Removing old keywords from cloud

lkbart

First off, I really do like the new Smugmug sites - lots of cool customizations & features!

However, when I crossed over to the new Smugmug, keywords from my old galleries were separated with commas, so a title like "la Compagnie (1935)" was changed to keywords "la" "Compagnie" and "1935", so in the keyword cloud, you would see "la" or "of" or "a", small words which should never be used as keywords. I have gone in and changed some of them, it's going to be a long process to get them all corrected unfortunately, but even after I corrected the keywords in the gallery, when I went back out to the Search page, I would still see the "la", but when I clicked on it, it took me to an empty gallery & said "no photos found".

I managed to get rid of the old (replaced) keywords by going to the Search page and doing a new customization where I removed the cloud content block & replaced it with a new cloud content block. It just seems like the removed keywords should actually be removed from the content on the search page without having to go through the customization menu to replace the content block (with the same content block).

So now I also wonder if any new photos with keywords that I add are being included in the Search cloud without having to recustomize the Search page every time I add new photos or change keywords to older photos? I believe that the Cloud not updating may be a bug & would appreciate a Smug Hero checking this out. Thank you.

EDIT: I've continued removing unwanted keywords, but now after I've removed & re-added the content block on my search page, the old keywords are still showing up even though when you go to the photo, they keywords are NOT there any more. Suggestions please?

bobbyhero

Please contact us directly about this, and be sure to include direct links to examples. As far as I know, this shouldn't be happening - or at the very least, we need to bring it up with engineering.
http://help.smugmug.com

lkbart

Well, I think my impatience may be at least partially at fault here; and maybe I am still being impatient, but my search list (here: http://bartlettphotoart.smugmug.com/search) still shows: "choreographed by Denise a. Celestin" (which I have changed just to "Denise A. Celestin") and goes to a page with no photos here: http://bartlettphotoart.smugmug.com/keyword/choreographed%20by%20denise%20a.%20celestin

I will check back later to see if it's just taking time to update & proceed from there.

WinsomeWorks

lkbart wrote: »

First off, I really do like the new Smugmug sites - lots of cool customizations & features!

However, when I crossed over to the new Smugmug, keywords from my old galleries were separated with commas, so a title like "la Compagnie (1935)" was changed to keywords "la" "Compagnie" and "1935", so in the keyword cloud, you would see "la" or "of" or "a", small words which should never be used as keywords. I have gone in and changed some of them, it's going to be a long process to get them all corrected unfortunately, but even after I corrected the keywords in the gallery, when I went back out to the Search page, I would still see the "la", but when I clicked on it, it took me to an empty gallery & said "no photos found".

I managed to get rid of the old (replaced) keywords by going to the Search page and doing a new customization where I removed the cloud content block & replaced it with a new cloud content block. It just seems like the removed keywords should actually be removed from the content on the search page without having to go through the customization menu to replace the content block (with the same content block).

So now I also wonder if any new photos with keywords that I add are being included in the Search cloud without having to recustomize the Search page every time I add new photos or change keywords to older photos? I believe that the Cloud not updating may be a bug & would appreciate a Smug Hero checking this out. Thank you.

EDIT: I've continued removing unwanted keywords, but now after I've removed & re-added the content block on my search page, the old keywords are still showing up even though when you go to the photo, they keywords are NOT there any more. Suggestions please?

I don't know if the link I'll post here is part (or all) of your problem, because you're saying that your keywords are ( ? ) separated by commas in New Smug.... and I'm curious; if that's true, how were they separated in Legacy Smug? Anyway, there's a rotten known issue that they're taking incredibly long to fix, and I cannot begin to think of switching over until they do fix it, because it'll screw up nearly all my galleries. It's a problem where multi-keywords often break into separate ones in New Smug if you even open up that edit box (even if you do nothing or edit nothing & just close it). The bug described well here: http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=241834 If this is your problem, it's a little shocking to me that Bobbyhero doesn't know about it. Or even if it's not your problem, I sure hope he does know about it.

It continues to greatly anger me that SmugMug simply don't see this as important enough to fix immediately, or last month, or last week... and maybe not even next week. And they offer no help to all these people whose keywords are being consistently screwed up by this (many of whom aren't even aware it's a problem... :pissed Evidently we're on our own as far as fixing those thousands of keywords, if we're on New Smug.

