I talked with a smugmug hero using the livechat on their help page. He told me to do the smug square thumbnail you select the gallery then go into settings-appearance- and turn on square thumbs. I think once that setting is on it applies to all images in the gallery. I uploaded some photos tonight and the gallery that the photos were in did not have square thumbs on. Once I turned it on, the photos that I uploaded did go to the square smug thumbnail. I really liked it the old way better. I wish they would tell us about these new changes before pushing them out.
Sure you can make them all square. But how do we adjust the focal point of the square thumb like we used to be able to do? That was Allen's question originally. No reply to that.
Hmmmm..., that's our mistake and I apologize. One of our product managers, Gabbie, is here tonight and working on that.
Edit: she's working with Kerry and Bonocore, so I dunno who will post it tonight.
Actually, that is my mistake and no one else. I didn't have my ducks in a row to get the post up in time, and I take full responsibility. Feel free to direct any angry "Why wasn't this announced on DGrin" comments to me. It was my responsibility and I failed you.
Surely we are not going to have to elicit votes to demonstrate support for restoration of the ability to crop image thumbnails as yet another 'new feature'?
Can someone in authority confirm this is yet another c*ckup and that it is being fixed right now as a matter of urgency, or are the lunatics running the asylum?
Actually, that is my mistake and no one else. I didn't have my ducks in a row to get the post up in time, and I take full responsibility. Feel free to direct any angry "Why wasn't this announced on DGrin" comments to me. It was my responsibility and I failed you.
I am sorry DGrinners.
I'm not worried about a forum post. I'm worried about why you guys would implement a new keyword tool that is SO much slower than the old tool. I'm trying to use it. So many more clicks. So slow. Missing features I use all the time.
I can't imagine how many hours I've spent staring at the bulk caption/keyword tool since 2006. It's always been a little clunky and was long overdue for an update. But why in the world would you guys make it worse?
Don't get me wrong, some of the new functionality is nice. Being able to select photos in the organizer and add keywords to them makes sense. But why take away the old tool? This is not a replacement.
EDIT: I'll give a simple example of a MAJOR feature that you took away... the ability to replace a keyword (or a caption). This is vital in cases of spelling mistakes. I could have a whole gallery where I misspelled a keyword on 50 photos. In the old tool, it was a 5 second fix. In the new tool... you tell me. Surely when you decided to remove features, you tested the new workarounds.
Another issue that occurred when new smug was released was that we could no longer bulk edit keywords across multiple galleries (without setting up a smart gallery). Now this point is moot because we can't bulk edit keywords within one gallery anymore, but regardless that was a critical feature for those of us that caption and keyword our pictures. Instead of fixing that bug, you just deleted the entire tool! One step forward, two steps backward... every time.
Look at all the functionally we have lost. Copy/paste between different photos. Search and replace especially fixing spelling mistakes.
Browser search for a word in a caption or keyword is lost.
Sure you can make them all square. But how do we adjust the focal point of the square thumb like we used to be able to do?
Hmmm... This is going to be an interesting discussion, but I'll just be totally transparent and let's see if we can collectively figure out the right course of action.
First of all, I just posted this pic of Sophie to my gallery on Sunday:
That gallery is SmugMug style, and I have thumbnails set to square, so cropping thumbnail made it so my thumbnail wasn't Sophie-less. Nice. Count me as a customer who wants and understands it.
What's vexing us is that's the only use-case where crop thumbnail currently has any effect. So it's confusing to a large set of our customers, who crop thumbnail for say, thumbnail-style and see no effect because it uses larger images. So the discussion became, how do we scale this tool for larger images and other gallery styles? And is crop the right paradigm or is it more like setting the focal point in a more intuitive way? Maybe it needs a re-think and re-write.
To help us understand use cases better, we instrumented the tools to watch them being used. We're eager to address two common customer concerns we hear a lot: (1) you have an overwhelming number of features. Please simplify. And (2) stop spending time on rarely-used features and spend your resources on more popular ones.
Which brings us back to crop thumbnail: it's rarely used anymore, hard for me to hear because I don't want a Sophie-less thumbnail in my gallery.
If the answer is, it's rarely used because it doesn't apply to all the use cases it should, and crop thumbnail is no longer intuitive enough for people to understand what it means because you also want to set the focal point on bigger tiles, then it sounds like we have work to do. I'm guessing that will be your opinions because you all seem to use it like I do... but I'd love to hear your use cases for bigger images, other gallery styles, etc.
