SmugMug Feature Requests #6
Andy
Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
Please put your feature requests in this thread.
Occasionally we will move a thread, or posts from a thread, to here, for the sake of having everything in one place. Thanks in advance for your input and telling us like it is!
Here's the prior feature request thread
Thanks!
Occasionally we will move a thread, or posts from a thread, to here, for the sake of having everything in one place. Thanks in advance for your input and telling us like it is!
Here's the prior feature request thread
Thanks!
0
This discussion has been closed.
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self explanatory
Also, let me choose how many pictures per page.....I don't like hitting next, next, next...
This is all I want for christmas!
Allow me to change Gallery created date (so I can set it to the actual event date, not when I uploaded the pics)
ability to define a default viewing style:
Allow me to sort my Categories and sub-categories by position (regardless of my gallery sort)
Allow sorting of my galleries within a Category (either by position, date, or other options)
Allow Sub-Categories to show up below the Category's galleries
Thanks!
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Just in case you didn't realize, you can control both category order and gallery order within the category. It isn't as simple as you like to do, but any category order can be accomplished and any gallery order within the category
can be accomplished.
What took me awhile to understand is that the category order is controlled by the first gallery from each category that appears in the gallery order. So, to make category A come first, you makes sure that a gallery in category A comes first in the gallery order. To make category B come second, you make sure that only category A's galleries come before the first gallery in category B.
So, if you had the followiing structure:
Category A
- Gallery 1
- Gallery 2
- Gallery 3
Category B
- Gallery 10
- Gallery 11
- Gallery 12
Category C
- Gallery 20
- Gallery 21
- Gallery 22
And you want your categories to display as B, C, A and you want the galleries in reverse numeric order, you can accomplish this by putting the galleries into the following order
12, 11, 10, 22, 21, 20, 3, 2, 1
The fact that gallery 12 comes first will cause category B to be listed first. The fact that gallery 12, 11 and 10 are in this order will control their display order within category B. The fact that gallery 22 comes next will cause category C to be the 2nd category displayed and so on...
I will not argue that this is intuitive so your feature request for something easier is a good one. It took me more than a year to understand how it works now. It would be clearly easier if categories had their own order and galleries within a category had their own order. But, today's implementation can be made to produce any result you want with a little work.
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You could get a thousand requests on how to provide statistics...
I was going to ask for a reset statistics button so I could see new "hits" but I thought of something better....
Let us download our statistic data, for current or previous months, to a file.
skip the thumbnail hits, but give me the data you have on the hits, and include the url to the gallery and/or pic. This way I could put it in excel, sort it anyway I want, follow the url to the pics I want to see, whatever.... Get's you guys out of the loop, and I get the info I am interested in.
trust me, I know all about it...... you proved my point!
thanks though, seriously.
Hi dmc, it's all there in the public thread. And our responses. And our track record of continued innovation - new features - and improvements. We're very open about new stuff coming in, some things get discussed at great length, and we'll give an indication about likelihood. Other things, we'll discuss and we'll say "can't promise if/when, but it's very important to us and we know to you, too." Becuase if we find out, for example, that what customer A thinks is a really easy feature, and initially we love it, but upon further digging we find some correlation to sub-system Z, and therefore it becomes a rather difficult feature to implement - now, if we'd said: "sure, we can implement that in 10 days time" we'd be spending the ensuing two weeks fanning flames becuase we didn't deliver. In addition, we don't make everything public - our roadmap or specific exact stuff that we're coming out with - by such and such a date. You can, however, see when we're really excited about something and judge for yourself. The bottomline is, except in really rare circumstances (I can think of only one time) we don't talk about new things in detail, in advance.
I hope this helps,
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You can do that already. Star Explorer
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The discussions are great, you have this thread, that thread, blogs, we get information about new releases when they come out, but there really is something missing....
We need a list... only updated by you (smugmug). It has our requests, and smugmug's current or final determination on whether the request is being considered, implemented, or deterimined to be not the direction smugmug wants to go....
It could have priority, estimated date of implementation, comments, etc.
