Of course, if there ARE heaps of people who do all this sort of thing online and online only, and the functionality is being heavily used, then I am very confused as to the state of the world.
bow
PS -- My daughter lives in Fremantle! I was able to visit last year and will go back next May. It is a shame most visitors only see the east side of your wonderful country.
SmugMug site => The Bakker Chautauqua
"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits." (Einstein)
Yes, but doesn't Smugmug actually make money from the professionals who sell their images on Smugmug? Every time I sell a photo, Smugmug gets a cut. And why wouldn't casual Iphone users just use Flickr, where they get a terrabyte of free storage?
Fair enough, I'd be curious what sort of activities the most profitable users provide.
But I'd wager that they are the same. Even though pros pay what, $300 each, plus percentages? I bet the profit is all in the median user who pays $60 or so and doesn't use it much. But I don't know.
It would be very interesting, and either energize or squash some of the expectations people have.
Don't know if this will work for people using new smug, but the address for the old bulk caption/keyword tool is: yoursite.com/photos/tools.mg?AlbumID=XXXX&AlbumKey=YYYY&tool=bulkcaption
You can find the albumid and albumkey in a gallery's source code. Definitely not ideal but if you really want to use the old tool, it's still there... I think! Anyone want to see if it still works?
Do you have the URL for the previous thumbnail crop tool as well?
Maybe thenickdude would also be able to save this function from annihilation by including it in his Chrome browser extension, which he is presently augmenting with a bulk image title/caption/keyword function as discussed over here.
I have to say that I am confused as to why an image hosting and website producing company would prioritise online image editing above actual site functionality as items to be worked on. Are there really so many people out there who would prefer to do image editing online rather than on their originals on their own computers?
Personally, I would have loved to see real and actual CSS capabilities introduced to enable us to customise sections of the site (and all cascading sub-sections) as should be the case with CSS, since those I can't do myself at home, whereas image editing is something that virtually all computers have at least the basic capabilities to do.
Am I really in the minority while people are editing the images on their websites in situ?!
Looks like you got rid of the feature for "Crop Thumbnail", though, where we could select the way the thumbnail would look. Response from Heroes was that the feature may be gone for good. That would be quite the bummer for those people using "Thumbnail" gallery view and no longer can control how their images look in their galleries. I'm sure we'll see some requests to get the feature back.
I just tried the new Editor a few minutes back and that was the first thing i was missing. I will not do a request... i will simply not use any gallery style anymore that will make this feature a required tool. That means: No more SmugMug gallery style... I also removed nearly all CSS code i had on my previous design, because i'm tired to keep my site up to date with all the changes done by SmugMug. Some of them are nice...but i really don't want to check my own site every day just to see if SM has released a code update that might break my layout (happened last with the vertical scrollbar in the captions in lightbox-mode).
Well... i'll give the keyword editor a try... hopefully it is usable.
P.S. Just tried to add keywords to multiple photos using ORGANIZE > EDIT > KEYWORDS. I selected "UNSELECT ALL" and selected the photos i wanted to add a keyword to. Then i clicked on "KEYWORDS" on the right panel. Instead of open the keywords-panel like it does when you open a single photo in the editor the panel moves to the left and completely disappears then. Time for another mail to the helpdesk.
...Then i clicked on "KEYWORDS" on the right panel. Instead of open the keywords-panel like it does when you open a single photo in the editor the panel moves to the left and completely disappears then. ...
Using FireFox 29...
Same thing happens when I use it.
The tool is completely useless unless adding the same in bulk to all.
Using Smugmug style much easier to just edit captions/keyword/title directly under photo.
The tool is completely useless unless adding the same in bulk to all.
Using Smugmug style much easier to just edit captions/keyword/title directly under photo.
I will not use SM-Style anymore since you cannot select the crop for the thumbs anymore. OK, i could do that just for editing. But i found another bug when you upload photos to a SM-gallery-style with SquareThumbs=On... those will get a square thumb which you cannot reset to original aspect ratio... looks funny now in the organizer. See screenshot (Mail to helpdesk is on its way...)
I'm off to an convention with lots of stars...i fear the day i will upload my photos to my site with all that borked bulk-edit-features and other bugs... i may tag my photos in my photo software in the future... much easier now.