Allen

I've added 100's of new keyword in NewSmug like this
"word word"; word; "word word";
and with not one problem.
All legacy KW's came over OK.

The only problem is when going in to edit anything in the "photo details" the last KW ; is missing.
First thing I do is add it back in.
If left off, very occasionally it will break the last KW into singles. Most of the time it doesn't
but I don't take a chance.

Very simple, follow that method and you will have NO problems.

lkbart

I think the biggest part of my problem was the long delay between when I changed the keywords and when they actually showed as being changed; that and sometimes one or two photos would not change, so I'd have to change them individually, don't know why but it seemed to mostly happen to ones that were collected to or from other galleries. However, I have experienced the comma-separation issues, and it's very frustrating because sometimes a multi word keyword gets separated, and sometimes it doesn't. The quotes do seem to work well, but I'd prefer to not have to go back in and put every keyword phrase in quotes.

I noticed that the separators appear differently whether you go into the "Organize" mode or if you click on the individual photo and go to Edit>Photo Details. It seems that the Edit>Photo Details always shows the keywords separated by semicolons, but in the Organize mode, it shows commas and semicolons. But it takes a lot more time to input the keywords individually, and when I use the semicolons in the Organize mode, it still sometimes separates the phrase into individual keywords, and sometimes not. It would be nice to know the specific parameters for keywords; I don't even know if it is a standardized thing or very specific to websites (I'd guess the latter).

They did tell me I should go in and change the keyword limit from 100 to 255, which is the max allowed. There was no number 100 in the tab, but I went ahead & entered the 255. Regarding this, I guess I don't understand the keyword thing - I thought that in order to be found by search engines, you need lots of keywords, but if we are limited to 255, do the search engines see more than 255? And if the search engines pick up more than 255, then why are we limited to 255? And if I have more than 255 on my site, how are the 255 chosen - is it based on the number of instances or what?

WinsomeWorks

lkbart wrote: »

I think the biggest part of my problem was the long delay between when I changed the keywords and when they actually showed as being changed; that and sometimes one or two photos would not change, so I'd have to change them individually, don't know why but it seemed to mostly happen to ones that were collected to or from other galleries. However, I have experienced the comma-separation issues, and it's very frustrating because sometimes a multi word keyword gets separated, and sometimes it doesn't. The quotes do seem to work well, but I'd prefer to not have to go back in and put every keyword phrase in quotes.

I noticed that the separators appear differently whether you go into the "Organize" mode or if you click on the individual photo and go to Edit>Photo Details. It seems that the Edit>Photo Details always shows the keywords separated by semicolons, but in the Organize mode, it shows commas and semicolons. But it takes a lot more time to input the keywords individually, and when I use the semicolons in the Organize mode, it still sometimes separates the phrase into individual keywords, and sometimes not. It would be nice to know the specific parameters for keywords; I don't even know if it is a standardized thing or very specific to websites (I'd guess the latter).

They did tell me I should go in and change the keyword limit from 100 to 255, which is the max allowed. There was no number 100 in the tab, but I went ahead & entered the 255. Regarding this, I guess I don't understand the keyword thing - I thought that in order to be found by search engines, you need lots of keywords, but if we are limited to 255, do the search engines see more than 255? And if the search engines pick up more than 255, then why are we limited to 255? And if I have more than 255 on my site, how are the 255 chosen - is it based on the number of instances or what?

That's a pain that the separators appear differently in Organize from how they appear in Details. SmugMug has been extremely uncommunicative about the New Smug's keyword parameters, separators, multi-word expectations, etc. etc. It's highly frustrating. They don't seem to comprehend how many people's sites are/were based on gallery feeds dependent on keywords, etc. The parameters are indeed quite different for every photo website, and even between stock photo sites. Every site has its own parameters, & they can be aggravating. You can check on Smug's parameters, but I don't know if they've got all the Help details updated correctly, and the many keyword bugs that have yet to be fixed are going to invalidate some of the Help statements for the time being, until it all works as it "should".

