Photos Not Coming Up Under My Domain

EverythingEverywhere · October 21, 2016

I've been a Smugmug customer for years, and for years when I wanted to get the URL for an image I would right click and I would get a URL with my custom domain.

Now, however, when I right click to get the URL, every photo is returning me a URL starting with photos.smugmug.com

I really want my images to use my custom domain, which is what I set it up for. What happened? Is there a setting I need to change?

Hikin' Mike · October 21, 2016

Might want to read this: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=257829

EverythingEverywhere · October 25, 2016

If I understand the other thread correctly.....this sucks.

I've been a Smugmug customer for years, and this is the first time I'd actually consider leaving Smugmug for a different service.

The custom domain was a huge selling point for me and one of the things I always used to promote Smugmug to other bloggers.

This is not good.

leftquark · October 26, 2016

EverythingEverywhere wrote: »

If I understand the other thread correctly.....this sucks.

The custom domain was a huge selling point for me and one of the things I always used to promote Smugmug to other bloggers.

I know one of our Account Managers has already reached out to you but I also wanted to chime in here, since this is a public forum and others might be able to take advantage of the response/discussion...

We haven't gotten rid of your custom domains -- all links on your site still use your custom domain and your visitors will always see your custom domain when browsing your site. The best way to share your photos is to link to the lightbox view where the photo is displayed as large as you allow while remaining in the context of your site. By sharing this URL your visitors can browse other photos, purchase prints, contact you, etc. You can obtain this URL by clicking on the photo to open it in lightbox and copying the address from the address bar, or by copying the "Photo Link" from the "Share" panel.

Sharing the direct link to the photo (by right clicking on it and selecting "Copy Image URL" or choosing an embed size from the Share Panel) allows viewers to download the photo and doesn't load the photo in the context of your site, and they can't browse other photos, purchase prints, or get in touch with you.

Is there a reason you're choosing the direct photo links instead of the lightbox links?

We always want to make sure your photos are served as fast and as reliably as possible to you and your visitors and some changes were made that had the unfortunate side effect of requiring us to serve all photos from https://photos.smugmug.com. We'd love to go back to serving photos from your custom domains as soon as we can.

(P.S: If the discussion gets broader with a wider audience, I'll probably merge this with the other thread so we can have 1 place to discuss this topic!)

Allen · October 26, 2016

leftquark wrote: »

...
We always want to make sure your photos are served as fast and as reliably as possible to you and your visitors ...

No one has given us any indication of this speed increase. Is it in nano, micro, or whole seconds?

Most know that you can shorten the URL and see the site, otherwise the photo is posted anonymous.
Without the domain they don't have a clue whose site it is. With photos plastered all over the internet I
would assume this would be very important.

leftquark · October 26, 2016

Allen wrote: »

No one has given us any indication of this speed increase. Is it in nano, micro, or whole seconds?

It's very difficult to quantify in numbers because it depends on a number of things: # of photos loading on the page, location, internet connection, etc. On a page with a large # of photos, it'd be fairly significant because each image is delivered slightly faster. In locations, like Florida, where we had noticeably slow delivery, they should see a huge increase.

EverythingEverywhere · October 26, 2016

The best way to share your photos is to link to the lightbox view where the photo is displayed as large as you allow while remaining in the context of your site.

No, that's your opinion of the "best" way to link photos. It is more time consuming for me to do that. Why would I take more time and use more steps to get the exact same result?

I use exact sizes for the images I post on my WordPress site. The images I use as 1200px wide. Not 1024, not 1280. That means I'm not using the set list of sizes given to me, but rather I'm putting in an exact size in the URL of the image. If I wanted to use a list of predetermined sizes that were not on my domain, I'd just use Flickr, which is what I was using before I moved to Smugmug.

Also, right clicking to get the URL is much faster than using the lightbox, and then clicking to get a size I'll have to edit anyhow. Even if I used the lightbox, I'm still getting an image which has the smugmug.com domain.