Now this point is moot because we can't bulk edit keywords within one gallery anymore,
Hey pilotdave,
Can you help me understand what you mean by that? I'm not questioning that you know what you're talking about, I know you do, but I'm bulk editing my keywords and just want to understand if you mean the tool is not useful to you anymore, or it's too confusing to find, or...
The problem we had with the old tool, which I hope you can understand, is people just couldn't figure it out, except for really advanced users like you.
Can you help me understand what you mean by that? I'm not questioning that you know what you're talking about, I know you do, but I'm bulk editing my keywords and just want to understand if you mean the tool is not useful to you anymore, or it's too confusing to find, or...
The problem we had with the old tool, which I hope you can understand, is people just couldn't figure it out, except for really advanced users like you.
Ok, I should have been more specific. We can bulk add keywords and we can bulk remove keywords. But I can't change a keyword. And I can't do all the things that complicated old tool could do. I use those tools all the time and I think a lot of other users would if you made up some good tutorials... or just make them more intuitive. Over the years I've found ways to save myself hours using those tools.
Correcting spelling errors or erroneous keywords is the easiest example. It used to be a few clicks to fix a gallery worth of a bad keyword. Imagine I tagged a bunch of photos with the keyword "jeff." I later realized that was Jim in my pictures. Old way was to use that complicated tool to write out "replace keyword jeff with jim in all keywords" and hit preview. How exactly would I do that with the new tool? Yep, one at a time. And to be clear, back before new smug was introduced, we could do that across multiple galleries. If i found out Jeff was really Geoff after taking 1000 pictures of him, I could fix them all in a matter of seconds. That functionality was lost even in legacy when new smug was introduced.
But I loved saving myself tons of time using "add keyword XXX where contains YYY." Any time I had keywords that go together, i could save myself a ton of time. Or "remove keyword XXX where unselected." Sometimes it's fastest to add keywords to all photos then remove them from the unselected ones.
I tried going through a gallery with the new tool. I was able to do some bulk keywording in the organizer. Then I opened up a single image in the editor and started working through the gallery. Add keywords, hit save, wait, then move to the next image, add keywords, hit save, wait, move to the next, etc. It's nice that way because the image is big enough to see. But man is it slow. The old way way had everything on one page where i could jump around and copy and paste and use page down on the keyboard to quickly jump to more pictures. There was no hitting save every time i added a keyword to a photo.
Those tools were powerful. I was hoping the updated bulk keyword tool would allow us to create caption templates where we could insert metadata using tags. Like putting {date taken} into the capton would replace the tag with the date taken from the metadata.
The new tool suggests keywords when you start to type one but it works terribly. Suggestions should come from all our keywords. And it would be even better if could predict based on keywords that are commonly used together like lightroom does.
Anyway, you've made it clear that smugmug is no longer interested in customers like me. Customers that don't understand why a smart gallery should have a 1000 image limit or that don't understand why every update to smugmug increases the number of clicks required to complete a task. I'm not leaving... just giving up faith that smugmug is headed in any sort of direction that suits my needs.
If you advertised a new advanced version of smugmug that included all these tools, javascript, iframes, limitless customization, etc, I think it would be a hit. Fortunately I already have it. But I'm afraid as we approach new smug's first birthday, you'll be taking legacy smug away from me any day now.
That gallery is SmugMug style, and I have thumbnails set to square, so cropping thumbnail made it so my thumbnail wasn't Sophie-less. Nice. Count me as a customer who wants and understands it.
Like Allen, part of my workflow when I upload a new gallery (I use Smugmug-style galleries) is to go through and "crop" each thumbnail, if needed, to enlarge and position the focal point of the image.
The inability to crop Smugmug-style thumbnails is a huge loss of functionality for me.
Regarding the other changes, I typically caption and keyword my photos before uploading them to Smugmug, but as others have stated, occasionally I'll catch a spelling error or just decide I want to modify an existing keyword, and use the old keyword replacement functionality to fix things quickly. If you have customers who struggle to "get" the advanced features, then find a way to put them in an "advanced" section/tab, but please stop taking away functionality. I don't get your reasoning...wanting to "dumb things down" for the rest of us. There should be enough room in the world for the "slow" customers and the ones who want a fully featured, complex set of organizing tools.
