Product Releases through October 12, 2016

leftquark

We'll be posting weekly release notes to our blog every Friday - so stay tuned to the blog for the most up-to-date notes. I'll continue posting here on a monthly basis.

We've been busy the last month and a half!

New Features:
- UPDATED: EZPrints updated the Photo Aprons: they're now 100% Cotton and have 2 pockets!
- UPDATED: The Coupons page received an overhaul and new interface. All the same features just a new look, and a few bug fixes as well.
- NEW: Introduced 4 new "System Galleries". These are Galleries that live in your sites root folder and cannot be deleted, but are visible to you from the Organizer. See more below.
- NEW: When selecting a Profile Photo, Profile Cover Photo, Printmark, or Watermark, you can now select a photo directly from your computer; it doesn't have to live on SmugMug first. Photos will be uploaded to one of the 4 new System Galleries. See more below.
- NEW: You can now sell phone cases with your photos on them!
- NEW: Google Translate Content Block, which will translate your site into any number of languages Google supports!
- UPDATED: Importing photos from Dropbox now uses a built-in SmugMug interface instead of Dropbox's interface. We'll display beautiful thumbnail's of the photos plus the filename (Dropbox only displayed the filename, which made it difficult to find photos).
- NEW: Smart Auto-Crop: For all new uploads we'll automatically determine a point of interest and use that to determine where to crop square thumbnails in Thumbnail Style Galleries. See more below.
- NEW: Something's in store for Smuggy on Halloween. On October 31, see if you can spot what's special!

Fixes:
- Pro Payment emails (from the Pro Payments tool) will now come from the SmugMug Heroes email address instead of the Countess of Cash. Our Heroes are faster at responding and we want to give you the best experience possible!
- Fixed an issue with Collected Photos not showing the individual download icon when Download Buttons is turned ON.
- Ensured HTML5 video player is used on Android devices.
- Cleaned up some of the HTML/CSS on Profile Photos and Profile Cover Photos
- The 404 pages on SmugMug.com got a little love. The 404 pages on your own sites remain the same.
- Fixed some issues with toggling Taxes ON or OFF in the Getting Paid section of Pro accounts.
- Fixed an issue loading Account Settings when using Chrome version 54.
- Embedded videos (from the share panel) are now served over HTTPS for extra security.

Inline Uploading and System Galleries:
When selecting a Profile Photo, Profile Cover Photo, Printmark, or Watermark, you can now select a photo directly from your computer; it doesn't have to live on SmugMug first. Previously if you went to set one of these photos and the photo wasn't already uploaded, you'd have to back out of the tool, go into the Organizer, navigate to a gallery, upload the photo, then go back into whatever tool you were in. No longer! You can do it right from within the tool.

When you click to select the photo, we'll pop up a new dialog box asking if you want to use a photo from your computer or one already on SmugMug. If you choose a new photo from your computer, we'll ask you to select the photo from your computer. If you choose a photo from SmugMug, we'll launch our Picker.


Photos will be uploaded to one of the 4 new System Galleries. These will be available in the Organizer and are considered "Unlisted" galleries that are visible to you and your visitors if you share the link (as of October 12, we have a small bug that's preventing them from being visible. We're working on a fix):
- Watermark Images
- Printmark Images
- Profile Images
- Cover Images

The System Galleries are created the first time you use the tool to upload a new photo. They cannot be deleted, although photos can be moved in and out of them via the Organizer.

Smart Auto-Crop:
Most cameras these days do some sort of Facial Recognition and store the faces in the metadata of the photo. Additionally, they also store which focus point was used. We'll now use this information to automatically "crop" photos around the subject of your photo! Additionally, if you've used Lightroom's Facial Recognition and embedded it within the photo, we'll also use that. No more heads getting chopped off!


Notice how the heads in the first 3 photos are no longer cut-off.

Currently this is only displayed on Thumbnail Style Galleries but we're working on adding it to all Content Blocks when 1:1 thumbnails are used. Additionally, we'll use this information when generating the Ti and Th thumbnail display sizes so that your SmugMug Style and Organizer thumbnails will take advantage as well.

This only applies to new photos uploaded after October 7th, 2016. At some point in the future we may go back and re-process all existing photos but that is not planned at this time.

Allen

Perhaps you all should stop these trivial updates and fix something important like the Camera Awesome app first.
You know, things people are actually using first.

leftquark

Allen wrote: »

Perhaps you all should stop these trivial updates and fix something important like the Camera Awesome app first.

