Please do let me know. I felt confident that we had most of this resolved. But, as I said there may still be a few corner cases.
Created about 40 smart galleries ( after keywording the photos)... Obviously, I had to enter my rules and save them. Came back later after uploading and keywording new photos and I have to go to each smart gallery and hit the refresh button and then save to get the new pics to show up in the smart gallery. Smart galleries are in Show Choir / 2011 Show Choirs - scroll down to the individual performer galleries
Created about 40 smart galleries ( after keywording the photos)... Obviously, I had to enter my rules and save them. Came back later after uploading and keywording new photos and I have to go to each smart gallery and hit the refresh button and then save to get the new pics to show up in the smart gallery. Smart galleries are in Show Choir / 2011 Show Choirs - scroll down to the individual performer galleries
I'm going to be doing this a lot it looks like.
Can you give me details about how you uploaded and when/how the keywords were added?
Can you give me details about how you uploaded and when/how the keywords were added?
1) uploaded the photos using "Send to Smugmug" From Shahine
2) added keywords to photos by going to the source gallery, selecting tools, then caption/keyword
3) Created smart galleries and rules, then clicked the "Click to refresh preview" button and saved.
4) On a separate occasion, added more photos to a new source gallery (same upload method), added keywords (same method) and the new photos do not show up in the smart galleries until I go to the individual smart galleries, one by one, via settings, make this gallery smarter, and click the "Click to refresh preview" button and save.
I hope this is fixed soon, my Player/Jersey number specific galleries are a huge hit. It is making my pictures more of an impulse buy than a chore going through 200 pictures to find your kids picture. With that said creating and setting the stuff up for 25 kids per HS team is a real chore is there a chance an API for Smart Galleries will be implemented soon so someone could write some code to make life easier for those whose livelyhood looks to depend on this??
I hope this is fixed soon, my Player/Jersey number specific galleries are a huge hit. It is making my pictures more of an impulse buy than a chore going through 200 pictures to find your kids picture. With that said creating and setting the stuff up for 25 kids per HS team is a real chore is there a chance an API for Smart Galleries will be implemented soon so someone could write some code to make life easier for those whose livelyhood looks to depend on this??
Thanks,
Bump!! Uhm, is there any news on this? These Smart Galleries are VERY important to my site. I was hoping it would be fixed in the last Maintenance window.
David, I am afraid that I do not have any news. Sorry. I really wish that I did. I have sent this to the programmers and I am waiting on their response. I am asking for details from them. I will let you guys know as soon as I know more. Please understand that we cannot promise when any bugs will be fixed. There are too many factors involved with resource allocation, finding other problems, priorities etc.
The issue where you would create keywords then have to refresh the smart galleries should be fixed.
The issue was that when you were creating keywords that were new to the system they would end up skipping the affected albums when it came time to generate the images within the smart gallery.
Please test and let me know if you are experiencing that problem any more.
I think we finally got the bug fixed with this one. But, there may be some rare corner cases still out there.
Smuggers... If you do have trouble, please give me details. I need to know exactly what you are doing. What keywords you are using, links to galleries, how you are adding the keywords, what uploader, etc. That will help us track the problem down.
The rules are to include keywords: portrait, portfolio
and to exclude: wedding photography, wedding, wedding photographer
I've double checked the wedding photos that the gallery is including, and the keywords are usually portrait, portfolio, wedding photography
Shouldn't these photos be excluded? Anyone know why the rules are not applying?
This sounds like a different issue from the one that we fixed last week. You've give us some wonderfully detailed data points though, Doc and I will look at this early next week and figure out what is wrong. I agree that based on how your gallery is setup it should be be working as you describe - but it is a feature I'm just now beginning to look closely at so bare with me.
If you would not mind verifying one thing for me: if you did not have the exclusion rules does it seem like the complete set of matching images is showing up? Or are there images that should be showing up but are not?
Also, is this a smart gallery that you setup and were expecting existing images to fall into, or was the gallery pre-existing and the issue is when you are keyword-ing newly uploaded images that they are showing up (or not showing up) when they should? Hope that makes sense, I probably could have found a better way of asking this question.
Last, to help me find any potential log files that might help me debug this did this happen around the time of your post on this forum (sat 04/23/2011 around 6am)? If not is there some time window that might help me focus on the right time frame or is that too hard to pin down?
