If we could come up with something both more flexible AND as easy/easier to use, we'd do it in a heartbeat. I've asked for help from dgrinners many times, and so far, everyone has come up empty.
Here's the Nth call for help.
Don
At some level this isn't your problem. For the pro users who keep telling you why they want more levels of hierarchy, it's their problem if they use the feature in some way that makes it hard for their customers to find what they want. They are telling you that they have ideas for using more levels of hierarchy that will make it easier for themselves and their customers. Why not make this a feature of pro accounts and then they will be paying you for the freedom to do it they way they want. If it's not hard for you, what do you care? Just make it an "advanced/pro" feature. It's advanced because it's on some obscure menu, maybe the "advanced" menu. And it's pro because only pro accounts get it.
If you do it that way, you won't be putting it into the hands of people who will use it in some way that just confuses themselves.
So, what's missing from this?
I do think virtual galleries, categories, and subcategories modeled on searching is a good idea, but it really doesn't let the pros organize their work the way they want. Suppose I want a journal view at the "category" level, for example?
In my experience, hierarchy, even very deep hierarchy works great as long as someone puts some thought into it and it isn't too arbitrary. That's the reason MS ended up with "My Documents"; the average user wasn't good at creating meaningful hierarchy. But we all use hierarchy all the time to simplify things. Libraries stacks have a lot of hierarchy, each book has a structure that might include "Books", chapters, sections, paragraphs, and sentences. We give date/time in year/month/date/hour/minute/second.
So make us pay for it...
Charge $X/year for each additional level allowed. That will keep it under control, I think, but not limit pros who actually know what they want to do with it. Any you'll get paid.
At some level this isn't your problem. For the pro users who keep telling you why they want more levels of hierarchy, it's their problem if they use the feature in some way that makes it hard for their customers to find what they want. They are telling you that they have ideas for using more levels of hierarchy that will make it easier for themselves and their customers. Why not make this a feature of pro accounts and then they will be paying you for the freedom to do it they way they want. If it's not hard for you, what do you care? Just make it an "advanced/pro" feature. It's advanced because it's on some obscure menu, maybe the "advanced" menu. And it's pro because only pro accounts get it.
If you do it that way, you won't be putting it into the hands of people who will use it in some way that just confuses themselves.
So, what's missing from this?
On the surface, this sounds very logical and makes a lot of sense.
Once you mix a healthy dose of reality from the "How to be a great smugmug customer service rep", though, it falls apart.
Most of the time, when a browsing person ('browser') gets confused, they just give up. On the rare occasion that they make a stink, they make a stink to us because they find the help links and email links and whatnot.
As a result, not only does it take up our precious customer support time, but it also makes both us and our pro look bad. Yet the Pro never hears about it, they just complain about no sales.
I know it's a bit arrogant of us to insist that we know best, but it IS our job to do photo sharing, we serve more than 1,000,000 unique visitors per day, and we interface directly with tens of thousands of customers, so we get a very tight feedback loop of what does and doesn't work.
We're often wrong, as we've seen over and over, but on this particular point I think we're correct. However, I think that's only because we haven't come up with something brilliant that's better... and I think it's waiting for us. We just need to get that lightbulb moment.
The Keyword search works perfectly for a multi-category seach. I tried it on a group of photos from a sports related activity with some folks at work. What onethumb didn't add to his description of keywords is that the screen offers the viewer additional sort words specific to the current selection. This means the user can continue to filter by clicking additional keywords (i.e. "combine with"), so you don't necessarily need a keyword search script.
I simply gave the entire group a common keyword, a subset of this an additional keyword, and a further subset of the subset another keyword.
This will show 27 photos. Then click on "combine with" Lana. This will reduce the selection to 8 photos. Then combine with team, and the selection narrows to one.
This should work fairly well for several of the event type scenarios discussed in this thread.
The only thing I noticed is that my sort order changed. The original gallery is sorted by filename. I don't know how it ordered this keyword selection.
The Keyword search works perfectly for a multi-category seach. I tried it on a group of photos from a sports related activity with some folks at work. What onethumb didn't add to his description of keywords is that the screen offers the viewer additional sort words specific to the current selection. This means the user can continue to filter by clicking additional keywords (i.e. "combine with"), so you don't necessarily need a keyword search script.
I simply gave the entire group a common keyword, a subset of this an additional keyword, and a further subset of the subset another keyword.
This will show 27 photos. Then click on "combine with" Lana. This will reduce the selection to 8 photos. Then combine with team, and the selection narrows to one.
This should work fairly well for several of the event type scenarios discussed in this thread.
The only thing I noticed is that my sort order changed. The original gallery is sorted by filename. I don't know how it ordered this keyword selection.
Brad
You can also just type in something like:
yourname.smugmug.com/keyword/keyword1-keyword2
Y'all don't want to hear me, you just want to dance.
