Small changes to eliminate lots of tedium
rolette
Registered Users Posts: 223 Major grins
1) Can we please get an option to disable auto-generation of keywords from filenames? It gets really old to have to edit keywords after every upload to clear them out. Probably the #1 thing that frustrates me more and more over time is the refusal by SM to leave my keywords alone.
Before you suggest it, no, it is still not a reasonable work-around to leave the generic filename on my photos.
This request has been made by several folks for a long time (at least as for a couple of years now). I know there are folks that like the current behavior. The rest of us would really like either a global or per gallery option to disable it.
2) Under the Tools menu, is there any chance you could move the "Crop Thumbnail" up one level in the menu structure? This is a minor one, but ever since the menu rework a few months back, this is just slower than it used to be when I need to twiddle several thumbnails.
I thought that the updated crop tool might be a better path than digging through the menus, but it doesn't help. Saving a cropped thumbnail takes way too long to do unless you have to edit the thumbnail. Since there's no way to see the current thumbnail while in the crop tool, that means I end up going back to the gallery after saving each thumbnail.
Between the extra menu depth and the extra clicks required because of the updated crop tool, workflow for editing thumbnails is longer than ever.
3) One more cleanup for the Crop Thumbnail tool: the thumbnail ratio should default to 1:1 for galleries that are configured for square thumbs.
When using square thumbs, I generally have to adjust the thumbnail on 40-60% of my pics, so fixing (2) and (3) would speed up my workflow considerably (at least the part that happens in SM).
None of these changes are new requests. They should be relatively small to implement and would remove most of the areas of tedium from how I use SmugMug.
Thanks,
Jay
Before you suggest it, no, it is still not a reasonable work-around to leave the generic filename on my photos.
This request has been made by several folks for a long time (at least as for a couple of years now). I know there are folks that like the current behavior. The rest of us would really like either a global or per gallery option to disable it.
2) Under the Tools menu, is there any chance you could move the "Crop Thumbnail" up one level in the menu structure? This is a minor one, but ever since the menu rework a few months back, this is just slower than it used to be when I need to twiddle several thumbnails.
I thought that the updated crop tool might be a better path than digging through the menus, but it doesn't help. Saving a cropped thumbnail takes way too long to do unless you have to edit the thumbnail. Since there's no way to see the current thumbnail while in the crop tool, that means I end up going back to the gallery after saving each thumbnail.
Between the extra menu depth and the extra clicks required because of the updated crop tool, workflow for editing thumbnails is longer than ever.
3) One more cleanup for the Crop Thumbnail tool: the thumbnail ratio should default to 1:1 for galleries that are configured for square thumbs.
When using square thumbs, I generally have to adjust the thumbnail on 40-60% of my pics, so fixing (2) and (3) would speed up my workflow considerably (at least the part that happens in SM).
None of these changes are new requests. They should be relatively small to implement and would remove most of the areas of tedium from how I use SmugMug.
Thanks,
Jay
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Crop tool - you mean, tools>this photo>crop? you can go from photo to photo....
defaulting to square 1:1 we'll try!
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Yeah, I understand that. That's why I asked for an option to disable it instead of just "fixing" it.
Pretty sure that menu item is for cropping the photo, not the thumbnail, right? Specifically, I mean Tools>This Photo>More>Crop Thumbnail. I'd like to see the "Crop Thumbnail" menu item move up a level so it is under "This Photo" rather than buried under the "More" menu.
Thanks!
Jay
I'm with you on this one Jay. It is really, really annoying to go to all the trouble to accurately keyword your photos and then have Smugmug come along and add a bunch of junk keywords that they grabbed out of my generic filename and add them to every single photo. Further, they are different for every single photo so they are impossible to remove in bulk keyword functions.
They say they will eventually do something about it, but it has been soooooooooooooo long ago that we first brought this to their attention and nothing has been released that they apparently don't think it's a very important thing to offer us.
It's a total cop-out to say that some people want it exactly the way it is without acknowledging that what it does now is just unacceptable to some of us. I'm really tired of that answer.
Andy, I know someone was actually working on this 9 months ago (he asked me some questions about how it should work). I wish you guys would just prioritize this high enough to actually finish it and release it. It seems some things get started and just take forever to actually get released.
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1) For first thumbnail, select Tools/Photo/Crop Thumbnail
2) Select 1:1
3) Crop Thumbnail
4) _Before_Saving_ middle-click on the right-arrow (to open the next image in a new tab)
5) Save cropped thumbnail
6) Open new tab
7) Repeat from stage 2)
8) Close all of the tabs.
Sorry, but why does the updated crop tool require more clicks for you or more time?
Previous Thumb cropping:
1) Navigate to photo in gallery
2) Tools > This Photo More > Crop Thumbnail
3) Adjust crop.
4) Click "Save".