The way the system works for your specific smart gallery is as follows:
1. Finds all of the images containing all of the keywords "portrait", and "portfolio".
2. It then excludes images that contain all of the keywords "performance", "wedding photographer", and "wedding photography"
What I mean by #2 is that only images that contain ALL the keywords "performance", "wedding photographer", and "wedding photography" will be excluded. In other words by adding "performance" you probably made even more images show up in your smart gallery. They all need to be present because you have selected "Match: All".
I think what you are trying to do is to match images containing both "portrait" and "portfolio", but exclude any that contain "performance", "wedding photographer", or "wedding photography". Unfortunately the system does not currently allow for changing the "AND/OR" condition between different sets of rules. Right now (algebraically speaking) the system is doing this:
("portrait" AND "portfolio" AND NOT "performance" AND NOT "wedding photographer" AND NOT "wedding photography")
What I think you are trying to do is:
("portrait" AND "portfolio" AND NOT ("performance" OR "wedding photographer" OR "wedding photography"))
To test if my theory is right, if you could leave your smart gallery configured the way it is then add the keywords "portrait", "portfolio", "performance", "wedding photographer", and "wedding photography" to it and verify that it does not show up after it is indexed I would really appreciate it. Then if you remove either "performance", "wedding photographer", or "wedding photography" it should now show up.
One solution would be to add a keyword like "exclude_from_people" to all the images you want excluded from this smart gallery and set a single exclude rule in the gallery to that keyword. The trick here is to limit your smart gallery to a single "Exclude" rule, what is messing you up here are the multiple exclude rules.
Another potential solution that I have not tested is to create another smart gallery and in that gallery do a "Match Any" on the keywords you want to exclude (in your case "performance", "wedding photographer", "wedding photography"). Then in the smart gallery you are having a problem with replace all the exclude rules with "exclude" > "my photos" > "gallery" > "select the gallery you just created". I'd be very curious to know if this works, sorry I have not had time this weekend to test it. Of course each smart gallery still can only contain the number of images specified in the "Max # of photos to return", which currently maxes out at 1,000. if the gallery being used to collect keywords you want to exclude goes over that, some will slip through.
The way the system works for your specific smart gallery is as follows:
1. Finds all of the images containing all of the keywords "portrait", and "portfolio".
2. It then excludes images that contain all of the keywords "performance", "wedding photographer", and "wedding photography"
What I mean by #2 is that only images that contain ALL the keywords "performance", "wedding photographer", and "wedding photography" will be excluded. In other words by adding "performance" you probably made even more images show up in your smart gallery. They all need to be present because you have selected "Match: All".
I think what you are trying to do is to match images containing both "portrait" and "portfolio", but exclude any that contain "performance", "wedding photographer", or "wedding photography". Unfortunately the system does not currently allow for changing the "AND/OR" condition between different sets of rules. Right now (algebraically speaking) the system is doing this:
("portrait" AND "portfolio" AND NOT "performance" AND NOT "wedding photographer" AND NOT "wedding photography")
What I think you are trying to do is:
("portrait" AND "portfolio" AND NOT ("performance" OR "wedding photographer" OR "wedding photography"))
This is what im trying to do, yes.
To test if my theory is right, if you could leave your smart gallery configured the way it is then add the keywords "portrait", "portfolio", "performance", "wedding photographer", and "wedding photography" to it and verify that it does not show up after it is indexed I would really appreciate it. Then if you remove either "performance", "wedding photographer", or "wedding photography" it should now show up.
Im not sure exactly what "it" you want me to add the keywords to. Do you mean I should include ALL keywors in the smart gallery settings? If so, as expected, none of them show up when I set all the keywords to INCLUDE. Then If I remove "performance" and "wedding photographer", I only get those photos with "portrait" "portfolio" and "wedding photography" included.
One solution would be to add a keyword like "exclude_from_people" to all the images you want excluded from this smart gallery and set a single exclude rule in the gallery to that keyword. The trick here is to limit your smart gallery to a single "Exclude" rule, what is messing you up here are the multiple exclude rules.
Hm. Sounds like a lot of work!
Another potential solution that I have not tested is to create another smart gallery and in that gallery do a "Match Any" on the keywords you want to exclude (in your case "performance", "wedding photographer", "wedding photography"). Then in the smart gallery you are having a problem with replace all the exclude rules with "exclude" > "my photos" > "gallery" > "select the gallery you just created". I'd be very curious to know if this works, sorry I have not had time this weekend to test it. Of course each smart gallery still can only contain the number of images specified in the "Max # of photos to return", which currently maxes out at 1,000. if the gallery being used to collect keywords you want to exclude goes over that, some will slip through.