Yes, the examples that onethumb gave made that perfectly clear.:D My point is that a user essentially has a ready made, context sensitive pick list right today, no scripting required, no new programming by smugmug. The examples given earlier by others seemed to require the intended viewer to have previous knowledge of the keywords to put yourname.smugmug.com/keyword/keyword1-keyword2 together. Some people had suggested they would put some instructions on a webpage etc. When I tried this for the first time, I was pleasently surprised to see that there is already an automated process.
Any event photographer could now simply send a link like: yourname.smugmug.com/keyword/event. The person viewing that link would then see all photos for that day and would be presented with a list of additional key words to refine their search at the top right of the page. They might then click on the race number and/or kart number (something like the example given earlier in this thread).
This whole thread started because a number of people spoke of their strong desire to have more levels of sub-categories. The keyword approach could be used to take this to as many levels as required. The stated downside (with sub-categories) was the increased number of clicks to get where the viewer wants to go. Obviously with keywords, it is possible to go much more directly to the final "sub-category" (keyword selection) instead of having to travel through many levels of a nested hierarchy.
The reason I was surprised with this solution is because I turned off displaying keywords long ago on my page. When trying this out, I quickly tagged a few photos then tried the yourname.smugmug.com/keyword/keyword1-keyword2 approach and thought, that's cool! It was only when I looked on the top right corner of the screen that I saw that I could add/subtract other keywords ( and it only showed keywords associated with this set, not the million other keywords that smugmug generated for other galleries).
Onethumb answered one person's response with something like "I think we already have that". I guess what everyone is stumbling around with is that many of us really had no idea how keywords actually worked without seeing a real life example.
So to repeat someone else's point, maybe the power of keywords needs to be advertised a bit more and not be smugmug's best kept secret.
Most of the time, when a browsing person ('browser') gets confused, they just give up. On the rare occasion that they make a stink, they make a stink to us because they find the help links and email links and whatnot.
Fix this. For pros who insist on more levels than you are comfortable with, point the appropriate help sections at something that the pro writes and gives his contact for tech support.
We're often wrong, as we've seen over and over, but on this particular point I think we're correct. However, I think that's only because we haven't come up with something brilliant that's better... and I think it's waiting for us. We just need to get that lightbulb moment.
Don
The problem is that this is so ill defined a problem that it's impossible to work on. I don't really understand what makes you so uncomfortable with filesystem style hierarchy and so comfortable with the arbitrary category/subcategory/gallery style you do support. I know that you think hierarchy is confusing, but, then so are a lot of worthwhile things. We have to choose between confusing grandma and having email, for example. Personally, I find it confusing that you treat different levels of the hierarchy so differently.
Can you give an outline of a possible solution? What tests would it have to pass? Is there someway to make this more concrete?
This whole thread started because a number of people spoke of their strong desire to have more levels of sub-categories. The keyword approach could be used to take this to as many levels as required. The stated downside (with sub-categories) was the increased number of clicks to get where the viewer wants to go. Obviously with keywords, it is possible to go much more directly to the final "sub-category" (keyword selection) instead of having to travel through many levels of a nested hierarchy.
The reason I was surprised with this solution is because I turned off displaying keywords long ago on my page. When trying this out, I quickly tagged a few photos then tried the yourname.smugmug.com/keyword/keyword1-keyword2 approach and thought, that's cool! It was only when I looked on the top right corner of the screen that I saw that I could add/subtract other keywords ( and it only showed keywords associated with this set, not the million other keywords that smugmug generated for other galleries).
Agreed and same here. My only gripe about this feature is that it is not easy or intuitive to access via a search and it is basically hidden if you don't have the (awful looking) keyword "cloud" sitting on your page.
My point is that I'd like easier access to the keyword search for my site. I'm still not sure how to get to it without doing the whole www.mikelanephotography.com/keyword/ thing.
Just to reiterate what you were saying, in my opinion the keyword system can be used in effect to create an nth level layers. There are other sites which use a very similar system as the method by which they allow users to categorize their entries -- del.icio.us is the site that I'm thinking of.
Y'all don't want to hear me, you just want to dance.
My only gripe about this feature is that it is not easy or intuitive to access via a search and it is basically hidden if you don't have the (awful looking) keyword "cloud" sitting on your page.
I was thinking about what this would look like. In my example, I only had a few key words for these specific photos, and therefore I only see a manageable amount at the top of the screen.
If some like Ann used it for soccer and used the jersey number as one of the keyword criteria, it might look ugly. I guess you could use a "range" keywords like 1-20, 21-40, etc.
I agree with your point that an clean looking input box where the user simply typed the keywords and it went out and did the www.yourname\smugmug.com\keyword\word1-word2 automatically would be very useful.
I was thinking about what this would look like. In my example, I only had a few key words for these specific photos, and therefore I only see a manageable amount at the top of the screen.
If some like Ann used it for soccer and used the jersey number as one of the keyword criteria, it might look ugly. I guess you could use a "range" keywords like 1-20, 21-40, etc.