But, they removed the only convenient gallery keyword maintenance tool we had, the one from legacy. 2 clicks
New tool 4 clicks
We use to be able to open a keyword gallery and maintenance that keyword across all galleries. This was disabled.
Then found a work-around, using a smart gallery for maintenance of a keyword across all galleries.
Imagine all the clicks creating a smart gallery and setting it for a keyword for every keyword wanting to fix.
But it worked.
The new tool looks like you can edit/add/fix a single KW but it is only for a single gallery, not across the whole site.
So I guess you have to find every gallery it was used in and do one gallery at a time. Or again use a smart gallery
for this.
Bottom line, enable a keyword gallery to use the new tool (bulk). Now going from a keyword gallery to organizer opens
in top level not KW gallery. Selection under photo only does single photo.
...But i found another bug when you upload photos to a SM-gallery-style with SquareThumbs=On... those will get a square thumb which you cannot reset to original aspect ratio... looks funny now in the organizer. See screenshot (Mail to helpdesk is on its way...)....
I have square turned on before upload. Then crop every thumb. In organizer I see all my cropped
thumbs. I guess I don't switch the gallery back to original aspect ratio so haven't noticed that.
But, I would think all the thumbs would be regenerated from original when selecting new aspect ratio.
That's a bug if it's not happening.
I switched the SquareThumbs to Off but the aspect ratio did not change. Anyway... i got a reply from the helpdesk:
So it should work... it just did not work on my last upload... hopefully it will work in the future.
Great they got it figured out.
I'm only three galleries behind so far individually cropping thumbs so I'll wait till they resolved this. Most
of my bird shots are not portrait full frame type so got'a crop small to see bird in thumb. My site's
designed to scan the thumbs for interesting photos to look at. I hate sites that make you look at every
photo. Why I hate slideshows.
I just tried the new Editor a few minutes back and that was the first thing i was missing. I will not do a request... i will simply not use any gallery style anymore that will make this feature a required tool. That means: No more SmugMug gallery style...
In thinking why the ability to crop thumbnails had been dropped without discussion and what options i might have to deal with it, it had occurred to me that this might be a forerunner to the SmugMug style being discontinued altogether (likely, also without warning), and that I might need to consider moving all my SmugMug-style galleries to another style (perhaps Collage Landscape) before I'm forced to.
I also removed nearly all CSS code i had on my previous design, because i'm tired to keep my site up to date with all the changes done by SmugMug. Some of them are nice...but i really don't want to check my own site every day just to see if SM has released a code update that might break my layout (happened last with the vertical scrollbar in the captions in lightbox-mode).
I had also hoped, for exactly the same reasons as you, that I could clean out most or all my legacy CSS customisation when i migrated to New SmugMug. However as a lot of legacy functionality wasn't carried across, I have ended up back in much the same position i was in before! So I regret that I'm just as vulnerable as ever I was back in legacy days to changes (both announced and unannounced) that can disturb the integrity of my customisation and cause a lot of rework. And I don't feel I'm making any customisation that is anything but extremely modest!
If this Image editor is going to stay, (please, no!), then I hope we can at least get the capability for a single image, to view all the text we might update on that one image all at once. Right now, having to do titles and captions, then save those, then do keywords, save those, then location data and then save those... Phew, it's all just so very cumbersome. Can those at least all be under one edit and save action when viewing a single image?!?!
I used to be able to go into organize, select keywords, view all the pictures and their keywords, and copy and paste from one to the other.
Now I have to type in the same keywords over and over again!
This is not progress.
I am afraid that I am with Dennis (and many others) on this one... my workflow is through LR and I use David's great plugin to publish here.
I publish to various social media sites as well and use them to drive traffic back to my site here (in the form of a URL). This info is entered via Caption Metadata and as it cannot be excluded when uploading here via the plugin, traditionally, once uploaded, I have gone into keywords and removed the URL link that was populated from the metadata. It was not ideal, but it could be removed fairly easily.
This is virtually impossible now, as the only way to see the title and caption information on an image, is on a shot by shot basis.
This is now what is needed if I want to see the title and caption info in a whole gallery:
Organise
Select All
Title And Caption
Unselect All
Select first image
Roll down Title And Caption on the right and make changes
Deselect image
Select next image
Roll down Title And Caption on the right again ... and so on.
Surely at least the Title And Caption option should remain open when selecting the second image.