- Greg
I will try this last option now. Thanks for your thoughts and input
The way the system works for your specific smart gallery is as follows:
1. Finds all of the images containing all of the keywords "portrait", and "portfolio".
2. It then excludes images that contain all of the keywords "performance", "wedding photographer", and "wedding photography"
What I mean by #2 is that only images that contain ALL the keywords "performance", "wedding photographer", and "wedding photography" will be excluded. In other words by adding "performance" you probably made even more images show up in your smart gallery. They all need to be present because you have selected "Match: All".
Greg,
This seems like a broken design for what I would guess is the common case for exclusions. Not suggesting that exclusions should be hard-coded to "Match: Any" because I'm sure there are use cases for the way it works now. Really need to be able to control the match conditions on keywords and exclusions separately.
I will try this last option now. Thanks for your thoughts and input
This did work. I created a smart gallery called "excludefromPEOPLE" under portfolio, then excluded this gallery from my "People" smart gallery.
However my site seems pretty slow (at least when l loading this gallery) with these settings. Is it possible that this method is slower because it has to essentially populate 2 smart galleries, then apply rules to determine which photos to include in the People gallery?
I agree that there should be a way to code it so that it will exclude ANY of the exclusion rules. The way it is set up now makes logical sense from a programming perspective, but is not at all intuitive from a user perspective.
This did work. I created a smart gallery called "excludefromPEOPLE" under portfolio, then excluded this gallery from my "People" smart gallery.
However my site seems pretty slow (at least when l loading this gallery) with these settings. Is it possible that this method is slower because it has to essentially populate 2 smart galleries, then apply rules to determine which photos to include in the People gallery?
I agree that there should be a way to code it so that it will exclude ANY of the exclusion rules. The way it is set up now makes logical sense from a programming perspective, but is not at all intuitive from a user perspective.
It won't be any slower, there is probably something else going on. The first time you load a gallery after having updated it may be a little bit slower, but after that the selection of images comes from what is post-generated - which is as fast no matter how they got there.
As for this being non-intuitive, I kinda agree, but there are also people who use this feature the way it is implemented. So what works for us may not work for them. There is a pretty easy work-around for it though at least.
This seems like a broken design for what I would guess is the common case for exclusions. Not suggesting that exclusions should be hard-coded to "Match: Any" because I'm sure there are use cases for the way it works now. Really need to be able to control the match conditions on keywords and exclusions separately.
$0.02,
Jay
Its a pretty easy work-around, I don't think this measures up to something that is "broken" though.
Its a pretty easy work-around, I don't think this measures up to something that is "broken" though.
Yes, if you have a single gallery where you need to do this, it's an easy work-around. It's not a scalable answer though. By "scalable", I mean that it doesn't hold up from a gallery manageability point of view for folks with large numbers of galleries.
Part of the reason I used "broken" to describe it is that SM has a really bad habit of defending implementations that work for some users and not for others rather than fixing it so it can work for all of us. We had to nag and fight for years about the whole "auto-generated keywords based on file names" issue.
The "easy work-around" that came back over and over was to not rename our files from the camera default names. Not a scalable solution for folks that manage our files and would like useful file names.
Look, Smart Galleries have been broken since they were released. We are excited to see them getting fixed and I personally don't want to have them limited by an awkward to manage work-around once their basic functionality finally works.
Still broken?
Is this still broken? From what I gather it's been over a year... and yes, I'm using the term broken. I'm a sports photographer and I set up smart galleries so I could easily maintain galleries by ATHLETE. I currently have 390 Athlete Smart (dumb?) Galleries (http://photos.pixelens.com/Athletes)... if I have to refresh the galleries of EVERY athlete after each shoot, that is going to add substantially to my work load.
Is this still broken? From what I gather it's been over a year... and yes, I'm using the term broken. I'm a sports photographer and I set up smart galleries so I could easily maintain galleries by ATHLETE. I currently have 390 Athlete Smart (dumb?) Galleries (http://photos.pixelens.com/Athletes)... if I have to refresh the galleries of EVERY athlete after each shoot, that is going to add substantially to my work load.
What's the ETA on the fix guys?
Cheers!