5) Wait for save to finish.
6) Click "back to gallery"
7) Navigate to new photo in the gallery.
8) Tools > This Photo More > Crop Thumbnail .
Updated thumbnail cropping:
1) Navigate to photo in gallery
2) Tools > This Photo More > Crop Thumbnail
3) Adjust crop.
4) Click "Save".
5) Wait for save to finish.
6) Navigate to new photo on the tool page.
Seems faster to me?
-Anne
Hi Anne,
Unfortunately, even with the updated crop tool, I still end up having to do the "back to the gallery" two-step. The "why" is a combination of 2 things:
1) When navigating from photo to photo within the crop tool, you can't see what the current thumbnail crop is.
2) Saving thumbnail crops is sloooow, so it isn't practical to change them unless you really need to.
If the tool would show the current thumbnail crop, it would help eliminate the back and forth stuff.
Any idea why saving thumbnail crops is so slow? It seems like this step could be sped up tremendously for users if clicking Save Crop just posted a message with the photo id and the 2 coordinate pairs for the thumbnail to a queue. The actual thumbnail generation/update could be handle async.
Just an idea...
Jay
This is the slow part for me. It takes around 20-30 seconds for the save to finish. If I am trying to crop thumbnails in a gallery of 50 photos, then this is over quarter of an hour of waiting.
Which is exactly why SmugMug needs to make the executive decision that this "feature" is a bad idea. It pollutes your keywords. I have done some keyword searches on smugmug and i'll often find huge numbers of completely unrelated pictures because an entire set had certain words in their filenames. With the huge number of photos on smugmug, I bet there are hundreds of thousands of errant, useless keywords in your database.
Keywords should be meaningful and tagged on purpose.
I support dropping the "feature" or at the very least making it optional.
Dave
The Arrange Photos tool does not arrange by filename correctly. I have lately been using standard canon filenames... IMG_1234.jpg, etc. I can successfully arrange the entire gallery by filenames using gallery customization, but the arrange tool fails to sort by filenames. When I choose to sort by filenames, nothing changes. This is a real annoyance for me because I often find that sorting by date fails for burst shots. My camera shoots at 6.3 frames per second, so the time in the exif can be exactly the same (to the second) for a few pictures. For whatever reason, smugmug usually gets the order wrong when sorted by date.
I wish the arrange tool allowed two simultaneous types of sorts... first by date, then by filename. If two images have identical dates, it should sort them alphabetically (or numerically).
I wish new galleries could be added to the top of a category/subcategory instead of the bottom by default. That's the way I want it sorted, so now every time I add a new gallery (every week), I need to move it to the top.
Speaking of arranging galleries, that tool needs a big update. PLEASE at least get rid of the error message that pops up if you try to click on a gallery before all the thumbnails have loaded. Sometimes it takes a long time for all the thumbnails to load. I just want to move the last gallery to the beginning of the list. I don't need to see thumbnails for that. But I am forced to wait until all the thumbnails have loaded. Very annoying. Also, I often find that arranging galleries fails. Especially when the gallery I try to move to the top is empty. It often takes two or three tries to get the arrangement to stick.
Please add a "newest galleries" feature to the homepage. I use featured galleries for this. I used some customization to change the name "featured" to "newest" so it looks fine, but it means I need to do a lot of steps every time I add a new gallery. First I go to featured gallery #1. Tools -> don't feature gallery. Then Tools -> Feature Gallery, and set it to #2. Then I go to the new gallery I just created and Tools -> feature gallery, and set it to #1. A lot of work to just show people that I added one new gallery.
Speakling of featuring galleries, maybe I'm the only one, but I'd like to be able to feature empty galleries. Why? Simply because I add new galleries weekly and I like to set things up ahead of time. I use the picasa uploader. I edit my files, then create a new gallery, then begin the upload. While the files are uploading, I arrange galleries to move the new gallery to the top of the list and I'd like to be able to feature the new gallery so as soon as files appear, it's ready to go on my homepage. That way I can go to bed while the files upload and when I wake up the next morning, everything is up and running.
To do that, I need access to the Tools in an empty gallery. I can work around it, but it takes a lot of steps and copying and pasting to feature an empty gallery.
Thanks for listening to me whine!
Dave
I'm surprised that it's quite so tedious. With judicious use of a multi-tab browser, you could probably remove all of the automatic keywords within a minute or two.
Here's what the bulk keyword screen looks like when this problem exists.
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Related to this, there's a seemingly random problem where I'll add a set of keywords in bulk & they'll end up with quotes around them. Then I have to do a second step of removing quotes. Not a big deal now & then, but after it happens on multiple galleries a bunch of times, I wish I knew how to stop it.
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I see - you want to keep _some_ of the keywords that smugmug auto-generates, but not others...