Last night I did about half my kart racing photos. A bunch of editing of keywords, for sure, but you can see the results of what you are talking about by looking at my page: mercphoto.smugmug.com
I have decided to tag each racing image with at least three keywords: track name, event date, and rider number. Eventually I might add kart type (i.e. kid kart, shifter, clutch, etc.) but that is not always easy to identify from the picture.
Cluttered or not? Easy searching or not? I think I can explain the three-step process to find photos easy enough to customers. Choose the keyword for your track. Next the keyword for the event date. Finally your rider number keyword.
OK, I'll try something that seems like a constructive suggestion to me. What about supporting a "simplified" and "expert" (or something) view? This would be similar to gallery style. The viewer can set his preferences and the smugmug customer can have some control over deraults and/or whether they can be overridden. In simplified mode, viewers see what they see now. In "expert" mode, full arbitrary hierarchy is revealed. This works because galleries still have category/subcategory, allowing a simplified view. But the smugmug customer is free to work with a nested folder model where galleries can have subgalleries.
Last night I did about half my kart racing photos. A bunch of editing of keywords, for sure, but you can see the results of what you are talking about by looking at my page: mercphoto.smugmug.com
I have decided to tag each racing image with at least three keywords: track name, event date, and rider number. Eventually I might add kart type (i.e. kid kart, shifter, clutch, etc.) but that is not always easy to identify from the picture.
Cluttered or not? Easy searching or not? I think I can explain the three-step process to find photos easy enough to customers. Choose the keyword for your track. Next the keyword for the event date. Finally your rider number keyword.
I see the potential power of this feature, but boy this is not easy to use without each viewer reading and understanding a multi-sentence description of how to use it first. Further, the big block on the homepage that lists every single keyword you have in your galleries is just plain ugly and hard to understand. And, after you select your first keyword, the "combine with" text/presentation is very small text and not that simple to understand (e.g. it's pretty techy).
This doesn't seem to line up with the Smugmug "easy to use" mantra. So as not be to just a complainer and offer some constructive feedback, I'm working on some ideas for how this could work a lot better. More when I get them written down.
I see the potential power of this feature, but boy this is not easy to use without each viewer reading and understanding a multi-sentence description of how to use it first.
My fear as well. Powerful, and awful fast too. Heck, since some photos have more than one kart in them, you can actually search for every photo from a particular event with two particular karts in them! Pretty neat.
But... unsure how quick I can get users to "learn" this process.
Further, the big block on the homepage that lists every single keyword you have in your galleries is just plain ugly and hard to understand.
Would be nice to pick and choose which keywords show up there, but I have no idea how Smugmug would implement that or allow me to choose.
The only thing I noticed is that my sort order changed. The original gallery is sorted by filename. I don't know how it ordered this keyword selection.
FYI, keyword views are always shown with the most recent first.
FYI, keyword views are always shown with the most recent first.
I'm really digging this keyword thing.
Question: Should I make it a habit to make keywords all one word? For example, instead of "Iron Rock Raceway", make it "IronRockRaceway"? Any underlying reason one way or the other, and if I do one word will it keep the mixed-case of the lettering?
Second Q: If it is advised to make keywords with no spaces, is there any easy way to bulk convert keywords? Some of my keywords link to nearly 4000 photos.
Fix this. For pros who insist on more levels than you are comfortable with, point the appropriate help sections at something that the pro writes and gives his contact for tech support.
You're not getting it. Education is dang near impossible, and very expensive. We cannot afford to educate our customers, because they *do not* want to be educated.
Everything must be intuitive. Which is why all features at smugmug get worked over, then worked over again when we get feedback, then worked over again.... It's probably a neverending battle, but if we have to somehow educate the majority of people about a feature, we've lost and need to hit the drawing board again.
The problem is that this is so ill defined a problem that it's impossible to work on. I don't really understand what makes you so uncomfortable with filesystem style hierarchy and so comfortable with the arbitrary category/subcategory/gallery style you do support. I know that you think hierarchy is confusing, but, then so are a lot of worthwhile things. We have to choose between confusing grandma and having email, for example. Personally, I find it confusing that you treat different levels of the hierarchy so differently.
Can you give an outline of a possible solution? What tests would it have to pass? Is there someway to make this more concrete?
People have already been educated, over 10 years on the breadcrumbs-on-the-web layout. Yahoo! did it first, and spent the time to educate people, and now thousands of sites now employ it. People "get" it. They're allergic to too many layers deep (which is why the Yahoo! directory started dying a slow death to search), but they do get the idea.
They don't get folder-like heirarchy. We hear over and over how people can't even find the photos on their PCs to upload ... and that's heirarchy they built themselves! How on earth can they navigate someone else's photos?
The test a new solution would have to pass is, on the surface, a simple one: If I go and take 100 random people off the street, sit them in a focus group room, and tell them nothing ... can most of them navigate someone's galleries without frustration or education? If yes, we've won. If no, we've lost.
