Call me a luddite....
jefff100
Registered Users Posts: 16 Big grins
O.K. Call me whatever you want, I dont care.
I really dont care for the new website interface. I'm not really blown away by a specatular wall to wall images of the thumnails.
I understand that they needed a new back end, a new support structure. Fine, but we should have the option of having a user interface that was just like the old one; running on top of the new support architecture. I don't live and breathe photography. I dont have hours each day to spend twiddling with a website to customize it. This is just an online photo album, nothing more. I dont care if it looks dated. I'm dated, I'm over the hill. So what? Is Smugmug only concerned with those customers who are Pro or Semi-prophotographers? I don't have anyone to impress, my site is for me.
- I liked the old toolbars, with the text that you could read. They were simple and easy to understand.
- To me its a gross slap in the face to tell us we cant keep comments left by visitors in the past. That should be our choice, not Smugmug's.
- I don't like the little tiny pinpoint icons. You have to guess at what they mean, there is no accompanying text. I feel like we are regressing back in time. Years ago we had cavemen & hieroglyphics; wall paintings. Then we as humans evolved, and developed the written word. This is a step back in time. Yeah, I konw the new MS office does the same thing. I dont like it either.
- I tried playing with some of the new templates. None of them really impress me or make me say "wow" In fact, there really only seems to be 3 different formats, with subtle varioations on a theme for each one. I had eventually settled on the one they called "Dash"....and found out that many of its parameters could not be adjsuted. So much for a really custom website huh?
I have emailed Smugmug help several times, and asked them several basic, direct questions. They seem to be responding with canned replyies that refer us to review the help menu / videos. Thanks for nothing guys, I could have done that on my own. yeah, I konw. They are swamped. My heart just bleeds, Smugmug brought this on themselves.
I'm seriously considering cancelling my SM account, but I dont want to loose all that I have builit into my account and I dont know which of the other services to try at this point. If Smugmug cares this little about the my opionons and how I want my site to behave, why should I pay for a premium service?
There are free sites out there that I can have cr&p from. To me the new smugmug is like Flicker without the advertising and spam.
Suggestions? Can any of the other sites import directly from a Smugmug account?
I dont mind paying for my photo hosting. But I'm not going to pay and then have the hosting site tell me that I have to make my site conform to their "new standards" becase my old site looked "old".
Basically that's what they were saying in the video roll out session.
thanks,
Jeff
jeffroberts.smugmug.com
I really dont care for the new website interface. I'm not really blown away by a specatular wall to wall images of the thumnails.
I understand that they needed a new back end, a new support structure. Fine, but we should have the option of having a user interface that was just like the old one; running on top of the new support architecture. I don't live and breathe photography. I dont have hours each day to spend twiddling with a website to customize it. This is just an online photo album, nothing more. I dont care if it looks dated. I'm dated, I'm over the hill. So what? Is Smugmug only concerned with those customers who are Pro or Semi-prophotographers? I don't have anyone to impress, my site is for me.
- I liked the old toolbars, with the text that you could read. They were simple and easy to understand.
- To me its a gross slap in the face to tell us we cant keep comments left by visitors in the past. That should be our choice, not Smugmug's.
- I don't like the little tiny pinpoint icons. You have to guess at what they mean, there is no accompanying text. I feel like we are regressing back in time. Years ago we had cavemen & hieroglyphics; wall paintings. Then we as humans evolved, and developed the written word. This is a step back in time. Yeah, I konw the new MS office does the same thing. I dont like it either.
- I tried playing with some of the new templates. None of them really impress me or make me say "wow" In fact, there really only seems to be 3 different formats, with subtle varioations on a theme for each one. I had eventually settled on the one they called "Dash"....and found out that many of its parameters could not be adjsuted. So much for a really custom website huh?
I have emailed Smugmug help several times, and asked them several basic, direct questions. They seem to be responding with canned replyies that refer us to review the help menu / videos. Thanks for nothing guys, I could have done that on my own. yeah, I konw. They are swamped. My heart just bleeds, Smugmug brought this on themselves.
I'm seriously considering cancelling my SM account, but I dont want to loose all that I have builit into my account and I dont know which of the other services to try at this point. If Smugmug cares this little about the my opionons and how I want my site to behave, why should I pay for a premium service?
