@Ferguson said:
I actually find it rather insulting (I do not care if true) to your customers that you just assume people who had something coded with a default had no clue what the default meant, and you are doing this "for their own benefit". Telling someone "You are not smart enough or attentive enough so we are taking over control" is generally only well received when pulling a rip cord just before the ground, not in business.
There's a big leap to go from "not knowing" to "too stupid" and one that I certainly didn't make. When a family members calls and asks a question on how to use their computer, they're not asking because they're "not smart enough" to understand, they're asking because they're looking to be educated. Not all of our customers are as technically knowledgeable as those of you here on DGrin -- you are a smaller group of very intelligent, knowledgable customers that have skills beyond the vast majority of our other very intelligent but less computer knowledgable customers. We also have a great team of Product Managers, Designers, UI Experts and Engineers that put a lot of thought into these decisions. We test various wording, phrasing, and options with a broad range of our customer base and settle on the items that are comfortable to the majority of our customers.
Maybe I went to far in the description, but I really believe you (and Microsoft and many others who come before you) do a disservice to your customers when you assume they are not capable of understanding the more complete answer, and dumb it down. Try to make it something they can understand, whether that is horizontal and vertical resolution or megapixels.
As a simple example, one of the things I have had the most trouble with here, and we have had the most conversations about, is how metadata is updated. With the goal of trying to make it simple and transparent to the customer, you have made so many un- and partially-documented special cases that really smart, technical people cannot figure it out. All with good goals, but all of those techniques might be summed up as "trying to make the computer ignore what the customer actually does, and instead do what you think is what they want". Invisibly, silently. This latter is the real issue.
I get the motive. I've designed software for decades, and users do dumb things no matter how smart, and trying to protect them from themselves is always a temptation, and usually a good thing.
The issue I think comes in transparency. It is one thing to say to a user "Did you mean perhaps X because Y is going to cause this problem" and quite another to simply change X to Y silently. The real key here is when your "for their own good" choices cut the user out of the loop.
Take your sizes and "All but original". I can sit here and convince myself I'm clueless what it really means, e.g.
I have a panorama that is 500 x 9000, what happens?
I uploaded a tight crop where the original is smaller than your X3 size and chose "All but original" - what happens?
My original is 4500 x 3500, and I ask Smugmug for a dynamic resize of 4499 x 3499 with "all but original" set -- does it do it? Does it only do it if that's filling a real screen as opposed to a direct URL request? Does it always pick the next lowest standard size from the original? (Coming back to the ones above).
Wouldn't it be easier to actually tell people what the rules really are? In English but complete and correctly described? As opposed to having the software do all sorts of tweaking and twerking of the rules under the covers for our own good?
And wouldn't it have avoided this entire discussion if for everyone with X3 + watermark (or whatever criteria you used to judge whose galleries to change for them) had been sent a nice email "New feature... blah blah blah... we see you are using X3 with a watermark. Now that this feature is available, you may want to consider changing to large sizes, since your water mark protects against copying. You can change it as shown in these screen shots."
Do you really think ANY user would then say "these guys are making me do extra work"? I think the majority reaction would be "so what - delete" but a few will think it good and change it. I doubt anyone would spontaneously (without prompting) suggest you SHOULD have changed it for them.
But you should have known for darn sure if you just changed people's galleries without permission someone was going to complain?
Honestly, this case is not a big deal (certainly for me), but I really think it is a fair question to ask Smugmug - why do you approach things in this way, and is it really the right way to treat customers.
On a side note of this: is there any way to center all photos of one gallery in the lightbox view within their "frame" in an easy way? A large number of my panorama photos sticks to the top of the page instead of being centered when there would be enough room for centering left, looking kind of like a stamp on an unaddressed large envelope...
And second question: would there be any chance to change how panoramas are shown? Right now their height is determined by the width of the screen, but that makes some of the larger ones very long but tiny, what I would like to achieve is that they would become scrollable, so that their height would be – in best case – determined by the height of the screen instead. This one for example would really profit from such a change: lilleulven.com/Photos/Panorama/i-3xPphbh/A Or would my only chance be to display my panoramas in "Original" Size?
I noticed something I do not like at all. To side scroll the panoramas in lightbox, when I grab the browser
bottom scroll bar the overlay pops up and covers the photo. Bad design as you have to keep stopping
the scroll and wait for the overlay to hide.