If we could peruse the list, we would know what is going on. Right now we have lots of discussion.... I can look into the past to see if it has been talked about... but I can't tell if anything is planned.
This thread is a perfect example, the requests are put in, but then discussion takes place, we go off topic, the thread gets big, the request get buried, then I don't know if anyone noticed the original request....
I'm done for today, I'll let others in......
Hi dmc, thanks again for your valuable input. We really appreciate it when you lay it on us straight. We try to be equally straight, so please re-read my post above... thanks again!
All the best,
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The following are a few of my observations and suggestions for Goggle maps.
There seems to be a limit of 150 photos showing in Goggle maps from the home
page. Is there a way to refresh the map view to get a new set of photos?
I would also like to be able to zoom and frame of a particular area of the world and
have photos from all Smugmug public galleries of that area shown. Maybe a refresh to
show another set. This would be great for vacation planning
Random Smugmug photos. Be able to generate a set of random public photos on the
world view. And of course refresh for new set.
AL
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Thanks for the input, Al. Moved to the features thread.
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I've got a request!
The ability to add a description to a category would be really useful.
At the moment it's possible to add a description to individual galleries but being able to have a similar feature for groups of galleries (by category) would be good.
Apologies if this has been requested before - I've searched lots of the old threads but not found anything.
Can I also add another "vote" to the request for user-settable timezones on comments et, (I found this posted as a request on an older thread).
BTW... While I'm posting, just wanna say how great smugmug is. After trying a few others, I signed up pretty much as soon as I found the site!
Since the time the current production API were rolled out, many new "properties" were added to albums and images (e.g. GPS coordinates).
Is it possible to add at least some of those new properties as optional struct members to the existing production API?
Unless I'm greatly mistaken on how things work on a server side, it would be simply a matter of parsing those few new tags and putting the parsed values into already existing DB fields. And, of course, adding them to the docs.
This would be HUGE xmas gift for every smugmug customer who's using 3d party tools (and S*E alone speaks for more than 200+ people).
Thanks!
Yes, DMC, you can download and store stats in the database (starting with S*E Power Edition). I must warn you, though, that currently SM only provides stats for the last 3 months only. So unless you do that at least every other month the data will be gone and S*E will be able to help you anymore. The good news: if you do download it - it will stay with you indefinitely (or at least until your PC crashes, but that's a backup question:-). So just make it a habit to download the prior month stats in the beginning of each one - and you'll be fine
HTH
Of course the only FREE Mpeg-1 batch converter out there, TMpgenc, does not correctly output my 16:9 video files from my DVD-cam! I've spent countless hours trying to get it to work and it just won't. FX MPEG Writer (which Smugmug recommends) worked on the first try, but does not support batch converting without paying a fee! :cry
There are many FREE batch Mpeg-4, WMV, Divx, Xvid...etc encoders out there, but Smugmug doesn't support them! :cry
I can't post a 1 minute long video at any reasonable size without artifacts because of the 16mb and Mpeg1 limitations. :cry
PLEASE GIVE US MPEG-4! I don't care about the lowest common denominator, I know my audience has players that are compatible with MPEG-4. Any WINDOWS system 98 or above has a Windows Media Player version which can play MPEG-4. Quicktime can run MPEG-4 for Macs. Linux has many players which support MPEG-4, I've even got WMV9 to run on Linux.
I know its not hard to code, I have a PHP script which runs on my home server that can support ALL of the mentioned formats.
What would the internet be like if all web-sites were built to run perfectly on a 100MHZ Windows 95 computer?
At least give us Flash Video! There are free encoders we can use to make flash videos too! Why not? Thats what Google Video uses.
Edit: I take that back, Flash wouldn't allow the users to easily download videos, and I'm not sure if there are any free batch Flash Video encoders. Mpeg-4 all the way!
Hi Dodge,
Thanks for writing. I'm afraid I have no new news. Here's the last thread where we discussed it and I wish I had a better answer for you.
All the best,
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Just a thoughts....
