Newbie needs help
Imagemarks
Registered Users Posts: 2 Beginner grinner
HI!
I'm brand new & I just became a paying member today. Thus far my experiences with support have been a bit disappointing & I'm wondering if that is what I should expect or if the staff is simply overwhelmed with new cases? What can I do to get a better first impression of this service? I am at the end of my year as a premium subscriber on Zenfolio and the features and capabilities of SmugMug are very appealing to me but the tutorial was very basic and I think I'm in need of a tutor to become successful using and applying these features/layouts, etc...suggestions welcomed!
Thanks.
Alan
I'm brand new & I just became a paying member today. Thus far my experiences with support have been a bit disappointing & I'm wondering if that is what I should expect or if the staff is simply overwhelmed with new cases? What can I do to get a better first impression of this service? I am at the end of my year as a premium subscriber on Zenfolio and the features and capabilities of SmugMug are very appealing to me but the tutorial was very basic and I think I'm in need of a tutor to become successful using and applying these features/layouts, etc...suggestions welcomed!
Thanks.
Alan
0
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Unfortunately I closed my account. The on-boarding process was disappointing and the program is NOT user-friendly at all. Had too many problems uploading and error messages throughout the application. After 8 hours of dedication to design, I've determined this is not for me. Hopefully in a few years it will be easier to use and I'll take another look. Your Gallery sizes are miniscule, and I see your clients have been asking about that for more than a year. The Square format of the slideshow cuts off every picture & unfortunately, presentation is everything.
Thanks for trying to assist me.
Thanks for the feedback, it's very much appreciated. Our slideshow is not square format, we can help you with that if you come back. You can even see 2:1 on my site, http://www.moonriverphotography.com
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Look at the thumbnail ribbon in the full screen slideshow of this gallery and you'll see how stupid it looks with nearly every head cut off in the portrait oriented images. And the worst part about it is there is NOTHING we can do to change it in any way other than disable all slideshow views.
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Yeah, it worked-- uploading, I mean. But as I predicted, explaining all the weirdness in the wording on the upload pages (for the Simple Uploader) was very frustrating for both of us. The aggravating thing is, no one is telling us anything. Please, please-- this is such basic user-interface stuff. Can't someone just take a few moments and fix the wording so that it's not nonsensical to people? And if they can't, could they at least tell us when it'll be fixed? I find it really embarrassing for such a sophisticated site. "Time Remaining: Uploads Pending" -- the wording for when the upload is complete. That's the worst. And then the other stuff. Just... spare us. Fix it before more people run away.
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I've acknowledged it a long time ago and I agree with you. We need to get some face detection stuff going, eh?
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Anna Lisa, I'm willing to have one of my heroes schedule an appointment with you this coming week. Logging in takes microseconds for us. I think you just need to have someone walk you through a few things. I suspect that things are being conflicted in your browser and also your use of your main password and an assistant password. If you want this help, please email ATTN: Andy at the help desk I will assign a hero to contact you and walk you through this in person, live.
We have received your Simple Uploader feedback numerous times, thanks for providing it again. I'm going to see about getting it sorted.
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I won't be using the assistant password from here anymore. If it gets used, it'll be from someone else's computer. I just hope they won't have to click the log-in screen every time they upload.
DayBreak, my Folk Music Group (some free mp3s!) http://daybreakfolk.com
DayBreak, my Folk Music Group (some free mp3s!) http://daybreakfolk.com
My suggestion for all automatic square thumbnails (e.g. gallery, slideshow, etc) is to do the following:
- For portrait shots, assume the "point of interest" is 1/3 from the top
- For landscape shots, assume the "point of interest" is 1/3 from the left [or the right - I'm not certainly which is more common]
- When generating the square thumbnail, instead of using a center-crop, use a crop that keeps the "point of interest" at the same ratio in the thumbnail as in the original
- E.g. for portrait 1:1.5 ratio photos, the crop should be from 0.1111 to 0.7777 of the vertical axis (from the top).
This should solve a large proportion of the problems with minimal computing resources.Bit, in the end, both of those are going to be just slightly better guesses and still significantly imperfect. Auto-cropping a non-square image into square and expecting to end up with the right part of the subject in the resulting crop is just NEVER going to be reliable. There is NO way for a computer to automatically know what the important part of the image is.
The only two reliable solutions are letting the site owner specify the crop (like they can do with gallery thumbnails) or letting the site owner have non-cropped thumbs (like galleries set to "original" thumbs can have). Slideshow thumbs need to do the same as galleries do - give us the control we have in galleries.
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