If you read the latest posts in this thread (that I started a few days ago when my smart galleries weren't updating properly): http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=196058, it sounds like they believe they've fixed the issues with smart galleries not updating properly as of today. I think the fixes prevent future problems with newly uploaded images. I don't know what happens if you already have smart galleries that are not up-to-date due to previous bugs. If you have a lot of smart galleries that appear to be out-of-date and need to be fixed, you can probably ask customer support to fix them for you (that's what they did for me as you can see in that thread). You can also interact with the developer who is actually working on the problem in that other thread (and seems pretty good at what he does). I'm under the impression that he's new and isn't the developer who wrote the original code that had all these problems.
If you read the latest posts in this thread (that I started a few days ago when my smart galleries weren't updating properly): http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=196058, it sounds like they believe they've fixed the issues with smart galleries not updating properly as of today. I think the fixes prevent future problems with newly uploaded images. I don't know what happens if you already have smart galleries that are not up-to-date due to previous bugs. If you have a lot of smart galleries that appear to be out-of-date and need to be fixed, you can probably ask customer support to fix them for you (that's what they did for me as you can see in that thread). You can also interact with the developer who is actually working on the problem in that other thread (and seems pretty good at what he does). I'm under the impression that he's new and isn't the developer who wrote the original code that had all these problems.
You are correct, customer service can help in cases of existing galleries needing to get refreshed. The fixes I've deployed will not fix previously affected galleries.
Also, FYI, this was a lot more then just "fixing bugs" on this one. I've been busier then normal on this so I haven't had time to be as verbose as I usually am about the problems and what I did to fix them. One of the big changes is that the smart gallery system as a whole now does its work atomically from the point that a image is indexed until it gets added into the smart gallery. In other words: even if the bugs that existed had not been found and fixed (which they have been) the system still would have been able to deal with those failures by re-processing the images and keeping everything in a nice consistent state. I am definitely confident stating that smart galleries should work flawlessly going forward, and as you probably know I do not make such declarations of victory lightly.
- Greg
P.S. Thank you for kind words. I started at SmugMug in December, the "new engineer shine" may be starting to wear off, thankfully
P.S. Thank you for kind words. I started at SmugMug in December, the "new engineer shine" may be starting to wear off, thankfully
I've been a software engineer (in many startups) and managed software engineers (at all levels) for many years (currently retired).
I know from all the software engineers I've worked with that there is one rare category of engineers (a significant cut above the rest) that can go into a complicated problem (probably hard to reproduce) and a complicated piece of code (usually written by someone else) understand what the code is doing (and not doing), find the problem they were looking for and find several other things wrong with the code too. And, because the fix is implemented from a thorough understanding of how things really should work, it will be rock solid and the architecture will have been meaningfully improved along the way. Though I barely know you and have never met you in person, I know already that you are in this rare category. Smugmug is lucky to have found you and hopefully they realize it already or will soon. Great job on the smart gallery fixes/rearchitecting and on the image rotation stuff earlier.
You are correct, customer service can help in cases of existing galleries needing to get refreshed. The fixes I've deployed will not fix previously affected galleries.
I am definitely confident stating that smart galleries should work flawlessly going forward, and as you probably know I do not make such declarations of victory lightly.
- Greg
P.S. Thank you for kind words. I started at SmugMug in December, the "new engineer shine" may be starting to wear off, thankfully
Thanks for the update Greg! Sounds like I started using these at just the right time... enjoy your stint at SM!
The way the system works for your specific smart gallery is as follows:
1. Finds all of the images containing all of the keywords "portrait", and "portfolio".
2. It then excludes images that contain all of the keywords "performance", "wedding photographer", and "wedding photography"
What I mean by #2 is that only images that contain ALL the keywords "performance", "wedding photographer", and "wedding photography" will be excluded. In other words by adding "performance" you probably made even more images show up in your smart gallery. They all need to be present because you have selected "Match: All".
I think what you are trying to do is to match images containing both "portrait" and "portfolio", but exclude any that contain "performance", "wedding photographer", or "wedding photography". Unfortunately the system does not currently allow for changing the "AND/OR" condition between different sets of rules. Right now (algebraically speaking) the system is doing this:
("portrait" AND "portfolio" AND NOT "performance" AND NOT "wedding photographer" AND NOT "wedding photography")
What I think you are trying to do is:
("portrait" AND "portfolio" AND NOT ("performance" OR "wedding photographer" OR "wedding photography"))
I'm being burned by this. Personally, I'm having a hard time coming up with a use case where you'd want the current behavior, while it seems obvious that people want the expected behavior.