BTW, change the links to public by removing the "/organize" part.
@Lille Ulven said:
And second question: would there be any chance to change how panoramas are shown? Right now their height is determined by the width of the screen, but that makes some of the larger ones very long but tiny, what I would like to achieve is that they would become scrollable, so that their height would be – in best case – determined by the height of the screen instead.
This is a little off the topic of this thread, but I've found an interesting work-around for panoramas. Put a single panorama picture in a Carousel content block. I like them set at 66% of screen height. The result is a panorama that scrolls. The only problem is that this puts the panorama in a separate content block rather than in-line with the rest of the pictures in a gallery. I generally put the panoramas at the end of the gallery page -- I use collage landscape display -- and sometimes advertise their presence in the captions to the regular gallery pictures. Click here for an example. This gallery has three panoramas at the end.
@Allen thanks for the hint with the public links - changed now :-)
As for scrolling, as far as I can recall I cannot scroll them in the light box either. There must be a way of realizing this without sucking...I hope.
@Jtring well the inline part doesn't really matter for me, since my panoramas got their own galleries...so potentially building up that gallery differently might do the trick, downside might be that titles and captions would no longer work...I need to give this a bunch of thoughts.
PS: I am pretty good with off-topics, I know, my brain just jumps through too much in a way to short amount of time.
@Ferguson said:
A simple example, one of the things I have had the most trouble with here, and we have had the most conversations about, is how metadata is updated.
I understand what you mean, but this is a bad example, considering everyone at SmugMug wants to change the metadata replacement issue. It was held up for the new rendering engine, and now that we've pushed it live, we can slot in the project to fix metadata replacement into our Roadmap (yay! I'm super excited for that).
@Ferguson said:
Take your sizes and "All but original". I can sit here and convince myself I'm clueless what it really means, e.g.
Wouldn't it be easier to actually tell people what the rules really are? In English but complete and correctly described? As opposed to having the software do all sorts of tweaking and twerking of the rules under the covers for our own good?
We concur and are working on some better terminology for what that means. Stay tuned.
@Ferguson said:
I uploaded a tight crop where the original is smaller than your X3 size and chose "All but original" - what happens?
Just like before, the appropriately sized display copy will be created as the same size as your original, and that display copy will be displayed. For example, if you uploaded a 400 x 270px image, then only Ti, Th, and Small are created and the small is always delivered.
@Ferguson said:
My original is 4500 x 3500, and I ask Smugmug for a dynamic resize of 4499 x 3499 with "all but original" set -- does it do it? Does it only do it if that's filling a real screen as opposed to a direct URL request? Does it always pick the next lowest standard size from the original? (Coming back to the ones above).
Think of "All but Originals" as working exactly the same as max display size always worked, except it will always be set to whatever the largest display size was. A month ago that was X3. Today it's 5k (5120px). If you request a custom size above 5k, we'll return the 5k display copy. If you request anything smaller than 5k, we'll return that custom size. The point of this setting, is so that when we unveil 8k, and 10k, and 36k, or any other size in the future, we won't have to go through this pain-point again -- you'll have told us that you want whatever the largest size is.
@Ferguson said:
And wouldn't it have avoided this entire discussion if for everyone with X3 + watermark (or whatever criteria you used to judge whose galleries to change for them) had been sent a nice email "New feature... blah blah blah... we see you are using X3 with a watermark. Now that this feature is available, you may want to consider changing to large sizes, since your water mark protects against copying. You can change it as shown in these screen shots."
We're still trying to figure out the best way to handle this -- I'd rather play it safe and leave the setting at X3 for those old galleries that were set at X3, but we also want to make sure that your smugmug sites look great well into the future. I'll let you know what we ultimately decide. We definitely plan on announcing the new display sizes but we've been slowly rolling it out and we'll make the announcement when it's out and we've settled on these important decisions.
@Ferguson said:
A simple example, one of the things I have had the most trouble with here, and we have had the most conversations about, is how metadata is updated.
I understand what you mean, but this is a bad example, considering everyone at SmugMug wants to change the metadata replacement issue. It was held up for the new rendering engine, and now that we've pushed it live, we can slot in the project to fix metadata replacement into our Roadmap (yay! I'm super excited for that).
