New alt/title tags for photos include filenames, even if filenames are disabled
thenickdude
Registered Users Posts: 1,302 Major grins
The newly added "alt/title tags" for photos include filenames, even if the display of filenames are disabled for the gallery. This adds a bunch of worthless alt tags that are distracting when you hover over a photo:
http://n-sherlock.smugmug.com/Animals/Wildlife/
EDIT: They're only visible when logged in (because presumably guests don't get to see the filename data in the first place). That's acceptable, I guess.
http://n-sherlock.smugmug.com/Animals/Wildlife/
EDIT: They're only visible when logged in (because presumably guests don't get to see the filename data in the first place). That's acceptable, I guess.
https://www.sherlockphotography.org/
Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!
Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!
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SmugMug Support Hero
Yes but if titles and captions are present they still appear on hover of image, How can i remove the little box that still pops up?
I would really appreciate any help i can get
All the best
Giuseppe
www.natureandwildlifeimages.com
This is a browser thing and can be disabled at least for Safari and Firefox.
EDIT
[Strike]But it seems something is wrong with your Title and Caption because first "Title" should be shown with a larger Font than the Caption. And when hovering over an image, tooltips should only show the content of Title, not both. Imagine some writes a little story about the image in Caption and a 900x600px tooltip box pops up.
It seems like your image have a Title, but its not[/strike]
Seems there were some changes made by SM, so I mixed things up here.
Your images only have a Caption and its first line is shown in lightbox view as Title. But tooltips takes the Caption at it full size (the whole eight lines). Add a Title and the tooltip will be smaller. And maybe compress the Caption a bit, f.e. by removing empty lines - it looks not good either.
Thanks for reply and suggestions Jorg,
but I'd like to find a solution to remove the little white box that pops up when hovering over a photo.
Regards
Giuseppe
A better way would be to remove all unnecessary information (like camera and lens data, which are available via the Info button already) and format the Captions nicer, but even than other still see tooltips, because they want it this way. There is a life outside SM
You might be able to disable it in your browser... but than you would miss how your site looks to others...
That's why I've posted a Feature Request asking for users to have the ability to edit the tag values - see http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=240508
If we were allowed to set tag values title="" and alt="" for an image, the "little white box" should not appear for that image. Jörg is correct - it is a browser thing, but if a browser finds title="" and alt="" it doesn't display the "tooltip".
When I embed pics (hosted on SmugMug) into my blog posts, I (usually) get no "little white boxes" because I (usually) clear the tag values. User-control allows me to do this on WordPress, but SM has assumed control over my tag values here, that's something that I think is wrong. They're my images, they should have my values in their tags.
What about disabled people using a speech software or a software which converts the text of your Blog to braille? What would they be able to hear/feel when coming along your images?
Maybe: "their is an image" (because there an empty Alt and Title tag) instead of using "Lesser Kestrels ( Falco naumanni) Castiglia - La Mancia ( Spain )" <- Mind the spaces in ( ..text.. )
A much better Caption would be "a mating couple of Lesser Kestrels (Falco naumanni) taken at Castiglia, La Mancia, Spain" - which is a good one btw:
http://www.natureandwildlifeimages.com/Birds/Birds-in-action/i-sM7Rj4f/A
No Alt or Title tag means no indexing of images by crawlers. Crawlers are "blind" related to images and need those tags. Nope, it is not. Aside that this is nothing what I would call "user-controlled"
User controlled would mean that you let your users / visitors decide HOW they see the information. You decide about what they see by providing the right content and a nicer format.
Which is what they have: your images have the attributes (seen from a browser perspective) you have written to them by filling out the Caption field.
As long you set a Title and / or Caption this is put into the HTML Alt or Title tag. For a reason and is what we all want. IMHO.
If there is an Alt or Title tag, browsers will show them as a tooltip.
The little white box (tooltip) is IMHO not the problem. The problem more likely is the information in it, respectively how the information is presented / looks like.
Add a small Title and it is shown as a tiny tooltip only.
Ugly: the tooltips are unstyled bright yellow from the browser default, and look completely different and jarring from the rest of the site.
Distracting: you're looking at a photo and suddenly, pop! Your attention is drawn by a popup appearing for no discernible reason (the whole screen is filled with photos so they appear wherever you idly leave your mouse).
Worthless: Most of the time, these tooltips appear where the photo is already labelled by an adjacent caption! They just end up covering up the image for you and provide zero value to your visitors.
Who cares about navigation for the blind when you are selling photographs? It is a complete non-issue.
SmugMug already serves a completely different version of the site to search engines like Google. They have to, since Google doesn't support JavaScript. They could trivially generate alt/title attributes only for Google, preserving indexing, and leave our photo displays alone.
Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!
I believe that we should have the option to edit the tag-values that SM unilaterally extracts from the caption/title texts. Fine, you like SEO and crawling, so you should keep the current way that SM constructs the tag values, but let us have the opportunity to over-write or delete those values if we wish.