Hmmm... This is going to be an interesting discussion, but I'll just be totally transparent and let's see if we can collectively figure out the right course of action.
Why then, to establish the starting point for the 'transparent discussion', did you expunge the previous thumbnail functionality in a scorched earth policy.
What's the justification for dropping this? Nothing was broken. Those who wanted default thumbnails (whether in the aspect ratio of the original image or square) could let SmugMug create these for them automatically. Those who wanted to frame the thumbs themselves (such as off-centre or focused tightly on a specific aspect of the image, etc) could do so, without obstructing the workflow of the 'default' group.
To help us understand use cases better, we instrumented the tools to watch them being used.
Baldy, this 'discussion' isn't about 'transparency' and you know it! How can you watch users to better understand how they customise their thumbnails when you have now denied them the function?
We're eager to address two common customer concerns we hear a lot: (1) you have an overwhelming number of features. Please simplify. And (2) stop spending time on rarely-used features and spend your resources on more popular ones.
Users are asking you for less features? Give me a break!
You already provide a reduced function set for customers on your basic plans and, without telling you how to run what has hitherto been a great service from a user standpoint, isn't this the device that you should be using so that users with more advanced needs have have the (already existing) functionality they want and others don't pay for it and aren't bothered by it?
If the answer is, it's rarely used because it doesn't apply to all the use cases it should, and crop thumbnail is no longer intuitive enough for people to understand what it means because you also want to set the focal point on bigger tiles, then it sounds like we have work to do.
How can it be 'no longer intuitive enough'? To the extent it was intuitive before, it must still be intuitive now. It's intuitive quality hasn't degraded with simply the effluxion of time! Or are you saying the average IQ of your customer demographic has declined to the point that a significant proportion can't work it out any more?
I'm guessing that will be your opinions because you all seem to use it like I do... but I'd love to hear your use cases for bigger images, other gallery styles, etc.
But while you're thinking about how thumbnails might work better (if that's what you would do), and we've seen some excellent thinking manifest in new SmugMug, why can't we continue to have the thumbnail function tomorrow that we had yesterday?
BTW, as a long time user, I'm very disenchanted with the new model of SmugMug user engagement whereby a whole slew of functionality was just quietly dropped in the transition from legacy to new SmugMug, and more functionality has been dropped progressively as 'new features' have been added, as in this case. I'm also very disappointed with the poorly thought-through and buggy releases of late and all the weasel-words (or deafening silence) which have accompanied them, not to mention all the anguish these have caused.
What happened to the user-centric and quality-focused SmugMug I knew back in 2005 and in all the years through to 2013? I fear it's gone forever, but I'd love to be proved wrong!
I created a new (test) gallery and loaded up some images. I then went to the Organiser, selected all images and clicked on the wrench.
At that point I can enter a caption that successfully appears for all images but I cannot enter a title for all images - that box is not active. Why not? Am I doing something wrong? Otherwise, how do i achieve 'bulk editing' of titles, or was that enhancement not delivered by these changes?
Why then, to establish the starting point for the 'transparent discussion', did you expunge the previous thumbnail functionality in a scorched earth policy.
What's the justification for dropping this? Nothing was broken.
I can think of one easy justification: You're a New SmugMug user, and you try using the crop-thumbnail tool, but nothing happens. Your thumbnails don't change, not in your Thumbnail-style gallery or in a Gallery content block or a Multiple photos content block, nowhere. This just confuses users and wastes their time, making them give up in frustration. Thumbnail crop promises to work, but in reality has zero effect on 75% of the default SmugMug design loadouts (since only about 25% of those use the SmugMug gallery display style).
I can think of one easy justification: You're a New SmugMug user, and you try using the crop-thumbnail tool, but nothing happens. Your thumbnails don't change, not in your Thumbnail-style gallery or in a Gallery content block or a Multiple photos content block, nowhere. This just confuses users and wastes their time, making them give up in frustration. Thumbnail crop promises to work, but in reality has zero effect on 75% of the default SmugMug design loadouts (since only about 25% of those use the SmugMug gallery display style).
Simple solution... only show the tool in smugmug style galleries. Or just write up a "gotcha" in the tool that explains what it does.
You certainly can change a keyword. Just click it to select it and type in the replacement.