Just to be clear it is not about NOW, but about the process that led to the current mess. It seems obvious that a lot of people made decisions along the vein of "what should we really do if the user uploads a shot and the data is different than it was" which morphed into "maybe they wanted" or "I bet it would be better if we" as opposed to "user did it -- let's update it".
There's a strong argument to be made for "the user set it to X3, leave it alone" as being ALWAYS less controversial.
And if I replace an image, REPLACE the image.
Seriously, I think you guys are trying to hard to solve problems people not only do not need solved, they do not want YOU to solve for them.
@Oja said:
Many of my galleries that had been set to X3 max were changed to all but original too. It seems to be quite random which ones this happened to.
They were not, as has been said, ones which had watermarks?
@Oja said:
All of my galleries have watermarks on them.
OK, the ones with watermarks changing to "all but original" that SM said they did.
So I take it that some which were X3, did have watermarks, were not changed? It may be useful to SM to give them examples of those, if their application of this was inconsistent. Though I think the primary question is whether their changes away from X3 were a good or bad thing to you.
I already did a bulk change back to a more reasonable size so I can't check now. The galleries that didn't change appeared to be smart galleries that I set up to aggregate images from other galleries, so I might not have set the to have watermarks although the watermark is part of my standard settings I apply when creating a new gallery. For some reason I also just discovered that my default settings I apply has changed from applying X3 to applying "all but original". Very strange and unexpected.
I think it was definitely a bad decision to default to "all but original" for watermarked images. These image sizes are way to large to be comfortable with even with a watermark on them. Watermarks are trivial to remove with a healing brush swipe or crop and so I relied on a combination of limiting maximum size and watermarking relatively unobtrusively. Don't understand what smug mug was thinking as I can't imagine anybody wanting the larger sizes except in special cases.
@Oja said:
Don't understand what smug mug was thinking as I can't imagine anybody wanting the larger sizes except in special cases.
We hear from customers all the time, who have wanted bigger display sizes. This has become much more vocal as screen sizes increase, resolutions increase, and 4k monitors/tv's become cheaper and much more popular. We also hear from many of our customers that the reason they love their SmugMug site is because the photos fill the screen. We were one of the first to do that and it's why many of us, including myself, came to SmugMug in the first place (Snapfish, Shutterfly, Flickr, and the others weren't filling the screen and the photos looked horrible small). The decision was made with those people in mind.
With that said, I wasn't comfortable with having your settings changed on you, so we have an update going through QA right now that will return all those galleries back to X3 and will make X3 the default size for when you create new galleries. We have some other things in the works to make the experience better, and push people towards using the larger sizes, if they wish. Stay tuned for the update and then in the future for some additional improvements.
I hate that the new forum doesn't show a post date, only the month/year so I have no idea how old your comment is (other than last month, which could be 5 days ago or 5 weeks ago) - WHEN do you plan to return our settings to what we had originally set because it obviously still hasn't been fixed? Do I need to somehow find the time to go through every single gallery on my site to see which ones were affected so I can fix them? I already found two galleries that were set to All But Original and I'm not happy about it, sizes I had specifically limited are now shown in full screen glory on my 27" monitor. If it's not being fixed immediately you need to let people know about it so they can fix it themselves if they need to.
This is what angers me the most about SmugMug, this isn't the first time that you've made changes that affect MY site in ways that affect MY business without my knowledge. It's not until I stumble across a thread on the forum that I find out. You shouldn't change any settings on a business level account without our knowledge. I love big beautiful images that fill the screen as much as anyone and I may use it in certain cases, but it's a business decision for me to limit the size. If we're busy working and creating new galleries, we don't have to time surf all of the old galleries our own website on a regular basis to find out what new surprises you might have for us. We need to trust that the way we set things up won't change without our knowledge. It's not SmugMug's place to second guess if we did it intentionally or not. Work from the assumption that we did do everything intentionally. The majority of my business is in image licensing, and my experience has shown that there is a direct correlation between the size of the display image and the number of infringements. Watermarking doesn't stop it and right-click protection doesn't stop it. I don't need or want 5120px images floating around loose on the internet. That is sufficient for a 20" print. I might as well enable originals. It's bad enough that you would make this the default for new galleries, but I can't believe it was done to all of our existing galleries.
@OffTopic said:
WHEN do you plan to return our settings to what we had originally set because it obviously still hasn't been fixed? Do I need to somehow find the time to go through every single gallery on my site to see which ones were affected so I can fix them? I already found two galleries that were set to All But Original and I'm not happy about it, sizes I had specifically limited are now shown in full screen glory on my 27" monitor. If it's not being fixed immediately you need to let people know about it so they can fix it themselves if they need to.
