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Things SmugMug should really do better -- from a new user.
stone
Registered Users Posts: 4 Beginner grinner
Heya :-)
I recently got myself a Smugmug account and have been playing with it for a bit, uploading pictures, organizing things, trying out the various customization options, etc. Essentially, I like Smugmug. If only it was not for the really annoying parts, the annoying parts, and the plain missing parts -- let me elaborate -- maybe I have just not found the option yet, and you guys have a solution I am unaware of
Annoyances (careful, a big wall of text is incoming and may crit you
:
Now don't take this the wrong way, there are many, many things I really like. Your design is nifty, the galleries rock, things that are there do usually work, handling a decent amount of pictures and galleries is not a problem, the site is speedy and spiffy, there are solid foundations for future features, this forum rocks, the support answered in minutes, not hours, and come on, Amazon S3 + EC2 + Akamai are just cool things. Even though these annoyances exist, I am about to become a paying subscriber.
--stone
I recently got myself a Smugmug account and have been playing with it for a bit, uploading pictures, organizing things, trying out the various customization options, etc. Essentially, I like Smugmug. If only it was not for the really annoying parts, the annoying parts, and the plain missing parts -- let me elaborate -- maybe I have just not found the option yet, and you guys have a solution I am unaware of
Annoyances (careful, a big wall of text is incoming and may crit you
:- It is impossible to change the "Date Taken" for photos. Some of my files apparently were taken in 1969, others had the wrong time set in the camera, yet others were scanned and never had proper Date-Taken metadata fields in the JPEG. The only way to "fix" this is to download the picture, edit it in some software, then reupload it -- which is an utter waste of bandwidth and really, really annoying IMHO. I have not yet tried replacing a picture, though I imagine there will be some hassle with that as well if I do not want the URLs to change -- so if, in the future, I notice dates being wrong, I really can't change them at all unless I want to break external linking.
- The oft-repeated Category/Subcategory limit. I get that you guys want to keep it simple for visitors, and that your oft-repeated answer is that people won't buy pictures they cannot find (not that that's of importance to me, not being a professional photographer); This structure feels way too rigid to me, especially considering there are no such things as virtual galleries (which would really, really rock -- cherry-pick photos from unlisted galleries and make a virtual gallery out of the best ones -- or even just the ones you have no problem with all the world seeing). It seems to me an "easy" solution would be to have multiple island-roots. The first time I read about SmugIslands, I thought to myself "cool, I can make an island for my coworkes, for my friends, for my family, etc. -- but no, one account -- one island.
- Sharegroups. Sharegroups are good, nice, fun. Unfortunately, you do not have categories/subcategories in sharegroups. You do not get sharegroup-searching, sharegroup-keywords, etc, especially if you choose "unlisted" galleries. This seems wrong and somewhat lazy; if I want to share pictures of a wedding, a birthday, a party, or a trip with a select subset of people, I really, really would like them to be able to actually use the cool features Smugmug has -- but keyword-searching simply does not work. You have to expose the keywords to the world at large/all smuggers for search to reasonably work, and then the galleries ahve to be listed, too. This simply will not do; if I keyword pictures with the names of people, I may not want them to be found by all smuggers or google or other search engines -- simply because that is a wildly inappropriate invasion of privacy. It's fine if my intended audience can see those names, it is not fine to enter "surname_name" into google and find the pictures, at least without explicitly setting it so.
- Tagging. Tagging sort of works, unless you are crazy, foreign, and use things like umlauts (äöü, etc.) for things like names. I like being able to find pictures of people by simply typing in their name; but if I put in the keyword "Löwe", only "lwe" will be used, making the tag clouds utterly useless for those cases. Furthermore, if I set the keyword to john_löwe, a search for either john or löwe will not find it. According to a thread here on dgrin that is simply too hard a computer science problem to solve. I wonder how other people do it then -- heck, there are services offering reasonable regular expression support for billions of items, and tagsearching of the form WHERE a LIKE "%subtag%" (with optimizations, of course).