Ok, I hadn't see that and it's nice. But going back to my example, how would I use the new tool to replace the keyword "jeff" with "jim" throughout a gallery? There's no way to select all images tagged with "jeff" to make the change at once. An amazingly simple thing to do with the old tool would take many times as long with the new tool.
How about if I wanted to add "flower" to every picture tagged wtih "rose?" It's functionality smugmug once dreamed up because there was a good reason for it. Or if I want to remove "2013" from every picture tagged with "2014?"
You could accomplish these by adding some functionality to the organizer. "Select photos (containing/not containing) ___." Then with the selection we could make the changes we want in bulk.
Have a couple people at smugmug race to add keywords to a gallery. One using the old tool and one using the new tool. The old tool will win every time. It needed some sprucing up, not deletion.
Dave
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BaldyRegistered Users, Super ModeratorsPosts: 2,853moderator
What happened to the user-centric and quality-focused SmugMug I knew back in 2005 and in all the years through to 2013? I fear it's gone forever, but I'd love to be proved wrong!
W.W., there is a remarkable transformation that occurs when we hire our customers, some of them who were very hard on us, like Tomasz Nowicki was. And when I asked Tomasz, what happened to your fiery self once you got inside? He answered, "I worked the desk and saw the other side."
It doesn't take long on the desk to see how confusing the crop thumbnail tool is and the frustration it causes, or to do the metrics and see how few people use it as a % of our customers.
So I think instead of putting a lot of people in an impossible situation, we have to find a reasonable solution.
A reasonable stop-gap might be to resurrect the tool temporarily and add messaging saying that it only works on SmugMug style if thumbs are set to square. The downside of that is a minority of people read messages like that and they don't know for thumbnails and cropping and SmugMug style and why you would want to do it anyway. And as everyone who has worked the desk for a few hours will tell you, tutorials and help pages and forums are for the minority. Most people just start a chat or email.
We're meeting in an hour about what to do about this and my inclination is to build a tool that lets you select the focus of any photo where we don't display the whole photo. It seems to me that tool would be used more, be less confusing, and more adaptable to various displays. One of our engineers built it as a hack-day project, but as with most things, as you build and use an alpha, you discover all the corner cases and execution details, like it isn't perfectly adaptable when you switch display styles and get different image sizes. You might crop tighter for a small thumb than you would a bigger tile, etc.
I hope at the meeting you also take into consideration the examples from pilotdave.
I use replace in the fashion Dave mentions on a regular basis.
I like the old edit tool where I could see everything at once.
I dislike the new tool and it is certainly not intuitive to me or efficient!
Amen.
I need to be able to cut and paste the keywords from one picture to another like before.
As a heavy user of the feature in almost all of my galleries, I'm very disappointed by the loss of crop thumbnail functionality. I like square thumbs, so I have always used it to both ensure subjects are not cropped off and to zoom in on the subject in small thumbnails. But, I have also been disappointed that a manually-cropped square thumbnail in SmugMug style is not carried up to folder-level thumbnails.
If you can add the functionality to specify a focus for automatic cropping of ALL thumbnails across the site, I would still be losing the ability to more tightly crop images. But, it would be an overall improvement, because I could ensure that none of my subjects were cut off in any thumbnails. If you do add this feature, please provide a workflow that enables us to select focus in an organizer-type layout that displays multiple images on a page at one time. One does not need a large, individual image to select a focus point. I don't want to have to select an individual image, pick the focal point, save my change, exit, and then select another image as we did with the crop thumbnail tool.
A reasonable stop-gap might be to resurrect the tool temporarily and add messaging saying that it only works on SmugMug style if thumbs are set to square.
Who's not in favour of 'reasonable'? Why woudn't you want to be 'reasonable'? It should be a very short meeting?
Put yourself in my position - over 19,000 images in SmugMug-style galleries, all with focused square thumbnails which is fundamental to the consistent look and feel of my site. Overnight you remove my ability to format my thumbnails this way. From this point forward, I can no longer maintain this essential characteristic of my site and this will progressively break down and become a mess as new images and galleries are added.
I've now got to suffer "Sophie Syndrome" whether I like it or not - no warning, no discussion. What's the point of a thumbnail that's not representative of the related image? I might as well not have one!