One way to think of it is to evaluate each rule on its own. So,
INCLUDE KEYWORD apple
INCLUDE KEYWORD pear
EXCLUDE KEYWORD blue
EXCLUDE KEYWORD white
The gallery starts with an empty set. The first rule adds all pictures with the keyword "apple", the second rule adds all pictures with the keyword "pear". The third rule removes any pictures with the keyword "blue" and the fourth rule removes any pictures with the keyword "white".
One solution would be to add a keyword like "exclude_from_people" to all the images you want excluded from this smart gallery and set a single exclude rule in the gallery to that keyword. The trick here is to limit your smart gallery to a single "Exclude" rule, what is messing you up here are the multiple exclude rules.
Another potential solution that I have not tested is to create another smart gallery and in that gallery do a "Match Any" on the keywords you want to exclude (in your case "performance", "wedding photographer", "wedding photography"). Then in the smart gallery you are having a problem with replace all the exclude rules with "exclude" > "my photos" > "gallery" > "select the gallery you just created". I'd be very curious to know if this works, sorry I have not had time this weekend to test it. Of course each smart gallery still can only contain the number of images specified in the "Max # of photos to return", which currently maxes out at 1,000. if the gallery being used to collect keywords you want to exclude goes over that, some will slip through.
The first solution is very cumbersome, and requires changing photo processing steps. It's a nightmare when pictures exist in multiple places and need to be in synch, for example, on one's local hard drive, a server, and on SmugMug.
The idea that you can only have one EXCLUDE rule seems very broken, I'm sorry to say.
The second proposed solution doesn't work for two reasons: first, a new smart gallery whose rules are only a series of "EXCLUDE" rules and "match ANY" is empty. This actually makes sense, since there are no INCLUDE rules. Of course, if you did try and add an INCLUDE rule. it would defeat the purpose because if you set "match ANY" then the EXCLUDE rules have no effect, and if you set "match ALL" then you're back to the original problem of multiple EXCLUDE rules colliding with each other. Second, you'd quickly run into the 1000 pictures max, so it would all be for naught.
This seems like a broken design for what I would guess is the common case for exclusions. Not suggesting that exclusions should be hard-coded to "Match: Any" because I'm sure there are use cases for the way it works now. Really need to be able to control the match conditions on keywords and exclusions separately.
I can't think of use cases for how it works now, but I accept that people may have gotten used to the current behavior and it can't be unilaterally changed. Possible solutions: Add a new "match" setting of "ALL with individual exclusions" or add nested rules (a block of rules with a "match all" or "match any" at the top).
The way the system works for your specific smart gallery is as follows:
1. Finds all of the images containing all of the keywords "portrait", and "portfolio".
2. It then excludes images that contain all of the keywords "performance", "wedding photographer", and "wedding photography"
[snip]
Right now (algebraically speaking) the system is doing this:
("portrait" AND "portfolio" AND NOT "performance" AND NOT "wedding photographer" AND NOT "wedding photography")
What you wrote in Boolean logic doesn't seem to match what you described in text. The Boolean expression you wrote looks correct, it matches images that contain any of the INCLUDE keywords if they don't contain any of the EXCLUDE keywords. That's the desired behavior. What we're seeing instead matches your text description, which as a Boolean expression would I think be:
("portrait" AND "portfolio" AND NOT ("performance" AND "wedding photographer" AND "wedding photography"))
Another way to figure it out is with a truth table for a target picture, say it has the following keywords: portrait, portfolio, performance.
Let's analyze the Boolean expression using this example picture:
("portrait" AND "portfolio" AND NOT "performance" AND NOT "wedding photographer" AND NOT "wedding photography")
I can't really comment on the boolean rules in the above posts, but I'll try another way to explain how the smart gallery rules work.
For the ALL match rule, two different sets created:
First set includes photos that match all the include rules. Going with the:
INCLUDE KEYWORD apple
INCLUDE KEYWORD pear
example, it would only include photos that have apple *and* pear as keywords.
Second set works similarly but looks at all exclude rules and only contains the photos that match all exclude rules. Example:
EXCLUDE KEYWORD blue
EXCLUDE KEYWORD white
would mean the set would only contain photos that have blue *and* white.
In a final step, the second set of images (from the exclude rules) is removed from the first set (include rules), only leaving photos that are not part of the second set.
I hope that clarifies on how the system works.
For suggesting changes or additions to the smart gallery rules, you can add a suggestion to the SmugMug feedback page.
