Keyword Albums sort order

BigBubba

I recently signed up for Smugmug and have been working on creating my site (markandtracy.com). My plan is to use keywords heavily. I was going to keyword every photo with as many keywords that makes sense. I planned to create smart galleries for a few of the keywords that I want to highlight but not all keywords.

I started by uploading photos for this year (2010). All seems to be working fine so I started to upload photos from last year. I eventually plan to upload photos from the past 8 years to my site.

Well, I discovered that the photos I uploaded most recently (the photos from 2009) were displaying first in my keyword albums. I tried to find where to set the sort option for my keyword album and discovered that there really isn't one. The user has the option of sorting by most recent or most popular but there is not a setting. Since the albums default to most recent I still did not understand why it was not working so I emailed support and they told me that it was working correctly.

Apparently, Smugmug believes that sorting by most recent means to sort by most recently uploaded and not most recent photo based on the photo date.

This just seems plain wrong to me. First, why not have the same gallery setting for keyword albums that you have for everything else? Second, why sort by most recently uploaded? This means you have to be careful about what order you actually upload stuff since this affects the looks of your albums.

So here are my questions:
1) Are keywords not used by most people? Is this just a small little feature they added that most of the Pro users don't really use?
2) Does sorting by most recently uploaded seem correct to you? Or do you agree that sorting by photo date seems more appropriate when a user chooses to sort by most recent?

jfriend

There is no sort option for keyword galleries. But, you can make a smart gallery (using keywords) and set the sort option there in the gallery settings for the smart gallery. A smart gallery is much more of a real gallery than a keyword gallery which is really just a bunch of search results. See http://www.smugmug.com/help/smart-galleries for more info.

BigBubba

jfriend wrote: »

There is no sort option for keyword galleries. But, you can make a smart gallery (using keywords) and set the sort option there in the gallery settings for the smart gallery. A smart gallery is much more of a real gallery than a keyword gallery which is really just a bunch of search results. See http://www.smugmug.com/help/smart-galleries for more info.

John, thanks for the reply. Yes I am aware that I can use the smart gallery option and I plan to do that with some of the keywords. But, in my opinion, the current sort order just doesn't make sense. It seems like "most recent" should be based on photo date, period. Of course, you know the old saying about opinions....they are like as***les, everybody has one and some of them stink. I am curious if everybody agrees with me or does the current sort order make sense.

I had planned to feature the keywords at the top of my homepage at http://www.markandtracy.com to encourage people to use them but this sort order issue makes me want to move them to the bottom of the page and not depend on them.

jfriend

BigBubba wrote: »

John, thanks for the reply. Yes I am aware that I can use the smart gallery option and I plan to do that with some of the keywords. But, in my opinion, the current sort order just doesn't make sense. It seems like "most recent" should be based on photo date, period. Of course, you know the old saying about opinions....they are like as***les, everybody has one and some of them stink. I am curious if everybody agrees with me or does the current sort order make sense.

I had planned to feature the keywords at the top of my homepage at http://www.markandtracy.com to encourage people to use them but this sort order issue makes me want to move them to the bottom of the page and not depend on them.

The order appears to be related to the order that they were added to the search index which is often kind of random. If you want to add a feature request, this is where they get looked at: http://feedback.smugmug.com/forums/17723-smugmug.