they will be big (150px) and beautiful when your visitors visit on a bit monitor. Promise!
I also encourage you to use our newer themes, not Khaki and "red" like youv'e been showing.
Ummm, I have a big beautiful screen, and they're not large. This is what I have been trying & trying to tell you!!! Sheeesh. And I haven't been showing Khaki... I stated that I barely ever use that theme because of the tiny thumbs. (it's about the only stretchy theme whose thumbs stay tiny) I use it in a gallery or two where I wanted the color for some reason. The newer themes, which are otherwise decent, have crappy fonts... no bold. The titles & captions are nearly invisible. Unless I use html, which seems like it won't be allowed. Or CSS, which is a PITA to do for a bunch of galleries. Anyway, I use red in that particular gallery because it's a red gallery! (I have a category called "color cascade", with one gallery per color. http://www.winsomeworks.com/Art/Cascade-of-Colors ) There's nothing else that works, & certainly no new colors that would have worked. Incidentally, there's no purple or even lavender anywhere-- not in new themes, not in old themes. Every primary color & secondary color has at least one or two options in the available themes, with one exception: purple.
Longish Comments
I like the fact that there are improvements happening. As usual there are some likes and dislikes. I will say that I did not read all the comments in the 110 posts as I wanted to look at my galleries from a fresh perspective and avoid prejudicing. I call it the dog pile affect at work. You keep piling on to one issue that someone has brought up and miss the other ones.
My Comments:
I like that there is an indication which account I am logged in under
I think the Upload icon takes a little getting used to, I understand it is an arrow going up into a cloud but that took me a few seconds to understand. It was a little too art not enough function for my taste.
The green outline around the search box was a little more pronounced than I would like
I also would recommend there be a ? or similar icon next to “Help” for consistency sake.
I would be interested in seeing what the upper right corner would look like as just icons
The speed is pretty impressive
I do not like each keyword being in its own bubble under the image
I do like the info icon being below the image
I like the magnifying glass icon when hovering over the main image as I think it adds to the discoverability of the larger view
I would prefer an arrow or hand instead of a magnifying glass when hovering over a video
I am aware that there will be changes to the amount of HTML allowed in gallery descriptions. I hope that there is enough to allow a link to an event outside of the gallery. Such as on the Hockey Gallery where I linked to the box score
There appears to be some sizing issues on my 1080p display (1920 x 1080) where I would have to scroll down to see the whole image when in Lightbox mode. Firefox 4 on a Mac 10.6.7
Did I mention I liked the speed improvements
I would like to be able to control the background color of the Lightbox and Video Player. I would have rather have it be an opaque color then a translucent color
I did not like the changes to the share feature not having an indication that by clicking the URL it would be copied to the clipboard. I also would have liked to see it in a box not just floating on the image as I am concerned that it might not always be easy to see
I do like the new layout of the buttons on the Lightbox so that the close button does not seem so out of place
I would prefer if the captions were centered under the Lightbox display. Even better would be the ability to change the alignment. It does not bother me as much in the “standard view”
I think that there should be the ability for people to leave comments without being logged into SmugMug or Facebook. I understand that it is a very common authentication tool, however will it work with various privacy settings? I think that having it like a blog where the owner is responsible for their decision to moderate or not is the way to do it. Yes, like a WordPress blog
I saw that there is going to be a change to the rating system. I would like to be able to have an easy way to get votes and rating back from my images. I would also like the scale to be more than just “up” or “down” but a user defined scale.
I would like for a tool to jump many pages or images at once, not just advance one page of thumbnails or one image at a time. In an ideal world I would like to have a jump ten button and a numeric entry box.
I really like the ability to see gallery stats from within the gallery, much easier to get to. I think overall the user menu has improved
I like the clear indication in the thumbnail grid that the image is hidden; it would be nice to have it on the larger image as well.
The download icon was not very intuitive to me. I thought it was a way to view a single image.
I like that the slideshow starts full screen
I am sure that there will be more comments to come, but these are my first few ones. I also am pretty sure that some of these might be existing features – but I might just not have looked for them.
Hmmm
I like the cleaner look. It's already confusing as hell for the photographer but for the client it should be simple stupid. "Look, add, purchase" seamless. I played with it a tiny bit and only found one thing that was weird... on some photos when I clicked the thumbnail it highlighted the thumbnail blue. As I clicked on 2, 3, 4th photos it did the same. I got to the 5th and it did nothing but show the photo in the viewer (didnt change color). Other than that - for the little time I spend, it looked to be clean and simple which is all my clients want at the end of the day.
Some more time should be put at exposing other items for sale however. I am not sure how this should be done. Have all kinds of idea's but eh...
Hopefully this will go in the right direction.:ivar
Thumbnail hover
Great!! You picked up the thumbnail hover color/border shape and keep it for
the current thumb as you're browsing thru the thumbs. I had to hack this in
the current CSS.
I'm assuming any special themes we've created will be thrown out the
window. A whole nuther world of converting?
Oh no. Don't even say it. I was starting to think I'd switch to my portfolio theme, http://www.winsomeworks.com/Portfolio/AnnaLisaYoder-PhotoFavorites/6704667_LAjfv/268304062_UN9w4 or variations of it (sometimes using other colors instead of the deep purple) throughout my site. I think one of my biggest worries now is that the site will become, like someone said, another cookie-cutter site, but I just have to pray it won't. I guess this is the danger of letting those of us who've done lots of customizations see what the new site will look like... because we're so unsure how many of our customizations will continue to be valid, now that we've worked so hard on them. Yeah, the fear factor is great. I don't know what's to be done about it. I just can't begin to imagine what my site will really end up looking like, and only want it to look about 1/4 like the new stuff I'm seeing. How not to worry?
I still haven't heard any response to any of my earliest thoughts, either (post #40)... such as the comment box.... why it's piled up under the main photo to the right, when everything else is already there. If just moved to the left, we wouldn't need to scroll to see it.
* Clean and more modern looking. For the most part, I like the "feel" of it. Nice job.