- People-tagging. It seems to me it would be a good idea to have some sort of way to tag people in pictures, apart from the tag system just discussed; for instance, it would be useful to be able to associate contact information with it, or a "people search" function. I was pretty disappointed in how little Smugmug helps with this kind of thing.
- Privacy. It appears that smugmug really, really wants you to put all your pictures up available to the public at large -- or stuff just won't work. Geotagging won't work in unlisted galleries, search won't work in sharegroups or unlisted categories, tagging won't work, category/subcategory in sharegroups won't work, etc. -- While this is fine if your primary use of smugmug is to show off your work to the world at large, personally I do not want all my pictures to be easily indexed by the world at large (robots.txt-"protection" or not). It may simply not be appropriate for my coworkers to see my computer gaming-related galleries and vice versa -- and it's certainly inappropriate to share pictures of people at parties when they do not neccessarily all want to be found on google -- but would still like the pictures shared amongst eachother. Privacy controls are a big part of that, and so far, smugmug really does not impress in that area.
- Geotagging. There is a bug report open for over 4 years now requesting bulk geotagging support. You guys said it was coming "soon", 4 years ago. Is this stuff simply not a priority at all ? I was also wondering as to why geotagging on unlisted galleries (or even passworded ones) was disallowed, citing the Google Maps API ToS -- which simply do not forbid it. Kudos to your support team, they let me know that the ToS at google were recently changed to allow just this and that it's coming soon. Well, hopefully not 4-years soon ;-)
- Bulk operations for viewers. I have many computer-literate friends I like to share pictures with. Some of them prefer to collect pictures in their own software or galleries (Picasa, menalto gallery, plain old folders, etc.). There seems to be no way to make it possible for these people to have a "download this gallery" button to simply send them a zip. They'd have to resort to specialized Smugmug album fetchers. Is something like this in the works, or will I have to roll my own ?
- Import from web; it would be nice for those migrating from elsewhere to be able to give SM a few URLs to fetch and put in a gallery, thereby bypassing the (usually slow) home internet connection. It could even have a few bells and whistles, like being able to import menalto gallery galleries automatically. I have looked at Migratr for this, but it quite simply either crashes or fetches SOME of the galleries missing others, or puts them all in one flat gallery -- and then it takes ages to upload all that stuff again, in any case.
- Some social tools would be nifty -- i.e. allow people to tag themselves in pictures (this would require some sort of login for people who do not have smugmug accounts -- while this service is nice, there are people who simply do not wish to pay $60 per year just to be able to add tags with their names to pictures they are in .
- Bug : the default theme in Opera 9.x at 1154x8something screen resolution puts the current image /below/ the gallery of thumbnails on the left leaving a big black space on the right. Firefox does not have this problem.
- A read only site-wide login would be nice -- i.e. Something exactly like the normal login (being able to look at all galleries, even unlisted, use all features, including tag search even on unlisted galleries, etc.), but without any rights to change photos, tags, galleries, etc. Use-case is quite simple : when on the road or at other computers, I do not neccessarily trust the computer I am using to log into smugmug to get a few pictures I need or want to show to people; there could be viruses on there, keyloggers, etc. -- especially in internet cafés; it would be nice to be able to use a read-only version of my real account for those cases and not live in fear of some yahoo messing with all those pictures, the painstakingly organized galleries, or even wipe it all out, outright.
- Better support for backup/restore. I like that you have faith in your infrastructure, but better be safe than sorry. It would be really nice to have a feature whereby I could easily download a backup containing everything related to a gallery/island, and later restore it, in one go. That way if disaster strikes, it does not hurt as much
- Rotation of pictures. This works, but is cumbersome when you need to rotate multiple pictures in different directions -- i.e have 100 pictures in a gallery, rotate 10 left, 10 right, mirror two, and rotate a few by 180°. For this you need to go to the rotate picture tool 4 times. There has got to be a better way. (This feature also sometimes "forgot" to rotate a few pictures I had selected, and once even reset the selection mid-way through; some bugs still lurk there.)
- Arranging of galleries/pictures. Drag & Drop would be nice for the gallery positioning. The current system, plainly spoken, sucks.