Personally I don't give a monkey's chuff about having my images crawled, I care nothing for SEO, and I'd be a happier man if Google would keep its prying nose out of my life. I DO care about what is in my tags. Yes, most of my "tooltips" display the Caption text because I have few Titles. I would use Titles extensively if there was a way to bulk add them, but there isn't, and I'm not about to add titles on a one-by-one basis to my thousands of images on SM. At the moment the only place to put an image description is in a caption that I want to keep with the image but which isn't necessarily suitable as a tag value.
As for those "disabled people using a speech software or a software which converts the text of your Blog to Braille", surely their software would be able to recognise the Caption text? If it picks up both Caption text and the "Tooltip" text, they'll not gain anything new, they'll just hear/feel the same thing twice, it'll sound/feel like I have a bad keyboard-stutter or a repetition disorder!
OK, maybe there's some confusion between us regarding the definition of "user". My intent was to mean that I am the user, anyone looking at my dross on SM would be a visitor. I appreciate that our terminology may differ regarding this.
"Which is what they have: your images have the attributes (seen from a browser perspective) you have written to them by filling out the Caption field." -Yes, I agree, but who decides where the tags get their values? SM does. I don't. SM could have pointed both tag values at Title, or pointed one at Title and the other left blank for the user/account-holder/me/myself/I to populate (or not) as I see fit via some as-yet unprovided input screen (but reference my comment about using the "edit caption/keyword" screen)
What I ask for can be done, and would not mean that you would lose the SEO advantages of having tag values. All it needs is the will, the time, and some consideration of a true cross-section of SM's user-base.
Jörg, I suspect that you're a wiser man than I am. I'm sure that you understand that "choice" is better than "unilateral imposition".
I don't wanna throw any monkey-wrenches in the works, and I don't recall what SmugMug is doing now in New SmugMug. But this whole thing with the alt tags could get thrown even more wacky for captions / titles / descriptions / whatever that people haven't gone in & manually edited (on SmugMug)....IF they edit in PhotoShop, that is. I've begged for years for SmugMug to change this, but in Legacy, they still do not use the "Document Title" field from PS as the caption (or title, or whatever you wanna call it) that's directly under a photo. (of course, in Legacy, we only had the one option). But they place what's in the PS field "Description" as our title in Legacy! (which is what few people expect...I always have to go in & edit it as my descriptions are much too long). It's so weird because every other site I upload to: iStockphoto, Fotolia, Dreamstime, BigStock, 500px, they all use those fields correctly, as they were meant: "Document Title" becomes the main one you see directly under your photo! And then if there's a spot for Description, which there isn't on Fotolia, they just use the Doc Title for the Title/Caption. But no, not SmugMug. Smug has to do it differently & drive me batty & create hours of extra work on uploads. But I digress....
So "New Smug" now has 2 fields. I forget what they call it, title & then caption, or caption & then title? Which is typically longer / smaller? Anyway, I don't know where they take those from if you've edited those fields in PS. (those fields match in PS & LR too, I believe) I hope they do it correctly this time, so that I don't have to go in & manually re-edit everything. I know now that if I don't get around to it for awhile, I'll end up with these ridiculously long captions in SmugMug that aren't supposed to be there; they're typically meant for my stock photos & a few others that people may want more explanation for. So that means I'd also end up with these alt / title tags that would take up LOTS of space & yes, cover up the photo on hover if I don't re-edit right away. Oh well, maybe don't put that in your pipes & smoke it!
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The tooltip only shows up as long the mouse is not moved - when moved it only is shown for a second (if) and does not pop up again, even when you stay on an image. ROFLMAO. Covering the image? Where do you know from? I can't tell for my visitors. Ahso, selling? Good luck. You offer X3 (1.600px) without RCP and no watermarks which easily can be resized to 4.800px. If I want I'ld have a 24x30'' print on my wall in a week. The panos are bit more work, but well... The better/sharper your images are, the better for the ones who want a cheap print...
Anyway. Its a non-issue for whom? For you maybe. Seems you never had contact with blinds. There is not only black and white. There are lots of people which are partial blind and use speech readers. Guess you also believe blind peoples have no pictures on their walls nor they are doing photos on their own? If so that would be a pretty small soap bubble you might live in.
Wonder what Gary Albertson, Sonia Soberats and Pete Eckert (just to name some) think about this. They are blind (or going blind) photographers, the later is an award winner.
The Flickr blind photographer group had problems when Flickr changed its look and I believe it will be the same here soon (if not already)
Guess that ADA, DDA respectively the Equality Act and European Laws will come into force more and more in the future and than its not you who decide how your website at SM is build, but SM. As with the cookies for Europeans they have to make sure to be compliant here.
Do they? Which version / website? Provide a proof please. So just ask them to do so. If you believe Titles are so worthless and ugly, you should be the first who ask SM for an option to turn them off in the feature request forum.
I just don't want to get a victim of strange ideas from a few, which silently is put productive by SM and worse: gets into default settings without me being informed, like it was with the stupid "filename keywording" some time ago.