Comments
Created about 40 smart galleries ( after keywording the photos)... Obviously, I had to enter my rules and save them. Came back later after uploading and keywording new photos and I have to go to each smart gallery and hit the refresh button and then save to get the new pics to show up in the smart gallery. Smart galleries are in Show Choir / 2011 Show Choirs - scroll down to the individual performer galleries
I'm going to be doing this a lot it looks like.
Can you give me details about how you uploaded and when/how the keywords were added?
http://help.smugmug.com
1) uploaded the photos using "Send to Smugmug" From Shahine
2) added keywords to photos by going to the source gallery, selecting tools, then caption/keyword
3) Created smart galleries and rules, then clicked the "Click to refresh preview" button and saved.
4) On a separate occasion, added more photos to a new source gallery (same upload method), added keywords (same method) and the new photos do not show up in the smart galleries until I go to the individual smart galleries, one by one, via settings, make this gallery smarter, and click the "Click to refresh preview" button and save.
http://help.smugmug.com
Any news? Thanks.
http://help.smugmug.com
I hope this is fixed soon, my Player/Jersey number specific galleries are a huge hit. It is making my pictures more of an impulse buy than a chore going through 200 pictures to find your kids picture. With that said creating and setting the stuff up for 25 kids per HS team is a real chore is there a chance an API for Smart Galleries will be implemented soon so someone could write some code to make life easier for those whose livelyhood looks to depend on this??
Thanks,
www.phabulousphotos.com
Sportsshooter.com Member
http://www.sportsshooter.com/members.html?id=10162
Bump!! Uhm, is there any news on this? These Smart Galleries are VERY important to my site. I was hoping it would be fixed in the last Maintenance window.
www.phabulousphotos.com
Sportsshooter.com Member
http://www.sportsshooter.com/members.html?id=10162
http://help.smugmug.com
The issue was that when you were creating keywords that were new to the system they would end up skipping the affected albums when it came time to generate the images within the smart gallery.
Please test and let me know if you are experiencing that problem any more.
- Greg
I think we finally got the bug fixed with this one. But, there may be some rare corner cases still out there.
Smuggers... If you do have trouble, please give me details. I need to know exactly what you are doing. What keywords you are using, links to galleries, how you are adding the keywords, what uploader, etc. That will help us track the problem down.
--Doc
http://help.smugmug.com
http://ccmixed.smugmug.com/Portfolio/People/15663689_yCAuz#1238460383_P9SAT
The rules are to include keywords: portrait, portfolio
and to exclude: wedding photography, wedding, wedding photographer
I've double checked the wedding photos that the gallery is including, and the keywords are usually portrait, portfolio, wedding photography
Shouldn't these photos be excluded? Anyone know why the rules are not applying?
Thanks,
Chris
Quarkview Photography
Popular
Recent
The rules are to include keywords: portrait, portfolio
and to exclude: wedding photography, performance, wedding photographer
And Im getting wedding and performance photos showing up, despite the fact that in both cases, they have keywords that should exclude them.
Quarkview Photography
Popular
Recent
This sounds like a different issue from the one that we fixed last week. You've give us some wonderfully detailed data points though, Doc and I will look at this early next week and figure out what is wrong. I agree that based on how your gallery is setup it should be be working as you describe - but it is a feature I'm just now beginning to look closely at so bare with me.
If you would not mind verifying one thing for me: if you did not have the exclusion rules does it seem like the complete set of matching images is showing up? Or are there images that should be showing up but are not?
Also, is this a smart gallery that you setup and were expecting existing images to fall into, or was the gallery pre-existing and the issue is when you are keyword-ing newly uploaded images that they are showing up (or not showing up) when they should? Hope that makes sense, I probably could have found a better way of asking this question.
Last, to help me find any potential log files that might help me debug this did this happen around the time of your post on this forum (sat 04/23/2011 around 6am)? If not is there some time window that might help me focus on the right time frame or is that too hard to pin down?
- Greg
The way the system works for your specific smart gallery is as follows:
1. Finds all of the images containing all of the keywords "portrait", and "portfolio".
2. It then excludes images that contain all of the keywords "performance", "wedding photographer", and "wedding photography"
What I mean by #2 is that only images that contain ALL the keywords "performance", "wedding photographer", and "wedding photography" will be excluded. In other words by adding "performance" you probably made even more images show up in your smart gallery. They all need to be present because you have selected "Match: All".