Agreed and same here. My only gripe about this feature is that it is not easy or intuitive to access via a search and it is basically hidden if you don't have the (awful looking) keyword "cloud" sitting on your page.
My point is that I'd like easier access to the keyword search for my site. I'm still not sure how to get to it without doing the whole www.mikelanephotography.com/keyword/ thing.
Just to reiterate what you were saying, in my opinion the keyword system can be used in effect to create an nth level layers. There are other sites which use a very similar system as the method by which they allow users to categorize their entries -- del.icio.us is the site that I'm thinking of.
Keyword searching is available from the main search bar all across the site... Is it not working for you?
del.icio.us invented the tagging scheme, I spent a weekend hanging out with them and then shamelessly built smugmug's.
Plenty of other sites, whether they're blogs, photo sharing, bookmarks, or whatever now use tags almost exactly like we do, which makes aggregating them easier.
OK, I'll try something that seems like a constructive suggestion to me. What about supporting a "simplified" and "expert" (or something) view? This would be similar to gallery style. The viewer can set his preferences and the smugmug customer can have some control over deraults and/or whether they can be overridden. In simplified mode, viewers see what they see now. In "expert" mode, full arbitrary hierarchy is revealed. This works because galleries still have category/subcategory, allowing a simplified view. But the smugmug customer is free to work with a nested folder model where galleries can have subgalleries.
Lightbulb?
No lightbulb. You're thinking like someone who actively thinks about using a computer and has a wealth of information about how computers work. You're thinking like less than 1% of the population.
Go read one of Jeremy Zawodny's latest blog entries about user expectation , especially the part about Mac Word 6.
If the customer has to think or learn something new, we've lost our battle, and will lose some money. Education is expensive.
Question: Should I make it a habit to make keywords all one word? For example, instead of "Iron Rock Raceway", make it "IronRockRaceway"? Any underlying reason one way or the other, and if I do one word will it keep the mixed-case of the lettering?
The typical way to tag on the web is to use CamelCase, and it does make URLs prettier & easier to pass along. But it's your call. Non-geeks often don't "get" CamelCase, and would never think to look for New York as NewYork, for example. Which is why smugmug is farily unique on the net and allows spaces.
Second Q: If it is advised to make keywords with no spaces, is there any easy way to bulk convert keywords? Some of my keywords link to nearly 4000 photos.
Thanks!
Yep, go into the keyword for the one you want to change. Select the Bulk Caption/Keyword tool. Then there's an option to change X into Y. That's all there is to it!
I see the potential power of this feature, but boy this is not easy to use without each viewer reading and understanding a multi-sentence description of how to use it first. Further, the big block on the homepage that lists every single keyword you have in your galleries is just plain ugly and hard to understand. And, after you select your first keyword, the "combine with" text/presentation is very small text and not that simple to understand (e.g. it's pretty techy).
This doesn't seem to line up with the Smugmug "easy to use" mantra. So as not be to just a complainer and offer some constructive feedback, I'm working on some ideas for how this could work a lot better. More when I get them written down.
--John
I wonder if maybe on the http://yourname.smugmug.com/keyword/ page, we should let you specify a few different "root blocks" and display keyword clouds based on each of those which you can use as a base to drill down with.
Keyword searching is available from the main search bar all across the site... Is it not working for you?
del.icio.us invented the tagging scheme, I spent a weekend hanging out with them and then shamelessly built smugmug's.
Plenty of other sites, whether they're blogs, photo sharing, bookmarks, or whatever now use tags almost exactly like we do, which makes aggregating them easier.
Don
It isn't working well Don. When I do a search for say keyword1 keyword2 I get the three tiered search results the first is the keywords, the second is the gallery, the third is the pictures. The pictures that I get are rarely ever the same as if I went to www.mikelanephotography.com/keyword/keyword1-keyword2.
For instance if you go to my page and search for seattle space needle (for no other reason than I know what I should get) you'll see that the keyword results say "seattle(57)" and that's it. There are no galleries found (interesting since I have a gallery named seattle) and there are 2 pictures found but they are not displayed so I don't know what they are.
If you to go www.mikelanephotography.com/keyword/seattle-space%20needle you get an entirely different result. There are 3 images (and for some odd reason they showed up as a slideshow this time with no option to change that...freaky) which is exactly what there should be.
I wonder if maybe on the http://yourname.smugmug.com/keyword/ page, we should let you specify a few different "root blocks" and display keyword clouds based on each of those which you can use as a base to drill down with.
Does that sound interesting to anyone?
Don
Gah! I HATE the keword cloud! That's why I don't have the keywords on my main page in the first place. If you can do it another way it may be of interest, but not if it is that awful cloud.
Y'all don't want to hear me, you just want to dance.
Gah! I HATE the keword cloud! That's why I don't have the keywords on my main page in the first place. If you can do it another way it may be of interest, but not if it is that awful cloud.
