Individual Comments no longer available in Traditional setting
yvonne
Registered Users Posts: 193 Major grins
Hi there,
I've done a search but not found the answer...
When enabling comments on a gallery, there used to be a drop down option to leave a comment for the individual image or the whole gallery.
Using the Traditional layout (which is what I've always used for this scenario), that option seems to have disappeared. You can now only leave a comment for the whole gallery.
I have searched through all the settings in case the permissioning has changed, but I can't find anything that will turn on comments for individual photographs.
Here's a link to what I mean:
http://yblume.smugmug.com/Client-Files/summers-cock/Album-v2/14581943_rDN5x
And I've gone back to look at images that I know for a fact had individual comments (as I can still see the comments in my control panel), yet they are no longer displayed when I click on the image in question.
Any idea why this is happening, please?
Thanks, Yvonne
I've done a search but not found the answer...
When enabling comments on a gallery, there used to be a drop down option to leave a comment for the individual image or the whole gallery.
Using the Traditional layout (which is what I've always used for this scenario), that option seems to have disappeared. You can now only leave a comment for the whole gallery.
I have searched through all the settings in case the permissioning has changed, but I can't find anything that will turn on comments for individual photographs.
Here's a link to what I mean:
http://yblume.smugmug.com/Client-Files/summers-cock/Album-v2/14581943_rDN5x
And I've gone back to look at images that I know for a fact had individual comments (as I can still see the comments in my control panel), yet they are no longer displayed when I click on the image in question.
Any idea why this is happening, please?
Thanks, Yvonne
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Comments
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I tried the Thumbnails setting but that doesn't have individual image comments either. Plus the thumbnails style really doesn't display album layouts in pairs of spreads the way the Traditional does, and the thumbs are too small. Why do you hate the style so much you actively feel you need to get rid of it?
Anyway, it was working fine until very recently. So it's not like I was hoping to have the style enhanced, it's just that it seems to have been "de"-hanced.
This would be a real problem for me as apart from off-site backup, album proofing is my main use of smugmug. Without comments I can't run my album proofing and will have to go and get some album proofing software and bring the whole thing in-house, which is what I've been trying to avoid. The smugmug method has been successful for me in that way for years and I've recommended smugmug to several users in the past, specifically based on the fact that it's a really efficient way of album proofing.
Is there any kind of script I can put in that will make it come back?
Regards, Yvonne
http://www.moonriverphotography.com/Galleries/Landscapes-for-Sale/634937_G88Gj#156527313_FYSr2
then click a photo. Show Details to leave a comment.
http://www.moonriverphotography.com/Galleries/Landscapes-for-Sale/634937_G88Gj#104246074_2sxSN-A-LB
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Many thanks.
I guess thumbnails will have to do.
So, my site (www.djdigitaldave.net), which is built entirely on the 'Traditional' style and which I have spent literally thousands of hours over the years designing, configuring and tweaking, will be completely unsupported (soon, you hope) and with no prior notice that a particular gallery style could at any time be arbitrarily eliminated? Really?
And what does taking away a pre-existing feature (comments in the 'Traditional' style, which no longer display under individual photos and for which I received no notification) have to do with enhancing a gallery style?
- Dave
www.djdigitaldave.net
If you'd like help in using Thumbnails style on your site, it'd be great for you to make a new post inthe customizing forum, we'll be happy to assist in getting you going with it. It's a much more updated look, utilizes screen space much better, and is a better viewing experience.
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Andy, with all due respect, "dropping hints" is not an effective way to communicate with your customers. I've had the style button hidden on my site for five years, so I wouldn't have noticed that the 'Traditional' style is no longer there. Moreover, DGrin is a place that I visit to problem-solve and troubleshoot my site; it's not a place that I hang out in routinely so, again, I didn't get the "hint".
More to the point, if I had known that the years of work that I put into my site would ultimately be for naught, I never would have put in the time and effort. In fact, I would never have signed-up with Smugmug because the whole point of joining Smugmug for me was that you offered users the wherewithal to customize their website. The 'Traditional' gallery style provided very specific design characteristics and customization options that fit my needs. That's why I signed-up. None of the other gallery styles available at that time worked for what I wanted to do and, unfortunately, none of them do now.