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I strongly agree. I put a lot of effort into putting proper keywords on my photos before uploading, and it doesn't make sense that I have to go and clean up the keywords after uploading. As other users have mentioned, if half the users want this feature, it should be an option.
SmugMug's implementation of keywords is excellent, but I have to be able to trust that it uses ONLY the keywords that I've provided.
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I agree with every one of Jay's suggestions.
Although I'm an amateur who uploads very few photos compared to many others, my time is nevertheless just as important and could be spent doing other things instead of removing extraneous keywords, adjusting thumbnails using a tedious process, and working around things such as where Caption text is pulled from (this is what's discussed in the referenced thread).
Brent
The recent UTF-8 keywords release included an under the hood rewrite of our keyword processing logic. And it was the 1st phase of general keywording improvements, the next is an account level setting to enable/disable filename keywording.
The 3rd and final phase of improvements, will allow users control over what is and isn't allowed from with respect to filename keywording using a user definable set of rules/filters.
Cheers,
David
SmugMug API Developer
My Photos
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A possible 4th and really final phase of improvements would be an account level setting to enable/disable updating/synchronizing keywords and caption in the IPTC when downloading the original photo from SM back to the local computer.
cheers,
Nick.
Nick.
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my Smugmug site: here
Malte
I really think you tend to over simplify things, you have no complete idea how hard some things are - but don't get me wrong for a nano-second! WE LOVE your passion and input!
That said, there will be a little something extra in your holiday stocking this season, if you can be patient a little while longer, because we love to get your feedback and we really do listen to you
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Wouldn't this be cool to have it be a user option?
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And while I'm at it and doing further testing: same goes for the EXIF/GPS info fields when the photo was GEO tagged in SM. I'm not sure yet about the thumbnail but would be surprised if that was updated after changing/cropping it in SM.
Like Malte wrote, in the end, supporting data portability means prevailing through time!
cheers,
Nick.
Nick.
my equipment: Canon 5D2, 7D, full list here
my Smugmug site: here
Yes Andy, that's what we want and the way to make almost everyone happy.
The point of some posters here that doesn't seem to be understood very well, is a principle one. Keywords are a powerful tool. But when the keyword lists become polluted with nonsense keywords that are auto-generated, the usefulness of keywords quickly vanishes. Even if some keep their keyword lists tight and clean, if others don't, the usefulness still degrades for keywords searches over all-of-SM, Google etc. That is why they advocate to not auto-generate at all and only allow keywords added on purpose on SM or, before upload, with another app that saves them in the IPTC fields.
I agree with those posters but I also know that their Utopian goal is unobtainable in the real world, so I settle for just keeping my keyword list clean, making a small island of keyword-sanity.
When those "virtual galleries" come on-line, I suppose there will be a keyword-driven feature like almost possible already. I think that this new feature will make many members more aware of their keywords, hopefully cleaning up the mess ;-)
cheers,
Nick.
Nick.
my equipment: Canon 5D2, 7D, full list here
my Smugmug site: here
That's a huge improvement, but I'm fairly convinced that even having the option is a bad idea (in general). I'll shut that feature off so it won't affect me anymore, but I do believe many people will (possibly unknowingly) leave it turned on and continue to generate garbage in smugmug's keyword list. No big deal for the most part, until you want to search for something and get hundreds or thousands of junk results. Turning the feature off completely seems like a reasonable thing to do. You supply a decent keywording tool... you encourage people to use it. Why would you want to fill it with computer-generated trash?
But I am glad you guys are going to make it optional! I hope it's implemented in a way that's easy to use with all uploaders (ie site-wide setting as opposed to a gallery setting). I'm guessing it'll be part of gallery settings. If it defaults to on, I'd imagine you'll see a lot of people using it without realizing.
Dave
You are about to release a solution to a long running complaint of mine. I've already acknowledged (to devbobo in this thread) that I'm excited it's finally coming.
Then, you decide to jump into the thread and challenge a two month old posting of mine to essentially tell me I was wrong two months ago and this couldn't have been fixed easily. What are you possibly gaining by doing that other than pissing me off exactly when I'm about to be happy. It's like you have some sort of axe to grind with me and you just have to get the last zinger in at the exact moment that you could have had me pleased. That does not seem like intelligent customer relations, especially when you know that I don't typically just sit there and take challenges like that.
Since you've already coded a solution, it would be pointless for me to continue this argument, but I do wonder why you felt you had to jump in with a last second zinger to me responding to a two month old post.
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There now boys, play nice.
Could it have been that Andy got in late and didn't notice the datestamps?
My impression is that Andy, like me, has the highest respect for you John. You're one of the smartest guys here and you're always helpful and curtious. You're also a guy who knows what he wants and are vocal about it, nothing wrong with that. I think Andy is just responding to your banter, really. I think you're reading something into it that isn't there.
Malte