Release Notes: Map This, Google Calendar, Polished Shopping Cart, Education site

mbonocore

Autumn is kicking off to a great start. Here are the top features that we’ve added to SmugMug since our last update.

Map This in the New SmugMug



We love taking cues from your feedback, and this was one of the big ones you missed when going from legacy to the new SmugMug.

If your photos are geotagged, we’ll automatically display a little globe icon underneath it in your gallery or lightbox. Click it and you’ll see that pin highlighted on a map that displays pins for all other geotagged photos in that gallery. We’ll group the ones close together until you zoom in enough.



Gone are the old 150-pin limits – If every photo in your gallery is geotagged, we’ll pin every single one of them on your map. Special galleries like your Popular Photos, Keywords and Date are capped at 1000 pins.

One last thing: Map This now works for unlisted and passworded galleries, so anyone you share those with can enjoy browsing by location, too. Catch up on all the mappy goodness on SmugMug.

New : Google Calendar



Busy photographers, this one’s for you. We added a new content block for Google Calendar, so you can show your fans (or clients) when you’re busy and when you’re not.

Simply drag in the content block to any page on your site, then copy your Google Calendar ID and paste it in. Voila! There’s plenty of ways to tweak the settings so that it’s exactly what you want.



You’ll also notice that we’ve created a brand-new customization section called “Services” where you’ll find the new Google Calendar content block as well as the Wufoo form block that we recently debuted.

Look to our help pages for explanation on everything you need to know about embedding your calendar, and you can find more help about Google Calendars on their site.

Fresher Shopping Cart

Since we rolled out a new look for SmugMug, we’ve got some catching up to do on some other parts of the experience. We started with the shopping cart:



In addition to giving it a beautiful, smooth new skin to match the rest of your website, we also added more options to the sidebar to make choosing a print product a heckuva lot easier.



In fact, we’ve gotten so much feedback from you (and your customers!) to display print sizes that didn’t need cropping, so now you can just uncheck that box to see all options that don’t require any trimming.

Happy buying and selling!

New Education Site

Last but not least, we’re proud to point out the fact that this news blog may have gotten a bit quieter in the last few weeks. We’ve officially taken the extra tips, tricks, and guest posts and will be publishing them on our brand new Education Site:



The new School.smugmug.com site will be the place to go if you’re looking for photography advice, how to get the most out of your SmugMug account, money-making business tips and inspirational posts by successful SmugMug photographers. We’ll also include a complete newsletter archive, featured SmugMug photos and dates when you can talk to us next.

You should continue to watch this space for announcements about product-related stuff like release notes, bug fixes, contests and other Smuggy goodness. And, as always, our help pages are the place to go if you need help with your website.

Let us know what you think, what you’d like to see in the coming weeks. Cheers!

garrettm30

Feedback on new maps:

I love the new maps feature: it looks great and works great.

I am concerned that for pictures taken at home I would essentially be putting my home address on the Internet. The only solutions I can find so far are these:

1. Remove locations before uploading my pictures, but I wouldn't want to do that for my own offline records.
2. Disable GPS per gallery. That's an easy enough solution on galleries where I want all the pictures to not have locations, but it doesn't help when I have mixed location in some galleries, some of which are at home.
3. Individually edit each photo. Less than ideal because it removes locations even from me when logged in, and it is tedious. Still, this seems like the best option for the present unless I'm missing something.

Here are a couple of solutions the come to mind that I suggest to you:

1. Allow the managing of locations that are hidden when logged out, or perhaps generalized such as city-specific but not address-specific.
2. Or, perhaps a bulk location editor in the organizer. I like the first option best, but I think this second option would be of greater use to more SmugMuggers, because it would be useful for other things. I can see many users who would use it to tag untagged photos, and it would be a perfect fit in the organizer, right alongside the Gallery Tools (Captions & Keywords, Adjust Thumbnails).

What do you think?

dwterry

It's great that you are adding new features - could you go back and finish the ones you started first?

Still stick in smugmug limbo land - can't go forward with the "new" smugmug - and can't go back. (tired, frustrated, even more so realizing how little has been done to the "new" smugmug while seeing the "new" features are being developed before the "new" smugmug is finished)

southeasternphotography

dwterry wrote: »

It's great that you are adding new features - could you go back and finish the ones you started first?

Still stick in smugmug limbo land - can't go forward with the "new" smugmug - and can't go back. (tired, frustrated, even more so realizing how little has been done to the "new" smugmug while seeing the "new" features are being developed before the "new" smugmug is finished)

He really has a point. Many feature requests are for items that used to be in legacy. I do believe adding the Mapping function was a request to get something back from Legacy...but I understand the issue. For instance, re-writing the Slideshow so we will have the options that we had in Javascript to make them look fabulous and have random selection across a wide variety of galleries. But, that's just me as I don't geotag my images - my D700 won't do it!!!

Anyway, kudos for getting the Education Site up to show us what y'all HAVE accomplished. Appreciated.:D

kimbomac

In the legacy Smuggy you could see the Map This button appear for the gallery if ANY images in the gallery were geotagged. In some of my galleries where all images were taken at the same place, I have only tagged one or a few (to save time and get around the previous pin limit!), but without knowing exactly which is tagged, it is impossible to actually make use of the Map This button. Can the Map This button appear for the whole gallery, rather than only on tagged images? And to extrapolate from that, can we have the same Map This button on folders that have any images within them with geotags on them. That way, a high-level holiday folder with many sub-galleries could show a Map This button so that all the images from that holiday could be seen on one map.

The tiny Map This world is good, but it would be so much better to be at a level(s) higher than just the image!

brocot

Almost all of my pictures are geotagged. I still don't have the possibility to set the number more the 200 in the MAP settings.

martintyler

Not seeing the little globe icon on photos on my custom 'page' which I was forced to use since you still can't customise galleries to get larger photos, change spacing or move titles etc

Great to see you've had time to integrate Google Calendar - but i'm with dwterry here - please finish and fix up all the basic stuff first!