As to the 255-word limit, I think you're confusing a few different types of keyword lists, & I'm not sure where you're going in & limiting something to 255... I have no idea why you'd want to do that, or why someone would tell you to do that. Maybe someone who's on New Smug can answer that. But anyway, as far as I know, 255 is only a limit on what is visible to your visitors on a keyword block (or cloud?) that you may be showing on a page. You can use way more keywords on your entire site. And the way that 255-word list is "chosen" is by which ones you use most frequently. In Old Smug, the most-used keywords also show bolder & larger, & I think that's how those new clouds behave also, right?

But there are other limits on your site too. We site owners used to be able to view our entire list of keywords (separated by bullets) on our /keyword page in Legacy Smug (still can, if still on Legacy). Now on New Smug I think that page is limited to 5,000 keywords... i.e. even if you use 6,000 keywords, you won't be able to view them all on one page the way you could on Legacy. There's a feature request to change that so that it worked the way it used to. Please understand that the /keyword page is entirely different from a keyword block, accessible as /keywords. And btw, visitors to your site can see a page like that too, although they'll only see keywords to photos that are public. For instance, I have some Unlisted galleries, & if I view my keyword page, I'll see all my keywords. My visitors can't see the keywords that are on photos in Unlisted galleries. And many visitors wouldn't even know to find that page, unless you have it linked to your NavBar or some menu the way I do. Most people wouldn't even have interest in it. I have a humongous family, so it's of use to them as the 255-word block wouldn't even begin to cover my closer family members' names.

The other limit you may be thinking of is the limit on keywords per photo. You can place about as many keywords under each photo as you want, but SmugMug is only going to index the first 30 words in the list (multi-word keywords are treated as one, if separated by commas or semi-colons in Legacy, or if you make sure those semi-colons stay put in New Smug!) Those words don't alphabetize as they do on some sites. They'll just count 30 from the very first word you place there. So for SmugMug, it always makes the most sense to place the most important words early in the list. The drawback (in Legacy... don't know about NewSmug) is that there's no counter or anything else to tell you when you've reached 30 words.

As far as search.... I've heard so many conflicting bits of info about keywords & SEO & search engines that it's very hard to know what to believe. Perhaps it would be a good idea to have a couple test galleries & have keywords set up a couple different ways in those galleries & see what happens a few months down the road with searches. I've read statements saying search engines barely look at keywords under photos in a gallery at all, but focus much more on gallery descriptions, titles & captions. And I've seen statements saying that's incorrect & that they do see keywords. I've also read that they see certain kinds of keywording as spamming. Compounding the issue: If your keywords are hidden to the public, some people will tell you search engines aren't "happy" about stuff being hidden & then they're even less likely to crawl them. Idk; I really don't like the look of all those keywords under my photos, so I have them hidden. I can't tell you whether it helps or hurts, because SmugMug is not being transparent with us right now about exactly what they're feeding to Google as far as our RCP-ed images, or whether they've changed their tune on that, so I can't tell whether my SEO is affected more or less by RCP or keywords either way. Once again... frustrating!!

Allen

In the gallery "photo details" keywords show cleaned up, removed (") and only (;). Except the last one is missing.
In bulk editing in organizer they mostly show what you entered. Isn't that simple enough and can be lived with?

pilotdave

WinsomeWorks wrote: »

But there are other limits on your site too. We site owners used to be able to view our entire list of keywords (separated by bullets) on our /keyword page in Legacy Smug (still can, if still on Legacy). Now on New Smug I think that page is limited to 5,000 keywords... i.e. even if you use 6,000 keywords, you won't be able to view them all on one page the way you could on Legacy. There's a feature request to change that so that it worked the way it used to. Please understand that the /keyword page is entirely different from a keyword block, accessible as /keywords.

Not quite right. The /keyword page or a keyword block is limited to showing your most common 255 keywords. The 5000 limit applies to viewing images tagged with any particular keyword or combination of keywords (the maximum size of a keyword gallery). A keyword smart gallery is limited to 1000 photos.

The 255 limit is really the biggest offender because for many of us, it hides keywords that are only used once or twice. And those are usually the typos. So the limit makes it very hard to maintain a clean, mistake-free keyword list. Thank goodness for legacy.