I think what you are trying to do is to match images containing both "portrait" and "portfolio", but exclude any that contain "performance", "wedding photographer", or "wedding photography". Unfortunately the system does not currently allow for changing the "AND/OR" condition between different sets of rules. Right now (algebraically speaking) the system is doing this:
("portrait" AND "portfolio" AND NOT "performance" AND NOT "wedding photographer" AND NOT "wedding photography")
What I think you are trying to do is:
("portrait" AND "portfolio" AND NOT ("performance" OR "wedding photographer" OR "wedding photography"))
To test if my theory is right, if you could leave your smart gallery configured the way it is then add the keywords "portrait", "portfolio", "performance", "wedding photographer", and "wedding photography" to it and verify that it does not show up after it is indexed I would really appreciate it. Then if you remove either "performance", "wedding photographer", or "wedding photography" it should now show up.
One solution would be to add a keyword like "exclude_from_people" to all the images you want excluded from this smart gallery and set a single exclude rule in the gallery to that keyword. The trick here is to limit your smart gallery to a single "Exclude" rule, what is messing you up here are the multiple exclude rules.
Another potential solution that I have not tested is to create another smart gallery and in that gallery do a "Match Any" on the keywords you want to exclude (in your case "performance", "wedding photographer", "wedding photography"). Then in the smart gallery you are having a problem with replace all the exclude rules with "exclude" > "my photos" > "gallery" > "select the gallery you just created". I'd be very curious to know if this works, sorry I have not had time this weekend to test it. Of course each smart gallery still can only contain the number of images specified in the "Max # of photos to return", which currently maxes out at 1,000. if the gallery being used to collect keywords you want to exclude goes over that, some will slip through.
- Greg
I will try this last option now. Thanks for your thoughts and input
Quarkview Photography
Popular
Recent
Greg,
This seems like a broken design for what I would guess is the common case for exclusions. Not suggesting that exclusions should be hard-coded to "Match: Any" because I'm sure there are use cases for the way it works now. Really need to be able to control the match conditions on keywords and exclusions separately.
$0.02,
Jay
This did work. I created a smart gallery called "excludefromPEOPLE" under portfolio, then excluded this gallery from my "People" smart gallery.
However my site seems pretty slow (at least when l loading this gallery) with these settings. Is it possible that this method is slower because it has to essentially populate 2 smart galleries, then apply rules to determine which photos to include in the People gallery?
I agree that there should be a way to code it so that it will exclude ANY of the exclusion rules. The way it is set up now makes logical sense from a programming perspective, but is not at all intuitive from a user perspective.
Quarkview Photography
Popular
Recent
It won't be any slower, there is probably something else going on. The first time you load a gallery after having updated it may be a little bit slower, but after that the selection of images comes from what is post-generated - which is as fast no matter how they got there.
As for this being non-intuitive, I kinda agree, but there are also people who use this feature the way it is implemented. So what works for us may not work for them. There is a pretty easy work-around for it though at least.
- Greg
Its a pretty easy work-around, I don't think this measures up to something that is "broken" though.
- Greg
Yes, if you have a single gallery where you need to do this, it's an easy work-around. It's not a scalable answer though. By "scalable", I mean that it doesn't hold up from a gallery manageability point of view for folks with large numbers of galleries.
Part of the reason I used "broken" to describe it is that SM has a really bad habit of defending implementations that work for some users and not for others rather than fixing it so it can work for all of us. We had to nag and fight for years about the whole "auto-generated keywords based on file names" issue.
The "easy work-around" that came back over and over was to not rename our files from the camera default names. Not a scalable solution for folks that manage our files and would like useful file names.
Look, Smart Galleries have been broken since they were released. We are excited to see them getting fixed and I personally don't want to have them limited by an awkward to manage work-around once their basic functionality finally works.
Regards,
Jay
Is this still broken? From what I gather it's been over a year... and yes, I'm using the term broken. I'm a sports photographer and I set up smart galleries so I could easily maintain galleries by ATHLETE. I currently have 390 Athlete Smart (dumb?) Galleries (http://photos.pixelens.com/Athletes)... if I have to refresh the galleries of EVERY athlete after each shoot, that is going to add substantially to my work load.
What's the ETA on the fix guys?
Cheers!
Homepage • Popular
JFriend's javascript customizations • Secrets for getting fast answers on Dgrin
Always include a link to your site when posting a question
You are correct, customer service can help in cases of existing galleries needing to get refreshed. The fixes I've deployed will not fix previously affected galleries.
