Alphabetic order of galleries

Pactus45

Hi !
When I want to move photos in numerous different galleries, the choice of galleries isn't in alphabetic order... :scratch
Why ? How can I change this ?
Thank you

denisegoldberg

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be anything that can be done to change the gallery order in the "move" list. It appears (to me) that the sequence of the list is by category. I don't know if that helps at all...

I'd love to see the list arranged either alphabetically or alphabetically within category with open and close links to expose or not expose the gallery list for each category. Not there right now though...

--- Denise

phototristan

denisegoldberg wrote:

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be anything that can be done to change the gallery order in the "move" list. It appears (to me) that the sequence of the list is by category. I don't know if that helps at all...

I'd love to see the list arranged either alphabetically or alphabetically within category with open and close links to expose or not expose the gallery list for each category. Not there right now though...

--- Denise

The order of the listing is the most recently edited/created gallery is at the top.

denisegoldberg

phototristan wrote:

The order of the listing is the most recently edited/created gallery is at the top.

Thanks for the explanation. That helps - but it would be much better if the order was alphabetic.

--- Denise

SamirD

denisegoldberg wrote:

Thanks for the explanation. That helps - but it would be much better if the order was alphabetic.

--- Denise

I'll second this. I DREAD using any tools that have a dropdown box for the galleries. If I didn't create it recently, I can't really find it! (Note: I have a lot of galleries. )

jfriend

SamirD wrote:

I'll second this. I DREAD using any tools that have a dropdown box for the galleries. If I didn't create it recently, I can't really find it! (Note: I have a lot of galleries. )

Doing something to make management of galleries practical, when you have hundreds of galleries has been requested with great urgency for multiple years now. It's an absolute disaster to try to do a very simple operation like move a photo from one gallery to another when you have 600 galleries, many with the same name (names like "Highlights", "Team" and "Coaches") which are common gallery names in many of my categories. It's so much of a disaster just to move an image, that I often find it less painful to just re-upload the image to the new gallery because the move function is so worthless as soon as you have a decent number of galleries.

Smugmug has simply not made it a priority to make it easy to use the management tools when you have lots of galleries. As a long time customer with two pro accounts who has lots of galleries in both accounts, I'm very disappointed that this need for their most active customers is so sorely overlooked and not prioritized. They clearly have the code already to offer a nice hierarchical list (it's there in the Add Photos button already) if they just decided it mattered.

I doubt this is true, but sometimes it feels like they don't really want to make it easy for those of us with lots of galleries/photos since they choose to do things that are many times more work than this for newbie users (like Easy Customizer, cards, Picnik, etc...) while continuing to ignore this fundamental usability issue for the management tools.

SamirD

jfriend wrote:

Doing something to make management of galleries practical, when you have hundreds of galleries has been requested with great urgency for multiple years now. It's an absolute disaster to try to do a very simple operation like move a photo from one gallery to another when you have 600 galleries, many with the same name (names like "Highlights", "Team" and "Coaches") which are common gallery names in many of my categories. It's so much of a disaster just to move an image, that I often find it less painful to just re-upload the image to the new gallery because the move function is so worthless as soon as you have a decent number of galleries.

Smugmug has simply not made it a priority to make it easy to use the management tools when you have lots of galleries. As a long time customer with two pro accounts who has lots of galleries in both accounts, I'm very disappointed that this need for their most active customers is so sorely overlooked and not prioritized. They clearly have the code already to offer a nice hierarchical list (it's there in the Add Photos button already) if they just decided it mattered.

I doubt this is true, but sometimes it feels like they don't really want to make it easy for those of us with lots of galleries/photos since they choose to do things that are many times more work than this for newbie users (like Easy Customizer, cards, Picnik, etc...) while continuing to ignore this fundamental usability issue for the management tools.

All I can say is that SM is a business and I think those of us on the larger side of number of galleries are more of a loss-leader than profit center. If that is the case, I can see why tools aren't a priority for us--we're not their bread and butter.

But that being said, SM seems to keep an ear open rather than completely turn the cheek with a "stay if you want to stay, go if you want to go" attitude. This is a large factor for me since customer service and customer relations aren't usually the strong point of many online-based businesses.

jfriend

SamirD wrote:

All I can say is that SM is a business and I think those of us on the larger side of number of galleries are more of a loss-leader than profit center. If that is the case, I can see why tools aren't a priority for us--we're not their bread and butter.