We moved all galleries back before the holidays. Could you send me an example or two of a gallery that didn't get moved back so we can look into why it didn't get flagged?
@leftquark said:
We moved all galleries back before the holidays. Could you send me an example or two of a gallery that didn't get moved back so we can look into why it didn't get flagged?
I think I've already found and fixed most of them, but here is one I missed that I haven't fixed yet -
I think we've identified the issue. Would you mind leaving the gallery set to "All but Original" until Monday when the Engineering team is back in the office and we can verify the solution?
@OffTopic said:
[SNIP]
I hate that the new forum doesn't show a post date, only the month/year so I have no idea how old your comment is (other than last month, which could be 5 days ago or 5 weeks ago)
Although this isn't the main point of this thread, it's a real issue on dgrin. Could you please resume presenting the actual post dates?
@OffTopic said:
[SNIP]
I hate that the new forum doesn't show a post date, only the month/year so I have no idea how old your comment is (other than last month, which could be 5 days ago or 5 weeks ago)
Although this isn't the main point of this thread, it's a real issue on dgrin. Could you please resume presenting the actual post dates?
I need to ask Vanilla if there's a way to do this. TBD!
Should the maximum available size be larger than original?
I actually tried it, and it does expand the size to be larger than the original. I do have original sizes enabled.
I am not objecting to it, I really see no harm in my case, but it seemed... weird. The example shows the URL that should let you find it in my otherwise unlisted folder. I think it would have been less weird if it had ALL sizes plus original, but it stopped one larger.
I also thought maybe at first one side was smaller, but the original is smaller on both edges than the next size up shown.
@leftquark said:
As far as I know, the largest display size has always been smaller than the original. Lemme dig in.
A follow-up on a related situation. Here is a very heavily cropped picture where, in the lightbox, I can show an X2 that's larger than the original. The original is 1210 x 967. The X2 is 1280 x 1023; an up-scale. I think this is related to a bug I reported to the help desk about a week ago that X2 display copies that are wider than high (landscape orientation) or square seem to be coming out at 1280 x something, even if the something exceeds 960. When I reported to the help desk, all I had were a few too-big X2's. This is the first time I've seen up-scaling.
@leftquark said:
The issue with X2 sizes displaying larger than their original should now be fixed. Thanks for pointing this out!
Thank you for working the up-scaling issue. When I reload to produce new display copies on the case I mentioned, the X2 for my 1210 x 967 original now is an appropriate 1201 x 960.
Do note the other bug is still floating about. With a suitably large landscape-orientation original, the code will still produce an X2 that is 1280 x "whatever" even if that "whatever" exceeds the specified 960. For an example, take a look at the first three photos in this gallery. All have X2's that exceed 960 in height. I even went so far as deleting the photos and re-uploading to make sure I was checking freshly-produced display copies. That's the issue I reported to the help desk last week. It looks like your developers are going to have to dip into the X2 sizing logic again. (Although since you had it right before, the fix shouldn't be hard or mysterious.)
Thanks Jim! This is one I'm going to have to think about with the team. This is one of the reasons why the new sizes (X4, X5, 4k and 5k) went to a square scheme where the height and width have a similar maximum pixel dimension. It seems undesired to shrink the longest edge just because the shorter edge hits its maximum. I'll let you know what we decide.
@leftquark said:
Thanks Jim! This is one I'm going to have to think about with the team. This is one of the reasons why the new sizes (X4, X5, 4k and 5k) went to a square scheme where the height and width have a similar maximum pixel dimension. It seems undesired to shrink the longest edge just because the shorter edge hits its maximum. I'll let you know what we decide.
Maybe. Maybe not. Let me toss out a few thoughts, some of which your team, I hope, is already mulling.
It would seem the really critical thing is to have a lot of steps, without big gaps, for width and (especially) height.
Why especially height? On computer monitors (not necessarily tablets), the height is usually the constraint. Monitors are typically in landscape orientation and most are wider than the native aspect ratio of camera sensors. Length is the constraint when the photo wider in aspect than the viewing window. I'm sure that happens, but I suspect it's the less common situation. So some focus on height is in order.