The way it is at the moment (unless I am missing something) it is so time-consuming, it is useless.
As much as I hate the new keyword system, I'm trying to get used to it and see if I can get quicker at using it.
Just ran into a new issue... not really a bug, just a poor design. I have a bunch of photos in a gallery that I want to tag with the same keyword. Every time I try to quickly select them in the organizer (using a laptop with no mouse), I inadvertently drag one. This causes the gallery sort order to change to "sort manually" and deselects all the photos I've already selected.
In the old bulk caption/keyword tool, I could very quickly page down and make my selections with no fear of inadvertently dragging a photo and having to start over.
Dave
0
BaldyRegistered Users, Super ModeratorsPosts: 2,853moderator
How would you characterize your most prevalent customer type though?
Is that one of the reasons DGrin's community seems at odds with Smugmug now -- is your average customer the type who (perhaps) is using Smugmug AS their storage place, they upload here, they edit here -- not as display place for their archive or portfolio but as THE place?
Our most prominent customer type is not very technical. They describe themselves as artists and are increasingly women (reflecting the photography industry as a whole). Here on dgrin we are very technical and predominantly men.
In thinking why the ability to crop thumbnails had been dropped without discussion and what options i might have to deal with it, it had occurred to me that this might be a forerunner to the SmugMug style being discontinued altogether.
SmugMug style is still the most popular on SmugMug, so it's not going away.
The crop thumbnail tool was discontinued because it fell into disuse and caused confusion (what is a thumbnail, why doesn't it work for thumbnail style, etc.). We're bringing it back until we can build something better that lets you set a focal point and radius, or something similar, that our customers can understand.
...
The crop thumbnail tool was discontinued because it fell into disuse and caused confusion (what is a thumbnail, why doesn't it work for thumbnail style, etc.). We're bringing it back until we can build something better that lets you set a focal point and radius, or something similar, that our customers can understand.
Great, but what's a radius? All my crops are square and some very tiny.
SmugMug style is still the most popular on SmugMug, so it's not going away.
The crop thumbnail tool was discontinued because it fell into disuse and caused confusion (what is a thumbnail, why doesn't it work for thumbnail style, etc.). We're bringing it back until we can build something better that lets you set a focal point and radius, or something similar, that our customers can understand.
Some people may sit on here and complain about the New SM and how things are going ... but how many companies have a forum as active as this, in which the company's leader peruses the forums, listens to its customers, and responds appropriately??? I applaud you, Baldy, for taking the time to listen to those of us on here and take action.
We all have to remember the "Apple effect" -- companies develop their products for their most typical user, which tends to be the non-tech savvy users who just want something simple. We on the forums are the tech savvy minority. It's a balance between keeping the very technical users happy while also trying to put out a product that is easy for anyone to use. Clutter-free, simple is the trend ... which always upsets the technical people who want features loaded all over the place. Hopefully SM can find the right balance with their new tools.
Baldy: how much user testing goes on with the new features? Do you find a varied audience (non-tech and tech users) to play with the features before going live, or is it really only tested by SM staff?
I also removed nearly all CSS code i had on my previous design, because i'm tired to keep my site up to date with all the changes done by SmugMug. Some of them are nice...but i really don't want to check my own site every day just to see if SM has released a code update that might break my layout (happened last with the vertical scrollbar in the captions in lightbox-mode).
I'm with you on this one. It seems like every week I'm fixing my site and updating my customizations website. It's very frustrating. It would at least be nice if SM's release blog kept us informed but most of the time I stumble upon these changes randomly, or someone on DGrin points it out to me.
Ideally it would be nice if the New SM was actually as powerful as it was touted during its release. It was supposed to be "code-free" but I find I have just as much, if not more code vs. legacy. The WYSIWIG tools need to be refined and expanded, some of which seem like simple features:
- text editor for fonts, colors, sizes
- ability to turn features off by toggling a switch (captions, keywords, etc)
- ability to use more than 1 Google font
- ability to control menu borders, spacing
- better control of link attributes (hover, color, etc)
- better control of gallery styles (the release a few months back was a start but very limited)
- better color management (features aren't similar across sections ... i have a ton of CSS just to get all my colors to match from the caption text to the comment text to the body text, etc)
First off, Baldy is right. Before we call Moulder and Scully in, We are not getting rid of the SmugMug Gallery Style. We love it, and alot of employees still use it as their default.