But that being said, SM seems to keep an ear open rather than completely turn the cheek with a "stay if you want to stay, go if you want to go" attitude. This is a large factor for me since customer service and customer relations aren't usually the strong point of many online-based businesses.

Many of the heavy users are also some of the biggest supporters so that has to be factored in somehow. My individual account may be a money loser by itself, but try factoring in my 290 referrals and contributions to the community here and the equation works out pretty differently for their business.

Further, I think every customer has the right to demand that the tools can easily distinguish between two galleries in different categories that are both named "Highlights". That's simply a design oversight that has been known for at least three years and never prioritized such that anyone fixes it. And, it's even worse because the consequences of accidentally moving an image to the wrong gallery are disastrous. When you discover an image you were moving didn't go into the right gallery, try finding where it did go to correct the issue. It could take hours to find it.

If you value the usability of your service, then seriously poor usability things in existing functionality should get prioritized high enough that they get addressed in a reasonable time frame (e.g. next major release), even if it means pushing out some newer features. That's how a service that highly prioritizes usability for all its customers does things. We're not talking about a new feature here. We're talking about an existing feature that doesn't work in some circumstances and the fix is known.

SamirD

jfriend wrote:

Many of the heavy users are also some of the biggest supporters so that has to be factored in somehow. My individual account may be a money loser by itself, but try factoring in my 290 referrals and contributions to the community here and the equation works out pretty differently for their business.

Further, I think every customer has the right to demand that the tools can easily distinguish between two galleries in different categories that are both named "Highlights". That's simply a design oversight that has been known for at least three years and never prioritized such that anyone fixes it. And, it's even worse because the consequences of accidentally moving an image to the wrong gallery are disastrous. When you discover an image you were moving didn't go into the right gallery, try finding where it did go to correct the issue. It could take hours to find it.

If you value the usability of your service, then seriously poor usability things in existing functionality should get prioritized high enough that they get addressed in a reasonable time frame (e.g. next major release), even if it means pushing out some newer features. That's how a service that highly prioritizes usability for all its customers does things. We're not talking about a new feature here. We're talking about an existing feature that doesn't work in some circumstances and the fix is known.

I agree that the business aspect needs to be factored in somehow, but when talking about tools, I've NEEDED ftp uploading capability for years now. Many of the other pros need it too. It's just not fitting with the business model on some level we can't see.

At least that's what I'm going to tell myself. If I knew that I was being deliberately ignored, I'd research even more for a new service to move to.

jfriend

SamirD wrote:

I agree that the business aspect needs to be factored in somehow, but when talking about tools, I've NEEDED ftp uploading capability for years now. Many of the other pros need it too. It's just not fitting with the business model on some level we can't see.

At least that's what I'm going to tell myself. If I knew that I was being deliberately ignored, I'd research even more for a new service to move to.

I don't know why there hasn't been much engagement on even why ftp isn't being considered so it's hard to tell whether they have something against it or just don't understand why it's needed given all the other API access to uploading.

Personally FTP isn't important to me as StarExplorer serves my needs for large unattended, reliable uploads to multiple galleries better than an FTP client would and we probably shouldn't turn this thread into an FTP discussion (feel free to start a new thread if you want to).

SamirD

jfriend wrote:

I don't know why there hasn't been much engagement on even why ftp isn't being considered so it's hard to tell whether they have something against it or just don't understand why it's needed given all the other API access to uploading.

Personally FTP isn't important to me as StarExplorer serves my needs for large unattended, reliable uploads to multiple galleries better than an FTP client would and we probably shouldn't turn this thread into an FTP discussion (feel free to start a new thread if you want to).

And I think you've hinted at the heart of the issue here--the moving tool isn't critical for me, ftp is. The moving tools is critical for you while ftp isn't. Managing all these user demands and the demands of making a profit at SM are what guides all the decisions. And we'll never know the inner workings of all that.

You better than anyone knows the power of finding workarounds. Luckily, SM's design responds well to that.