If you really wanted to make my life simple, you'd have long ago created a WordPress plugin. You should notice that almost every single person who has been complaining about this has their own website and they embed their images primarily on their own site. We want to have consistency with our websites and the images used on our websites.

What really bugs me about this is the fact that:

1) No one told us about this change. It was done hoping that no one would notice.

2) We are being fed a line about this being for our own good, with out really trying to understand our business or how we use Smugmug.

There seems to be a lot of assumptions on the part of Smugmug of how we use the serivce, or how we should use the service, which are wrong for a significant number of users.

leftquark · October 26, 2016

First I want to address your 2 points of concern:
1) We didn't do this hoping nobody would notice. As the Head of Product I've spent a lot of time thinking about how we can get better at announcing changes within the product. We're not that great at it right now and we have a number of things in work to get better at it (like posting weekly Release Notes on our blog). I did my best to discuss the changes here on dgrin, though I realize the entire SmugMug community isn't checking dgrin religiously. What I'm trying to say here is that it wasn't something we tried to slip under the rug and hope nobody noticed. We're here to serve you all and build you a great product that you'll love and sneaking one over you isn't in our DNA.

2) The reason why SmugMug's Director of Product also runs DGrin is so that we can discuss these kinds of things for you. I'm here so I can understand how you use SmugMug and how you run your business. Please remember that everyone runs their business or uses SmugMug differently and we try to build SmugMug so that it meets the needs of the majority. My involvement in this thread, for example, is so that I can better understand your use cases. Additionally, my goal was not to feed excuses to you; there's both benefits from using the https://photos.smugmug.com paths and negatives and I've just been trying to explain the benefits.

I've visited your blog and your site and I now have a better understanding of how you're using your SmugMug photos: you're both embedding them on your WordPress site and offering them for download from there.

For the embedding of photos on your site, we have a feature that works with WordPress called oEmbed, where you can take the URL from your address bar and paste it straight into WordPress, which will then automatically convert it into an embedded image. This is a great feature for 99% of our WordPress customers, though I realize for you that it wouldn't get you the 1200px exact images that you're looking for. In that case, your workflow of getting the image URL and then converting it to a custom size is the correct way to do it. If you had enabled "Right Click Message" (as most SM customers do) then you'd have to go through the Share Panel to get the image URL's.

If you were just embedding your photos on your WordPress site then how we're currently doing things is a common practice and your visitors would never see the non-custom domain addresses. Look at many of the top websites and their photos are embedded using direct links to their CDN, without their custom domain in it (here's an example from moz.com, where all their images are embedded via their CDN). Amazon does this. Even our competitors like SquareSpace , PixieSet and most of our other competitors do this as well; they're all serving from their CDN and not from the custom domains.

The biggest issue that I see for you is in your downloadable links to the various image sizes. Those do display to the visitor when they hover over the link and I can understand your concern here. That doesn't look great when you're trying to have a consistent site.

We have a change that we've put into QA that would let you convert the https://photos.smugmug.com links into your custom domain links. It would bypass our CDN, so photos delivery might be slightly slower and less reliable, but would get you the look and feel you're looking for. There's a few things we need to double check before giving it the go-ahead and I'll be sure to let you know if and when it goes live.

Once that's live, we can also figure out how to update the Share Panel to use custom domain URL's. Would it help you if the share panel could also generate custom size links for you?

leftquark · October 26, 2016

For what it's worth, I also see that you're uploading multiple copies of the same photo at various resolutions. Did you know that SmugMug can generate those different resolutions for you, and you'd just need to upload the photo once, and then manipulate the URL? For example, using the 1920x1200 photo, this URL will regnerate it as a 960x600: https://photos.smugmug.com/Other/Wallpapers/n-VkMfM/i-kVzjtg6/0/960x600/i-kVzjtg6.jpg.

https://photos.smugmug.com/Other/Wallpapers/n-VkMfM/i-kVzjtg6/0/[COLOR="Red"][B]960x600[/B][/COLOR]/i-kVzjtg6.jpg

EverythingEverywhere · October 26, 2016

The only images I upload different sizes of are for my monthly desktop wallpapers, and I have to do those at different sizes because they are different resolutions. The logo and calendar placement is different for each size. I am aware of how you can change resolution in Smugmug, but I don't like that solution. I'd prefer to crop to get the proper resolution.