* Keywords are taking up WAY too much space! The bubble around each keyword needs to go away...
* The new buy button sticks out like a sore thumb. Everything else in the UI is subtle and doesn't draw attention away from the photos. The bright colors on the buy button practically yank my attention up there. Not good - at least for a non-pro site.
* Not sure I like the navigation buttons being below the thumbs and the main picture. Maybe it is just because I'm used to them being up top, but I'm constantly having to do a double take with my mouse when navigating.
* Minor nit: the square+pencil icon used for the Edit button under the big picture are more white (almost the same brightness as when you hover the mouse over them) than the Share button right next to it. They should be consistent - preferably like the Share button.
* The new buy button sticks out like a sore thumb. Everything else in the UI is subtle and doesn't draw attention away from the photos. The bright colors on the buy button practically yank my attention up there. Not good - at least for a non-pro site.
We do expect / hope to offer some buy-button customizing options, as Don mentioned in his post #1. Thanks for the feedback!
Sorry Smugmug. I have had a pro account for a while but have just signed up for a zenfolio trial.
There has been a lot of discussion on this thread about whether the changes are good or not, but I think we're missing a bigger point, which is that nobody asked for this!
Three of the top four feature requests are about printing options, self-fulfillment and other currencies, and these collectively have ~2600 votes. These seem like a good idea for priority #1, especially as many of the voters have waited patiently for years. How many votes does a gallery redesign have? I'm personally not worried about recustomising my site; I'm worried about constant customer complaints related to $USD sales and slow international postage. Smugmug, you should be worried about this too, or you should scrap the feature request system as it just gives false hope.
I'm very curious as to how many other pros are against this and will leave smug. This is the 3rd time in this thread I have asked if a poll can be done to see how many pros are in favor of this. Still nobody from smugmug has responded. A poll can only help you guys. If it comes out favorably for changes great for you guys, if most of the pros are against this also great for you guys. You then will have an idea of how many people will leave. This is a win win for you. All sorts of industries rely on polls being conducted before a major change takes place. I think the poll should some how be emailed to all paying pro customers since not everyone follows dgrin. I think you owe it to your customers to see what they really think not just base feedback on what gets posted in a forum. I really hope some e from smug will respond to this. Thanks for listening.
Sorry Smugmug. I have had a pro account for a while but have just signed up for a zenfolio trial.
There has been a lot of discussion on this thread about whether the changes are good or not, but I think we're missing a bigger point, which is that nobody asked for this!
Three of the top four feature requests are about printing options, self-fulfillment and other currencies, and these collectively have ~2600 votes. These seem like a good idea for priority #1, especially as many of the voters have waited patiently for years. How many votes does a gallery redesign have? I'm personally not worried about recustomising my site; I'm worried about constant customer complaints related to $USD sales and slow international postage. Smugmug, you should be worried about this too, or you should scrap the feature request system as it just gives false hope.
A company that ONLY works on the explicit things that customers ask for will find themselves behind in the market in a short while. While customers know what they want NOW, customers aren't very good at seeing what brand new stuff the services they use will need in the future to remain competitive and what innovations the industry is working on.
Thus, a company like Smugmug needs to work on both kinds of things - explicit things that customers ask for and things that they think will keep their photo site on the competitive edge for the future. If they didn't work on the former, they wouldn't be serving their customer's explicit needs. If they didn't work on the latter, suddenly you'd find that they had fallen behind in the overall photo marketplace and had not innovated. In this case, they happen to think that improving their photo display is an important thing to invest in (and I tend to agree). Fortunately for us, they aren't only working on one thing - they have multiple employees working on a variety of things. Some features will come sooner than others just due to the timing of how long things take and how complicated they are to implement.
Put another way, if Smugmug doesn't keep improving their photo display (speed, presentation, etc...) they will fall behind in the marketplace. Obviously, they have to do many other things also or they will also fall behind.
A company that ONLY works on the explicit things that customers ask for will find themselves behind in the market in a short while. While customers know what they want NOW, customers aren't very good at seeing what brand new stuff the services they use will need in the future to remain competitive and what innovations the industry is working on.
Thus, a company like Smugmug needs to work on both kinds of things - explicit things that customers ask for and things that they think will keep their photo site on the competitive edge for the future. If they didn't work on the former, they wouldn't be serving their customer's explicit needs. If they didn't work on the latter, suddenly you'd find that they had fallen behind in the overall photo marketplace and had not innovated. In this case, they happen to think that improving their photo display is an important thing to invest in (and I tend to agree). Fortunately for us, they aren't only working on one thing - they have multiple employees working on a variety of things. Some features will come sooner than others just due to the timing of how long things take and how complicated they are to implement.
Put another way, if Smugmug doesn't keep improving their photo display (speed, presentation, etc...) they will fall behind in the marketplace. Obviously, they have to do many other things also or they will also fall behind.
John, thanks for this - it's very true. We're gonna try and solve all the gnarly problems, and hopefully make it as painless as possible for everyone to get the new goodness without hassle. Stay tuned, we've been monitoring all this feedback (thanks all!) and we're all focused on making this work for all.
Sorry if it has been discussed... didn't read the whole thread...
Are you getting rid of the old "arrange photos" tool? I see drag and drop, sort, and arrange by number. The old version has the 4th arrange option that's now missing. "arrange photos" is the only arrange tool I have ever found useful! Please don't get rid of it!
Drag and drop sucks because filenames aren't shown and you can only move one photo at a time. Sort is useless because that can be set using other tools. And by number just takes too long. The old arrange photos tool could use some modernizing, but it lets me do what I need to do.
I normally auto sort by filename. I just ran into an occasion where unknowingly lightroom changed file naming for part of an import due to some conflict. So sorting by filename fails because suddenly a group of incorrect photos appears in the wrong spot. None of the tools provided in the new system let me move a large group of photos at once.
Please don't sacrifice useability for looks. I hope you're working on improving the tools we use, not just the interface our customers see. If you want to improve arrange tools, let us arrange by multiple things... date taken and filename. For example when 2 images have the same date taken, go by the filename. That would save me a ton of time.