There's a number of items on here that are pretty exciting, and I would have thought you specifically would have been excited about. For example, you've complained about how you can't set the cropping of Feature Images on Folders/Galleries and we just released a feature that automatically crops it for you. We're working on a number of other very exciting projects.

gricketts

Thanks
Thanks for the continuing tweaks, fixes, and improvements. Keep up the good work.

pilotdave

leftquark wrote: »

For example, you've complained about how you can't set the cropping of Feature Images on Folders/Galleries and we just released a feature that automatically crops it for you. We're working on a number of other very exciting projects.

Does this exist already? The release only talks about square thumbnails in thumbnail galleries. That's a start but I am waiting for it to work on feature photos in folder/gallery content blocks. All of mine use 3:1 crop ratios which limits the photos I can use. I'd love this auto crop feature to be used throughout smugmug.

Dave

leftquark

pilotdave wrote: »

Does this exist already? The release only talks about square thumbnails in thumbnail galleries. That's a start but I am waiting for it to work on feature photos in folder/gallery content blocks. All of mine use 3:1 crop ratios which limits the photos I can use. I'd love this auto crop feature to be used throughout smugmug.

Oops -- guess I let the cat out of the bag early Yes, it's on its way.

agallia

leftquark wrote: »

Oops -- guess I let the cat out of the bag early Yes, it's on its way.

I have long considered changes to my photo workflow, security of my photos, and where my photo 'home base' should be. With the continuing SM upgrades, tweaks new tools and ease of use, I have chose Smugmug as the center from which I work. Thanks for continuing to make SM #1.

HaraldE

agallia wrote: »

I have long considered changes to my photo workflow, security of my photos, and where my photo 'home base' should be. With the continuing SM upgrades, tweaks new tools and ease of use, I have chose Smugmug as the center from which I work. Thanks for continuing to make SM #1.

Morning, totally agree, Harald

leftquark

pilotdave wrote: »

Does this exist already? The release only talks about square thumbnails in thumbnail galleries. That's a start but I am waiting for it to work on feature photos in folder/gallery content blocks. All of mine use 3:1 crop ratios which limits the photos I can use. I'd love this auto crop feature to be used throughout smugmug.

Our second iteration just went live: Square Tiles on the following Content Blocks will now take advantage of Smart Auto-Crop. We'll be implementing this in non-square tiles in the future.

- Folder Content Block
- Galleries Content Block
- Pages Content Block
- Folders, Galleries, and Pages Content Block
- Single Photo Content Block
- Multiple-Photos Content Block

leftquark

Our third improvement to Smart Auto-Cropping just went live! Smart Auto-Cropping now works for all non-square aspect ratios.

Any photo uploaded after October 7 that has certain information embedded in it (like facial recognition, focus point information from certain manufacturers, People data from Lightroom, etc) will now automatically center around the point of interest in the photo!

pilotdave

leftquark wrote: »

Our third improvement to Smart Auto-Cropping just went live! Smart Auto-Cropping now works for all non-square aspect ratios.

Any photo uploaded after October 7 that has certain information embedded in it (like facial recognition, focus point information from certain manufacturers, People data from Lightroom, etc) will now automatically center around the point of interest in the photo!

Having trouble seeing this in action on my site. Any more info you can provide? I tested it with a known focus point and lightroom facial recognition and can't get it to auto-crop the featured photo in a galleries content block or the square thumbnails in the gallery.

I'm using lightroom, and have tried exporting and using the regular smugmug uploader and uploading directly from the lightroom plugin. In the lightroom plugin settings, i have include all metadata selected and remove person info unchecked.

Dave

leftquark

Dave, can you send me a link to the photo so I can dig in? I know we support Focus Points from Sony and Canon but do not support Nikon (since their metadata is unfortunately lacking in that area) but the LR facial recognition should work.

pilotdave

leftquark wrote: »

Dave, can you send me a link to the photo so I can dig in? I know we support Focus Points from Sony and Canon but do not support Nikon (since their metadata is unfortunately lacking in that area) but the LR facial recognition should work.

Here's an example I tested:

https://photos.smugmug.com/Skydiving/2016/11-12-16-CPI/i-FFXHGLC/0/XL/2016-11-12_skydive_cpi_0078-XL.jpg

My cameras are Sony and Canon, so that shouldn't be the problem.

Dave

leftquark

pilotdave wrote: »

Here's an example I tested:

https://photos.smugmug.com/Skydiving/2016/11-12-16-CPI/i-FFXHGLC/0/XL/2016-11-12_skydive_cpi_0078-XL.jpg

My cameras are Sony and Canon, so that shouldn't be the problem.

Digging in, no Point of Interest was detected and as far as I can tell:
- Lightroom strips the camera's focus point information before it uploads the JPG, so we couldn't use the camera's focus point
- No Facial recognition from Lightroom was embedded in the photo's metadata. Not sure why it didn't include it.