- "Default" Categories/Subcategories : Is there a way to trim this list ? I will never have any galleries in 80% of the default categories. They are just annoying when trying to select the right category for my next gallery. Why is it that I cannot cut this list down to what I really need/want ? (this would also be really, really useful for non-English speakers or non-English islands).
- Category/Subcategory character limits : I cannot use anything other than alphanumeric characters, numbers, dashes, and underscores in these. Why is that ? What is so bad about having a slash in there ? How about characters in foreign languages ? Heck, what about Kanji ?
- Localization. I know this is probably not high on your list, but bears thinking about; I know several people who would really enjoy Smugmug -- if only it was available in German. They will not be using an english-language service, no matter how elegant
- API consistency; I have not looked into this too far, but some of the scripts linked on your hacks-page simply do not work anymore. One of the gallery-to-smugmug uploaders, for instance, expected <ImageID> somewhere in the response. If possible, please don't change the semantics of API calls of "previous" versions of the API so that this does not happen -- granted it was only a few lines of code to change to make it work again, but that's only if you know Perl :P
- On your help pages, the links to contact a real human do NOT work in Opera. You need to use Firefox. Opera just displays an empty overlay.
- There seems to be no way to export a Google Earth kml of your gallery. Maybe I just have not found it yet. Then again, the geolocation features are just not up to par yet, anyway (i.e. bulk editing, as mentioned before
Now don't take this the wrong way, there are many, many things I really like. Your design is nifty, the galleries rock, things that are there do usually work, handling a decent amount of pictures and galleries is not a problem, the site is speedy and spiffy, there are solid foundations for future features, this forum rocks, the support answered in minutes, not hours, and come on, Amazon S3 + EC2 + Akamai are just cool things. Even though these annoyances exist, I am about to become a paying subscriber.
--stone
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open it directly in GoogleEarth. I ran into a problem other day that it only
grabbed the first 100 photos though.
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1. Date taken - you can edit this locally with programs like irfanview, or exifer. Sorry it can't be done on SmugMug
2. we'll have more deeper tree structure, hang in there.
3. UTF-8 in keywords is in test right now, hopefully won't be long.
4. Privacy w/ Geotagging - sorry, it's a google limitation. We take privacy VERY seriously and offer so many options. Public, private, passworded, SmugMug only, no Google, more. I'm sorry we don't impress you here, we've gone very far we believe! http://www.smugmug.com/help/private-photo-storage and http://www.smugmug.com/help/private-search-island
5. Bulk geotagging - Google won't allow it, sorry. We'd love to.
6. Download gallery for visitors? Give them AlbumFetcher: free here: http://wiki.smugmug.net/display/SmugMug/Hacks+and+Apps
7. Opera - we don't officially support it, sorry. It mostly works fine. Supported systems: http://www.smugmug.com/help/supported-systems
8. Can't trim our category list, I'm sorry.
9. Cat / Subcat name characters - sorry, it's a system issue, wish you could use other things. Soon we'll have more support there for UTF-8
Things I didn't touch on - thanks for the suggestions. I would love it if you'd put your most wanted ones here: http://smugmug.uservoice.com
thanks!
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"9. Cat / Subcat name characters - sorry, it's a system issue, wish you could use other things. Soon we'll have more support there for UTF-8
Is this a new system issue? When I first started setting up cats/subcats, I was able to use
to break my subcat display into two or more lines; and I was able to use parentheses as well. I went to create a new subcategory today and I could not set up my newest subcategory to mimic the others --i.e. Canadian Rockies (Aug-Sep 2009).
Call me crazy, but I like to have consistency in the way my gallery names, subcategories, and categories are displayed. I have no idea what UTF-8 means, so my question is, will we be able to use other than alpha-numeric characters sometime in the near future? Or is this a no-go (in which case I am going to have to revisit my naming conventions).
Yeah, that was the only way I found it to be possible; it's a somewhat annoying limitation -- it would be cool if that were to change at some point -- also since it will save you guys bandwidth
Thank you :-)
This is excellent news, thank you.