Not being a Pro-user, I don't have to worry about some of the points raised here, but having spent a fair bit of time customising my site, the way the new design appears and how it works is important to me...
A lot of my customisations were attempts (successful, mostly!) to make the appearance cleaner, remove things I didn't want, and re-arrange things on the gallery pages - and so far, I'm pleased that in my opinion, the new design has achieved a lot of this without my customisations.
I hope that we'll still have the opportunity to move things around a bit, as the big attraction to smugmug when I originally signed up was how each site could look completely different, and unique, if desired - but perhaps this might be better achieved with an extension of the gallery/theme settings?
Anyway, I have the following thoughts/feedback on the new design:
* Facebook "like" button flashes up (white -> image) and is distracting - is this something that can be resolved?
* The left/right arrow keys should be disabled if there is no photo/page to navigate to (e.g. disable "left" on first page/photo and "right" on last page/photo).
* Could we have the caption as a tooltip on the thumbnails on gallery pages?
* Photo caption is too detached from the caption - it would look better directly below the photo (Q: is this just my site, perhaps an existing customisation inadvertently affecting it?)
* The "info" pop-up looks nice, but I'd like to see all information on one screen by default - perhaps have the basic and detailed areas as collapsing sections instead of different tabs?
* The buttons need more detailed tooltips to help guide people (e.g. commenting on Photo/Gallery - potentially not clear what these buttons will do)
* The comments section makes the page a bit tall - it'd be nice not to have scrollbars on the gallery pages.
* The comment section could do with a title (say next to the Photo/Gallery buttons) to frame it more clearly.
I just took another look at the new smugmug-style design. A few more comments:
As I noted in my initial feedback, I still feel very strongly that the slideshow button, page navigation, and photo navigation should be above the photos. If a description is opened these elements fall below the readable portion of the browser window. Please provide a setting that allows the site owner to specify whether those buttons should be above or below the photos.
The buy button is too prominent. I'd like to see more subtle colors used. Why not provide multiple buy buttons and let the site owner choose?
Don't display "commenting has been disabled for this photo". If I turned comments off for a gallery then there should be no indication of comments at all.
Thanks for your replies. I agree in theory that smugmug needs to keep innovating and that ideas shouldn't necessarily always come from user feedback. My point was that ~2600 votes on essentially one thing should prompt smugmug to at least consider focusing more energy on photo-sales options for non-US pros rather than on sexy-ing up the interface. It seems a lot like re-painting a perfectly good shopfront when the cash register inside doesn't work.
Andy, if an overhaul of the cart is currently getting as much focus as this, fantastic! Just point me to the similar dgrin thread showing the beta and asking for user input, as I can't seem to find it.
To OneThumb and Andy
I have a website with another company - not related at all to photography, which provides everyone with the facility to build their sites using various and many components they provide as a kind of standard. This includes 100's of different template styles which are customizable, still within the basic system.
We also have the option to fully customize the templates - header, background, font style and colour etc. from those provided in the templates.
Then there is the ultimate flexibility of completely uploading your own html but still benefiting from the behind the scenes stuff that makes the system as a whole so successful ie re-submitting sitemaps, analyzing keyword content etc etc
I know I'm not great at explaining techie things but I hope you'll understand where I'm coming from and consider this as a possibility.
Could Smugmug offer this type of option where we are allowed to completely customize our sites without the template restrictions but can opt in to things - shopping cart, comments etc.
Pay close attention to the part where Ford decided it was cheaper to pay the lawsuits vs. fix the design, and consider the percentage of those people on SM who customize their sites vs. those who don't. Also, consider the cost of servicing a client who customized a site and has lots of photos vs. a client who did not, is new, and probably has fewer photos. Feel free to calculate the cost of Amazon S3 storage over here: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html
:giggle Cute blog, but really, what's the point? Smugmug never presented the new design as anything other than a work-in-progress -- very EARLY progress, by their own admission. The fact that they are even asking for their customers' opinions this early in the process is nice and more than most companies do. I don't recall getting the chance to voice my opinion to open ears for other software I buy or services to which I subscribe.
:giggle Cute blog, but really, what's the point? Smugmug never presented the new design as anything other than a work-in-progress -- very EARLY progress, by their own admission. The fact that they are even asking for their customers' opinions this early in the process is nice and more than most companies do. I don't recall getting the chance to voice my opinion to open ears for other software I buy or services to which I subscribe.
I'm not sure exactly what the blog was referring to, but the main image on http://www.smugmug.com/ advertises a gallery look that is not available. I've always thought that was a bit uncool.
I'm not sure exactly what the blog was referring to, but the main image on http://www.smugmug.com/ advertises a gallery look that is not available. I've always thought that was a bit uncool.
True - just noticed that.. :nono if the roll-out is indeed "many months" away, that's a bit premature to be showing that as what's currently being offered. I thought the blog was referring to what was being discussed in this thread - if not then that's my mistake. oops.
True - just noticed that.. :nono if the roll-out is indeed "many months" away, that's a bit premature to be showing that as what's currently being offered. I thought the blog was referring to what was being discussed in this thread - if not then that's my mistake. oops.
Looks like maybe he deleted his post that referenced the blog. The homepage has been showing what it has now for several months now. Been mentioned here before.
There has been a lot of discussion on this thread about whether the changes are good or not, but I think we're missing a bigger point, which is that nobody asked for this!.
I just want to explicitly reply that this isn't true. These changes (and the related ones you're not seeing yet because this is a VERY EARLY preview) are easily the most requested, nay, most DEMANDED, features SmugMug has ever worked on.
We hear it every day on the Help Desk. We hear it every day in person. We hear it every time we do user testing. We hear it at every trade show.
The message is crystal clear, which is why we're devoting so many resources to this project. Stay tuned... There's a lot more coming that should make it even clearer just how many major customer requests will be solved with this update.
Much faster. I can see pre-caching at work and it seems to work well. Navigating around within a page and to a new page is much faster in this new style. This is a major win.
Visual cleanup is good. Graphic and layout cleanup of the old design was definitely needed. This is moving in the right direction.