I am working on a list of things that we are working on based on your feedback. I will get it to you tomorrow, cause I need to get to bed, as I got bit with a nasty food poisoning bug tonight
Some people may sit on here and complain about the New SM and how things are going ... but how many companies have a forum as active as this, in which the company's leader peruses the forums, listens to its customers, and responds appropriately??? I applaud you, Baldy, for taking the time to listen to those of us on here and take action.
We all have to remember the "Apple effect" -- companies develop their products for their most typical user, which tends to be the non-tech savvy users who just want something simple. We on the forums are the tech savvy minority. It's a balance between keeping the very technical users happy while also trying to put out a product that is easy for anyone to use. Clutter-free, simple is the trend ... which always upsets the technical people who want features loaded all over the place. Hopefully SM can find the right balance with their new tools.
Baldy: how much user testing goes on with the new features? Do you find a varied audience (non-tech and tech users) to play with the features before going live, or is it really only tested by SM staff?
Thank you, leftquark. Changes like these always torture me because it's so hard to know whether we've made a mistake, or we just moved someone's cheese and once they spend time with the new tools their minds will change, or we're angering a vocal minority for the greater good.
I worked for Steve Jobs for a few years back in the day and watched him go through the same torture with virtually every new launch or change. He famously couldn't work for a few days after many product launches because of the backlash.
As to the testing, it varies by product, but it's far more difficult and misleading than you can imagine. Most of our employees were customers of ours or a competitor before they joined, and almost all use SmugMug now. So they are generally building what they want to use, same process as Apple. For big changes like New SmugMug, we brought in a lot of people. I remember one guy who spent two hours with us, was so disgusted with new SmugMug, after the test he went to his extended family and told them to cancel their subscriptions and move to a new service. That was pretty devastating.
The hardest thing about the testing is we bring in people who have spent a lot of time with an older tool and mastered it. Now they're sitting in front of one with a new paradigm wondering what it all means. They will almost always favor the old tool or ask for the old features in the new tool. But what usually happens (unless we made a fundamental mistake with the paradigm), is some time later when they become familiar with the new tool, the old one falls into disuse.
Our current approach right now is to iron out the rough spots in the new tools first, then see if for people who've really tried the smoothed-out new tools, there are major holes and deal with them.
Allen points out one, which is replacing keywords across galleries. That's a hole. But that came with new SmugMug and the way the organizer works, not these new tools. So that's a separate issue.
I used to be able to go into organize, select keywords, view all the pictures and their keywords, and copy and paste from one to the other.
Now I have to type in the same keywords over and over again!
This is not progress.
I second that!
Surely SmugMug can retain the old caption/keyword bulk edit tool alongside the new Photo Editor.
The loss of the old bulk tool has had an enormous effect on my use of Smugmug.
BaldyRegistered Users, Super ModeratorsPosts: 2,853moderator
edited May 29, 2014
Hey, sorry, disclaimer: I haven't kept up on this thread since I last posted but we did talk to Denise and I do have some news.
I know many of you will disagree with much of this, but I'll tell you what we're thinking so you know.
We think there's a difference between bulk editing and batch editing, even though they sound the same. Bulk means, for example, being able to apply a keyword to a lot of photos at one time. Batch means being able to see a large selection at once and rifle through them. The new tool, once customers get used to it, seems far better for bulk, and the old tool was better for batch. We think 80% of what our customers do is bulk, and 20% is batch, but 20% is still a big number.
None of us will know for certain unless and until we have both tools side-by-side, instrumented, so we can collect data on the two.
So we're bringing back the batch editor but adding the ability to add title, and also cleaning it up so it's presentable. I know, we've read many times here that the functionality is all that really matters to you, and I believe you. It's just that you really are the 1% use case for the appearance of the tool. The 99% take one look at it and say GAH.
So how long will this take? Not sure because the engineers who will work on it are at a JavaScript conference today so we couldn't get an estimate, but we don't think it's a big job.
And Denise will have access to it during its QA cycle because she does QA for a living and knows the drill.
Some may worry, "what if you instrument it and find that very few people use it? Do we lose it again?" We'll cross that bridge when we come do it, if we ever do. From the sound of it, there is a compelling use case, which is there is no place to quickly view what captions, keywords and titles are applied to which photos, in batch.