When SmugMug 2.0 came along, like many others I had to make a decision as to whether to stay or go. I spent several weeks working in my sandpit to see whether I could get a presentation for my site that was acceptable to me, under the threat that at some time in the future SmugMug would just transition me if I didn't do it for myself. After swallowing a whole heap of rats, I migrated to the design I have now, including copious re-engineering of gallery structures and content.
Having made that decision and completing the work required to implement it, now you are steadily removing functionality that was the basis and justification for me remaining a user. Is that fair? By all means change and improve the way the functionality works and add features and capabilities, but just pull functionality, and without discussion?
As a heavy user of the feature in almost all of my galleries, I'm very disappointed by the loss of crop thumbnail functionality. I like square thumbs, so I have always used it to both ensure subjects are not cropped off and to zoom in on the subject in small thumbnails. But, I have also been disappointed that a manually-cropped square thumbnail in SmugMug style is not carried up to folder-level thumbnails.
If you can add the functionality to specify a focus for automatic cropping of ALL thumbnails across the site, I would still be losing the ability to more tightly crop images. But, it would be an overall improvement, because I could ensure that none of my subjects were cut off in any thumbnails. If you do add this feature, please provide a workflow that enables us to select focus in an organizer-type layout that displays multiple images on a page at one time. One does not need a large, individual image to select a focus point. I don't want to have to select an individual image, pick the focal point, save my change, exit, and then select another image as we did with the crop thumbnail tool.
That makes a lot of sense, Ben. We dove pretty deep into this in today's meeting and decided to add back the crop thumbnail tool until we have a replacement that is more general for all the new shapes and sizes, and more understandable for the masses.
The situation is it no longer fits the way SmugMug is primarily used today, making it unintelligible for most users.
Hopefully we can get it restored quickly for the people like you and me who still use it, and also hopefully we can retire it with something much better in the not too distant future.
Point taken about making it easier to do for a large number of images, also for the other tools.
Usually when I have a spelling error or change in keywords the same exists in captions. I jump to my preexisting
unlisted smart gallery I created especially for this. After Smug removed bulk edit for keyword galleries this is the
no only way accomplish this. My keywords are used across many galleries.
I created a new (test) gallery and loaded up some images. I then went to the Organiser, selected all images and clicked on the wrench.
At that point I can enter a caption that successfully appears for all images but I cannot enter a title for all images - that box is not active. Why not? Am I doing something wrong? Otherwise, how do i achieve 'bulk editing' of titles, or was that enhancement not delivered by these changes?
In the absence of any feedback here, I lodged this question with the Help Desk and this is the reply I got.
Hi Ross,
Thank you for your email.
The photo editor was changed, the there is an option to add a title of the images within a gallery. It's in the same area as the caption. Since titles are typically related to a single image, it appears we did not make it a bulk option, like the other tools, though.
Please see this blog post for more information about the new photo editing tool: http://news.smugmug.com/
If there's anything else we can help you with, feel free to write us back.
This is unbelievable! It 'appears', despite all the discussion on this point, that it has been decreed image titles should not be maintainable in bulk, even though this function is facilitated by the Photo Editor redesign. I despair.
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Sure you can make them all square. But how do we adjust the focal point of the square thumb like we used to be able to do? That was Allen's question originally. No reply to that.
Nice idea but it's no longer there.
Edit: she's working with Kerry and Bonocore, so I dunno who will post it tonight.
Actually, that is my mistake and no one else. I didn't have my ducks in a row to get the post up in time, and I take full responsibility. Feel free to direct any angry "Why wasn't this announced on DGrin" comments to me. It was my responsibility and I failed you.
I am sorry DGrinners.
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Can someone in authority confirm this is yet another c*ckup and that it is being fixed right now as a matter of urgency, or are the lunatics running the asylum?
I'm not worried about a forum post. I'm worried about why you guys would implement a new keyword tool that is SO much slower than the old tool. I'm trying to use it. So many more clicks. So slow. Missing features I use all the time.
I can't imagine how many hours I've spent staring at the bulk caption/keyword tool since 2006. It's always been a little clunky and was long overdue for an update. But why in the world would you guys make it worse?
Don't get me wrong, some of the new functionality is nice. Being able to select photos in the organizer and add keywords to them makes sense. But why take away the old tool? This is not a replacement.