Top tool bar good. The old Tools button was too intermixed with things that people wanted to customize and thus it would get hidden accidentally too easily. Separating it out into the top bar is good.
Showing graphic on hidden image thumbs is great. I built my own customization to do that in the old gallery style because it was so useful. This is a nice feature add. We won't need that customization any more.
Cleanup of CSS identifiers is good. It's a good thing that you've cleanup all the CSS identifiers and are now prefixing all of yours with "sm-". This will help a lot to avoid conflicts with user HTML (particularly in headers/footers).
Using official page tags is good. Using the body sub-tags like header, footer, article, section, etc... should help with SEO.
Better auto-sizing of main image. I think I'm seeing better auto-sizing of the main image so that vertical and horizontal don't have to both be the same size (one can be XL and the other X2 if that's what fits).
Bad Things:
Loss of HTML in gallery descriptions and captions is going to bust a number of sites in ways that may not ever be fixable on Smugmug. It feels like you don't have a good sense of what creative things people have used this for.
Calling our custom HTML "page busting HTML" sets a tone that your customers are destroying their pages and they can't be trusted. Yes, some people screw up their pages by putting bad HTML in it (I've helped countless ones on dgrin). But, do you punish the entire customer base by taking away powerful tools just because some people mess it up. Why don't you do like blogs do and check the user HTML for the obvious things like mismatched div tags? This is a huge step backwards for many to lose the ability to put HTML in these fields. Why take this capability away? If SM is turning into a site on training wheels where you can't possibly make a mistake and thus you can no longer customize any way you want with your own HTML, then I may be looking around for other options. It's the very freedom to do anything I can code with JS, CSS or HTML that has kept me from leaving. I know I'm not the majority of the market, but if you want people like me around (for our beneficial effect on the rest of the community), you need this capability. I have no issue with you offering tools that makes it less likely that you need to resort to your own HTML (like easy customizer), but why prohibit custom HTML? I know of several SM sites that will simply be ruined without custom HTML and will be hundreds of hours of work to convert to some other scheme.
For novice viewers:
Navigation below is risky. If the page navigation ever ends up "below the fold" (which seems possible for people who have large custom headers or important multiline gallery descriptions), novices will be completely lost that there is more than one page to the gallery. It is massively safer to put the page and image navigation above the images.
Download button is cryptic. The icon used for the download button is completely non-obvious. The graphic is not self-explanatory to a novice and there is no tooltip that explains the button when you hover. Since I regular make originals available to my soccer and rowing parents, I have a lot of experience with people having trouble knowing how to download images in the old style - so much so that I added a giant "Download Image..." button to my galleries. What you have here will not be obvious to novice viewers. You should at least have a hover tooltip that explains what it is. And, I'd suggest a graphic that is a lot more obvious. What you have now is distinct from the other graphics you have, but completely unclear for what it means.
Comments are confusing. Whether you're leaving a Photo comment or a Gallery comment is just a very confusing feature. My viewers are regularly confused by this distinction and one of the customizations I support on the older gallery style is to hide one of the options to viewers ony have one type of comment (and thus won't be confused). Though you've changed the UI, I don't see that you've done anything to alleviate that confusion and perhaps even made it worse because the tabs are not obvious which is the active tab. Trying to make it pretty has made it less clear (and it was confusing before). I think you're also making things confusing by trying to overload the tabs as they both control the display type for comments and control which type of comment you can leave. I don't like that the empty edit box where one types a comment is always on screen, pushing the actual comments further down below the fold on the screen.
Keyword graphic is cryptic. No novice viewer is going to know what the keyword graphic is or means. It's not clickable. It doesn't offer any hover text. The graphic is so small and dim, it's not obvious what it is.
Comment auth. Requiring either FB or Smugmug login will kill a lot of my legitimate comments and I didn't have a problem with comment spam so this is a step backwards. Please remember that there are still a lot of people who view/comment on photos who don't do FB. IMO, you have to include at least Google and Hotmail and maybe even Yahoo if you're going to require auth to leave a comment.
Where's the cart? I don't see how one gets to your cart. Once you're done picking images, how do you get to the cart. All I see is Buy This Photos and Buy Many Photos, neither of which is what one is looking to do at this stage. Shouldn't there be a "View Cart" option or a "Checkout" option?
Gallery Navigation goes in the browser Back Button. This never used to be the case. Now, when I just move through a gallery, every image I see is in the back button state for the browser. That means that the old click-flow of open a gallery, navigate around in it, then hit Back to go back to the category no longer works. Is this intentional because it's a pretty big paradigm change? Is it better this way? I'm don't think so. I don't think I want every single image I view to go into my browser back state.
Gallery Layout Issues:
Single line gallery description is busted. As lots of people have said, forcing us to default to a single line of gallery description is a deal breaker. We should decide (not you) whether we want one or more lines to display there. The whole notion that Smugmug would ever think they should control this rather than the gallery owner scares me a bit. It's like you think you know how we want it for a particular gallery rather than us. I hope the site isn't going that general direction. I have several galleries with multi-line copyright notices that need to be displayed by default. I should get to decide this - not you. I have no problem with you making initial collapsed single line an option as long as we aren't forced to have it.
Single line gallery "more..." is broken. In addition, the "More..." detection is downright broken. It truncates lines that don't need to be truncated such that when I click on the more... it just displays two more words on the same line. That's just downright silly (actually I'd call it a bug since it provides no purpose other than obscuring the end of the line of text).
Navigation needs to be above photos. Way too much risk that it falls below the fold and the viewer never knows it's there and that there are more pages. Plus, is it that advantageous to be on the bottom that we should force millions of viewers to retrain themselves on where it's located. I don't see the big advantage to having it below and I see plenty of risk. To move it below and overcome the negatives for being down there, there has to be really compelling reasons and I don't see those reasons.
