Zenfolio introduces batch gallery downloading

wellman

Very nice indeed. Any chance we might see the same from the Smug?

http://www.zenfolio.com/zf/news.aspx

Andy

Help me out here. Didn't you make a tool that does this ?

wellman

Andy wrote:

Help me out here. Didn't you make a tool that does this ?

Yes, but not as elegantly. AlbumFetcher is great for folks wanting to download multiple galleries at once, especially account owners. Putting up with the hassle of using a third-party app to accomplish this is worth it.

However, there are a lot of use cases where reliance on a third-party app is less favored. For example, if a wedding photographer elected to give his clients access to the full-size JPGs, a "Download All" button in the gallery which is integral to the site (and therefore easier and "more trustworthy") would be wonderful. Grandparents wanting to batch download pictures of the kiddos for their own uses fall into the same use case.

Just sayin...

Andy

wellman wrote:

Yes, but not as elegantly. AlbumFetcher is great for folks wanting to download multiple galleries at once, especially account owners. Putting up with the hassle of using a third-party app to accomplish this is worth it.

However, there are a lot of use cases where reliance on a third-party app is less favored. For example, if a wedding photographer elected to give his clients access to the full-size JPGs, a "Download All" button in the gallery which is integral to the site (and therefore easier and "more trustworthy") would be wonderful. Grandparents wanting to batch download pictures of the kiddos for their own uses fall into the same use case.

Just sayin...

Yup.

And our list is a country mile long of stuff folks want (demand!) so we're glad for album fetcher.

Funguyphoto

Agree!
I've been looking for this feature for a while now. As a user who is only interested in sharing photos this would be a welcome addition.

JW

rla1022

Is this available yet ?

Funguyphoto wrote:

I've been looking for this feature for a while now. As a user who is only interested in sharing photos this would be a welcome addition.

JW

In addition Phanfare has this feature. I'm trying to make this the central repo for all our pictures.

Malte

wellman wrote:

Very nice indeed. Any chance we might see the same from the Smug?

http://www.zenfolio.com/zf/news.aspx

Hmm, I requested that feature over there and it was implemented. Maybe I should request it here too?

+1

Malte

rla1022

Malte wrote:

Hmm, I requested that feature over there and it was implemented. Maybe I should request it here too?

+1

Malte

I agree, im sort of appalled by the solution's presented. I dont want to give my secure password to anyone , i dont care if your my sister or grandmother. I use the same password secured for everything in my password vault. My router, my severs, my computers, and my online banking. The only solution appears to be give people an app and my userid and password. Crazy solution. As much as i love smugmug, i am a prouser for the sole reason of having the custom domain name, this feature alone might cause me to not renew this year.

Cameron

rla1022 wrote:

I agree, im sort of appalled by the solution's presented. I dont want to give my secure password to anyone , i dont care if your my sister or grandmother. I use the same password secured for everything in my password vault. My router, my severs, my computers, and my online banking. The only solution appears to be give people an app and my userid and password. Crazy solution. As much as i love smugmug, i am a prouser for the sole reason of having the custom domain name, this feature alone might cause me to not renew this year.

FYI - you can have a custom domain at the power level as well - if that's the only pro feature you need, it's a much cheaper solution.

rla1022

Thanks for that

CSwinton wrote:

FYI - you can have a custom domain at the power level as well - if that's the only pro feature you need, it's a much cheaper solution.

I did not know that. When did that change occur ?

SamirD

rla1022 wrote:

I agree, im sort of appalled by the solution's presented. I dont want to give my secure password to anyone , i dont care if your my sister or grandmother. I use the same password secured for everything in my password vault. My router, my severs, my computers, and my online banking. The only solution appears to be give people an app and my userid and password. Crazy solution. As much as i love smugmug, i am a prouser for the sole reason of having the custom domain name, this feature alone might cause me to not renew this year.

