My rant about new smugmug

kits

:scratch:scratch:scratch:scratch
Before I whine/rant I want to appreciate the smugmug team for making me feel that they are the best until the new site launched. I am sure they will soon be the best again. Maybe their old site was too good and it will take them long while to add those features to the new site.

First, the new site design looks very modern, sleek and attractive. Attractive, until you see how many cool features I am missing from my old smugmug which I was so depended on.

1. There used to be a checkbox to hide pictures within gallery with single click. Now, it is hidden in menu and even then it doesn't tell if photo is hidden or not as there is no check mark if photo is hidden. I don't even think it hides the pictures anymore.
2. Before, some galleries that have several 100s of pictures I was able to jump to a certain page when I hover the navigation arrows. Now, you can't, have to scroll through 100s of pictures. For example. on cruise trip gallery I might want to view 5th day pictures and I can guess it probably is located after 10 pages and was easy to get there before. Not anymore.
3. No Auto-sizing to fullscreen for SLIDESHOW. 60% of my 27" monitor (2560 X 1440) space is wasted wiith black bars. Plus all the cool features of slideshow like speed, click to get photo strip to start slideshow anywhere, etc, etc all gone
4. More clicks need to add captions, keywords. Before, i was able to navigate picture while entering captions. Not anymore.
5. Featured Galleries functionality was so easy before. Now, you have to do little complicated steps to get it.
6. No visitor view. Have to log out and visit site and enter visitor password.
7. It was nice before to see the visitor password hint right away. Now visitors have to hover over the "need a hint" to see that and I bet many users will call/email to get the password.

I am sure I will soon discover more but I really am surprised how anyone can mess up slideshow by not having auto-sizing to full-screen on high resolution monitors. That's a very basic functionality to view pictures. That fix alone will let me give smugmug months to improve before I shop around to migrate to different site.

whoalse

They messed up almost everything, even the legacy site that supposedly should not be affected by the preview.

Sucks to be a Smugmug customer now.

macromeister

kits wrote: »

scratchscratch
... before I shop around to migrate to different site.

I wouldn't be too quick to do that if I were you. There have been some significant changes recently from some of the big software companies. FLICKR had a major user interface restructure with a lot of unhappy bunnies as a result, and Adobe have changed their strategy on delivering Photoshop CS to lease rather than purchase - and wow, did that cause some upset! :puke1 They are all doing the same sort of things - regrouping, restructuring, changing what they offer customers. Why?

It's my guess that the state of the economy is a factor, as is the growing competition (although that may not apply to Adobe yet) Another factor (and this is just my opinion) is they are all pursuing the middle ground which is were the bulk of the customers are - and, of course, the income revenue from sales and advertising. You may go elsewhere and find that in 6 months time they too make similar changes. The same thing has happened in politics (I'm not going off-thread) where all parties are chasing the same middle ground.

In the end it leads to dumbing down because you have to please as many people as possible which necessitates to some extent ignoring the people at the edges who have a different take on things and may have different expectations outside of that core in the middle. Or... as Abe Lincoln said "“You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”.

kevincoppalotti

But But But. not all of us want autosizing. I've seen auto sizing on my photos, it wrecks them. Like many i resize images to a smaller size to prevent theft. Trying to auto size a 800x600 up ruins the image.
By all means provide an option to resize up, but it should not be the default.

mbonocore

kits wrote: »

scratchscratch
Before I whine/rant I want to appreciate the smugmug team for making me feel that they are the best until the new site launched. I am sure they will soon be the best again. Maybe their old site was too good and it will take them long while to add those features to the new site.

First, the new site design looks very modern, sleek and attractive. Attractive, until you see how many cool features I am missing from my old smugmug which I was so depended on.

1. There used to be a checkbox to hide pictures within gallery with single click. Now, it is hidden in menu and even then it doesn't tell if photo is hidden or not as there is no check mark if photo is hidden. I don't even think it hides the pictures anymore.
2. Before, some galleries that have several 100s of pictures I was able to jump to a certain page when I hover the navigation arrows. Now, you can't, have to scroll through 100s of pictures. For example. on cruise trip gallery I might want to view 5th day pictures and I can guess it probably is located after 10 pages and was easy to get there before. Not anymore.
3. No Auto-sizing to fullscreen for SLIDESHOW. 60% of my 27" monitor (2560 X 1440) space is wasted wiith black bars. Plus all the cool features of slideshow like speed, click to get photo strip to start slideshow anywhere, etc, etc all gone
4. More clicks need to add captions, keywords. Before, i was able to navigate picture while entering captions. Not anymore.
5. Featured Galleries functionality was so easy before. Now, you have to do little complicated steps to get it.
6. No visitor view. Have to log out and visit site and enter visitor password.
7. It was nice before to see the visitor password hint right away. Now visitors have to hover over the "need a hint" to see that and I bet many users will call/email to get the password.

I am sure I will soon discover more but I really am surprised how anyone can mess up slideshow by not having auto-sizing to full-screen on high resolution monitors. That's a very basic functionality to view pictures. That fix alone will let me give smugmug months to improve before I shop around to migrate to different site.

Hi there!

1) When a photo is hidden via the menu, you can see icon over a muted image. See attached screenshot.

Screen Shot 2013-08-03 at 12.25.41 AM.jpg

2)The SmugMug gallery style has pages

3)A new Snazzy Full screen slideshow is on the way!

4) Great Feedback! I will submit it to the feedback forum

5) I apologize. With slicker interface, sometimes an extra step is needed.

6)This is being built as we speak.

7)Also great feedback and I will submit this as well.

Thanks!

Michael

mbonocore

kevincoppalotti wrote: »

But But But. not all of us want autosizing. I've seen auto sizing on my photos, it wrecks them. Like many i resize images to a smaller size to prevent theft. Trying to auto size a 800x600 up ruins the image.
By all means provide an option to resize up, but it should not be the default.

The maximum viewable photo size will always be taken from the gallery the original photo lives, so rest assured, no upsizing if you don't want it.

kits

Now that I spent more time with smugmug customization I can tell you - The new design rocks :-)!!! It sure has learning curve but so did the old site. I see now so many things can be done even better.

I think I might have customized my old site years back and don't even remember what I did. Just spent another hour with new site and I already have all the features I had with my old site and only better. The best part of this new site is it looks awesome on my Android phone, tablet, iPad, MacBook Pro Retina (yes, slideshow somehow shows full screen even on it's high resolution but not on my windows 8 desktop).

Loving the site better than Flickr now :-), I think if you are not a pro, you should jump on this new site and post questions here to resolve your issues.

kits

I can't seem to find "Download All" option for gallery. Is that hidden somewhere? In old site when I choose that I get a link in email to download the gallery.

jasonscottphoto

kits wrote: »

I can't seem to find "Download All" option for gallery. Is that hidden somewhere? In old site when I choose that I get a link in email to download the gallery.

It is in the Organizer