I wonder if maybe on the http://yourname.smugmug.com/keyword/ page, we should let you specify a few different "root blocks" and display keyword clouds based on each of those which you can use as a base to drill down with.
Does that sound interesting to anyone?
Yes.
One other thing. I can't seem to get CamelCase to work on my keywords. Everything turns out lowercase. For example, I entered KidKarts and got kidkarts.
One other thing. I can't seem to get CamelCase to work on my keywords. Everything turns out lowercase. For example, I entered KidKarts and got kidkarts.
You're right, sorry. I mis-remembered. CamelCase used to work, but then we got different keywords for Newyork, NewYork, newyork. Like all the other tagging sites, we now lowercase everything.
You're right, sorry. I mis-remembered. CamelCase used to work, but then we got different keywords for Newyork, NewYork, newyork. Like all the other tagging sites, we now lowercase everything.
You're right, sorry. I mis-remembered. CamelCase used to work, but then we got different keywords for Newyork, NewYork, newyork. Like all the other tagging sites, we now lowercase everything.
Sorry!
Don
If people like the camel case for visual reasons, you could make the searching/indexing be case insensitive, but still preserve the camel case visually if that's what is entered. Thus "NewYork" would display that way if that's how it was entered, but "NewYork", "newyork", "Newyork" would all be the same keyword.
I personally would like to see case preserved for names and proper nouns, but am fine with a case insensitive search/index.
Sorry, it doesn't, and as far as I know, no search engines do (or, at least, not very fast). This is an incredibly difficult computer science problem. Wildcard searching is usually based on prefix-branching using a tree. So a search term uses the first letter to quickly narrow the search, then the second letter, and so on.
We're not planning on implementing this until someone far more brilliant than I dreams it up at Stanford's CS department or something.
Maybe not out of Stanford, but out of Wisconsin around 1950, Stephen Kleene dreamt up regular sets, implemented in Unix as Grep etc.
OK, it's not super-efficient, but maybe there would be a reason to offload it to the client - for example, send a string of keywords and use the Javascript regular expression parser to pick out the matching words that the user can then re-submit in place of the original wildcard expression.
But there might be more of a use for this in file renaming than keyword searching.
Might as well chime in here with a few more reactions to other posts on this thread.
I am one of those who promptly removed the keywords from my main page, but I'll be trying out the keyword-URL feature as soon as I get a chance to retrofit some meaningful sets of keywords into my Galleries. I think I'll like it.
I'll be curious whether I can use the same bulk tools on keyword-defined galleries to add captions and copy or move images into different "real" galleries.
As for the existing "confusing" four-level category-subcategory-gallery-image hierarchy, I think part of the confusion is that these three levels behave so inconsistently. Personally, my ideal hieracrchy would blur the distinctions between all four levels as much as possible - even allowing individual photo's at the top level! You might have two additional "styles" - one "Mac-Finder-like, the other PC-exlorer-like. (You could even snif the client platform and provide the "right" view for that user.) You might need an additional option for your slide show - whether to go "deep" or stay shallow. For the "elegant" style, if you click on a thumbnail that happens to represent a "folder", you'd find yourself viewing a new set of thumbnails, that's all. The "feature photo" for a gallery could be used whenever you need to treat a galler as a photo (e.g., sort-order by exif creation date).
I imagine your support staff must get more calls from us account holders than from browsers confused over the category-subcategory-gallery scheme.
If the user is sitting at a PC, its likely (s)he's got some familiarity with the hierachy of the file system. Sure out of 100 random people off the sidewalk if you place them in front of a computer you'll first have to train some of them to use a mouse, Just as if you send invitations to all your relatives for a party at your house, some will get lost trying to find it, there might be one gets into an accident, some can't drive. No reason to cancel the party.
OK, here is another idea. Why not allow a gallery to have more than one category/subcategory? This gives more than one way to find it, if that makes sense. So then I might have:
2005->portraits->Jones Family
portraits->2005->Jones Family
Jones Family->2005
OK, here is another idea. Why not allow a gallery to have more than one category/subcategory? This gives more than one way to find it, if that makes sense. So then I might have:
2005->portraits->Jones Family
portraits->2005->Jones Family
Jones Family->2005
If the Jones family can find all their pictures, or just the ones with Mamma Jones and Sis Jones, or Daddy Jones and brother jones, or Just Mom and Dad, or just Bro and Sis (etc etc etc the combinations are limited only by the number of keywords you use) in a given year, simply and easily without having to know anything about how your site is set up then why push for a different category set up?
Now, I should say that I can't get the search to work for keywords like Don says they should, but assuming that can get fixed, why not just save the Joneses a bunch of time and make it easy for them to find exactly what they want in a hurry with keywords.
I could definitely be missing the point here but it just seems like this doesn't need to be that complicated. The way they have implemented the keywords amounts to categorization that is much more powerful and flexible than any hierarchical method could match.
I just don't think they implement the UI very well.