What about using the gallery name+nicename in the dropdown listing? We have to have unique nicenames for each gallery. Alphabetizing them isn't that hard as you know...

phototristan

Rest assured, we listen to customer feedback and are constantly working on improvements to our interface. (There once was even a time when that list was totally random and not in any particular order at all!)

jfriend

SamirD wrote:

And I think you've hinted at the heart of the issue here--the moving tool isn't critical for me, ftp is. The moving tools is critical for you while ftp isn't. Managing all these user demands and the demands of making a profit at SM are what guides all the decisions. And we'll never know the inner workings of all that.

You better than anyone knows the power of finding workarounds. Luckily, SM's design responds well to that.

What about using the gallery name+nicename in the dropdown listing? We have to have unique nicenames for each gallery. Alphabetizing them isn't that hard as you know...

Nicenames aren't globally unique, only unique to the category or sub-category so that doesn't really help. I don't want to have to manually make nicenames be globally unique as that would be quite a pain especially since 600 of them were auto-generated already by Smugmug.

jfriend

SamirD wrote:

And I think you've hinted at the heart of the issue here--the moving tool isn't critical for me, ftp is. The moving tools is critical for you while ftp isn't. Managing all these user demands and the demands of making a profit at SM are what guides all the decisions.

There is a subtle difference here though. You're asking for a completely new feature. I'm asking to make an existing feature work when you have lots of galleries, some with the same name. In that circumstance which is a perfectly normal occurrence for someone who shoots many sports teams like I do, an existing feature is just simply broken and unusable. My argument was that broken usability SHOULD get prioritized higher than new features and should get addressed in a timely fashion. That is clearly not happening for this issue.

SamirD

jfriend wrote:

Nicenames aren't globally unique, only unique to the category or sub-category so that doesn't really help.

Ahh...yes, I forgot about that.

SamirD

jfriend wrote:

There is a subtle difference here though. You're asking for a completely new feature. I'm asking to make an existing feature work when you have lots of galleries, some with the same name. In that circumstance which is a perfectly normal occurrence for someone who shoots many sports teams like I do, an existing feature is just simply broken and unusable. My argument was that broken usability SHOULD get prioritized higher than new features and should get addressed in a timely fashion. That is clearly not happening for this issue.

But as a programmer, you know that sometimes fixing a broken issue will require a complete re-write of the logic and an overhaul, which is just as taxing as adding a new feature.

What about gallery name+gallery number? It's not the most elegant solution, but it would give you an idea which gallery is which since gallery numbers are assigned in creation order.

jfriend

SamirD wrote:

But as a programmer, you know that sometimes fixing a broken issue will require a complete re-write of the logic and an overhaul, which is just as taxing as adding a new feature.

What about gallery name+gallery number? It's not the most elegant solution, but it would give you an idea which gallery is which since gallery numbers are assigned in creation order.

This isn't one of those issues. I'm also not discussing how much work it is. I'm discussing what priority it should be given. I am arguing that existing features with large usability problems for at least some users should be given a decent enough priority that it gets addressed in the next major release. If there are a lot of these issues, that may necessitate prioritizing it ahead of some new features. As it is this is clearly not happening because the issue has been known and complained about for several years with no solution implemented.

It's also not hard to fix (though that isn't my argument here). Without even changing the design, instead of putting only the gallery name in the list, all they have to do is put the category and subcategory and gallery name in the list so we can see the whole path and then sort the list by category/subcategory. No design change required, just put more text into the darn list box.

They have done a much more elegant solution than that in the Add Photos dialog that presents a hierarchical menu letting you pick category, subcategory, then gallery so they even have the code available for the elegant solution too if they wanted to go that route too.

SamirD

jfriend wrote:

Without even changing the design, instead of putting only the gallery name in the list, all they have to do is put the category and subcategory and gallery name in the list so we can see the whole path and then sort the list by category/subcategory. No design change required, just put more text into the darn list box.

They have done a much more elegant solution than that in the Add Photos dialog that presents a hierarchical menu letting you pick category, subcategory, then gallery so they even have the code available for the elegant solution too if they wanted to go that route too.

Well, these are all very quick and effective solutions. Maybe all it took was someone putting this solution right in front of them. UI design isn't easy, and it can be really hard to know what the perfect solution is unless you use it daily.