the kind of thing you can very well put out there and fix on the run. Pros who lose sales because of bugs will likely have very little sympathy or patience. I feel for you and am glad I'm not in your shoes for this one.
I continue to have the feeling that in a year from now I'll think back to what Smugmug was like when I joined and be very impressed with how far you've come. And I'll feel quite happy and satisfied with making that initial decision to drop $100 when I did instead of going with some other service. I like what you've got now, but I'm really looking forward to the future. Keep that dream alive for me!
Steve Crooks
Steve.Crooks.net
Ok ok -- lots of Mac users. :-} But good to hear about the focus on the Java uploader. As I said, I think the Mac Uploader is completely usable in its current state.
I didn't realize customization would be such a dealbreaker (and I think my real problem is with the word "skinnable"). Coming from a consumer POV, I look at places like Shutterfly and Ofoto, and don't see *any* customization features. Or even a place like pbase.com.
Do the "pro" sites (I saw DotPhoto and PhotoReflect mentioned) even let you do the kind of customization smugmug currently does? Doesn't look like either of those sites let you do that. So I mean... what smugmug allows now is more than any other photo hosting site I've ever seen. But I haven't really shopped around from the POV of a pro, so I don't know.
But of course I recognize though that a robust and powerful ordering (and price/customer management) system is a huge need for the Pros, so it's completely understandable that you're making that priority #1.
So hey, scrooks --
Is there some other company that offers more customization/personalization of its hosted photo galleries than smugmug does? Not that we'd want you to plug a competitor's site, but I'm just curious.
--Darryl
I believe there are a few, but they were quite a bit more expensive. I honestly didn't look that hard, being mostly happy with Smugmug right now and believing that the few things I want improved will happen soon. (I'm kind of growing my business along with Smugmug.) When I talked about customizing a site, I was really putting on the generic pro hat and expressing what I'm sure many pros do want.
In my case it's not that I'm really looking to customize the look that much, I just need the ability to add in information on a more granular level. For example, I take event shots for a school and I classify all those images in a category for that school. I would very much like to put some text specific to that school on the gallery list page, but only in that category. I don't want the text to show up in other categories, because those other categories contain shots from completely different places. That page with the gallery list is the entry point I give to people when I take event shots, essentially http://pictures.crooks.net/category, so it would be very, very handy to be able to personalize each category.
I've let the Smugmug people know about all my requests and so far I believe they'll get to them. But I'm perfectly content with them spending almost all their time at the moment finishing the all-important ordering retooling.
Steve Crooks
Steve.Crooks.net
Would we be looking at weeks, months, or years? Or am I jumping to conclusions?
We've been just a few weeks away from it for, erem, a few months. It's software... And software that requires a lot of user testing and an interface with the lab and the all-important thing: compatibility with a zillion browsers without having to install a plugin like Flash.
Adding photos to the shopping cart will be much easier too with fewer clicks required.