Why lots of steps? It would seem you always want a display copy around that's the same or just a bit bigger than the fill size to limit how much browser scaling you are asking for. Browser scaling may or may not be as good as the Lanczos scaling you use to create display copies. Keeping it limited seems prudent. You may also want a display copy around that's the same or just a bit smaller than the fill. That way the user can pull up a totally un-browser-scaled copy if desired. I do that to proof the images. I do that almost all the time on Chrome where I can see the browser-scaling softening.
As it stands now, you have pretty decent spacing on lengths but a big gap on heights between X3 and X4. Going all-square on the display copy size bounds or going back to all-4:3 would smooth that out. I suspect that's behind some of the desires to go all square. For that matter, just adding a new size or two between X3 and X4 to provide more height steps might suffice. The line of reasoning above also suggests there is benefit in having the display copy sizes match actual monitor resolutions (at least for those looking at SmugMug full screen). Popular new displays have heights of 1440, 1600, and 2160 so if you decide to go for new display copy sizes, these could be candidates for heights.
I'd caution you about making the old X3's, X2's, and below square and thus larger. Folks have limited the sizes they display for photo protection. Changing the sizing means everyone will need to rethink their photo protection needs. You certainly don't want to just do it and see if anybody notices. As your experience with changing the Maximum Size to "All but Original" indicates, some folks have very strong opinions about photo protection.
Because of the latter, I tend to like the "all-4:3" approach that doesn't touch the X3's and below. That does mean re-doing the X4's and above to add steps, but doing so does provide an opportunity to match a few of the common larger monitor sizes. I acknowledge that's kind of a big re-start, though.
In terms of your thoughts, our new engine for displaying photos has gotten really smart. While we don't necessarily generate Display Copies in a bunch of sizes (for obvious storage reasons), we've gotten really speedy at generating and delivering custom image sizes when they're needed. If we need a size in between X3 and X5, we'll use a custom size and you won't notice anything but beautiful photos.
I'd like expand on the comment I made earlier about viewing un-scaled display copies. As noted, I like to browse through my own pictures in the lightbox at an X2 setting if I'm not full screen, or X3 if I am, so as to avoid browser re-scaling. My galleries typically mix and match among photos with five different width:height aspect ratios -- 3:2, 4:3, 5:4, 1:1, and 4:5. As things stand now, full screen on my 1920 x 1200 monitor, the X3's all fit, and better, fill the screen vertically except for the the 3:2 which isn't too bad at 1066 high. The X2's have more of a gap around them, but all fit nicely and reasonably consistently inside the browser with the information bar visible up top. If SmugMug moves to equal height and width constraints, whether or not a picture fits depends strongly on its aspect ratio. Here's what would and would not fit, assuming 1600 x 1600 bounds on X3's and 1280 x 1280 bounds on X2's. Note a 1024 x 1024 XL always fits, but is pretty small for 3:2 and 4:3 aspects.
Photo Aspect
X3 rendering
X2 rendering
XL rendering
What would fit?
3:2
1599 x 1066 - Fits
1278 x 852 - Fits
1023 x 682 - Fits but small
X3
4:3
1600 x 1200 - Fits
1280 x 960 - Fits
1024 x 768 - Fits but small
X3
5:4
1600 x 1280 - NO
1280 x 1024 - Fits
1020 x 816 - Fits
X2
1:1
1600 x 1600 - NO
1280 x 1280 - NO
1024 x 1024 - Fits
XL
4:5
1280 x 1600 - NO
1024 x 1280 - NO
816 x 1024 - Fits
XL
I'd need to jump around between three sizes to browse a gallery with the full range of aspect ratios. Today I just pick one and go. That's a workflow impact. An idiosyncratic concern? Sure, both in my mixing aspect ratios and in wanting to browse a whole gallery of un-scaled display copies. But I might as well toss out the use case since is is one I'd have to work around.
Comments
Maybe I went to far in the description, but I really believe you (and Microsoft and many others who come before you) do a disservice to your customers when you assume they are not capable of understanding the more complete answer, and dumb it down. Try to make it something they can understand, whether that is horizontal and vertical resolution or megapixels.
As a simple example, one of the things I have had the most trouble with here, and we have had the most conversations about, is how metadata is updated. With the goal of trying to make it simple and transparent to the customer, you have made so many un- and partially-documented special cases that really smart, technical people cannot figure it out. All with good goals, but all of those techniques might be summed up as "trying to make the computer ignore what the customer actually does, and instead do what you think is what they want". Invisibly, silently. This latter is the real issue.