I only put a wallpaper once a month and they constitute less than 1% of my images of Smugmug. Wallpapers are less than 1% of the pages on my website. You are only looking at recent posts, not older posts and recent pages which don't appear on the front page of my site.

For everything else, I just upload 1 copy via Lightroom.

============================

As for SquareSpace, that is why I don't use them and why I've been using Smugmug. Pointing to competitors who don't offer the very thing which was a selling point for your company really isn't a great argument.

======================

I think there is confusion when people are talking about SEO.

Personally, I can care less about Google image search. Most people who view image search results don't even go to the page, and then they don't really convert. As I stated above, if I only cared about people finding my photos on image search, I'd put them on Flickr (and many people search for images directly on Flickr.)

What I care about is the SEO for my website.

I realize that many sites might take their images directly from their CDN, but it is a best practice to have an image come from the same domain as the site it appears on. (You also want to have the keywords for the page appear in the image URL if possible, not just the alt text. For example, I'm using a 301 redirect for this image http://everything-everywhere.com/territories-of-the-united-states.jpg just to get the proper text in the URL. Making that change actually made a big impact in where I rank and brought me up several spots in the search results.)

Does using a 301 redirect mean a slight decrease in speed? Probably. But it isn't noticeable, and the SEO benefits of being able to have my own domain and using keywords in the URL vastly outweigh any performance hit. I've seen it first hand many many times on different pages.

Ideally, here is what I'm looking for:

1) To have all my images on the same domain name as my website (which has been the case since I moved to Smugmug).

2) To be able to provide custom names for images (which Smugmug has never been able to do). Example: http://domain.com/custom-keyword.jpg This is can actually do on my end, but it isn't an optimal solution.

leftquark · October 27, 2016

EverythingEverywhere wrote: »

What I care about is the SEO for my website.

I realize that many sites might take their images directly from their CDN, but it is a best practice to have an image come from the same domain as the site it appears on.

When you say "it is a best practice", do you mean SEO wise or branding wise? I concur that branding wise, it's best if the image come from your custom domain, but SEO wise it's better to have it come from a domain with a higher page rank. There's a reason why some of the experts in SEO training (like Moz.com) use image links that come from their CDN.

The Domain Authority for everything-everywhere.com is 58.
The Domain Authority for smugmug.com is 84.

Your own domain, everything-everywhere.com gets a Domain Authority boost any time the search engines see links between your domain and a domain with higher authority. The more links between the SmugMug domain and your domain, the stronger your domain becomes.

In terms of https, Google has previous announced that sites using https will get a (very small) ranking boost. SEO is somewhat of a black box so we don't know how much it impacts, but since they do give a boost, and that boost might grow in the future, we'd love to serve everything with SSL.

You are also correct with regards to filenames. I'll poke the Engineering team and see if there's anything we can do to get original filenames into the URL. I will mention the current structure of using the image key came about because customers complained that if they moved a photo to a different gallery (or moved the gallery to a different folder), the URL's broke. By using the image key we can automatically redirect to the new location. Perhaps, though, there's a middle-ground solution where we can still redirect while also including the filename in the URL.

We have a fix that will allow your images to use your custom domain (or at least not redirect if you provide a link using your custom domain) but first it will get some pounding by our QA team. We'll probably still serve the photos from https://photos.smugmug.com going forward, but I think we could update the Share Panel to always provide Custom Domain URL's (or have a setting to convert the URL's for you).