I don't recall ever seeing any documentation anywhere on Smugmug's website indicating that a particular gallery style might eventually be eliminated, thereby rendering all my customization useless and leaving me with no other realistic gallery-style options.
It's bad enough that various aspects of my website's functionality were modified by Smugmug during system updates over the years without notice, leaving me to discover the problems when I happened to come across them in my website and forcing me to do hours of additional customization work to compensate for the changes. Now I'm faced with starting over from scratch again, and even that doesn't appear to be workable without a base gallery-style that functions the way I need it to.
The 'Thumbnail' style that you suggest will simply not work for me in terms of how I want my site to look and work. For starters, the thumbnail layout in this style will not display appropriately within my site design without major modifications that I don't want to make (850 pixels is already more than wide enough for the body of my site), the lightbox is simply not customizable enough for my needs, and worst of all, I can't limit the display-size of my images to 800 pixels wide, as I do now in the 'Traditional' style (which is is an absolute deal-breaker as it is imperative for both security and design purposes).
Even if I could somehow make the 'Traditional', or some other style, work, why would I put in the sweat knowing that Smugmug can kill any gallery style at any time? Where does it end? Maybe it would be no big deal for a professional web developer who can bang-out customizations in a few hours. But I customized my site by trial-and-error, learning to code on the fly, and it took me several years to get it right. There's no way I'm going through all that again with a whole new set of parameters for a gallery-style that doesn't do what I need anyway. I want to spend my time taking pictures, man, not coding my website from scratch again.
The bottom line is that I am beyond disappointed with this situation and I don't see any remedies at hand. I feel like a complete chump for ever believing in Smugmug, nevermind all the people I turned on to your service. Sorry if I sound bitter, but you just don't know how much time, effort, energy, and love I put into making my Smugmug site work. You'd be bitter too.
- Dave
www.djdigitaldave.net
If we can keep the style, for legacy purposes, that may be the best option - and I'll try to make that happen.
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No, I understood that. I was referring to the fact that there was no notification prior to signing-up with Smugmug and putting years worth of work into my site that a gallery-style could eventually be eliminated.
Just to be clear, I'm not asking for any enhancements or updates to any of the "legacy" gallery-styles. I'm just expecting pre-existing functionality to not be taken away. I've already lost the ability to display comments on individual image pages in the 'Traditional' style and I also have to force the older 'AllThumbs' style for my keyword-results pages because the page-nav on keyword-results pages in the 'Traditional' style stopped working out of the blue (http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=165495). There was never any notice or explanation for these changes, which just adds to the frustration.
I don't doubt that you'll give announcement, Andy, and I appreciate that. However, please allow enough time for users of the older styles to make other arrangements for their sites if it becomes inevitable that the styles are to be eliminated.
That would certainly be optimal for me and I very much appreciate your offer to try to make that happen. For what it's worth, I'm not being a stickler about this issue out of stubborness or being closed-minded about other gallery-styles. In fact, most of the newer gallery-styles do offer many benefits and improvements over the older styles that I very much like.
The problem I have is that all of the newer gallery-styles that utilize the Lightbox and stretchy/image-resizing features just offer so much less customization control than the 'Traditional' style and I find myslef unable to modify two or three key characteristics that are very important to me. Not being able to limit the size of the individual Lightbox image to 'Large' (or 800 pixels wide) and not even being able to center the 'X-Large' size because it is pinned to the width of the body wrapper are just two examples.
Maybe keeping around a couple of the older, more configurable gallery-styles will serve a segment of your customers that value the ability to fine-tune their Smugmug sites beyond what can be done with the newer styles.
Thanks for your attention and understanding, Andy.
- Dave
www.djdigitaldave.net
The 'limits' you refer to in your last post aren't there - make a separate post in the customizing forum and we'll be happy to explain and help when you're ready, no problem!
Cheers,
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I have the same problem with the Thumbs style that I had when it first came out... captions are cut off way too short. I understand that you can't show unlimited length captions, but what is shown seems way too short to me. Only the first one or two words of a caption are shown. There's room to show much more of the caption without reducing the number of thumbnails. The traditional style does a much better job in that area.
Here's a great example from my site:
Traditional:
Thumnails:
Dave