But with SM placing themselves in the professional photo-sharing space, pros typically don't want their photos easily downloaded. Even when I shoot for family, I'm still a pro. I can remove enough of the security that they can download whatever they like, but I'd rather them link to the photos to my site than just batch download and upload them to facebook as their own. The Internet generation truly believe that right-click save=free to use however.

darryl

SamirD wrote:

But with SM placing themselves in the professional photo-sharing space, pros typically don't want their photos easily downloaded. Even when I shoot for family, I'm still a pro. I can remove enough of the security that they can download whatever they like, but I'd rather them link to the photos to my site than just batch download and upload them to facebook as their own. The Internet generation truly believe that right-click save=free to use however.

We are not asking for "Download All" to be the default on all galleries. At least that's not what I'm asking. It's just that for professionals that *are* selling their digital copies, it would be much easier on the customer (after they pay, of course) to click once to download a single .zip file, instead of 30 times for 30 jpegs.

I actually implemented something like this about 6 months ago using an external website. It was pretty kludgy (downloading the files from SmugMug to a temporary cache, then zipping them up and providing a link to the .zip), and the files got huge (because they were for *all* of a child's photos from the school year). We had archives that were easily upwards of 500MB or more, so they would take hours to download.

The bigger problems implementing this that I see are in the shopping cart. They would need to add an item for "Download All Photos In This Gallery", and then I guess serve up the .zip file from there? (I've never purchased a single digital download, so I don't know how that works.)

Because SmugMug doesn't offer a "Download All Photos In This Gallery" item for sale, my son's new school decided to go the old-school route. When parents paid by cash or check in the office, we would enable Originals and turn off protection and watermarks for their child's gallery. I also used jfriend's awesome "Download Image" button to make it easier for them to find the link as opposed to hovering over the photo and choosing Save.

SamirD

darryl wrote:

We are not asking for "Download All" to be the default on all galleries. At least that's not what I'm asking. It's just that for professionals that *are* selling their digital copies, it would be much easier on the customer (after they pay, of course) to click once to download a single .zip file, instead of 30 times for 30 jpegs.

I actually implemented something like this about 6 months ago using an external website. It was pretty kludgy (downloading the files from SmugMug to a temporary cache, then zipping them up and providing a link to the .zip), and the files got huge (because they were for *all* of a child's photos from the school year). We had archives that were easily upwards of 500MB or more, so they would take hours to download.

The bigger problems implementing this that I see are in the shopping cart. They would need to add an item for "Download All Photos In This Gallery", and then I guess serve up the .zip file from there? (I've never purchased a single digital download, so I don't know how that works.)

Because SmugMug doesn't offer a "Download All Photos In This Gallery" item for sale, my son's new school decided to go the old-school route. When parents paid by cash or check in the office, we would enable Originals and turn off protection and watermarks for their child's gallery. I also used jfriend's awesome "Download Image" button to make it easier for them to find the link as opposed to hovering over the photo and choosing Save.

I can see where you're coming from. The problem is actually two-fold. One is the resulting size of the download, and the second is preparing the download.

I think a good implementation of this would be to be able to add images to digitally download to the cart, then SM would zip them up and then deliver them to the customer either via a download link, or for large collections, mail CDs/DVDs. I'm not sure how the digital downloads currently work, so the first part of my thought process may already be in place.

But the easiest solution for this for now may actually be really low tech. Since you mention that once the parents have paid for a gallery, the originals are basically "released". Instead of serving them via SM, why not just give them a link to a web server that just has the files in a directory. As parents purchase the whole gallery, you copy that gallery to the server and email them the link. In fact, you can even just have a zip file for each gallery ready and only copy that file to the server when it is purchased. You could use Paypal for the payment methods and have a button in the gallery for it. Once the payment cleared in Paypal, you just email them the link and they have x amount of time to download it. Or to avoid the download issues all together, just make a CD for them. Just some thoughts amidst sleepiness...

darryl

Samir: In the most recent case, no child had more than 6-10 photos in their gallery, so clicking "Download Image" 10 times wasn't a huge burden. As I said, we simply had to flip a few switches in the customize gallery page and they were set.

I would've loved to put a PayPal button in the Album Description so that we could streamline the ordering of "all original images", but the school does not yet have a PayPal account setup.

We wanted to use SmugMug to host the photos because we are also selling prints and photo products at a markup to raise funds for the school. SmugMug does a fine job of letting parents proof the photos and order whatever they want.