Y'all don't want to hear me, you just want to dance.
Comments
At some level this isn't your problem. For the pro users who keep telling you why they want more levels of hierarchy, it's their problem if they use the feature in some way that makes it hard for their customers to find what they want. They are telling you that they have ideas for using more levels of hierarchy that will make it easier for themselves and their customers. Why not make this a feature of pro accounts and then they will be paying you for the freedom to do it they way they want. If it's not hard for you, what do you care? Just make it an "advanced/pro" feature. It's advanced because it's on some obscure menu, maybe the "advanced" menu. And it's pro because only pro accounts get it.
If you do it that way, you won't be putting it into the hands of people who will use it in some way that just confuses themselves.
So, what's missing from this?
I do think virtual galleries, categories, and subcategories modeled on searching is a good idea, but it really doesn't let the pros organize their work the way they want. Suppose I want a journal view at the "category" level, for example?
In my experience, hierarchy, even very deep hierarchy works great as long as someone puts some thought into it and it isn't too arbitrary. That's the reason MS ended up with "My Documents"; the average user wasn't good at creating meaningful hierarchy. But we all use hierarchy all the time to simplify things. Libraries stacks have a lot of hierarchy, each book has a structure that might include "Books", chapters, sections, paragraphs, and sentences. We give date/time in year/month/date/hour/minute/second.
Is there something I'm just not getting?
Charge $X/year for each additional level allowed. That will keep it under control, I think, but not limit pros who actually know what they want to do with it. Any you'll get paid.
On the surface, this sounds very logical and makes a lot of sense.
Once you mix a healthy dose of reality from the "How to be a great smugmug customer service rep", though, it falls apart.
Most of the time, when a browsing person ('browser') gets confused, they just give up. On the rare occasion that they make a stink, they make a stink to us because they find the help links and email links and whatnot.
As a result, not only does it take up our precious customer support time, but it also makes both us and our pro look bad. Yet the Pro never hears about it, they just complain about no sales.
I know it's a bit arrogant of us to insist that we know best, but it IS our job to do photo sharing, we serve more than 1,000,000 unique visitors per day, and we interface directly with tens of thousands of customers, so we get a very tight feedback loop of what does and doesn't work.
We're often wrong, as we've seen over and over, but on this particular point I think we're correct. However, I think that's only because we haven't come up with something brilliant that's better... and I think it's waiting for us. We just need to get that lightbulb moment.
Don
I simply gave the entire group a common keyword, a subset of this an additional keyword, and a further subset of the subset another keyword.
To see what I mean, look at:
http://digismile.smugmug.com/keyword/corporate%20challenge%202005
This will show 27 photos. Then click on "combine with" Lana. This will reduce the selection to 8 photos. Then combine with team, and the selection narrows to one.
This should work fairly well for several of the event type scenarios discussed in this thread.
The only thing I noticed is that my sort order changed. The original gallery is sorted by filename. I don't know how it ordered this keyword selection.
Brad
www.digismile.ca
yourname.smugmug.com/keyword/keyword1-keyword2
http://photos.mikelanestudios.com/
Any event photographer could now simply send a link like:
yourname.smugmug.com/keyword/event. The person viewing that link would then see all photos for that day and would be presented with a list of additional key words to refine their search at the top right of the page. They might then click on the race number and/or kart number (something like the example given earlier in this thread).
This whole thread started because a number of people spoke of their strong desire to have more levels of sub-categories. The keyword approach could be used to take this to as many levels as required. The stated downside (with sub-categories) was the increased number of clicks to get where the viewer wants to go. Obviously with keywords, it is possible to go much more directly to the final "sub-category" (keyword selection) instead of having to travel through many levels of a nested hierarchy.
The reason I was surprised with this solution is because I turned off displaying keywords long ago on my page. When trying this out, I quickly tagged a few photos then tried the yourname.smugmug.com/keyword/keyword1-keyword2 approach and thought, that's cool! It was only when I looked on the top right corner of the screen that I saw that I could add/subtract other keywords ( and it only showed keywords associated with this set, not the million other keywords that smugmug generated for other galleries).
Onethumb answered one person's response with something like "I think we already have that". I guess what everyone is stumbling around with is that many of us really had no idea how keywords actually worked without seeing a real life example.
So to repeat someone else's point, maybe the power of keywords needs to be advertised a bit more and not be smugmug's best kept secret.
www.digismile.ca
Fix this. For pros who insist on more levels than you are comfortable with, point the appropriate help sections at something that the pro writes and gives his contact for tech support.
The problem is that this is so ill defined a problem that it's impossible to work on. I don't really understand what makes you so uncomfortable with filesystem style hierarchy and so comfortable with the arbitrary category/subcategory/gallery style you do support. I know that you think hierarchy is confusing, but, then so are a lot of worthwhile things. We have to choose between confusing grandma and having email, for example. Personally, I find it confusing that you treat different levels of the hierarchy so differently.