EDIT: I'll give a simple example of a MAJOR feature that you took away... the ability to replace a keyword (or a caption). This is vital in cases of spelling mistakes. I could have a whole gallery where I misspelled a keyword on 50 photos. In the old tool, it was a 5 second fix. In the new tool... you tell me. Surely when you decided to remove features, you tested the new workarounds.
Another issue that occurred when new smug was released was that we could no longer bulk edit keywords across multiple galleries (without setting up a smart gallery). Now this point is moot because we can't bulk edit keywords within one gallery anymore, but regardless that was a critical feature for those of us that caption and keyword our pictures. Instead of fixing that bug, you just deleted the entire tool! One step forward, two steps backward... every time.
Dave
Browser search for a word in a caption or keyword is lost.
My Website index | My Blog
First of all, I just posted this pic of Sophie to my gallery on Sunday:
That gallery is SmugMug style, and I have thumbnails set to square, so cropping thumbnail made it so my thumbnail wasn't Sophie-less. Nice. Count me as a customer who wants and understands it.
What's vexing us is that's the only use-case where crop thumbnail currently has any effect. So it's confusing to a large set of our customers, who crop thumbnail for say, thumbnail-style and see no effect because it uses larger images. So the discussion became, how do we scale this tool for larger images and other gallery styles? And is crop the right paradigm or is it more like setting the focal point in a more intuitive way? Maybe it needs a re-think and re-write.
To help us understand use cases better, we instrumented the tools to watch them being used. We're eager to address two common customer concerns we hear a lot: (1) you have an overwhelming number of features. Please simplify. And (2) stop spending time on rarely-used features and spend your resources on more popular ones.
Which brings us back to crop thumbnail: it's rarely used anymore, hard for me to hear because I don't want a Sophie-less thumbnail in my gallery.
If the answer is, it's rarely used because it doesn't apply to all the use cases it should, and crop thumbnail is no longer intuitive enough for people to understand what it means because you also want to set the focal point on bigger tiles, then it sounds like we have work to do. I'm guessing that will be your opinions because you all seem to use it like I do... but I'd love to hear your use cases for bigger images, other gallery styles, etc.
See post #20 above.
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Can you help me understand what you mean by that? I'm not questioning that you know what you're talking about, I know you do, but I'm bulk editing my keywords and just want to understand if you mean the tool is not useful to you anymore, or it's too confusing to find, or...
The problem we had with the old tool, which I hope you can understand, is people just couldn't figure it out, except for really advanced users like you.
Ok, I should have been more specific. We can bulk add keywords and we can bulk remove keywords. But I can't change a keyword. And I can't do all the things that complicated old tool could do. I use those tools all the time and I think a lot of other users would if you made up some good tutorials... or just make them more intuitive. Over the years I've found ways to save myself hours using those tools.
Correcting spelling errors or erroneous keywords is the easiest example. It used to be a few clicks to fix a gallery worth of a bad keyword. Imagine I tagged a bunch of photos with the keyword "jeff." I later realized that was Jim in my pictures. Old way was to use that complicated tool to write out "replace keyword jeff with jim in all keywords" and hit preview. How exactly would I do that with the new tool? Yep, one at a time. And to be clear, back before new smug was introduced, we could do that across multiple galleries. If i found out Jeff was really Geoff after taking 1000 pictures of him, I could fix them all in a matter of seconds. That functionality was lost even in legacy when new smug was introduced.
But I loved saving myself tons of time using "add keyword XXX where contains YYY." Any time I had keywords that go together, i could save myself a ton of time. Or "remove keyword XXX where unselected." Sometimes it's fastest to add keywords to all photos then remove them from the unselected ones.
I tried going through a gallery with the new tool. I was able to do some bulk keywording in the organizer. Then I opened up a single image in the editor and started working through the gallery. Add keywords, hit save, wait, then move to the next image, add keywords, hit save, wait, move to the next, etc. It's nice that way because the image is big enough to see. But man is it slow. The old way way had everything on one page where i could jump around and copy and paste and use page down on the keyboard to quickly jump to more pictures. There was no hitting save every time i added a keyword to a photo.
Those tools were powerful. I was hoping the updated bulk keyword tool would allow us to create caption templates where we could insert metadata using tags. Like putting {date taken} into the capton would replace the tag with the date taken from the metadata.