Can you verify in Lightroom that faces were detected and identified?

leftquark

pilotdave wrote: »

Here's an example I tested:

https://photos.smugmug.com/Skydiving/2016/11-12-16-CPI/i-FFXHGLC/0/XL/2016-11-12_skydive_cpi_0078-XL.jpg

My cameras are Sony and Canon, so that shouldn't be the problem.

I took your photo and imported it into Lightroom. I then clicked on the "Faces" button and identified it with "person1" and "person2", then exported it as a JPG (made sure "Remove Person Info" was UNchecked). I then uploaded it to SmugMug and the point of interest / faces were properly detected.

It appears either your lightroom hasn't detected the faces, or for some reason, it didn't embed the person information with the photo.

pilotdave

leftquark wrote: »

I took your photo and imported it into Lightroom. I then clicked on the "Faces" button and identified it with "person1" and "person2", then exported it as a JPG (made sure "Remove Person Info" was UNchecked). I then uploaded it to SmugMug and the point of interest / faces were properly detected.

It appears either your lightroom hasn't detected the faces, or for some reason, it didn't embed the person information with the photo.

I was wondering if maybe face detection didn't get updated when republishing a photo, so I tried tagging a face in another similar photo and uploading it afterward. When I set it to the gallery featured image, it's still cropped right down the middle. I'm using the latest version of Lightroom 6 (non CC). Any idea if there's another setting in Lightroom that might be screwing it up? Also, what tool are you using to look for focus points and face detection in the metadata?

Thanks!

Dave

pilotdave

I think I may have figured it out. I turned off "Automatically write changes into XMP" in the catalog settings and did another test with face detection. Seemed to work.

Dave

leftquark

pilotdave wrote: »

I was wondering if maybe face detection didn't get updated when republishing a photo, so I tried tagging a face in another similar photo and uploading it afterward. When I set it to the gallery featured image, it's still cropped right down the middle. I'm using the latest version of Lightroom 6 (non CC). Any idea if there's another setting in Lightroom that might be screwing it up? Also, what tool are you using to look for focus points and face detection in the metadata?

This is another case of being foiled by the silly "Replacing an image does not update the image's metadata". Since Face detection comes with the metadata and we're ignoring the metadata during the replace, we don't grab the face detection. Once again, we'd love to change things so that we'll update the metadata during replace, but we have a few things holding it up (I'm working on getting those blockers torn down).

We use "EXIFTool" to view Image's Metadata.

David_S85

Aaron, does the (ancient) Crop Thumbnail tool override the automatic thumbnail cropping?

leftquark

David_S85 wrote: »

Aaron, does the (ancient) Crop Thumbnail tool override the automatic thumbnail cropping?

Yes and no. The "Crop Thumbnail" tool impacts our Ti and Th sized images (which are used in 2 places: 1) SmugMug style thumbnails, 2) The "Picker", when we ask you to pick photos ... it used to be used in the Organizer, but we've moved those over to use Small's). So if you use "Crop Thumbnail" to alter the cropping, you'll only impact the Ti and Th's. The automatic cropping on Thumbnail style and on the Content Blocks uses the larger display sizes and is not impacted by Crop Thumbnail.

When you upload a new photo that has the appropriate metadata, we do use that to help generate the Ti and Th sized images, so they are initially automatically generated using the smart cropping. You can still override them as described above.

David_S85

Cool! Thanks, Aaron.

Allen

leftquark wrote: »

There's a number of items on here that are pretty exciting, and I would have thought you specifically would have been excited about. For example, you've complained about how you can't set the cropping of Feature Images on Folders/Galleries and we just released a feature that automatically crops it for you. We're working on a number of other very exciting projects.

Haha so it's your way for the crop and we have no choice. Perhaps there is more then one subject in
the photo and one has to be picked as they won't both fit. Also I usually use some zoom when cropping
which "your auto way" wouldn't have a clue.

Why not have the option to cycle the feature photo thru the WM crop tool? Can't get that coded in? It
would make it a lot simpler for everyone.

leftquark

@Allen said:

Perhaps there is more then one subject in the photo and one has to be picked as they won't both fit. Also I usually use some zoom when cropping which "your auto way" wouldn't have a clue.

The automatic cropping creates a point of interest based around all of the subjects in the photo, so it should take multiple people into account.

@Allen said:

Haha so it's your way for the crop and we have no choice. Why not have the option to cycle the feature photo thru the WM crop tool? Can't get that coded in? It would make it a lot simpler for everyone.

As we continue to move away from Ti and Th sizes, the "Crop Thumbnail" tool will no longer provide any benefit. My plan is to replace that tool with a new tool, which would set the Point of Interest, and would let you manually set the cropping (including "zoom" level).