Hikin' Mike · October 27, 2016

leftquark wrote: »

When you say "it is a best practice", do you mean SEO wise or branding wise? I concur that branding wise, it's best if the image come from your custom domain, but SEO wise it's better to have it come from a domain with a higher page rank. There's a reason why some of the experts in SEO training (like Moz.com) use image links that come from their CDN.

The Domain Authority for everything-everywhere.com is 58.
The Domain Authority for smugmug.com is 84.

Your own domain, everything-everywhere.com gets a Domain Authority boost any time the search engines see links between your domain and a domain with higher authority. The more links between the SmugMug domain and your domain, the stronger your domain becomes.

In terms of https, Google has previous announced that sites using https will get a (very small) ranking boost. SEO is somewhat of a black box so we don't know how much it impacts, but since they do give a boost, and that boost might grow in the future, we'd love to serve everything with SSL.

You are also correct with regards to filenames. I'll poke the Engineering team and see if there's anything we can do to get original filenames into the URL. I will mention the current structure of using the image key came about because customers complained that if they moved a photo to a different gallery (or moved the gallery to a different folder), the URL's broke. By using the image key we can automatically redirect to the new location. Perhaps, though, there's a middle-ground solution where we can still redirect while also including the filename in the URL.

We have a fix that will allow your images to use your custom domain (or at least not redirect if you provide a link using your custom domain) but first it will get some pounding by our QA team. We'll probably still serve the photos from https://photos.smugmug.com going forward, but I think we could update the Share Panel to always provide Custom Domain URL's (or have a setting to convert the URL's for you).

Keep in mind that Domain Authority (DA) is a metric from Moz and not Google. Those numbers are pretty much useless.

leftquark · October 27, 2016

Hikin' Mike wrote: »

Keep in mind that Domain Authority (DA) is a metric from Moz and not Google. Those numbers are pretty much useless.

While you are correct that they're a Moz metric, they're far from useless. They're a very strong indicator of how google and other search engines place importance on your domain when determining its ranking. It's a great indication of how strong your site is, how strong other sites are, and how your SEO will be impacted by links from those sites. If you're trying to build SEO rank on your own domain, it's quite useful to know which links are helping and which sites you can try to get links from in order to boost your own domain rank.

EverythingEverywhere · October 28, 2016

1) Putting my photos under smugmug.com isn't linking to my website, so this whole point is moot.

2) I'd have to abandon custom domains totally if I wanted that link benefit. I already have links from the Smugmug domain as I've been featured on their blog. Also, again, this is an argument for Flickr (DA 92) or Google Photos, not Smugmug.

3) There are diminishing returns to links. If I were to use the Smugmug domain on everything and put a link on every page on every page with my 30,000+ photos, it wouldn't be 30,000x better than a single link.

4) See my above comments about Smugmug telling us what is good for us.

SamirD · October 30, 2016

leftquark wrote: »

We have a change that we've put into QA that would let you convert the https://photos.smugmug.com links into your custom domain links. It would bypass our CDN, so photos delivery might be slightly slower and less reliable, but would get you the look and feel you're looking for. There's a few things we need to double check before giving it the go-ahead and I'll be sure to let you know if and when it goes live.

This is a solution for my use case.

Thank you for making it possible.

Ferguson · November 8, 2016

SamirD wrote: »

This is a solution for my use case. Thank you for making it possible.

Yes, thank you. I was also a proponent of this, though I am losing a bit of interest due to:

Bear in mind with encryption rapidly becoming required for many sites, this is not going to solve your problem if your site needs HTTPS. And trust me, we are getting to a world where HTTPS will be important from anything from browser warnings to SEO.

While I think they want to, my impression is there are no near term plans to permit custom domains to use HTTP here. Again, due to their CDN. I predict that will be the big SEO/branding issue for Smugmug within a year or two.

Photos Not Coming Up Under My Domain

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