When trying to reply to your post I get an empty box in here... strange. Also when clicking preview. See the image attached :-( If it is shown.
Yes, for a reason.
Mea culpa - I didn't really read to whom I replied and thought I still reply to Giuseppe, who original asked how to remove the tooltip. Mea maxima. No I am not wiser - but I agree that an option to switch it on or off would be a way to go. No prob.
If they didn't, search indexers wouldn't see anything on the page, since the whole page content is created by JavaScript. Try turning off JavaScript in your browser and view a New SmugMug site, you'll see a mostly blank page:
http://i.imgur.com/RQzTVq8.png
And if you look at the sourcecode of the page, you'll see a bunch of JavaScript code and virtually nothing else, as the page is all created dynamically by JavaScript:
http://i.imgur.com/rvh2gby.jpg
That's what Google would see too if SmugMug didn't have special support for the Googlebot.
Now install a User Agent spoofer like this for Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-switcher/
Or this for Chrome:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/user-agent-switcher-for-c/djflhoibgkdhkhhcedjiklpkjnoahfmg
Use it to set your user agent to Googlebot and load your page again. Now the page renders "fine" with JavaScript disabled:
http://i.imgur.com/yBCOr77.jpg
And if you view the sourcecode, you'll find that in addition to the regular JS for the page, SmugMug's server has manually rendered an HTML version of your site for Google's benefit:
http://i.imgur.com/TpSohSB.jpg
I say "fine" because the Google version isn't particularly complete, I think it only renders the first page of Collage Landscape galleries, for example. The rest of the gallery is probably taken care of by the sitemap XML that SmugMug supplies.
Frankly, I don't care if they add an option or not, I can add JS to my site so I'll just strip them out myself. For sure my suggestion of only rendering alt/title for search engines could be optional.
Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!
BTW: lots users have JS disabled for a reason. Some SM sites with home-brewed JS are annoying slow because they are badly coded.
I am not sure what I see here, when disabling JS and using a different user agent. For me it looks like JS scripts were executed? But I can't tell for sure.
Usually crawlers follows a sitemap when there is one (here sitemap-index.xml and sitemap-galleryimages.xml when at new SM. Usually there is a URL to find at the end of the robot.txt, which points crawlers to those sitemap files or you tell for example Google via webmaster tools about a sitemap) without the need to read/parse the site in a way like we "do".
But IMHO you don't have those (default) sitemap files nor a link to an alternative sitemap file in your robots.txt? For a purpose?
No offend, but if your theory about the alternative HTML "site" for crawlers is right, shouldn't we see more links and images of your site in e.g. Google? I only can see ~40 large images and some are custom, some lead to 404 (old links) or are advertize images by SM -> http://tinyurl.com/ot2drst At he bottom: framed-, mounted-, canvas-prints.
Don't get me wrong - I don't mention this because I want to brag, but my site which is up only ~eight weeks now and holds just ~240 images, shows more images in Google -> http://tinyurl.com/pha2y9o than yours. We both are on new SM style, we both underlay the same parsing of "possible alternative code / site" by crawlers, but you don't and I have sitemap. ??
Anyway. At the moment I am trying to figure out what this site is about:
www.naturesart-gallery.com
which belongs to SM and is to see as a visitor in my webmaster tools.
Add /keyword or /search to the URL.
... pressing any key except ALT in IE
A trick? Its just a workaround for local browsing which tricks you, not a solution for those who don't want their visitors getting tooltips.
If I remember it right, I told in here that "you might be able to disable tooltips in your browser"
No one was interested. Since you on FF and when sick pressing a key, go to about:config, search for browser.chrome.toolbar_tips and set it to false. No dramatic tooltips anymore for you.
I'll start by saying that I don't put any photo info in the Title, I use the Caption for that. With no Title to display, the tooltip/whitebox displays the Caption as a "fallback".
So, I experimented with using an "invisible" character for the Title. I used Alt+255, but I'm told that Alt+0160 also has the same effect. Now that there's a Title, the tooltip/whitebox defaults to displaying that in preference to displaying the Caption.
The results? Firefox doesn't show any tooltip/whitebox over "Alt+255"ed pics, whethere I'm logged in or out. Chrome shows an empty 1-character-wide tooltip/whitebox when logged in or out. I've not checked it on any other browser.
No doubt there are downsides. One is that some gallery styles (Journal and SmugMug Style) will display an apparently-empty "text" line containing the "invisible" character, where the title text would be displayed if the pic had a proper Title. I worked around that with the following CSS:
.sm-tile-title{ display:none }See it in action at http://beardedgit.smugmug.com/Panoramas - the first pic has a Title of "Alt+255", the others have no Titles, and the CSS is applied to suppress titles below the pics.I'm not sure how this hits SEO, but personally I don't care much for that.
So, if you don't need proper Titles and are prepared to use Captions instead, and if you care nothing for the possible effect on SEO, this dodge may be for you.
YMMV, caveat emptor, don't blame me if your world implodes, yada yada yada...