Multiple accounts - Feature request

JamesJWeg

I know that I have posted along these lines before, but I never got a real response, can we please have some answers this time. Can we get something rolling about ether a way to have multiple accounts for a single person, or multiple front ends for one account. The way it is now as I understand it if I got a second account for personal use (which I want) vs. one for Biz sales, I would have to provide a second e-mail address and would have to log out and back in to access the different accounts. Also I would not be able to move photo’s between them, upload to both at the same time etc. Then there is the issue of cost, would I have to pay full price for a second pro account just to better organize my photo’s by splitting of more personal ones? I am not saying that you would provide this for free, but can’t we at least get an annual discount? Yeah I can use my own code but that is only good for the first time, can’t we just get that amount off flat rate style? If you did it basically as multiple front ends then it would share a single traffic count/limit.



James.

Loadedagain

i also would like to bring my smugmug accounts together. right now they are all on different emails, and are a bit of a pain to keep track of. not too concerned about cost, as they are only basic accounts... but it'd be really nice to have them all on one email.

onethumb

JamesJWeg wrote:

I know that I have posted along these lines before, but I never got a real response, can we please have some answers this time. Can we get something rolling about ether a way to have multiple accounts for a single person, or multiple front ends for one account. The way it is now as I understand it if I got a second account for personal use (which I want) vs. one for Biz sales, I would have to provide a second e-mail address and would have to log out and back in to access the different accounts. Also I would not be able to move photo’s between them, upload to both at the same time etc. Then there is the issue of cost, would I have to pay full price for a second pro account just to better organize my photo’s by splitting of more personal ones? I am not saying that you would provide this for free, but can’t we at least get an annual discount? Yeah I can use my own code but that is only good for the first time, can’t we just get that amount off flat rate style? If you did it basically as multiple front ends then it would share a single traffic count/limit.



James.

I'll give it some thought, but my initial reaction is that the entire site would have to be re-written to support this, so I wouldn't hold your breath.

Wish I had a better answer for you, but accounts are designed to be distinct. Changing that design changes a lot of other assumptions.

Don

JamesJWeg

onethumb wrote:

I'll give it some thought, but my initial reaction is that the entire site would have to be re-written to support this, so I wouldn't hold your breath.

Wish I had a better answer for you, but accounts are designed to be distinct. Changing that design changes a lot of other assumptions.

Don

I suspect that you could save a lot of time by going at it from the angle of multiple front ends, or root's for pro accounts. That would be a lot easier to code than interconnecting accounts. I can see tying accounts could really mess up big time.

James.

winnjewett

I think that we are avoiding the real issue here. Baldy mentioned in another post that he uses multiple accounts in specific instances, such as the concours d'elegence. I believe if we work towards eliminating the need for multiple accounts, we wouldn't have to keep hacking our way towards a sensible solution. I had to buy another account so that I could tack on an additional folder level for a specific event.

I think that if we could solve two problems, we wouldn't need to integrate sm accounts:

1) A separate place for personal photos
2) An additional folder level for event photographers, and an easy way to change the look of a certain area.

-w

JamesJWeg

winnjewett wrote:

I think that we are avoiding the real issue here. Baldy mentioned in another post that he uses multiple accounts in specific instances, such as the concours d'elegence. I believe if we work towards eliminating the need for multiple accounts, we wouldn't have to keep hacking our way towards a sensible solution. I had to buy another account so that I could tack on an additional folder level for a specific event.

I think that if we could solve two problems, we wouldn't need to integrate sm accounts:

1) A separate place for personal photos
2) An additional folder level for event photographers, and an easy way to change the look of a certain area.

-w

Wouldn't the ability to build seperate front end's do just that without adding a folder level?

James.

jfriend

A vote for sub-sites for event photography

JamesJWeg wrote:

Wouldn't the ability to build seperate front end's do just that without adding a folder level?

James.

In previous discussions on this topic I've heard a concern by smugmug staff that they need to make sure that multiple users can't use the same account (but only pay for one account). Since storage is unlimited, I can understand that concern if they allow completely separate "sub-sites" to be presented from the same account.

At the same time, I frequently do event photography (sharing 300-1000 photos with hundreds of people) and fully understand and relate to the desire to be able to present an event as "it's own virtual site" without visual links to other events or to my family photos. When I take pics for the school talent show and share them with the entire school, I don't want those viewers to see my family pics as part of the same site.

I've come pretty close to this today with custom categories. The loose ends today when using a custom category are:

1) The breadcrumbs offer a link to the top level of my account. I'd like to hide that link, but the event is often composed of multiple galleries so I don't want all breadcrumbing off, just the top part that takes you to my home page.

2) Search is scoped to my whole site, not to a category.

3) There's no effective way to use keywords except as scoped to the whole site. I'd love to be able to use keywords scoped to a particular category.

4) Many of my events must be password protected (child privacy) and keywords can't be used in a password protected scope.

Other than that, we're pretty close. Item 1) is way more important than the other items.

There are other things that smugmug has gotten "right" in this regard. My favorite feature is that if you set up a whole bunch of galleries with the same password (as I do for all the galleries in an event), then the viewer only has to enter the password once for all the galleries with the same pwd. This effectively gives me password controlled custom categories which is great for event photography.

Also templates make it a lot easier to set up multiple galleries all with the same properties - again useful for event photography with multiple galleries.

Also, I love that you can still feature a photo to be the thumb for the gallery, even if your gallery is password protected. This substantially improves the look of a category full of password protected galleries. This was a tip I learned here.

And the APIs that Star*Explorer is built on enable me to configure hundreds of photo uploads across multiple galleries in the event and walk away and have it upload unattended.

So ... while we will always want more, you've gotten many things right too.

--John

JamesJWeg

I think the solution to preventing major sub-leasing type problems with the idea of multiple front ends would be to limit it to say two or three from ends, or better yet make it a pay option. I wouldn' blink over paying as much for an extra front end as a basic account, thus it would be just as cheap for said person to get thier own account and not share your bandwidth. It's a fine line, I understand both sides. Smugmug dosn't want to, and should not allow sub-leasing, too many problems, legal issues most likly as large as money. At the same time many people like me are going to have billy-bob friend/family who wants a place to throw a few pics, and often these people will eventually get thier own account because they as already familar with SM. Those of us who want personal vs biz sites are the larger issue. And yes SM has given us a lot and I don't forget that, but still we collectivly pay the bills.

James.