Caption needs to be right near the main photo. The caption feels completely disconnected from the main photo and that's just busted visually. Not only does the purpose of the caption not work as well as it should, but it looks bad visually too. The alignment of the caption is also screwy. It's in a box and that box isn't aligned with the image and that box is very subtle. Caption alignment has always been messed up in the Smugmug view. Because of the way the HTML was done in the old Smugmug view, there was no way to ever get the caption to line up with the edge of the photo. It looks like you still have that problem. For good visual appeal, you should fix that and hopefully not roll-out an HTML design that can never fix it. Obviously, it's a slight challenge because photo width can vary from photo to photo - that's why it has to be linked in the HTML design or programmatically positioned to match. If navigation was above the photos, then it would also put the caption closer to the main image.
Vertical space is not used very efficiently. There are a lot of empty vertical pixels in the gallery display. 1) The breadcrumb is fairly compact vertically, but it's on a line by itself so most of that line is wasted. 2) The name of the gallery is in a large font and has a lot of empty space between it and the breadcrumb. 3) There's a lot of empty space to the right of the gallery title and above the Buy button. 4) Above the thumbnails and the main image there's a lot of empty space. 5) There's a lot of empty space below the thumbnails and below the main image. 6) There's a lot of empty space between the caption and the comments.The whole thing just looks like it wasn't designed to maximize the image display which I would think would be one of the primary goals (along with looking nice).
Optimize thumbnail display. The thumbnail display could be significantly optimized if all thumbnails in the gallery happen to be the same orientation because you could optimize the row/column spacing for the actual orientation they are rather than leaving room for both orientations.
Main image misaligned vertically. The main image should be top aligned with the top of the thumbnails. Right now, it appears to be centered vertically which means that neither the top or bottom edge of the main image aligns with anything. It just looks "off".
Home icon misaligned. The home icon in the breadcrumb should be left aligned visually with the title below it. Right now, you have left aligned the actual graphic, but since the graphic contains empty space on the left side, the actual visual part of the graphic is not properly left aligned. Take the empty space out of the graphic and this problem would fix itself.
Keywords don't align with anything. Captions and keywords just don't look like they align left/right with anything. They honestly look like they were just plunked down randomly. Same with the caption.
Way too much space between caption and keywords. There's nearly 40 pixels of empty space between the bottom of the caption text and the top of the keyword text - that's just way too much empty space.
Need option for gallery title as part of breadcrumb. The most compact representation (and thus the most space for images) would include the gallery title on the same line as the breadcrumb rather than take a whole new line for it. I'd like to see a formatting option for that (either gallery setting or CSS customization).
Facebook Like button flashes when changing images. It's really disconcerting to see the Like button flash as you move from one image to the next. I understand the general problem you have with that iframe that FB owns, but this problem really needs to be solved somehow. It's visually very distracting and it's even worse now because you've made everything else so much dimmer and made it so much faster to switch images. Also, the bright gray FB Like doesn't fit visually with the general motif you have going.
Ugly graphic for privacy. You're using some sort of gold eye with a slash through it to signify both unlisted galleries and hidden images. IMO, the graphic is hideous and non-obvious what is means.
Rounded-corners look odd in Chrome (on Windows Vista). The actual rounded corner on the active thumbnail looks really odd in Chrome. It's like the border is two pixels, but the rounded part is one pixel. Looks bad enough that if I would ditch the effect on my site. I'm still unsure about the mixing of square and rounded corners (having a rounded corner only on the active thumb). It seems odd.
Dislike the look of the buy button. Since I don't sell for a profit, I don't want the buy button to stand out like a sore thumb (like it does now). I'd rather it blend in like the other controls.
Doesn't work well in small windows. The gallery doesn't seem to size itself to small windows.
Can't figure out when it goes to large thumbnails. The switch between large and small thumbnails in a gallery has always confused site owners and viewers and has always seemed somewhat random. I'm sure there's a coded algorithm behind it, but it's not obvious when/if this happens or if this is a desirable thing. The multiple sizes of category thumbs likewise confuses the heck out of Smugmug site owners. These variable behaviors that are trying to be smart, but aren't obvious enough how/why tend to just confuse.
Gallery menu sections invisible. The Gallery menu sections (Gallery and Batch) are not obvious at all. They need to stand out a lot more visually.
Three different displays for EXIF. I don't get why there are three different displays for the image info (small, medium and large). This just doesn't seem necessary to make it that complicated. Also, it's very disconcerting to have the size of the viewing palette change when you switch between the two views and then going to Full Info is just downright disconcerting to open a new browser window. This needs to get rethought. I like how you've captures the ISO, focal length, aperture and shutter in one nice display - that does make those values easier to find.
Need to see copyright info in EXIF palette. We NEED to see the Copyright meta field there.
For Site Owners:
Lost inline caption and keyword editing. Losing the inline editing of the caption and keywords is a real loss of efficient editing. It now takes a lot more clicks to browser through your images and set captions and keywords. Why would you remove the inline editing?
Lose "More" in the Edit menu. Where anywhere else in user interface does anyone use "More" as a menu item as much as you all do. If you feel like you have to have multiple levels to your menus, then group them into a grouped name that makes some sense. "More" just doesn't make sense to me. Why only 6 items at the top level of the Edit menu. There's lots more room than that. You have 16 items at the top level of the Gallery menu. I'd say, just get rid of the whole 2nd level menu there. It's just wasted clicks and harder discoverability.
Can't click on "More". Though you Mac folks may not be used to this, us PC folks are used to being able to click on a drop-down menu and have it open up the sub-menu. Windows menus work that way. While we can also hover, we don't have to - we can click. When I click on the "More" item in the Edit menu, the menu just goes away. This is wrong - it should open the sub-menu. I reported this issue in the old Tools menu a long time ago and you fixed it once before (actually it is fixed in the Gallery menu), but it's broken again in the new style for the Edit menu.
Keyword icon should be clickable to edit keywords. Since clicking the icon doesn't do anything now, why not allow the site owner to click on it to edit. That would save clicks and dexterity trying to select that option in the edit menu.
Keyword SEO? Are keywords really featured prominently enough in the site layout to get their just due for SEO? I see them as meta tags, but they're pretty buried in the site HTML and in no easily identifiable container to make them appear any more important than anything else.