The new tool suggests keywords when you start to type one but it works terribly. Suggestions should come from all our keywords. And it would be even better if could predict based on keywords that are commonly used together like lightroom does.
Anyway, you've made it clear that smugmug is no longer interested in customers like me. Customers that don't understand why a smart gallery should have a 1000 image limit or that don't understand why every update to smugmug increases the number of clicks required to complete a task. I'm not leaving... just giving up faith that smugmug is headed in any sort of direction that suits my needs.
If you advertised a new advanced version of smugmug that included all these tools, javascript, iframes, limitless customization, etc, I think it would be a hit. Fortunately I already have it. But I'm afraid as we approach new smug's first birthday, you'll be taking legacy smug away from me any day now.
Dave
Like Allen, part of my workflow when I upload a new gallery (I use Smugmug-style galleries) is to go through and "crop" each thumbnail, if needed, to enlarge and position the focal point of the image.
The inability to crop Smugmug-style thumbnails is a huge loss of functionality for me.
Regarding the other changes, I typically caption and keyword my photos before uploading them to Smugmug, but as others have stated, occasionally I'll catch a spelling error or just decide I want to modify an existing keyword, and use the old keyword replacement functionality to fix things quickly. If you have customers who struggle to "get" the advanced features, then find a way to put them in an "advanced" section/tab, but please stop taking away functionality. I don't get your reasoning...wanting to "dumb things down" for the rest of us. There should be enough room in the world for the "slow" customers and the ones who want a fully featured, complex set of organizing tools.
What's the justification for dropping this? Nothing was broken. Those who wanted default thumbnails (whether in the aspect ratio of the original image or square) could let SmugMug create these for them automatically. Those who wanted to frame the thumbs themselves (such as off-centre or focused tightly on a specific aspect of the image, etc) could do so, without obstructing the workflow of the 'default' group.
Baldy, this 'discussion' isn't about 'transparency' and you know it! How can you watch users to better understand how they customise their thumbnails when you have now denied them the function?
Users are asking you for less features? Give me a break!
You already provide a reduced function set for customers on your basic plans and, without telling you how to run what has hitherto been a great service from a user standpoint, isn't this the device that you should be using so that users with more advanced needs have have the (already existing) functionality they want and others don't pay for it and aren't bothered by it?
It can't be used at all now, so that's what you've prescribed for yourself and everyone else!
How can it be 'no longer intuitive enough'? To the extent it was intuitive before, it must still be intuitive now. It's intuitive quality hasn't degraded with simply the effluxion of time! Or are you saying the average IQ of your customer demographic has declined to the point that a significant proportion can't work it out any more?
But while you're thinking about how thumbnails might work better (if that's what you would do), and we've seen some excellent thinking manifest in new SmugMug, why can't we continue to have the thumbnail function tomorrow that we had yesterday?
BTW, as a long time user, I'm very disenchanted with the new model of SmugMug user engagement whereby a whole slew of functionality was just quietly dropped in the transition from legacy to new SmugMug, and more functionality has been dropped progressively as 'new features' have been added, as in this case. I'm also very disappointed with the poorly thought-through and buggy releases of late and all the weasel-words (or deafening silence) which have accompanied them, not to mention all the anguish these have caused.
What happened to the user-centric and quality-focused SmugMug I knew back in 2005 and in all the years through to 2013? I fear it's gone forever, but I'd love to be proved wrong!
At that point I can enter a caption that successfully appears for all images but I cannot enter a title for all images - that box is not active. Why not? Am I doing something wrong? Otherwise, how do i achieve 'bulk editing' of titles, or was that enhancement not delivered by these changes?
I can think of one easy justification: You're a New SmugMug user, and you try using the crop-thumbnail tool, but nothing happens. Your thumbnails don't change, not in your Thumbnail-style gallery or in a Gallery content block or a Multiple photos content block, nowhere. This just confuses users and wastes their time, making them give up in frustration. Thumbnail crop promises to work, but in reality has zero effect on 75% of the default SmugMug design loadouts (since only about 25% of those use the SmugMug gallery display style).
Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!
Simple solution... only show the tool in smugmug style galleries. Or just write up a "gotcha" in the tool that explains what it does.
Dave
You certainly can change a keyword. Just click it to select it and type in the replacement.
I have not had time to try, but can I copy a list of keywords from another gallery like I used to?