There are free sites out there that I can have cr&p from. To me the new smugmug is like Flicker without the advertising and spam.
Suggestions? Can any of the other sites import directly from a Smugmug account?
I dont mind paying for my photo hosting. But I'm not going to pay and then have the hosting site tell me that I have to make my site conform to their "new standards" becase my old site looked "old".
Basically that's what they were saying in the video roll out session.
thanks,
Jeff
jeffroberts.smugmug.com
0
Comments
You don't have to lose anything, if you just start working with the site you can have gorgeous design that YOU are happy with. You don't have to accept a template. I just looked at your site. You have NO customization. Go pick a template - put your galleries on a page. Move on and enjoy life.
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Well, with the old smugmug I didnt have to customize. it did everything I wanted it to in stock form and was easy to use. I tried playing with a couple of templates, kept getting frustrated and gave up.
I dont have any interest in spending hours tweaking a website; and I shouldnt have to.
I did have one of the SM support hero's finially answer with legitimate help however. My heartfelt thanks to Megan Newhouse. She (or someone did) created a template called "Old SmugMug" and it looks great. Thumbnails are a little bit smaller so they dont feel crowded. Gallery titles are beneath the thumbnails in easy to read contrasting colors.
We did loose something of significance however. Comments that friends and family have left on photos over the years are gone.
Bring back the old gallery comments and I'll probably unveil.
Jeff Roberts
DayBreak, my Folk Music Group (some free mp3s!) http://daybreakfolk.com
1) Provide Next/Prev hyperlinks above each image in "SmugMug" Gallery mode so that someone browsing my gallery can actually figure out how to move from one picture to the next. A very very small minority of users actually know to use the keyboard to browse
2) Show captions persistently when browsing in expanded mode (i.e. after clicking on an image to make it full screen). No, moving the mouse every single time is not a viable or user friendly option. Nor is having to move the mouse to hover over the caption every single time for multi-line captions so the caption can pop up and overlay over the image. Captions shouldn't disappear after 3-4 seconds of inactivity, they should be persistent. Where are the customization options for these issues?
3) Display the Gallery descriptions in the thumbnail view when viewing a Category/Subcategory. This is functionality lost from Legacy smugmug and I couldn't find any way to enable this
4) Make a nice user friendly "Download Image" icon or button above an image in a gallery so users can actually figure out how to download an image. I can assure you that a lot of people don't know to look through the tiny minimalistic icons and recognize that the downward pointing arrow icon indicates "Download"....but oh wait, no Javascript allowed...so much for customization coming to the rescue.
I really could go on and on. I understand the need to update your back end. I understand that you guys have a vision and that the back end changes will help you get there. But to take away so much functionality, and yes, customization is a slap in the face of all your existing customers. All the pretty widgets, etc are great but cannot begin to compare with the customization possible with javascript. A lot of the features and UI elements that made the legacy smugmug a simple and easy browsing experience are gone and no matter what you tell me, you and I both know that all the customization options provided with the new Smugmug can never address those issues. No, instead I have to be at the mercy of Smugmug's team to implement each feature if they deem it worthy.
The fact that there are no Next/Prev hyperlinks to browse through images in a gallery shows a complete lack of attention to detail and understanding how users interact with your product and galleries. It is even more disheartening when others point out that this feedback was provided on the forum a long time ago during the sneak previews and yet the same issues persist in your final product. What hope and faith is left that these will eventually be addressed?
I was told that until I hit unveil, as long as I didn't mess with gallery structures, everything was Sandboxed and my Legacy site would stay the same. Yet, a family member and I have found that our sites have been ruined by the migration and I now have tons of galleries missing, Category structure and breadcrumbs all messed up, and absolutely no way to fix the issue.
I was your biggest fan and in one fell swoop you have lost all my faith and trust in your company and it's competence. I feel bad about the harsh words but I just cannot fathom how this product could be shipped to the public in its current form and that you guys can subject your loyal customers to so much heartache. We are passionate about our photographs and our sites and to have the rug pulled from under us in this manner has been very unnerving. It seems like the entire design and layout was tested by young, tech savvy folks, and folks like that won't have any trouble with the site. But I know that my parents...heck even my wife will hate the new interface. Things are so completely non intuitive and so much worse from a usability standpoint in comparison to the Legacy smugmug. And what really grinds my gears is that there is so much harping about customization, yet all this customization can't let me mimic all the functionality and features in the original SmugMug Legacy mode. That is completely backwards, and no amount of eye candy will make up for all the usability issues that plague the new release. It's been one step forward visually and several steps backwards from a usability standpoint.