Ok, we have taken all of your feedback and have been working on it behind scenes. Some of these are in the beginning stages, while others are already in test. Keep in mind that priorities and scope can change. Also keep in mind this isn't by any means a complete final list of issues we plan to address, but these are things that are actively being worked on.
Allow for bulk title editing
Add 'On X Selected' in the title/caption editor. This number will display how many photos are highlighted.
Rework the behavior that shows empty text boxes on Title and Caption when in bulk editing. Currently, the boxes appear empty, which may be confusing if you have titles or captions on some of the selected photos.
Improve the initial behavior when you click on a keyword to edit. This should make it easier to edit keywords. These changes include changing the color of the keyword, making it editable on first click, and placing the cursor at the end of the keyword selected.
Change the wording "On All Selected" to "On X Selected" on the bulk keyword edit. X represents the number of selected images
A slew of Keyboard shortcuts throughout the editor to eliminate unneeded mouse clicks.
Keep the user in the tool they were using when they click "Unselect All" as opposed to returning them to the main photo editor menu.
Make the locked area more obvious that it is, indeed locked.
Add and improve functionality in special galleries (Date, Keyword, etc)
I think you guys have completely missed one of the points. Titles, captions and keywords are all
connected and should be edited on the same page. Why should we have to run two tools on a gallery
to make changes? Some times it's very important to see/edit both the keyword and caption together.
A lot of the KW changes come out of the caption.
As for Title, personally, I see no functionality in it. Just use the first line of the caption. All it does is
push the caption/KW's farther below the fold. Does the Title provide some kind of functionality I'm not
aware of?
Comments
PS -- My daughter lives in Fremantle! I was able to visit last year and will go back next May. It is a shame most visitors only see the east side of your wonderful country.
"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits." (Einstein)
Fair enough, I'd be curious what sort of activities the most profitable users provide.
But I'd wager that they are the same. Even though pros pay what, $300 each, plus percentages? I bet the profit is all in the median user who pays $60 or so and doesn't use it much. But I don't know.
It would be very interesting, and either energize or squash some of the expectations people have.
Maybe thenickdude would also be able to save this function from annihilation by including it in his Chrome browser extension, which he is presently augmenting with a bulk image title/caption/keyword function as discussed over here.
Good point
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I just tried the new Editor a few minutes back and that was the first thing i was missing. I will not do a request... i will simply not use any gallery style anymore that will make this feature a required tool. That means: No more SmugMug gallery style... I also removed nearly all CSS code i had on my previous design, because i'm tired to keep my site up to date with all the changes done by SmugMug. Some of them are nice...but i really don't want to check my own site every day just to see if SM has released a code update that might break my layout (happened last with the vertical scrollbar in the captions in lightbox-mode).
Well... i'll give the keyword editor a try... hopefully it is usable.
P.S. Just tried to add keywords to multiple photos using ORGANIZE > EDIT > KEYWORDS. I selected "UNSELECT ALL" and selected the photos i wanted to add a keyword to. Then i clicked on "KEYWORDS" on the right panel. Instead of open the keywords-panel like it does when you open a single photo in the editor the panel moves to the left and completely disappears then. Time for another mail to the helpdesk.
Using FireFox 29...
The tool is completely useless unless adding the same in bulk to all.
Using Smugmug style much easier to just edit captions/keyword/title directly under photo.
My Website index | My Blog
I will not use SM-Style anymore since you cannot select the crop for the thumbs anymore. OK, i could do that just for editing. But i found another bug when you upload photos to a SM-gallery-style with SquareThumbs=On... those will get a square thumb which you cannot reset to original aspect ratio... looks funny now in the organizer. See screenshot (Mail to helpdesk is on its way...)
I'm off to an convention with lots of stars...i fear the day i will upload my photos to my site with all that borked bulk-edit-features and other bugs... i may tag my photos in my photo software in the future... much easier now.
New tool 4 clicks
We use to be able to open a keyword gallery and maintenance that keyword across all galleries. This was disabled.
Then found a work-around, using a smart gallery for maintenance of a keyword across all galleries.
Imagine all the clicks creating a smart gallery and setting it for a keyword for every keyword wanting to fix.
But it worked.