CSS:
Breadcrumb identifiers. Each piece of the breadcrumb should be uniquely identified with a unique CSS identifier. For example, some people don't want to show the top category level of the breadcrumb because they've used that level to partition their site into separate sub-sites that they don't want people to see. One should be able to hide any level of the breadcrumb with CSS without resorting to javascript.
Fixed/known identifiers on menu items. Please put fixed CSS IDs on the buy menu and Share menu items so they can be directly targeted individually with CSS to either hide them, style them or change the text on them with JS. Right now all they have is generated Yui IDs which aren't fixed so can't be reliably targeted with either JS or CSS. One of my customization scripts adds these identifiers to the current menus for this purpose.
Custom borders on main image. It should be possible to do custom borders on the main image without messing up the layout of the gallery (because border width was added) or the alignment with other things. This was somewhat problematic in the old style. I haven't tried it to see what is and isn't possible now.
Other
I'd love to see an auto-expand upon hover option for the top toolbar. Hover over it and it would appear. Move the mouse elsewhere and it would go away. That way, it wouldn't be permanently taking vertical screen real-estate while working on my site - particularly when I'm on my laptop which isn't very tall. You probably can't make this the default because you need better discoverability for newbie site owners, but allowing auto-collapse/expand upon hover for experienced site owners would be a nice saver of screen real estate when working on our own sites.
The new URL format for galleries (with the image ID in the core URL instead of after the hash) will break some things. For example, people who have installed my slideshow will have to upgrade (to a new version that I haven't written yet) if they change the gallery URL. I'm sure there are other customization things that may break too because of this change. If it's strategic to change it this way, we can deal with it, but it's one more thing that will cause some breakage.
Javascript:
We need JS events for all dynamic aspects of the gallery page so things that aren't easily customized with CSS can be customized with JS. That means that anything in the gallery that is created with JS needs to have some sort of even that announces it's presence in the page so it can be customized.
Info window created.
Info window made visible.
Gallery created.
Main image shown.
Main image changed.
New gallery page displayed.
Comment added.
Creation of lightbox.
Display of lightbox.
Bugs
Focal length display is wrong. In the photo info window, the focal length says 4000mm when it should be 400mm.
John,
Thank you for doing such a clear analysis of the 'new design'. I've no doubt that you speak for many people like me who are very concerned about the fate of our sites, but aren't technically savvy enough, nor able to articulate our concerns effectively.
I hope that when you meet with Smugmug they heed your advice and look forward to your feedback. Perhaps they will also take advice from other longstanding and experienced customizers, behind the scenes, NOT on a public forum where every Tom, Dick and Caroline can throw in their comments
My personal view is that this is a massive faux pas on Smugmug's behalf (I expect the guys at Zenfolio will be laughing their socks off), they should go right back to basics, withdraw any previews etc, re-assure everyone they will not break our sites, and not make any further announcements until they have properly tested all proposed changes.
The whole thing feels a bit like a kid with a new bike - got to get out and show it off but keeps falling off.
Comments
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Big thumbs - please take this to our help desk - maybe you have some thing that is preventing your from seeing the big thumbs, thanks.
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I like the fact that there are improvements happening. As usual there are some likes and dislikes. I will say that I did not read all the comments in the 110 posts as I wanted to look at my galleries from a fresh perspective and avoid prejudicing. I call it the dog pile affect at work. You keep piling on to one issue that someone has brought up and miss the other ones.
My Comments:
- I like that there is an indication which account I am logged in under
- I think the Upload icon takes a little getting used to, I understand it is an arrow going up into a cloud but that took me a few seconds to understand. It was a little too art not enough function for my taste.
- The green outline around the search box was a little more pronounced than I would like
- I also would recommend there be a ? or similar icon next to “Help” for consistency sake.
- I would be interested in seeing what the upper right corner would look like as just icons
- The speed is pretty impressive
- I do not like each keyword being in its own bubble under the image
- I do like the info icon being below the image
- I like the magnifying glass icon when hovering over the main image as I think it adds to the discoverability of the larger view
- I would prefer an arrow or hand instead of a magnifying glass when hovering over a video
- I am not sure that the yellow mouse over highlight is the right color. On the images in my Hockey Gallery (http://photos.bradfordbenn.com/Travel/Hockey-Night-in-San-Jose-2010/) the visual contrast of the highlight was not consistent
- I am aware that there will be changes to the amount of HTML allowed in gallery descriptions. I hope that there is enough to allow a link to an event outside of the gallery. Such as on the Hockey Gallery where I linked to the box score
- There appears to be some sizing issues on my 1080p display (1920 x 1080) where I would have to scroll down to see the whole image when in Lightbox mode. Firefox 4 on a Mac 10.6.7
- Did I mention I liked the speed improvements
- I would like to be able to control the background color of the Lightbox and Video Player. I would have rather have it be an opaque color then a translucent color
- I did not like the changes to the share feature not having an indication that by clicking the URL it would be copied to the clipboard. I also would have liked to see it in a box not just floating on the image as I am concerned that it might not always be easy to see
- I do like the new layout of the buttons on the Lightbox so that the close button does not seem so out of place
- I would prefer if the captions were centered under the Lightbox display. Even better would be the ability to change the alignment. It does not bother me as much in the “standard view”
- I think that there should be the ability for people to leave comments without being logged into SmugMug or Facebook. I understand that it is a very common authentication tool, however will it work with various privacy settings? I think that having it like a blog where the owner is responsible for their decision to moderate or not is the way to do it. Yes, like a WordPress blog
- I saw that there is going to be a change to the rating system. I would like to be able to have an easy way to get votes and rating back from my images. I would also like the scale to be more than just “up” or “down” but a user defined scale.
- I would like for a tool to jump many pages or images at once, not just advance one page of thumbnails or one image at a time. In an ideal world I would like to have a jump ten button and a numeric entry box.
- I really like the ability to see gallery stats from within the gallery, much easier to get to. I think overall the user menu has improved
- I like the clear indication in the thumbnail grid that the image is hidden; it would be nice to have it on the larger image as well.