It was our desire to offer a "bargain" on all the original images (as opposed to pricing them individually) that required a separate payment system.

SamirD

Ahhh...I'm starting to get more of a feel for your situation. Right-clicking 10 photos isn't bad, and if most sales are like that, the overhead of adding paypal and the fees won't be worth it.

You may be able to offer the bargin on originals when coupons are implemented. If each digital is say priced at $1 and you know you will always have a minimum of 5 images in a gallery, you can make a coupon for 10% off anything over $5. That may be one solution.

darryl

SamirD wrote:

Ahhh...I'm starting to get more of a feel for your situation. Right-clicking 10 photos isn't bad, and if most sales are like that, the overhead of adding paypal and the fees won't be worth it.

You may be able to offer the bargin on originals when coupons are implemented. If each digital is say priced at $1 and you know you will always have a minimum of 5 images in a gallery, you can make a coupon for 10% off anything over $5. That may be one solution.

Yeah I was chatting with somebody on the IRC about coupons being a possible solution for this problem.

rla1022

I guess we agree to dis-agree
If smugmug is placing themselves toward a more "professional" audience, then why even offer power user levels. Plain and simple this is a feature that is missing. It's on picasaweb and zenfolio. I like mysite for the customizability and the features that smug offers are truly great, but this is a key feature. I hate telling family that they have to click download possibly 60xs to just download a gallery of pictures from our recent trip. FYI... im a paying smugmug customer who currently uses a pro account ( which was recently pointed out i can get on a power account) just for the cname. Idont care what my family does with the images i upload.

darryl

Interesting that somebody tried to provide a web-based solution for bulk downloads from SmugMug: SmugTug

Alas, it's now gone, and I probably know why:

I created a site-specific solution for my son's preschool's SmugMug account, and it sucked, because you had to wait forever for photos to be transferred from SmugMug to my webhost, then it had to zip them, then you had to download the zip. Because it would take so long, someone would inevitably think it was dead and cancel, leaving me with like 500MB+ of photos taking up space, so then I had to have a clean-up script to periodically make sure there weren't stale files lying around counting against my quota. But I had to be careful not to clean up too often in case somebody just let it run all night, which you would have to do for huge downloads over a slow connection (or even a moderately slow connection).

SmugMug now offers a Bulk digital downloads option:

If you’ve priced digital downloads at a gallery or portfolio level, a new option appears when logged-out users click the buy button: Buy all digital downloads. It’s an easy way for customers to select a digital version of every photo in the gallery with a click.

So clearly they have the technology to zip up a bunch of files (OMGWTFBBQ! ;-) [Actually, I haven't confirmed that they actually ship you a zip file. Maybe you end up having to click Download 50 times.]

They just need to make that available for free. Maybe they're afraid of the bandwidth costs. :-/

jfriend

darryl wrote: »

Interesting that somebody tried to provide a web-based solution for bulk downloads from SmugMug: SmugTug

Alas, it's now gone, and I probably know why:

I created a site-specific solution for my son's preschool's SmugMug account, and it sucked, because you had to wait forever for photos to be transferred from SmugMug to my webhost, then it had to zip them, then you had to download the zip. Because it would take so long, someone would inevitably think it was dead and cancel, leaving me with like 500MB+ of photos taking up space, so then I had to have a clean-up script to periodically make sure there weren't stale files lying around counting against my quota. But I had to be careful not to clean up too often in case somebody just let it run all night, which you would have to do for huge downloads over a slow connection (or even a moderately slow connection).

SmugMug now offers a Bulk digital downloads option:



So clearly they have the technology to zip up a bunch of files (OMGWTFBBQ! ;-) [Actually, I haven't confirmed that they actually ship you a zip file. Maybe you end up having to click Download 50 times.]

They just need to make that available for free. Maybe they're afraid of the bandwidth costs. :-/

Yeah, I suspect it is kind of easy for people to abuse the bandwidth usage with the download gallery option if it's free. With no bandwidth limits and a desire to keep it that way, I'm willing to understand how some features might not be all we want them to be because it's too easy to abuse the bandwidth usage. On the other hand, maybe Smug just hasn't gotten to that feature yet. We have no way of knowing. My soccer parents would love that feature (I let them download high res originals one by one now). I get requests to manually make them a DVD of the whole gallery.