I have gone through the Google Maps API ToS and found no clause that would apply, maybe I am just looking wrong. I mailed support about it a few days ago; it seems the ToS were recently changed, so there just may no longer be such a ToS limitation
I'd be happy to talk to Google about it if I can only point my finger at a line in the ToS
Yeah, the options are there, what did not impress me was the fact that keyword/search/etc. did not work with unlisted galleries and/or Sharegroups; right now you can either share all your photos with everybody you know and have search for everybody, or you can search some of your photos with some people, and some other photos with some other people, but none of those will have search if those two sets of people are not isomorphic.
Essentially this would stop being an issue entirely if Sharegroups were more like SmugIslands, or you could have multiple Smugislands or even multiple passworded SmugIslands.
There is also an issue were I to want to share parts of my collection with the world at large, while keeping other parts to family and friends -- SmugIslands fail completely then, since I can either share everything or nothing with Google or other Smuggers (provided that I also want visitors to have meaningful keywords search and the like
I hope you see what I am getting at there -- it's not that it's impossible to lock down your pictures, it's that you get more of an all-or-nothing with respect to some of the really cool features on SM
Yeah, though from a usability-standpoint a "download as zip" would rock even AlbumFetcher's world (which is excellent).
If that itch become too big of one to ignore, I may try to just write a cool little zip-gateway for SM; I've always wanted to try generating zipfiles on the fly without local storage, and I haven't played with Haskell recently
Yeah, it works excellently for the most part, other than that image wrapping around to the next column (if that makes any sense). Happens on larger screensizes too (just tried it on a widescreen
More excellent news
I will once I get home
Thanks, so far it's been a fun experience (even though my wall of text may lead you to believe to the contrary; I am just trying to be verbose with the things I do not like so that they may be resolved in the future -- or discarded once understood and deemed to not be in the SM vision
--stone
I am similarly frustrated by this issue. Using a site like SmugMug to collaborate in building photo archives has potential. But not if users can't edit basic metadata like date taken and identifying the people and locations in a photo. Downloading, editing in a desktop program, then replacing the photo in smugmug doesn't make sense.
Roy
What would make the most sense is if you could use Facebook tags here.
You want SmuggLr, not Migratr.
As you mention -- there's two types of tagging -- keywords and people. I think Facebook-style tagging (people) would be cool, but I've found that Flickr-style tagging (keywords) even more compelling for what I've been using SmugMug for lately: setting up a site for my son's preschool to share photos. We're talking 10,000 photos of cute kids, with 80 sets of parents looking at them, but no way for them to easily tag the photos with kids' names (we don't even need little boxes like in Facebook). Without that, it's really hard to find photos of *your kid* or *your kid* with *some other specific kid*. (I came up with a crappy workaround using Comments, and people who logged in to upload were able to tag, so in the end we got maybe 50% of the photos tagged, which was hugely useful. But there were still thousands of photos left untagged, which is sad.)
I found a Greasemonkey script to trim down the list for your local Firefox instance. Works nicely, but yeah, Firefox-only. Don't know if there's a similar plug-in for Opera:
http://wittman.org/smugscopecustomsmugmugui/
Excellent post Stone! A really solid feature request list.
Malte
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=149501
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I'm also a Smugmug newbie. One addition to the excellent Stone's list. I was surprised that unlike PBase or Zenfolio Smugmug seems to lack such photo annotation feature as Caption (in Zen-speak) or Description (in PB-speak). All seems to be limited just to a title. It's ok for a title to show underneath each thumb in thumbnail view but when people open image preview I'd like to give them a more elaborate description besides a title. Am I missing something?
I would also like an option to see individual page hits when viewing gallery pages and image previews. PBase and Zenfolio have this and I found it to be quite helpful. I like time to time to browse my own images to see how my perceptions change and to gauge what attracts others. Especially when you have new galleries and want to see how they are doing and what photos get popular. Interestingly what I like isn't always what others seem to like. Naturally this individual hit count display should be optional and can be enabled for owner and user views separately.
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I know about it. And it sometimes handy to see statistics in a separate view. But I'm talking about normal gallery browsing - you navigate to some image and in its preview see how many hits, you browse to the galley and see how many hits. You can allow this to be visible only to yourself or to visitors also.
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