I get the motive. I've designed software for decades, and users do dumb things no matter how smart, and trying to protect them from themselves is always a temptation, and usually a good thing.
The issue I think comes in transparency. It is one thing to say to a user "Did you mean perhaps X because Y is going to cause this problem" and quite another to simply change X to Y silently. The real key here is when your "for their own good" choices cut the user out of the loop.
Take your sizes and "All but original". I can sit here and convince myself I'm clueless what it really means, e.g.
I have a panorama that is 500 x 9000, what happens?
I uploaded a tight crop where the original is smaller than your X3 size and chose "All but original" - what happens?
My original is 4500 x 3500, and I ask Smugmug for a dynamic resize of 4499 x 3499 with "all but original" set -- does it do it? Does it only do it if that's filling a real screen as opposed to a direct URL request? Does it always pick the next lowest standard size from the original? (Coming back to the ones above).
Wouldn't it be easier to actually tell people what the rules really are? In English but complete and correctly described? As opposed to having the software do all sorts of tweaking and twerking of the rules under the covers for our own good?
And wouldn't it have avoided this entire discussion if for everyone with X3 + watermark (or whatever criteria you used to judge whose galleries to change for them) had been sent a nice email "New feature... blah blah blah... we see you are using X3 with a watermark. Now that this feature is available, you may want to consider changing to large sizes, since your water mark protects against copying. You can change it as shown in these screen shots."
Do you really think ANY user would then say "these guys are making me do extra work"? I think the majority reaction would be "so what - delete" but a few will think it good and change it. I doubt anyone would spontaneously (without prompting) suggest you SHOULD have changed it for them.
But you should have known for darn sure if you just changed people's galleries without permission someone was going to complain?
Honestly, this case is not a big deal (certainly for me), but I really think it is a fair question to ask Smugmug - why do you approach things in this way, and is it really the right way to treat customers.
@leftquark as an example for a gallery that was set to X3 and has now automatically been changed to "all but original": http://www.lilleulven.com/Photos/Travel/Europe/Norway and http://www.lilleulven.com/Photos/Panorama for example (two out of two that I have checked, so I assume it counts for all my galleries).
On a side note of this: is there any way to center all photos of one gallery in the lightbox view within their "frame" in an easy way? A large number of my panorama photos sticks to the top of the page instead of being centered when there would be enough room for centering left, looking kind of like a stamp on an unaddressed large envelope...
And second question: would there be any chance to change how panoramas are shown? Right now their height is determined by the width of the screen, but that makes some of the larger ones very long but tiny, what I would like to achieve is that they would become scrollable, so that their height would be – in best case – determined by the height of the screen instead. This one for example would really profit from such a change: lilleulven.com/Photos/Panorama/i-3xPphbh/A Or would my only chance be to display my panoramas in "Original" Size?
I noticed something I do not like at all. To side scroll the panoramas in lightbox, when I grab the browser
bottom scroll bar the overlay pops up and covers the photo. Bad design as you have to keep stopping
the scroll and wait for the overlay to hide.
BTW, change the links to public by removing the "/organize" part.
My Website index | My Blog
This is a little off the topic of this thread, but I've found an interesting work-around for panoramas. Put a single panorama picture in a Carousel content block. I like them set at 66% of screen height. The result is a panorama that scrolls. The only problem is that this puts the panorama in a separate content block rather than in-line with the rest of the pictures in a gallery. I generally put the panoramas at the end of the gallery page -- I use collage landscape display -- and sometimes advertise their presence in the captions to the regular gallery pictures. Click here for an example. This gallery has three panoramas at the end.
@Allen thanks for the hint with the public links - changed now :-)
As for scrolling, as far as I can recall I cannot scroll them in the light box either. There must be a way of realizing this without sucking...I hope.
@Jtring well the inline part doesn't really matter for me, since my panoramas got their own galleries...so potentially building up that gallery differently might do the trick, downside might be that titles and captions would no longer work...I need to give this a bunch of thoughts.
PS: I am pretty good with off-topics, I know, my brain just jumps through too much in a way to short amount of time.
I understand what you mean, but this is a bad example, considering everyone at SmugMug wants to change the metadata replacement issue. It was held up for the new rendering engine, and now that we've pushed it live, we can slot in the project to fix metadata replacement into our Roadmap (yay! I'm super excited for that).