- The download icon was not very intuitive to me. I thought it was a way to view a single image.
- I like that the slideshow starts full screen
I am sure that there will be more comments to come, but these are my first few ones. I also am pretty sure that some of these might be existing features – but I might just not have looked for them.Pictures | Website | Blog | Twitter | Contact
borealphoto.smugmug.com
I like the cleaner look. It's already confusing as hell for the photographer but for the client it should be simple stupid. "Look, add, purchase" seamless. I played with it a tiny bit and only found one thing that was weird... on some photos when I clicked the thumbnail it highlighted the thumbnail blue. As I clicked on 2, 3, 4th photos it did the same. I got to the 5th and it did nothing but show the photo in the viewer (didnt change color). Other than that - for the little time I spend, it looked to be clean and simple which is all my clients want at the end of the day.
Some more time should be put at exposing other items for sale however. I am not sure how this should be done. Have all kinds of idea's but eh...
Hopefully this will go in the right direction.:ivar
When viewing photos, the drop down box goes up when my resolution is not high enough. i'm looking on a netbook and the drop down only drops down when I can barely read the words on the page:
http://ericephoto.smugmug.com/Portfolio/Seattle/15992228_siimV/1197742666_gZnfp
Great!!
the current thumb as you're browsing thru the thumbs. I had to hack this in
the current CSS.
My Website index | My Blog
I'm assuming any special themes we've created will be thrown out the
window. A whole nuther world of converting?
My Website index | My Blog
I still haven't heard any response to any of my earliest thoughts, either (post #40)... such as the comment box.... why it's piled up under the main photo to the right, when everything else is already there. If just moved to the left, we wouldn't need to scroll to see it.
DayBreak, my Folk Music Group (some free mp3s!) http://daybreakfolk.com
* Clean and more modern looking. For the most part, I like the "feel" of it. Nice job.
* Keywords are taking up WAY too much space! The bubble around each keyword needs to go away...
* The new buy button sticks out like a sore thumb. Everything else in the UI is subtle and doesn't draw attention away from the photos. The bright colors on the buy button practically yank my attention up there. Not good - at least for a non-pro site.
* Not sure I like the navigation buttons being below the thumbs and the main picture. Maybe it is just because I'm used to them being up top, but I'm constantly having to do a double take with my mouse when navigating.
* Minor nit: the square+pencil icon used for the Edit button under the big picture are more white (almost the same brightness as when you hover the mouse over them) than the Share button right next to it. They should be consistent - preferably like the Share button.
Jay
We do expect / hope to offer some buy-button customizing options, as Don mentioned in his post #1. Thanks for the feedback!
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There has been a lot of discussion on this thread about whether the changes are good or not, but I think we're missing a bigger point, which is that nobody asked for this!
Three of the top four feature requests are about printing options, self-fulfillment and other currencies, and these collectively have ~2600 votes. These seem like a good idea for priority #1, especially as many of the voters have waited patiently for years. How many votes does a gallery redesign have? I'm personally not worried about recustomising my site; I'm worried about constant customer complaints related to $USD sales and slow international postage. Smugmug, you should be worried about this too, or you should scrap the feature request system as it just gives false hope.
We are - and that's why we're hard at work on it. Thanks for telling us how important it is to you - we really appreciate the feedback!
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Thus, a company like Smugmug needs to work on both kinds of things - explicit things that customers ask for and things that they think will keep their photo site on the competitive edge for the future. If they didn't work on the former, they wouldn't be serving their customer's explicit needs. If they didn't work on the latter, suddenly you'd find that they had fallen behind in the overall photo marketplace and had not innovated. In this case, they happen to think that improving their photo display is an important thing to invest in (and I tend to agree). Fortunately for us, they aren't only working on one thing - they have multiple employees working on a variety of things. Some features will come sooner than others just due to the timing of how long things take and how complicated they are to implement.
Put another way, if Smugmug doesn't keep improving their photo display (speed, presentation, etc...) they will fall behind in the marketplace. Obviously, they have to do many other things also or they will also fall behind.
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John, thanks for this - it's very true. We're gonna try and solve all the gnarly problems, and hopefully make it as painless as possible for everyone to get the new goodness without hassle. Stay tuned, we've been monitoring all this feedback (thanks all!) and we're all focused on making this work for all.
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Are you getting rid of the old "arrange photos" tool? I see drag and drop, sort, and arrange by number. The old version has the 4th arrange option that's now missing. "arrange photos" is the only arrange tool I have ever found useful! Please don't get rid of it!
Drag and drop sucks because filenames aren't shown and you can only move one photo at a time. Sort is useless because that can be set using other tools. And by number just takes too long. The old arrange photos tool could use some modernizing, but it lets me do what I need to do.
I normally auto sort by filename. I just ran into an occasion where unknowingly lightroom changed file naming for part of an import due to some conflict. So sorting by filename fails because suddenly a group of incorrect photos appears in the wrong spot. None of the tools provided in the new system let me move a large group of photos at once.
Please don't sacrifice useability for looks. I hope you're working on improving the tools we use, not just the interface our customers see. If you want to improve arrange tools, let us arrange by multiple things... date taken and filename. For example when 2 images have the same date taken, go by the filename. That would save me a ton of time.
Dave
A lot of my customisations were attempts (successful, mostly!) to make the appearance cleaner, remove things I didn't want, and re-arrange things on the gallery pages - and so far, I'm pleased that in my opinion, the new design has achieved a lot of this without my customisations.
I hope that we'll still have the opportunity to move things around a bit, as the big attraction to smugmug when I originally signed up was how each site could look completely different, and unique, if desired - but perhaps this might be better achieved with an extension of the gallery/theme settings?
Anyway, I have the following thoughts/feedback on the new design:
* Facebook "like" button flashes up (white -> image) and is distracting - is this something that can be resolved?
* The left/right arrow keys should be disabled if there is no photo/page to navigate to (e.g. disable "left" on first page/photo and "right" on last page/photo).