The new tool looks like you can edit/add/fix a single KW but it is only for a single gallery, not across the whole site.
So I guess you have to find every gallery it was used in and do one gallery at a time. Or again use a smart gallery
for this.
Bottom line, enable a keyword gallery to use the new tool (bulk). Now going from a keyword gallery to organizer opens
in top level not KW gallery. Selection under photo only does single photo.
My Website index | My Blog
thumbs. I guess I don't switch the gallery back to original aspect ratio so haven't noticed that.
But, I would think all the thumbs would be regenerated from original when selecting new aspect ratio.
That's a bug if it's not happening.
My Website index | My Blog
I switched the SquareThumbs to Off but the aspect ratio did not change. Anyway... i got a reply from the helpdesk:
So it should work... it just did not work on my last upload... hopefully it will work in the future.
I'm only three galleries behind so far individually cropping thumbs so I'll wait till they resolved this. Most
of my bird shots are not portrait full frame type so got'a crop small to see bird in thumb. My site's
designed to scan the thumbs for interesting photos to look at. I hate sites that make you look at every
photo. Why I hate slideshows.
My Website index | My Blog
I had also hoped, for exactly the same reasons as you, that I could clean out most or all my legacy CSS customisation when i migrated to New SmugMug. However as a lot of legacy functionality wasn't carried across, I have ended up back in much the same position i was in before! So I regret that I'm just as vulnerable as ever I was back in legacy days to changes (both announced and unannounced) that can disturb the integrity of my customisation and cause a lot of rework. And I don't feel I'm making any customisation that is anything but extremely modest!
Oh no! They'd better not do this. Almost all my galleries are Smugmug style.
"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits." (Einstein)
(FeaturePhotography.net)
I am afraid that I am with Dennis (and many others) on this one... my workflow is through LR and I use David's great plugin to publish here.
I publish to various social media sites as well and use them to drive traffic back to my site here (in the form of a URL). This info is entered via Caption Metadata and as it cannot be excluded when uploading here via the plugin, traditionally, once uploaded, I have gone into keywords and removed the URL link that was populated from the metadata. It was not ideal, but it could be removed fairly easily.
This is virtually impossible now, as the only way to see the title and caption information on an image, is on a shot by shot basis.
This is now what is needed if I want to see the title and caption info in a whole gallery:
Organise
Select All
Title And Caption
Unselect All
Select first image
Roll down Title And Caption on the right and make changes
Deselect image
Select next image
Roll down Title And Caption on the right again ... and so on.
Surely at least the Title And Caption option should remain open when selecting the second image.
The way it is at the moment (unless I am missing something) it is so time-consuming, it is useless.
Thanks for reading this
Clive
Just ran into a new issue... not really a bug, just a poor design. I have a bunch of photos in a gallery that I want to tag with the same keyword. Every time I try to quickly select them in the organizer (using a laptop with no mouse), I inadvertently drag one. This causes the gallery sort order to change to "sort manually" and deselects all the photos I've already selected.
In the old bulk caption/keyword tool, I could very quickly page down and make my selections with no fear of inadvertently dragging a photo and having to start over.
Dave
The crop thumbnail tool was discontinued because it fell into disuse and caused confusion (what is a thumbnail, why doesn't it work for thumbnail style, etc.). We're bringing it back until we can build something better that lets you set a focal point and radius, or something similar, that our customers can understand.
My Website index | My Blog
Some people may sit on here and complain about the New SM and how things are going ... but how many companies have a forum as active as this, in which the company's leader peruses the forums, listens to its customers, and responds appropriately??? I applaud you, Baldy, for taking the time to listen to those of us on here and take action.
We all have to remember the "Apple effect" -- companies develop their products for their most typical user, which tends to be the non-tech savvy users who just want something simple. We on the forums are the tech savvy minority. It's a balance between keeping the very technical users happy while also trying to put out a product that is easy for anyone to use. Clutter-free, simple is the trend ... which always upsets the technical people who want features loaded all over the place. Hopefully SM can find the right balance with their new tools.
Baldy: how much user testing goes on with the new features? Do you find a varied audience (non-tech and tech users) to play with the features before going live, or is it really only tested by SM staff?
