Am I asking for too much here?

esac

I am starting to get really annoyed. I think my scenario is rather simple, but it is the hardest thing to accomplish with SmugMug.

1. I want to put every photo online that I take, in unlisted galleries so that nobody can see. This allows me to keep an archive of all of my photos for future perusal.

2. Out of those unlisted photos, I want to select a subset of them, and display those to users/family/friends.

3. For the photos that are publicly viewable, they need to retain all of the features that a normal public gallery would have.

I thought that smart galleries and collections would give me exactly what I want. However I have found out that a photo follows the restrictions of the original gallery, not the gallery that it is listed in. What this means is that since keywords are not viewable for unlisted galleries, even though I am creating a public gallery and adding the photo as a collected photo, it ignores that galleries 'public' attribute, and chooses not to show keywords.

That means no keywords, no combine keywords, no tag cloud, nothing.

This is making it completely unusable for my purpose. I have been unable to use the site for a while due to other issues, but Doc has been gracious enough to get somebody to look into the issue for me. But it now seems that even if that issue was fixed, I can still not use the site for my needs

Please help here. Is there any way to accomplish what I want?

EDIT: sorry for the passive aggressive title, I was just frustrated :P

timnosenzo

esac wrote: »

Please help here. Is there any way to accomplish what I want?

Upload separate copies for the photos you would like to keep public.

esac

I could do that, but then smugmug loses out. Double the space, double the bandwidth. Also, this prevents me from being able to create smart galleries with different content from what I have unlisted which would be really nice

jfriend

esac wrote: »

I am starting to get really annoyed. I think my scenario is rather simple, but it is the hardest thing to accomplish with SmugMug.

1. I want to put every photo online that I take, in unlisted galleries so that nobody can see. This allows me to keep an archive of all of my photos for future perusal.

2. Out of those unlisted photos, I want to select a subset of them, and display those to users/family/friends.

3. For the photos that are publicly viewable, they need to retain all of the features that a normal public gallery would have.

I thought that smart galleries and collections would give me exactly what I want. However I have found out that a photo follows the restrictions of the original gallery, not the gallery that it is listed in. What this means is that since keywords are not viewable for unlisted galleries, even though I am creating a public gallery and adding the photo as a collected photo, it ignores that galleries 'public' attribute, and chooses not to show keywords.

That means no keywords, no combine keywords, no tag cloud, nothing.

This is making it completely unusable for my purpose. I have been unable to use the site for a while due to other issues, but Doc has been gracious enough to get somebody to look into the issue for me. But it now seems that even if that issue was fixed, I can still not use the site for my needs

Please help here. Is there any way to accomplish what I want?

EDIT: sorry for the passive aggressive title, I was just frustrated :P

I don't know if there's ever going to be a solution to the problem you describe. It may be intractable. The challenge is that when you upload an image to an unlisted gallery, you are telling Smugmug that you do NOT want people to be able to find your images by browsing your site, by browsing Smugmug, by searching Google or by searching Smugmug. That's the contract for an unlisted gallery. There is no middle ground. An image is either browsable or not and findable or not - it's binary - yes or no.

So, to respect the contract of an unlisted gallery, Smugmug says it shouldn't be browsable or findable. Therefore, it can't be in the keyword cloud and it can't be searchable. Now, if you go and try and put such an image in a virtual gallery, you've really confused things. Does Smugmug completely overturn the contract they had with you and now the entire gallery is findable because you put one image in a public virtual gallery. That wouldn't be the right choice because that breaks the previous contract that an unlisted gallery has. An image can't easily be findable in one place, but not findable in another place. It's either findable or not. So, you're in never, never land where you don't get all the features available to a public image. That is perfectly understandable to me.

It sounds like what you really want is the ability to make fully public some images from an unlisted gallery. Unfortunately, that just isn't a capability that Smugmug has built and, as you have found, virtual galleries won't get you all the way there and that doesn't surprise me. The default contract for images in an unlisted gallery is not what you are asking for and that needs to remain that way.

The work-arounds I can think of are as follows:

1) You can just upload separate copies of the public images into public galleries. Other than the additional hassle of uploading, you will have ALL features available to you with no compromise. Yes, it's Smugmug's loss on double storage, but it doesn't cost you anything and maybe it will incent them to support your feature in the future without double uploads.

2) You can make all your galleries be public rather than unlisted and then use the Hide capability for images that you don't want people to be able to browse.

3) You can put the original images into public galleries and use javascript to hide those galleries existence from the general public. This will gives you full public features on the images in those galleries, while attempting to hide the existence of the galleries. This isn't real security so if you really don't want anyone getting into the galleries ever, then don't choose this option.

esac

Yes, I do think it is possible, and does not break the rules of 'unlisted'. By putting a picture into an unlisted gallery, you are saying 'i dont want this image to be searchable or findable by keyword'. But once you add it into a public gallery via collection are smart gallery, you are changing that decision and saying 'yes i do want it publicly available and searchable (or more aptly put, for that picture you are overriding the settings with the rules of that particular gallery).

I think you are using a straw man argument in your explanation of making every picture in the unlisted gallery available. There is no reason that the settings for that particular picture can not be treated differently than all others in that gallery. Pretty much, a picture gets the lowest restrictions possible based off every gallery it is in:

Picture1
gallery1 - unlisted, no keywords, password protected
gallery2 - public, keywords, password protected
result - public, keywords, password protected

Picture2
gallery1 - unlisted, no keywords, password
gallery2 - unlisted, no keywords
gallery3 - public, keywords
result - public, keywords, no password

jfriend

esac wrote: »

Yes, I do think it is possible, and does not break the rules of 'unlisted'. By putting a picture into an unlisted gallery, you are saying 'i dont want this image to be searchable or findable by keyword'. But once you add it into a public gallery via collection are smart gallery, you are changing that decision and saying 'yes i do want it publicly available and searchable (or more aptly put, for that picture you are overriding the settings with the rules of that particular gallery).

