Smart Rules not working correctly

David_S85

Been playing around with the Smart Rules in a new gallery and there just isn't a way to generate most recent images without inadvertently including hidden and passworded gallery photos. I'd call that a bug. The toggle for "Include my unlisted/password protected galleries: YES / NO" instead reverses the order of the photos from oldest shots to newest shots and does not do what it says it should do. That's yet another bug with that tool.

To me it looks like Smugmug left the old Smart Rules tool intact and allowed access to it in New Smugmug without looking into what it actually now does.

What I'm trying to do is this:

Create a gallery (in my New Smugmug) that is just for x# of the most recently uploaded photos that does not include those from unlisted or passworded galleries. That way I can remove the normally Smugmug created Recent Photos from my main page and instead make a menu'ed item in the navigation that would point to that gallery, thus cleaning up the main landing page.

Thread that includes more detail about it here that Aaron tried to help me and fungtyc with.

An unfortunate byproduct of that not-too-well-working Most Recent Photos gallery using the smart rules (in New Smugmug) is that it now forces previously unlisted photos onto the front page of my old Smugmug's Recent area on the front page that the public can now see.

EDIT: Found a way to do what I want not using the smart rules tool, so sort of solved for me now.

W.W. Webster

I also discovered a number of bugs, particularly involving the include/exclude and public/private gallery rules and combinations and permutations of such, but I managed to work my way around them for the specific galleries I needed to set up.

I'd love to use smart galleries more extensively but I just couldn't be bothered getting into the inevitable push and shove required to specify and argue with the Heroes about whether these were really bugs or design features. They won't know but are obviously dissuaded from asking the engineers. Then Baldy will say it's only a problem for a minority of users who make a noise here, not for the vast majority of users, and will insist he be provided with use cases. Then, if bugs are acknowledged, God alone knows how long it will take for anything to be done about it - it goes on and on. I've been there and is very soul-destroying. But if you've got the energy, all strength to your arm, I wish you the best of luck!

Allen

David_S85 wrote: »

...does not include those from unlisted or passworded galleries. ....

This is the way it should work. Assuming the toggle for "Include my unlisted/password protected galleries is set to NO.
You, logged in, will see photos from unlisted or passworded galleries but visitors will not. Also the
password will be remember for some time so even logged out photos will show for PW'd galleries that you
entered PW for. You'll have to delete Smug cookies to remove this.

David_S85

Allen wrote: »

This is the way it should work. Assuming the toggle for "Include my unlisted/password protected galleries is set to NO.
You, logged in, will see photos from unlisted or passworded galleries but visitors will not. Also the
password will be remember for some time so even logged out photos will show for PW'd galleries that you
entered PW for. You'll have to delete Smug cookies to remove this.

Allen, that same gallery, when logged out, still showed unlisted photos.

Allen

David_S85 wrote: »

Allen, that same gallery, when logged out, still showed unlisted photos.

A long shot but they might be in your browser cache.

David_S85

There's another thread on this here. The short story is I just used the Recent Photos selection from a multiple photos block in a separate gallery and constrained it a bit. That automatically just displays the listed photos, and all of them to just me when logged in. Smart Rules can't do that. It should, but it can't.

SmugSam

David_S85 wrote: »

There's another thread on this here. The short story is I just used the Recent Photos selection from a multiple photos block in a separate gallery and constrained it a bit. That automatically just displays the listed photos, and all of them to just me when logged in. Smart Rules can't do that. It should, but it can't.

I was having a similar issue - I changed the toggle for showing Hidden/Unlisted galleries from Yes to No, but the photos were still showing. Then I realised the photos in question, I actually hadn't set to be Unlisted. Ahem... So I did that, then went back and had a look. They were still showing when they should have been hidden. I went into the smart rules, did a 'refresh' then saved the rules, and suddenly it was working.

I did notice when I moved some other smart galleries around, they stopped returning ANY photos. Again, I went in, refreshed the view (I didn't change any rules, just refreshed) and the photos showed up again.

So - the hidden/private galleries trigger seems to be working for me, for now, but there does seem to be some bugginess to the Smart Gallery functionality.