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
Ideally it would be nice if the New SM was actually as powerful as it was touted during its release. It was supposed to be "code-free" but I find I have just as much, if not more code vs. legacy. The WYSIWIG tools need to be refined and expanded, some of which seem like simple features:
- text editor for fonts, colors, sizes
- ability to turn features off by toggling a switch (captions, keywords, etc)
- ability to use more than 1 Google font
- ability to control menu borders, spacing
- better control of link attributes (hover, color, etc)
- better control of gallery styles (the release a few months back was a start but very limited)
- better color management (features aren't similar across sections ... i have a ton of CSS just to get all my colors to match from the caption text to the comment text to the body text, etc)
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
First off, Baldy is right. Before we call Moulder and Scully in, We are not getting rid of the SmugMug Gallery Style. We love it, and alot of employees still use it as their default.
I am working on a list of things that we are working on based on your feedback. I will get it to you tomorrow, cause I need to get to bed, as I got bit with a nasty food poisoning bug tonight
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I worked for Steve Jobs for a few years back in the day and watched him go through the same torture with virtually every new launch or change. He famously couldn't work for a few days after many product launches because of the backlash.
As to the testing, it varies by product, but it's far more difficult and misleading than you can imagine. Most of our employees were customers of ours or a competitor before they joined, and almost all use SmugMug now. So they are generally building what they want to use, same process as Apple. For big changes like New SmugMug, we brought in a lot of people. I remember one guy who spent two hours with us, was so disgusted with new SmugMug, after the test he went to his extended family and told them to cancel their subscriptions and move to a new service. That was pretty devastating.
The hardest thing about the testing is we bring in people who have spent a lot of time with an older tool and mastered it. Now they're sitting in front of one with a new paradigm wondering what it all means. They will almost always favor the old tool or ask for the old features in the new tool. But what usually happens (unless we made a fundamental mistake with the paradigm), is some time later when they become familiar with the new tool, the old one falls into disuse.
Our current approach right now is to iron out the rough spots in the new tools first, then see if for people who've really tried the smoothed-out new tools, there are major holes and deal with them.
Allen points out one, which is replacing keywords across galleries. That's a hole. But that came with new SmugMug and the way the organizer works, not these new tools. So that's a separate issue.
Surely SmugMug can retain the old caption/keyword bulk edit tool alongside the new Photo Editor.
The loss of the old bulk tool has had an enormous effect on my use of Smugmug.
http://www.lyall-photos.net/
I know many of you will disagree with much of this, but I'll tell you what we're thinking so you know.
We think there's a difference between bulk editing and batch editing, even though they sound the same. Bulk means, for example, being able to apply a keyword to a lot of photos at one time. Batch means being able to see a large selection at once and rifle through them. The new tool, once customers get used to it, seems far better for bulk, and the old tool was better for batch. We think 80% of what our customers do is bulk, and 20% is batch, but 20% is still a big number.
None of us will know for certain unless and until we have both tools side-by-side, instrumented, so we can collect data on the two.
So we're bringing back the batch editor but adding the ability to add title, and also cleaning it up so it's presentable. I know, we've read many times here that the functionality is all that really matters to you, and I believe you. It's just that you really are the 1% use case for the appearance of the tool. The 99% take one look at it and say GAH.
So how long will this take? Not sure because the engineers who will work on it are at a JavaScript conference today so we couldn't get an estimate, but we don't think it's a big job.
And Denise will have access to it during its QA cycle because she does QA for a living and knows the drill.
Some may worry, "what if you instrument it and find that very few people use it? Do we lose it again?" We'll cross that bridge when we come do it, if we ever do. From the sound of it, there is a compelling use case, which is there is no place to quickly view what captions, keywords and titles are applied to which photos, in batch.
Ok, we have taken all of your feedback and have been working on it behind scenes. Some of these are in the beginning stages, while others are already in test. Keep in mind that priorities and scope can change. Also keep in mind this isn't by any means a complete final list of issues we plan to address, but these are things that are actively being worked on.
I will keep you updated as these progress.
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Thank you very much.
http://www.lyall-photos.net/
connected and should be edited on the same page. Why should we have to run two tools on a gallery
to make changes? Some times it's very important to see/edit both the keyword and caption together.
A lot of the KW changes come out of the caption.
As for Title, personally, I see no functionality in it. Just use the first line of the caption. All it does is
push the caption/KW's farther below the fold. Does the Title provide some kind of functionality I'm not
aware of?
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