I think you are using a straw man argument in your explanation of making every picture in the unlisted gallery available. There is no reason that the settings for that particular picture can not be treated differently than all others in that gallery. Pretty much, a picture gets the lowest restrictions possible based off every gallery it is in:

Picture1
gallery1 - unlisted, no keywords, password protected
gallery2 - public, keywords, password protected
result - public, keywords, password protected

Picture2
gallery1 - unlisted, no keywords, password
gallery2 - unlisted, no keywords
gallery3 - public, keywords
result - public, keywords, no password

I'm not saying it couldn't be done (it's all just software - anything can be done in this regard), but there are many problems to be solved. Finding an image in search or via keyword cloud allows one to view the gallery it is in and that is a clearly a problem for an unlisted gallery. Putting an image in a virtual gallery allows one to view the image in its original gallery which is again a problem for an unlisted gallery that you wish to remain hidden. My point is that Smugmug is designed for a different purpose/architecture than you are aiming for and it is unlikely they are going to change their design center.

You are certainly free to file a feature request over at http://smugmug.uservoice.com, but if you want a solution anytime soon, I'd suggest investigating the work-arounds because I rather doubt Smugmug will change their architecture into what you want anytime soon.

mbellot

jfriend wrote: »

2) You can make all your galleries be public rather than unlisted and then use the Hide capability for images that you don't want people to be able to browse.

This actually seems like a pretty decent "work around" without the overhead of multiple copies, or even multiple galleries for the same image.

jfriend wrote: »

3) You can put the original images into public galleries and use javascript to hide those galleries existence from the general public. This will gives you full public features on the images in those galleries, while attempting to hide the existence of the galleries. This isn't real security so if you really don't want anyone getting into the galleries ever, then don't choose this option.

Especially true if you have the mobile/iphone option turned on for your site. The CSS customization to "hide" the public galleries is completely ignored when browsing that "interface".

BigRed

jfriend wrote: »

I don't know if there's ever going to be a solution to the problem you describe. It may be intractable. The challenge is that when you upload an image to an unlisted gallery, you are telling Smugmug that you do NOT want people to be able to find your images by browsing your site, by browsing Smugmug, by searching Google or by searching Smugmug. That's the contract for an unlisted gallery. There is no middle ground. An image is either browsable or not and findable or not - it's binary - yes or no.

So, to respect the contract of an unlisted gallery, Smugmug says it shouldn't be browsable or findable. Therefore, it can't be in the keyword cloud and it can't be searchable. Now, if you go and try and put such an image in a virtual gallery, you've really confused things. Does Smugmug completely overturn the contract they had with you and now the entire gallery is findable because you put one image in a public virtual gallery. That wouldn't be the right choice because that breaks the previous contract that an unlisted gallery has. An image can't easily be findable in one place, but not findable in another place. It's either findable or not. So, you're in never, never land where you don't get all the features available to a public image. That is perfectly understandable to me.

It sounds like what you really want is the ability to make fully public some images from an unlisted gallery. Unfortunately, that just isn't a capability that Smugmug has built and, as you have found, virtual galleries won't get you all the way there and that doesn't surprise me. The default contract for images in an unlisted gallery is not what you are asking for and that needs to remain that way.

The work-arounds I can think of are as follows:

1) You can just upload separate copies of the public images into public galleries. Other than the additional hassle of uploading, you will have ALL features available to you with no compromise. Yes, it's Smugmug's loss on double storage, but it doesn't cost you anything and maybe it will incent them to support your feature in the future without double uploads.

2) You can make all your galleries be public rather than unlisted and then use the Hide capability for images that you don't want people to be able to browse.

3) You can put the original images into public galleries and use javascript to hide those galleries existence from the general public. This will gives you full public features on the images in those galleries, while attempting to hide the existence of the galleries. This isn't real security so if you really don't want anyone getting into the galleries ever, then don't choose this option.

P.S. to Option 1 above... Structurally identical, but you might find it a preferable workflow to COPY pictures (albeit one at a time) from the Unlisted gallery to the Public gallery. That keeps the Unlisted gallery your master for viewing/selecting from.

denisegoldberg

BigRed wrote: »

P.S. to Option 1 above... Structurally identical, but you might find it a preferable workflow to COPY pictures (albeit one at a time) from the Unlisted gallery to the Public gallery. That keeps the Unlisted gallery your master for viewing/selecting from.

That takes a lot longer than simply uploading a second copy.

Plus - I believe there is still an open defect where copying pictures does not copy the EXIF data (as noted in the thread 2nd Copy EXIF Dates Lost).

--- Denise

esac

mbellot wrote: »

This actually seems like a pretty decent "work around" without the overhead of multiple copies, or even multiple galleries for the same image.

I am exploring this option, but right now I have a question. Will the original gallery now show up in the list of galleries on the homepage, and is there an easy way to hide this? I don't care if somehow the user clicks through to the original gallery, but the only galleries I want to see on the home page or in the galleries page are the ones I specifically allow (the collections and smart galleries).

esac

Also, there seems to be no way to mass hide all of your photos, so I have to click through photo by photo and mark it as hidden?