Also, FYI, this was a lot more then just "fixing bugs" on this one. I've been busier then normal on this so I haven't had time to be as verbose as I usually am about the problems and what I did to fix them. One of the big changes is that the smart gallery system as a whole now does its work atomically from the point that a image is indexed until it gets added into the smart gallery. In other words: even if the bugs that existed had not been found and fixed (which they have been) the system still would have been able to deal with those failures by re-processing the images and keeping everything in a nice consistent state. I am definitely confident stating that smart galleries should work flawlessly going forward, and as you probably know I do not make such declarations of victory lightly.
- Greg
P.S. Thank you for kind words. I started at SmugMug in December, the "new engineer shine" may be starting to wear off, thankfully
I know from all the software engineers I've worked with that there is one rare category of engineers (a significant cut above the rest) that can go into a complicated problem (probably hard to reproduce) and a complicated piece of code (usually written by someone else) understand what the code is doing (and not doing), find the problem they were looking for and find several other things wrong with the code too. And, because the fix is implemented from a thorough understanding of how things really should work, it will be rock solid and the architecture will have been meaningfully improved along the way. Though I barely know you and have never met you in person, I know already that you are in this rare category. Smugmug is lucky to have found you and hopefully they realize it already or will soon. Great job on the smart gallery fixes/rearchitecting and on the image rotation stuff earlier.
Homepage • Popular
JFriend's javascript customizations • Secrets for getting fast answers on Dgrin
Always include a link to your site when posting a question
Thanks for the update Greg! Sounds like I started using these at just the right time... enjoy your stint at SM!
See new thread with same problem for newly created albums, smart galleries, smart rules etc.
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=204271
Thanks, Monica
One way to think of it is to evaluate each rule on its own. So,
INCLUDE KEYWORD pear
EXCLUDE KEYWORD blue
EXCLUDE KEYWORD white
The first solution is very cumbersome, and requires changing photo processing steps. It's a nightmare when pictures exist in multiple places and need to be in synch, for example, on one's local hard drive, a server, and on SmugMug.
The idea that you can only have one EXCLUDE rule seems very broken, I'm sorry to say.
The second proposed solution doesn't work for two reasons: first, a new smart gallery whose rules are only a series of "EXCLUDE" rules and "match ANY" is empty. This actually makes sense, since there are no INCLUDE rules. Of course, if you did try and add an INCLUDE rule. it would defeat the purpose because if you set "match ANY" then the EXCLUDE rules have no effect, and if you set "match ALL" then you're back to the original problem of multiple EXCLUDE rules colliding with each other. Second, you'd quickly run into the 1000 pictures max, so it would all be for naught.
I can't think of use cases for how it works now, but I accept that people may have gotten used to the current behavior and it can't be unilaterally changed. Possible solutions: Add a new "match" setting of "ALL with individual exclusions" or add nested rules (a block of rules with a "match all" or "match any" at the top).
Please implement a solution to this problem.
What you wrote in Boolean logic doesn't seem to match what you described in text. The Boolean expression you wrote looks correct, it matches images that contain any of the INCLUDE keywords if they don't contain any of the EXCLUDE keywords. That's the desired behavior. What we're seeing instead matches your text description, which as a Boolean expression would I think be:
("portrait" AND "portfolio" AND NOT ("performance" AND "wedding photographer" AND "wedding photography"))
Another way to figure it out is with a truth table for a target picture, say it has the following keywords: portrait, portfolio, performance.
Let's analyze the Boolean expression using this example picture:
("portrait" AND "portfolio" AND NOT "performance" AND NOT "wedding photographer" AND NOT "wedding photography")
Image keywords: portrait, portfolio, performance
Keywords as truth table:
Boolean expression evaluated as truth table: ("portrait" AND "portfolio" AND NOT "performance" AND NOT "wedding photographer" AND NOT "wedding photography") =
(TRUE AND TRUE AND FALSE AND TRUE AND TRUE) = FALSE
Yet, the system treats this as TRUE.
For the ALL match rule, two different sets created:
First set includes photos that match all the include rules. Going with the:
INCLUDE KEYWORD apple
INCLUDE KEYWORD pear
example, it would only include photos that have apple *and* pear as keywords.
Second set works similarly but looks at all exclude rules and only contains the photos that match all exclude rules. Example:
EXCLUDE KEYWORD blue
EXCLUDE KEYWORD white
would mean the set would only contain photos that have blue *and* white.
In a final step, the second set of images (from the exclude rules) is removed from the first set (include rules), only leaving photos that are not part of the second set.
I hope that clarifies on how the system works.
For suggesting changes or additions to the smart gallery rules, you can add a suggestion to the SmugMug feedback page.
SmugMug Support Hero