Can you give an outline of a possible solution? What tests would it have to pass? Is there someway to make this more concrete?
My point is that I'd like easier access to the keyword search for my site. I'm still not sure how to get to it without doing the whole www.mikelanephotography.com/keyword/ thing.
Just to reiterate what you were saying, in my opinion the keyword system can be used in effect to create an nth level layers. There are other sites which use a very similar system as the method by which they allow users to categorize their entries -- del.icio.us is the site that I'm thinking of.
http://photos.mikelanestudios.com/
If some like Ann used it for soccer and used the jersey number as one of the keyword criteria, it might look ugly. I guess you could use a "range" keywords like 1-20, 21-40, etc.
I agree with your point that an clean looking input box where the user simply typed the keywords and it went out and did the www.yourname\smugmug.com\keyword\word1-word2 automatically would be very useful.
www.digismile.ca
Last night I did about half my kart racing photos. A bunch of editing of keywords, for sure, but you can see the results of what you are talking about by looking at my page: mercphoto.smugmug.com
I have decided to tag each racing image with at least three keywords: track name, event date, and rider number. Eventually I might add kart type (i.e. kid kart, shifter, clutch, etc.) but that is not always easy to identify from the picture.
Cluttered or not? Easy searching or not? I think I can explain the three-step process to find photos easy enough to customers. Choose the keyword for your track. Next the keyword for the event date. Finally your rider number keyword.
A former sports shooter
Follow me at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bjurasz/
My Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/mercphoto?ref=hdr_shop_menu
Lightbulb?
I see the potential power of this feature, but boy this is not easy to use without each viewer reading and understanding a multi-sentence description of how to use it first. Further, the big block on the homepage that lists every single keyword you have in your galleries is just plain ugly and hard to understand. And, after you select your first keyword, the "combine with" text/presentation is very small text and not that simple to understand (e.g. it's pretty techy).
This doesn't seem to line up with the Smugmug "easy to use" mantra. So as not be to just a complainer and offer some constructive feedback, I'm working on some ideas for how this could work a lot better. More when I get them written down.
--John
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But... unsure how quick I can get users to "learn" this process.
Would be nice to pick and choose which keywords show up there, but I have no idea how Smugmug would implement that or allow me to choose.
A former sports shooter
Follow me at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bjurasz/
My Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/mercphoto?ref=hdr_shop_menu
FYI, keyword views are always shown with the most recent first.
Don
I'm really digging this keyword thing.
Question: Should I make it a habit to make keywords all one word? For example, instead of "Iron Rock Raceway", make it "IronRockRaceway"? Any underlying reason one way or the other, and if I do one word will it keep the mixed-case of the lettering?
Second Q: If it is advised to make keywords with no spaces, is there any easy way to bulk convert keywords? Some of my keywords link to nearly 4000 photos.
Thanks!
A former sports shooter
Follow me at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bjurasz/
My Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/mercphoto?ref=hdr_shop_menu
You're not getting it. Education is dang near impossible, and very expensive. We cannot afford to educate our customers, because they *do not* want to be educated.
Everything must be intuitive. Which is why all features at smugmug get worked over, then worked over again when we get feedback, then worked over again.... It's probably a neverending battle, but if we have to somehow educate the majority of people about a feature, we've lost and need to hit the drawing board again.
People have already been educated, over 10 years on the breadcrumbs-on-the-web layout. Yahoo! did it first, and spent the time to educate people, and now thousands of sites now employ it. People "get" it. They're allergic to too many layers deep (which is why the Yahoo! directory started dying a slow death to search), but they do get the idea.
They don't get folder-like heirarchy. We hear over and over how people can't even find the photos on their PCs to upload ... and that's heirarchy they built themselves! How on earth can they navigate someone else's photos?
The test a new solution would have to pass is, on the surface, a simple one: If I go and take 100 random people off the street, sit them in a focus group room, and tell them nothing ... can most of them navigate someone's galleries without frustration or education? If yes, we've won. If no, we've lost.
Don
Keyword searching is available from the main search bar all across the site... Is it not working for you?
del.icio.us invented the tagging scheme, I spent a weekend hanging out with them and then shamelessly built smugmug's.
Plenty of other sites, whether they're blogs, photo sharing, bookmarks, or whatever now use tags almost exactly like we do, which makes aggregating them easier.
Don
No lightbulb. You're thinking like someone who actively thinks about using a computer and has a wealth of information about how computers work. You're thinking like less than 1% of the population.
Go read one of Jeremy Zawodny's latest blog entries about user expectation , especially the part about Mac Word 6.
If the customer has to think or learn something new, we've lost our battle, and will lose some money. Education is expensive.
Don
The typical way to tag on the web is to use CamelCase, and it does make URLs prettier & easier to pass along. But it's your call. Non-geeks often don't "get" CamelCase, and would never think to look for New York as NewYork, for example. Which is why smugmug is farily unique on the net and allows spaces.