But all these artificial limits cause problems. Why should a smart gallery be limited to 1000 photos? What If i have 6000 photos of a particular subject? How would I share the rest? Am I wrong to have more than 5000 photos of a particular subject? Why provide unlimited storage and then limit my ability to show them all? Why have I been religiously keywording my photos since joining in 2006 when the majority of photos of certain subjects will not be found in a keyword search?

Dave

WinsomeWorks

pilotdave wrote: »

Not quite right. The /keyword page or a keyword block is limited to showing your most common 255 keywords. The 5000 limit applies to viewing images tagged with any particular keyword or combination of keywords (the maximum size of a keyword gallery). A keyword smart gallery is limited to 1000 photos.

The 255 limit is really the biggest offender because for many of us, it hides keywords that are only used once or twice. And those are usually the typos. So the limit makes it very hard to maintain a clean, mistake-free keyword list. Thank goodness for legacy.

Dave

Oh gosh, thanks for catching that! I didn't think that sounded quite right as I was writing it, and now I see I'd already forgotten what got "fixed" recently (with the 1000 to 5000 limit raised) So yeah, you guys on New Smug still don't have access to the whole /keyword page as it existed in Legacy... hmmm, wonder if I should change my original post here that you're referring to?

Allen

The "1000" or newly changed to "5000" limit. This ONLY applies to the keyword gallery that opens when you click
an individual keyword. In other words, a single keyword will only show 5000 max photos in its gallery. I believe /search
on that KW will show all. I have 3559 KW's for "sandpipers" that show in /search. 3432 show on /keyword but the
number is less because it doesn't show videos (bug). I assume I'll blow 5000 the limit in a couple years.

WinsomeWorks

pilotdave wrote: »

Not quite right. The /keyword page or a keyword block is limited to showing your most common 255 keywords. The 5000 limit applies to viewing images tagged with any particular keyword or combination of keywords (the maximum size of a keyword gallery). A keyword smart gallery is limited to 1000 photos.

The 255 limit is really the biggest offender because for many of us, it hides keywords that are only used once or twice. And those are usually the typos. So the limit makes it very hard to maintain a clean, mistake-free keyword list. Thank goodness for legacy.

But all these artificial limits cause problems. Why should a smart gallery be limited to 1000 photos? What If i have 6000 photos of a particular subject? How would I share the rest? Am I wrong to have more than 5000 photos of a particular subject? Why provide unlimited storage and then limit my ability to show them all? Why have I been religiously keywording my photos since joining in 2006 when the majority of photos of certain subjects will not be found in a keyword search?

Dave

Dave

I only understand the 1000-image gallery limit in this way: I know how difficult it is to maintain those larger galleries, and sometimes even to view them.... galleries like that can take forever to load. Even to load them within any tools or organizers, where you may want to drag images around or whatever... they're unwieldy in my experience. On my computer, a 1000-image gallery would be 50 pages long!! (20 images per page in Smug Style). Yuck! That's really no fun at all, & I'd rarely get through a gallery like that, & highly doubt my viewers would either. So I don't want such galleries. Should that mean SmugMug limits them for everyone? Idk... maybe it's a way of helping things run more smoothly; i.e. they'll get fewer complaints like "my gallery just won't load", etc. In my case, though, I don't see why that limit would limit my ways of showing my photos.. I could easily get more specific with my keywords. (instead of "classic car", for example: "classic Cord" or "classic 1930s car") or all kinds of other creative ways to define a gallery or smart gallery. You could collect them differently, or maybe add a second parameter such as dates, etc., to the keyword parameter if it's a keyword-based smart gallery? (I don't know what the possibilities are in New Smug, I'm just giving examples rather than specifics).