* Could we have the caption as a tooltip on the thumbnails on gallery pages?
* Photo caption is too detached from the caption - it would look better directly below the photo (Q: is this just my site, perhaps an existing customisation inadvertently affecting it?)
* The "info" pop-up looks nice, but I'd like to see all information on one screen by default - perhaps have the basic and detailed areas as collapsing sections instead of different tabs?
* The buttons need more detailed tooltips to help guide people (e.g. commenting on Photo/Gallery - potentially not clear what these buttons will do)
* The comments section makes the page a bit tall - it'd be nice not to have scrollbars on the gallery pages.
* The comment section could do with a title (say next to the Photo/Gallery buttons) to frame it more clearly.
Looking forward to the next phase of the changes!
My SmugMug Site
- As I noted in my initial feedback, I still feel very strongly that the slideshow button, page navigation, and photo navigation should be above the photos. If a description is opened these elements fall below the readable portion of the browser window. Please provide a setting that allows the site owner to specify whether those buttons should be above or below the photos.
- The buy button is too prominent. I'd like to see more subtle colors used. Why not provide multiple buy buttons and let the site owner choose?
- Don't display "commenting has been disabled for this photo". If I turned comments off for a gallery then there should be no indication of comments at all.
--- DeniseMusings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
Thanks for your replies. I agree in theory that smugmug needs to keep innovating and that ideas shouldn't necessarily always come from user feedback. My point was that ~2600 votes on essentially one thing should prompt smugmug to at least consider focusing more energy on photo-sales options for non-US pros rather than on sexy-ing up the interface. It seems a lot like re-painting a perfectly good shopfront when the cash register inside doesn't work.
Andy, if an overhaul of the cart is currently getting as much focus as this, fantastic! Just point me to the similar dgrin thread showing the beta and asking for user input, as I can't seem to find it.
Iain
I have a website with another company - not related at all to photography, which provides everyone with the facility to build their sites using various and many components they provide as a kind of standard. This includes 100's of different template styles which are customizable, still within the basic system.
We also have the option to fully customize the templates - header, background, font style and colour etc. from those provided in the templates.
Then there is the ultimate flexibility of completely uploading your own html but still benefiting from the behind the scenes stuff that makes the system as a whole so successful ie re-submitting sitemaps, analyzing keyword content etc etc
I know I'm not great at explaining techie things but I hope you'll understand where I'm coming from and consider this as a possibility.
Could Smugmug offer this type of option where we are allowed to completely customize our sites without the template restrictions but can opt in to things - shopping cart, comments etc.
Caroline
www.carolineshipsey.co.uk - Follow me on G+
[/URL]
Somehow, I'm reminded of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Fuel_tank_controversy
Pay close attention to the part where Ford decided it was cheaper to pay the lawsuits vs. fix the design, and consider the percentage of those people on SM who customize their sites vs. those who don't. Also, consider the cost of servicing a client who customized a site and has lots of photos vs. a client who did not, is new, and probably has fewer photos. Feel free to calculate the cost of Amazon S3 storage over here: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html
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:giggle Cute blog, but really, what's the point? Smugmug never presented the new design as anything other than a work-in-progress -- very EARLY progress, by their own admission. The fact that they are even asking for their customers' opinions this early in the process is nice and more than most companies do. I don't recall getting the chance to voice my opinion to open ears for other software I buy or services to which I subscribe.
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True - just noticed that.. :nono if the roll-out is indeed "many months" away, that's a bit premature to be showing that as what's currently being offered. I thought the blog was referring to what was being discussed in this thread - if not then that's my mistake. oops.
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I just want to explicitly reply that this isn't true. These changes (and the related ones you're not seeing yet because this is a VERY EARLY preview) are easily the most requested, nay, most DEMANDED, features SmugMug has ever worked on.
We hear it every day on the Help Desk. We hear it every day in person. We hear it every time we do user testing. We hear it at every trade show.
The message is crystal clear, which is why we're devoting so many resources to this project. Stay tuned... There's a lot more coming that should make it even clearer just how many major customer requests will be solved with this update.
Good things:
Bad Things:
For novice viewers:
Gallery Layout Issues:
For Site Owners:
CSS:
- Breadcrumb identifiers. Each piece of the breadcrumb should be uniquely identified with a unique CSS identifier. For example, some people don't want to show the top category level of the breadcrumb because they've used that level to partition their site into separate sub-sites that they don't want people to see. One should be able to hide any level of the breadcrumb with CSS without resorting to javascript.
- Fixed/known identifiers on menu items. Please put fixed CSS IDs on the buy menu and Share menu items so they can be directly targeted individually with CSS to either hide them, style them or change the text on them with JS. Right now all they have is generated Yui IDs which aren't fixed so can't be reliably targeted with either JS or CSS. One of my customization scripts adds these identifiers to the current menus for this purpose.
- Custom borders on main image. It should be possible to do custom borders on the main image without messing up the layout of the gallery (because border width was added) or the alignment with other things. This was somewhat problematic in the old style. I haven't tried it to see what is and isn't possible now.
OtherJavascript:
Bugs
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Thank you for doing such a clear analysis of the 'new design'. I've no doubt that you speak for many people like me who are very concerned about the fate of our sites, but aren't technically savvy enough, nor able to articulate our concerns effectively.
I hope that when you meet with Smugmug they heed your advice and look forward to your feedback. Perhaps they will also take advice from other longstanding and experienced customizers, behind the scenes, NOT on a public forum where every Tom, Dick and Caroline can throw in their comments
My personal view is that this is a massive faux pas on Smugmug's behalf (I expect the guys at Zenfolio will be laughing their socks off), they should go right back to basics, withdraw any previews etc, re-assure everyone they will not break our sites, and not make any further announcements until they have properly tested all proposed changes.
The whole thing feels a bit like a kid with a new bike - got to get out and show it off but keeps falling off.
Caroline
www.carolineshipsey.co.uk - Follow me on G+
[/URL]
Thanks so much for posting this. I agree with everything you've presented.
Smug -
Please, please, please listen!
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com