Yep, go into the keyword for the one you want to change. Select the Bulk Caption/Keyword tool. Then there's an option to change X into Y. That's all there is to it!
Don
I wonder if maybe on the http://yourname.smugmug.com/keyword/ page, we should let you specify a few different "root blocks" and display keyword clouds based on each of those which you can use as a base to drill down with.
Does that sound interesting to anyone?
Don
For instance if you go to my page and search for seattle space needle (for no other reason than I know what I should get) you'll see that the keyword results say "seattle(57)" and that's it. There are no galleries found (interesting since I have a gallery named seattle) and there are 2 pictures found but they are not displayed so I don't know what they are.
If you to go www.mikelanephotography.com/keyword/seattle-space%20needle you get an entirely different result. There are 3 images (and for some odd reason they showed up as a slideshow this time with no option to change that...freaky) which is exactly what there should be.
Is it possible to be able to integrate what you'd find at www.mikelanephotography.com/keyword/keyword1-keyword2-...-keywordn into the search results that you get from a standard search? Because it obviously isn't doing it that way right now.
http://photos.mikelanestudios.com/
http://photos.mikelanestudios.com/
Yes.
One other thing. I can't seem to get CamelCase to work on my keywords. Everything turns out lowercase. For example, I entered KidKarts and got kidkarts.
A former sports shooter
Follow me at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bjurasz/
My Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/mercphoto?ref=hdr_shop_menu
You're right, sorry. I mis-remembered. CamelCase used to work, but then we got different keywords for Newyork, NewYork, newyork. Like all the other tagging sites, we now lowercase everything.
Sorry!
Don
Not a problem. The reasoning makes sense.
A former sports shooter
Follow me at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bjurasz/
My Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/mercphoto?ref=hdr_shop_menu
If people like the camel case for visual reasons, you could make the searching/indexing be case insensitive, but still preserve the camel case visually if that's what is entered. Thus "NewYork" would display that way if that's how it was entered, but "NewYork", "newyork", "Newyork" would all be the same keyword.
I personally would like to see case preserved for names and proper nouns, but am fine with a case insensitive search/index.
--John
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Maybe not out of Stanford, but out of Wisconsin around 1950, Stephen Kleene dreamt up regular sets, implemented in Unix as Grep etc.
OK, it's not super-efficient, but maybe there would be a reason to offload it to the client - for example, send a string of keywords and use the Javascript regular expression parser to pick out the matching words that the user can then re-submit in place of the original wildcard expression.
But there might be more of a use for this in file renaming than keyword searching.
Might as well chime in here with a few more reactions to other posts on this thread.
I am one of those who promptly removed the keywords from my main page, but I'll be trying out the keyword-URL feature as soon as I get a chance to retrofit some meaningful sets of keywords into my Galleries. I think I'll like it.
I'll be curious whether I can use the same bulk tools on keyword-defined galleries to add captions and copy or move images into different "real" galleries.
As for the existing "confusing" four-level category-subcategory-gallery-image hierarchy, I think part of the confusion is that these three levels behave so inconsistently. Personally, my ideal hieracrchy would blur the distinctions between all four levels as much as possible - even allowing individual photo's at the top level! You might have two additional "styles" - one "Mac-Finder-like, the other PC-exlorer-like. (You could even snif the client platform and provide the "right" view for that user.) You might need an additional option for your slide show - whether to go "deep" or stay shallow. For the "elegant" style, if you click on a thumbnail that happens to represent a "folder", you'd find yourself viewing a new set of thumbnails, that's all. The "feature photo" for a gallery could be used whenever you need to treat a galler as a photo (e.g., sort-order by exif creation date).
I imagine your support staff must get more calls from us account holders than from browsers confused over the category-subcategory-gallery scheme.
If the user is sitting at a PC, its likely (s)he's got some familiarity with the hierachy of the file system. Sure out of 100 random people off the sidewalk if you place them in front of a computer you'll first have to train some of them to use a mouse, Just as if you send invitations to all your relatives for a party at your house, some will get lost trying to find it, there might be one gets into an accident, some can't drive. No reason to cancel the party.
Gary
2005->portraits->Jones Family
portraits->2005->Jones Family
Jones Family->2005
If the Jones family can find all their pictures, or just the ones with Mamma Jones and Sis Jones, or Daddy Jones and brother jones, or Just Mom and Dad, or just Bro and Sis (etc etc etc the combinations are limited only by the number of keywords you use) in a given year, simply and easily without having to know anything about how your site is set up then why push for a different category set up?
Now, I should say that I can't get the search to work for keywords like Don says they should, but assuming that can get fixed, why not just save the Joneses a bunch of time and make it easy for them to find exactly what they want in a hurry with keywords.
I could definitely be missing the point here but it just seems like this doesn't need to be that complicated. The way they have implemented the keywords amounts to categorization that is much more powerful and flexible than any hierarchical method could match.
I just don't think they implement the UI very well.
http://photos.mikelanestudios.com/