New: Gallery Downloads for Visitors

leftquark

We’re excited to announce that we’ve added Gallery Downloads for your viewers. You’ll now be able to give friends, family, or clients the power to quickly and easily download an entire gallery of full-quality photos themselves.

No more need to send a disc or thumbdrive, or request the gallery download yourself and then forward the link.



Simply set this up in the gallery settings and remove yourself as the middleman in your digital-file deliveries.

You’re in control of whether or not this feature is available within a gallery, as well as who can use it—you can even set a password for the download process if you wish.


Downloading can also be password restricted: the user won't be able to download the gallery unless they enter the proper password. A password does not need to be set but you can change it whenever you want.

This release changes a few behaviors:
- In the past, setting Maximum Display size to "Original" would turn downloading on. This has changed. You can now set downloading independently from display size.
- For galleries with Max Display Size set to Original, downloading will be turned on.
- For new galleries, Basic/Power accounts will have download buttons set to ON by default. For Portfolio/Business accounts, download buttons will be set to OFF by default.
- Download passwords cannot be saved in Quick Settings, for security purposes.
- Your gallery needs to have more than 3 photos in it for the Download button to appear.
- Users will be asked for their email address so we can email them a link to the zip file once it's generated. Large galleries can take some time to generate and this will let them browse while they wait.
- Passwords are not stored in plaintext for your security. Make sure to remember gallery passwords if you set a download password.

For more information, see the Help Pages.

Ferguson

What happens to the emails collected?

leftquark wrote: »

- Users will be asked for their email address so we can email them a link to the zip file once it's generated. Large galleries can take some time to generate and this will let them browse while they wait. .

This is terrific. Tried it and it worked great.

I understand the need for a delay to get the zip, and thus the email.

Can you confirm that the emails will not be retained and used by Smugmug except for that one event?

I ask, because I know people will ask me.

The email sent refers to the privacy statement which much/most of it applies to those with accounts. It hasn't been updated in a while. In a quick look it SEEMS under the "use of information" you may then use this for advertisements. Which would be, I think, impolite if you did. I do not suggest you would, but a clear statement of what you will or won't do with these non-account emails would be helpful.

I hasten to add that over many years now Smugmug has given no sign of abusing such information. I use a specific email just for smugmug registration, and so would know if it was leaked or spammed or otherwise abused. So I do not mean this question to imply any nefarious intent.

But the question will come up.

leftquark

Ferguson wrote: »

Can you confirm that the emails will not be retained and used by Smugmug except for that one event?

We'll only use the email address to verify the request is a valid person (and email them the zip file), and if so, not require them to enter an email address every time they want to download a gallery.

markderry

THANKYOU Smugmug!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You are awesome!!!!!!!

Su2z

I love it

ande8150

Glad to see this. Long overdue, but happy it's here.

agallia

Kudos!!!!

MomaZunk

Will I know who has requested a download, and how many times it has been downloaded?

When I create a download link in the past, I do not know how many times, or how many people have downloaded the images.

Will this change help in that regard? or does this just generate a download link that I will not see at all?

Sheaf

MomaZunk wrote: »

Will I know who has requested a download, and how many times it has been downloaded?

When I create a download link in the past, I do not know how many times, or how many people have downloaded the images.

Will this change help in that regard? or does this just generate a download link that I will not see at all?

Right now, it just generates the download link for them. We discussed this request at length (and quite a few others), but ultimately decided to focus on the core functionality of quickly and easily sharing the photos. I hope we can add this in a future version.

Thanks for the feedback!

Jtring

Nice feature, but there are some execution problems.

When I look at my galleries, which use collage landscape and the Spartan theme, I find the combination of the SLIDESHOW, DOWNLOAD ALL, and BUY PHOTOS buttons ends up covering part of the gallery description. See the attached image, which shows the upper right corner of a dump from an exemplary gallery. This particular image was taken in preview mode after removing my custom CSS -- I wanted to make sure it wasn't the culprit -- but I get similar results with my custom modifications turned on and outside of preview mode. The image comes from Firefox 38 in Windows 7. I see the same thing using Chrome 43. I haven't checked other browsers.

While this is ugly when I'm logged in, at the moment users who are not logged in don't see the problem on my site since I have the shopping cart turned off. If I ever decide to turn the shopping cart on -- not an unreasonable thing to do -- they too will see the same overlap problem.

So, a request to Smugmug: Please fix the design so the new button doesn't interfere with existing display items. And maybe review why QC didn't spot this before it was rolled out.

Thx.

--

leftquark

Jtring wrote: »

When I look at my galleries, which use collage landscape and the Spartan theme, I find the combination of the SLIDESHOW, DOWNLOAD ALL, and BUY PHOTOS buttons ends up covering part of the gallery description. See the attached image, which shows the upper right corner of a dump from an exemplary gallery.

We're working on a fix for this and I'll let you know when its been pushed live.

Daniele

The introduction of download all button is very useful for my clients but the process did not like at all.
My client is annoyed and he called me right away.
The contacts with my client I want them to have just me.

Thanks

Daniele
www.danielecavadini.it

NY2LA

This new feature reminds me of what happens when Metro opens a new rail system. A minority of people suffer the consequences of an underutilized bus service they depend on being canceled. As a result of this new feature, I have requested a new feature here:

Bring Back Download Feature For Individual Images By Itself
http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=2004679

leftquark

leftquark wrote: »

We're working on a fix for this and I'll let you know when its been pushed live.

I wish we had a better answer, or rather a solution, however our design team is still determining the best way to fix this issue. I'll try to update you all when I know more.