I will be taking a good hard look at other options that can replace smugmug for me. I have till the end of this year on my current subscription and I'll be happy if things get sorted out, but as you can tell from my post above, there are LOTS of things that are wrong with the new SM for me.
Cheers
Interesting that you touched on my top 3 drive-me-crazy problems. I use captions and gallery descriptions heavily, and the new design treats them like they're fairly unimportant.
I'm being forced to move there because my legacy site is shattered, imposssibly broken, and I have weddings to deliver per timetables in my contract.
I had set up a two week trial account with Z. the day before SM's big announcement, after getting fed up with the long ignored video quality issue on password protected sites.
My experience with them in the last ten days thus far has been ...zen like.
I shouldn't be talking about them on here, but am just a little annoyed with SM blowing up my site at the moment.
I'm trying Z this weekend. I would assume that it has to work better than what Smugmug left us with.
DayBreak, my Folk Music Group (some free mp3s!) http://daybreakfolk.com
gotta link? Kinda hard to google it
Cheers,
My Website | My Blog | My Facebook Page | My YouTube
Between the pricing jump last year and then this I'm very, very upset with SM. I've asked the same question three times and can't get an answer. The "Heroes" won't even answer me.
The question? Will I get to keep my legacy site as is? Seems that the "Heroes" can't dignify me with an answer to that one.
How about it Andy? Can you answer that one for me?
Based on my experience, NO.
I never even entered Preview mode and my site has already been messed with (although SM claims they found the bug and are fixing it).
That alone tells me that they have actually migrated everybody on the back end, the whole "preview and unveil" thing is just a front end "cosmetic" step and a way to eliminate many of the more useful features (like Javascript).
Amen. That format (at least the one I'm using now - I assume they're all the same, or similar) is utterly annoying. Not only do the captions disappear, but when they're there they're covering my images. Both are annoying. If there's a workaround they're not making it obvious.
Exactly. Heck, in some cases I had to add a small graphic to some customers galleries explaining how to find the old download button - and that one was pretty obvious!
I have faith things will improve and SM in general will remain usable, but there are a ton of areas that need improvement. My biggest disappointment isn't the site but the attitude from many of the people involved. SM has rapidly gone from the "yes you can do that by..." attitude to a "you don't need or want that, do it our way..." attitude. At least that's what's coming across.
I was hoping I could stick with Legacy mode but looks like that won't be a long term solution. I'll wait around to see if the new SmugMug addresses a lot of my usability issues, but if not, I probably won't renew next year. At the moment it feels like a big downgrade in features and usability. I already host my own website on a Wordpress installation so all the widgets and customizability isn't really something I cared too much about. I just want a functional and easy to use interface for uploading and sharing images with friends and family, and that aspect has gotten worse with the upgrade so far.
i would assume by Z he means Zenfolio?
You'll likely want to get an official answer by writing them
http://help.smugmug.com
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He wasn't asking you as an employee of SmugMug, but as a fellow user/customer who is pushing people to try the "new" SmugMug.
If it's so great and easy to use why don't you whip up a couple tutorials for the other SM users who are struggling to get things back that used to work just fine before the "upgrade".
Will definitely cease to exist at some point in the future by it doesn't seem like they are in a rush to kill it just yet.
I agree with all the comments here. I find the new sumgmug disheartening. Completely customizable.......hogwash.
I don't know what I'm going to do at this point with my hosting, but based on what I've seen and experienced this week I'll have to do something.
Interesting that in the launch event one of the presenters was Fastline Media, a customization vendor for Smug......now, why would I want them if New Smug is as good as all the hoopla states it is? Seems there is a lot of attaboy back slapping going on.....I don't see the justification of that.
I've been trying to use new customization features and find them non-intuitive, inadequate, with toy-like presentations.
Deep sigh.......
ah OK. I've always leaned towards Photoshelter...