Allen

BTW, a smart gallery drawing one keyword has a 1000 limit. Looks like it needs to be raised to 5000.

lkbart

Thanks guys/gals ~ the clarification on the keywords is kinda what I thought, and I do get that it's the keyword cloud/list that I think is only in New Smug (not in Legacy, but I could be wrong) that is limited to the 255, although I wasn't sure about that before. So I guess the only control we have over what keywords are used in the cloud/list is to use the ones we want to see there on multiple photos & hope you don't go over the 255 for the internal search cloud/list. It would be really nice to see what the keyword parameters are for Smugmug, but I agree that it is likely different for old or new & may be a while before kinks are worked out; it would still be nice to know what they are supposed to be, and it would be even nicer to know what the search engines use also. I haven't been the best about utilizing keywords, but it seems like the photos now have a title and a caption in addition to keywords; I don't remember the title being different from the caption before, and all my titles are empty and you can't get to them in the Organize mode, only in the Edit mode. I'm guessing that there is a differentiation somewhere between titles and captions, but what is it? And the title doesn't show up anywhere that I can find (except in the Edit mode), what am I missing?

Glad to see that the semi-colon issue is on the known bugs list & hopefully will be fixed soon.

Allen

WinsomeWorks wrote: »

.... galleries like that can take forever to load....

Not a Smugmug style, it loads as fast as any other Smugmug style gallery.

I frequently go through these large galleries like sandpipers/warblers looking for miss-identified, rareities
and unknown/unnamed species.

pilotdave

Allen wrote: »

Not a Smugmug style, it loads as fast as any other Smugmug style gallery.

Exactly. I can do a search for my most common keyword, the location where i do most of my photography. Getting close to 30,000 pictures taken there since 2006. I can do a search and they all come up on one nearly unusable search results page. But I can't get them all to come up in one nice, neat smugmug style gallery with pagination. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

So 5000 pictures is the magic number smugmug thinks is appropriate for a particular keyword. 30,000 is apparently way too many. It's arbitrary and limiting. They offer unlimited storage, but limited ability to find those photos.

Dave

ChancyRat

Pilotdave said,

The 255 limit is really the biggest offender because for many of us, it hides keywords that are only used once or twice. And those are usually the typos. So the limit makes it very hard to maintain a clean, mistake-free keyword list. Thank goodness for legacy.

Allen invented a keyword page using HTML.
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=237468
See post #17 and all following.

I think this is the result for his site:
http://www.photosbyat.com/keyword/

The important starting point is to copy/paste all the keywords from the legacy site, to notepad.
I did that logged in to get one list that has hidden or unlisted keywords, and then another version for the logged out list.
Got that list on my computer for future reference.
Then some Excel work, his code in post !7.

pilotdave

ChancyRat wrote: »

Pilotdave said,



Allen invented a keyword page using HTML.
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=237468
See post #17 and all following.

I think this is the result for his site:
http://www.photosbyat.com/keyword/

The important starting point is to copy/paste all the keywords from the legacy site, to notepad.
I did that logged in to get one list that has hidden or unlisted keywords, and then another version for the logged out list.
Got that list on my computer for future reference.
Then some Excel work, his code in post !7.

That's his legacy site you linked to, since he hasn't unveiled. I added my legacy keyword cloud to my new site for a while but it was too much of a pain. The problem is that it doesn't update automatically as new keywords are added. Also, while you can add the html block to the default keyword page, I'm not sure if there's a way to hide the keyword cloud on a keyword results page (ie a keyword gallery). I'm using a custom keyword page on my site, but visitors will still get to the default keyword page eventually. It'll be confusing when the two keyword pages don't look alike.

The only real solution is for smugmug to remove the 255 limit.

Dave

Allen

pilotdave wrote: »

That's his legacy site you linked to, since he hasn't unveiled. I added my legacy keyword cloud to my new site for a while but it was too much of a pain. The problem is that it doesn't update automatically as new keywords are added. Also, while you can add the html block to the default keyword page, I'm not sure if there's a way to hide the keyword cloud on a keyword results page (ie a keyword gallery). I'm using a custom keyword page on my site, but visitors will still get to the default keyword page eventually. It'll be confusing when the two keyword pages don't look alike.

The only real solution is for smugmug to remove the 255 limit.

Dave

The cloud disappears with a gallery pops up below my html keyword link box. The same happens when KW in cloud is clicked. My KW box stays visible.

I don't add many KW's except if I find a new bird species. I keep the html in a notepad file for editing
and just paste the whole file in each time.

I think you can hide the default cloud with CSS.