Andy

darryl wrote: »

They just need to make that available

Stay tuned.

darryl

Andy wrote: »

Stay tuned.

Always such a tease, Andy. :-)

Sheaf

darryl wrote: »

Always such a tease, Andy. :-)

Don't worry, I wouldn't tease you. Take a look at your gallery tools menu.

Malte

Sheaf wrote: »

Don't worry, I wouldn't tease you. Take a look at your gallery tools menu.

Zenfolio's implementation is avaliable to visitors as well, what's you guys' thinking on that?

Malte

Andy

Malte wrote: »

Zenfolio's implementation is avaliable to visitors as well, what's you guys' thinking on that?

Malte

We want to make baby steps in this regard. You, as owner, can simply send the zipfile link to anyone you like. The link is active for 14 days It's possible in the future we may allow direct for visitors, but we want to see customer reaction to this. It's dead-simple for you to simply forward the email we send you to the person that you want to have the gallery download.

Thanks, Malte!

denisegoldberg

Andy wrote: »

We want to make baby steps in this regard. You, as owner, can simply send the zipfile link to anyone you like. The link is active for 14 days It's possible in the future we may allow direct for visitors, but we want to see customer reaction to this. It's dead-simple for you to simply forward the email we send you to the person that you want to have the gallery download.

Is it safe to assume that if you extend this bulk download to visitors that there will be a way for us to disable that? And that the option would be OFF by default?

--- Denise

Andy

denisegoldberg wrote: »

Is it safe to assume that if you extend this bulk download to visitors that there will be a way for us to disable that? And that the option would be OFF by default?

--- Denise

Please see other thread, already answered
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=179603

denisegoldberg

Andy wrote: »

Please see other thread, already answered
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=179603

I understood that - but you answered a question (above) about saying that you might possibly add this ability for visitors in the future. And I do not want visitors to be able to download galleries from my site. So if you do decide to enable it, I'm requesting a global "do not allow" setting, and I'm requesting that be set to not allow downloads by visitors by default.

--- Denise

Andy

denisegoldberg wrote: »

I understood that - but you answered a question (above) about saying that you might possibly add this ability for visitors in the future. And I do not want visitors to be able to download galleries from my site. So if you do decide to enable it, I'm requesting a global "do not allow" setting, and I'm requesting that be set to not allow downloads by visitors by default.

--- Denise

Hi Denise, I answered this very question in the FAQs in the linked thread Let's carry on over there if I haven't been clear enough, thanks!

Sheaf

denisegoldberg wrote: »

Is it safe to assume that if you extend this bulk download to visitors that there will be a way for us to disable that? And that the option would be OFF by default?

--- Denise

Denise, would you expect it to be off by default if the gallery settings enable individual downloading of originals?

jfriend

Sheaf wrote: »

Denise, would you expect it to be off by default if the gallery settings enable individual downloading of originals?

I can't speak for Denise, but if I had originals enabled for downloading, I would expect bulk downloading to be enabled. My logic is that when originals are enabled for download, all images are available for download already. At that point, bulk download is already available via third party tools and Smugmug's new bulk download feature is just making something that is already possible more convenient.

If you don't want bulk downloading to be available, turn off originals. I can't see a legitimate reason for having a different setting for downloading originals one by one vs. downloading multiple originals at once because you can always get multiple originals by just downloading multiple individual ones or by using a 3rd party app to get multiple at once.

denisegoldberg

Sheaf wrote: »

Denise, would you expect it to be off by default if the gallery settings enable individual downloading of originals?

If originals are enabled I can accept individual downloading defaulting to on.

I would prefer there to be a site setting that can be set to indicate whether downloading should be enabled for someone other than the owner - but as I normally don't enable access to originals that would be acceptable (as long as no downloads are allowed if originals aren't enabled).

I would actually prefer there to be a setting that disables downloading from 3rd party apps when originals are blocked. I believe there are apps out there that can currently download the non-original-sized-images without a site login, and I've never liked that.

--- Denise