Ok, I hadn't see that and it's nice. But going back to my example, how would I use the new tool to replace the keyword "jeff" with "jim" throughout a gallery? There's no way to select all images tagged with "jeff" to make the change at once. An amazingly simple thing to do with the old tool would take many times as long with the new tool.
How about if I wanted to add "flower" to every picture tagged wtih "rose?" It's functionality smugmug once dreamed up because there was a good reason for it. Or if I want to remove "2013" from every picture tagged with "2014?"
You could accomplish these by adding some functionality to the organizer. "Select photos (containing/not containing) ___." Then with the selection we could make the changes we want in bulk.
Have a couple people at smugmug race to add keywords to a gallery. One using the old tool and one using the new tool. The old tool will win every time. It needed some sprucing up, not deletion.
Dave
It doesn't take long on the desk to see how confusing the crop thumbnail tool is and the frustration it causes, or to do the metrics and see how few people use it as a % of our customers.
So I think instead of putting a lot of people in an impossible situation, we have to find a reasonable solution.
A reasonable stop-gap might be to resurrect the tool temporarily and add messaging saying that it only works on SmugMug style if thumbs are set to square. The downside of that is a minority of people read messages like that and they don't know for thumbnails and cropping and SmugMug style and why you would want to do it anyway. And as everyone who has worked the desk for a few hours will tell you, tutorials and help pages and forums are for the minority. Most people just start a chat or email.
We're meeting in an hour about what to do about this and my inclination is to build a tool that lets you select the focus of any photo where we don't display the whole photo. It seems to me that tool would be used more, be less confusing, and more adaptable to various displays. One of our engineers built it as a hack-day project, but as with most things, as you build and use an alpha, you discover all the corner cases and execution details, like it isn't perfectly adaptable when you switch display styles and get different image sizes. You might crop tighter for a small thumb than you would a bigger tile, etc.
Amen.
I need to be able to cut and paste the keywords from one picture to another like before.
If you can add the functionality to specify a focus for automatic cropping of ALL thumbnails across the site, I would still be losing the ability to more tightly crop images. But, it would be an overall improvement, because I could ensure that none of my subjects were cut off in any thumbnails. If you do add this feature, please provide a workflow that enables us to select focus in an organizer-type layout that displays multiple images on a page at one time. One does not need a large, individual image to select a focus point. I don't want to have to select an individual image, pick the focal point, save my change, exit, and then select another image as we did with the crop thumbnail tool.
www.ackersphotography.com
Put yourself in my position - over 19,000 images in SmugMug-style galleries, all with focused square thumbnails which is fundamental to the consistent look and feel of my site. Overnight you remove my ability to format my thumbnails this way. From this point forward, I can no longer maintain this essential characteristic of my site and this will progressively break down and become a mess as new images and galleries are added.
I've now got to suffer "Sophie Syndrome" whether I like it or not - no warning, no discussion. What's the point of a thumbnail that's not representative of the related image? I might as well not have one!
When SmugMug 2.0 came along, like many others I had to make a decision as to whether to stay or go. I spent several weeks working in my sandpit to see whether I could get a presentation for my site that was acceptable to me, under the threat that at some time in the future SmugMug would just transition me if I didn't do it for myself. After swallowing a whole heap of rats, I migrated to the design I have now, including copious re-engineering of gallery structures and content.
Having made that decision and completing the work required to implement it, now you are steadily removing functionality that was the basis and justification for me remaining a user. Is that fair? By all means change and improve the way the functionality works and add features and capabilities, but just pull functionality, and without discussion?
The situation is it no longer fits the way SmugMug is primarily used today, making it unintelligible for most users.
Hopefully we can get it restored quickly for the people like you and me who still use it, and also hopefully we can retire it with something much better in the not too distant future.
Point taken about making it easier to do for a large number of images, also for the other tools.
http://youtu.be/rXaftgbM21M
unlisted smart gallery I created especially for this. After Smug removed bulk edit for keyword galleries this is the
no only way accomplish this. My keywords are used across many galleries.
My Website index | My Blog
In the absence of any feedback here, I lodged this question with the Help Desk and this is the reply I got. This is unbelievable! It 'appears', despite all the discussion on this point, that it has been decreed image titles should not be maintainable in bulk, even though this function is facilitated by the Photo Editor redesign. I despair.