Will there be any future enhancement to include a way to Purge the Sales Information?
kc7dji
Hi kc,
Thanks so much for posting. We have heard this from folks, yes. And we're discussing it. Some want it, some want the permanent record. We did a nice change in the past few weeks, putting the most recent orders at the top of the screen (this was a direct result of hearing this request from our pros)... that helps, I hope... There are considerations - purging - OH NO I need that information (2 months later) .... help@smugmug.com - and you can see how that might cause some support issues. So, we're noodling this around.
Thanks so much for taking the time to tell us!
All the best,
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Thanks for the reply. I do understand why some wouldn't want to purge. That's why I'd make it a "button" and maybe even a confirmation after clicking the button. As a web software developer myself we have a phrase, "Here's the gun and here's the bullet. Do with it as you choose."
Anyway, thanks for listening. I love my pro account, execpt on renewal day.
kc7dji
(1) I received an email from a customer today and they too had their photos bent by the USPS. They suggested that a "Do Not Bend" or "Photos Enclosed" stamp be put on the shipping envelope. I emailed Help@Smugmug.com right away and was assured that a new order would be placed right away and that this issue has been addressed with EZPrints numerous times. I was pleased with the fast response of Smugmug support and hope that EZPrints makes this change soon.
(2) I wish there was a way of knowing how our customers placed their orders. This would include shipping (overnight, 2 day, etc.) and I would like to know how the photos were cropped. Is either of these something we might see in the near future?
Thanks in advance. Again, I've only had positive feedback on the most part from my customers and I'm hoping to continue down that same road. The above items will only help us all do a better job of providing services to our clients.
Regards,
Fred
Hi Fred - thanks for taking the time to tell us this. It's great feedback, and also some great suggestions. I'll make sure that we consider them.
All the best,
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Have a great one!
Fred
I'd like to have a capability to exchange pictures with other smugmug users.
Business case: on some event I take a picture of a friend and his family. I'm not much interested in this particular picture, but my friend naturally is. Since my friend is also a smugmug user (as most of my photography-involved friends are:-) I would like to give this picture to him. Image is already uploaded, so really all it takes is a "change of ownership", which on a technical level shall not be any more complex than one or two SQL statements. Very much like "move", just across single user boundaries.
Of course there is always some logistics involved. UI should provide the sender with an option of sending the copy (duplicate + move) vs sending the original (just move for good).
Also there should be certain action required from recipient, something similar to what happens when somebody want to send you a file over IM: first you receive a notification that somebody wants to send you an image, to which you have to respond within certain amount of time.
In SM case it can be an email with a link that expires after a day or so. Also, to avoid privacy violation and spamming, this feature can be only enabled between friends and family (both ways) and fans (one way - fans can receive, but cannot send back), and even that should be configurable and optional.
As an extra bonus, if this feature is implemented, it can be considered as a first phase of "trading/selling originals". Payments can be made via 3d party tools (like paypal) and SM membership is required, but at least it will be possible to sell (or give) the image files to other people.
Whaddayathink?
Thanks Nik, for the suggestion. At the moment, we're not so interested in Paypal... and if you ever have the need to move a gallery, we can do that for you easily by just emailing us at help@smugmug.com - we don't want to be doing that as a routine course of business but we'll gladly do it for you when asked.
We've got other plans in the works for "selling originals" (digital downloads via our shopping cart) - still no promises on when but it's something that we very much want to get done as we know how important it is to many pros.
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While it's good to hear that you guys are still thinking of selling digital downloads, my primary interest in this feature is not about the money, but the capability to easily exchange photos with other SM users. I have, for instance, a few pictures of DavidTO and his kids, I'm sure he would not mind having them in his possession. I, on the other hand, do not mind give them to him. Be both have SM accounts, so, rather than sending multimegabyte email I'd rather simply "transfer" them to him...
I take lots of pictures of my friends and colleagues and their families. I don't want to create separate gallery for one-two-three images each time and bug techsupport to move it. I just want to be able give the piccies to the corresponding subjects and let them deal with them..
Does it make sense to anybodybut me?