We concur and are working on some better terminology for what that means. Stay tuned.
Just like before, the appropriately sized display copy will be created as the same size as your original, and that display copy will be displayed. For example, if you uploaded a 400 x 270px image, then only Ti, Th, and Small are created and the small is always delivered.
Think of "All but Originals" as working exactly the same as max display size always worked, except it will always be set to whatever the largest display size was. A month ago that was X3. Today it's 5k (5120px). If you request a custom size above 5k, we'll return the 5k display copy. If you request anything smaller than 5k, we'll return that custom size. The point of this setting, is so that when we unveil 8k, and 10k, and 36k, or any other size in the future, we won't have to go through this pain-point again -- you'll have told us that you want whatever the largest size is.
We're still trying to figure out the best way to handle this -- I'd rather play it safe and leave the setting at X3 for those old galleries that were set at X3, but we also want to make sure that your smugmug sites look great well into the future. I'll let you know what we ultimately decide. We definitely plan on announcing the new display sizes but we've been slowly rolling it out and we'll make the announcement when it's out and we've settled on these important decisions.
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
Just to be clear it is not about NOW, but about the process that led to the current mess. It seems obvious that a lot of people made decisions along the vein of "what should we really do if the user uploads a shot and the data is different than it was" which morphed into "maybe they wanted" or "I bet it would be better if we" as opposed to "user did it -- let's update it".
There's a strong argument to be made for "the user set it to X3, leave it alone" as being ALWAYS less controversial.
And if I replace an image, REPLACE the image.
Seriously, I think you guys are trying to hard to solve problems people not only do not need solved, they do not want YOU to solve for them.
Many of my galleries that had been set to X3 max were changed to all but original too. It seems to be quite random which ones this happened to.
They were not, as has been said, ones which had watermarks?
All of my galleries have watermarks on them.
OK, the ones with watermarks changing to "all but original" that SM said they did.
So I take it that some which were X3, did have watermarks, were not changed? It may be useful to SM to give them examples of those, if their application of this was inconsistent. Though I think the primary question is whether their changes away from X3 were a good or bad thing to you.
I already did a bulk change back to a more reasonable size so I can't check now. The galleries that didn't change appeared to be smart galleries that I set up to aggregate images from other galleries, so I might not have set the to have watermarks although the watermark is part of my standard settings I apply when creating a new gallery. For some reason I also just discovered that my default settings I apply has changed from applying X3 to applying "all but original". Very strange and unexpected.
I think it was definitely a bad decision to default to "all but original" for watermarked images. These image sizes are way to large to be comfortable with even with a watermark on them. Watermarks are trivial to remove with a healing brush swipe or crop and so I relied on a combination of limiting maximum size and watermarking relatively unobtrusively. Don't understand what smug mug was thinking as I can't imagine anybody wanting the larger sizes except in special cases.
We hear from customers all the time, who have wanted bigger display sizes. This has become much more vocal as screen sizes increase, resolutions increase, and 4k monitors/tv's become cheaper and much more popular. We also hear from many of our customers that the reason they love their SmugMug site is because the photos fill the screen. We were one of the first to do that and it's why many of us, including myself, came to SmugMug in the first place (Snapfish, Shutterfly, Flickr, and the others weren't filling the screen and the photos looked horrible small). The decision was made with those people in mind.
With that said, I wasn't comfortable with having your settings changed on you, so we have an update going through QA right now that will return all those galleries back to X3 and will make X3 the default size for when you create new galleries. We have some other things in the works to make the experience better, and push people towards using the larger sizes, if they wish. Stay tuned for the update and then in the future for some additional improvements.
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
I hate that the new forum doesn't show a post date, only the month/year so I have no idea how old your comment is (other than last month, which could be 5 days ago or 5 weeks ago) - WHEN do you plan to return our settings to what we had originally set because it obviously still hasn't been fixed? Do I need to somehow find the time to go through every single gallery on my site to see which ones were affected so I can fix them? I already found two galleries that were set to All But Original and I'm not happy about it, sizes I had specifically limited are now shown in full screen glory on my 27" monitor. If it's not being fixed immediately you need to let people know about it so they can fix it themselves if they need to.
This is what angers me the most about SmugMug, this isn't the first time that you've made changes that affect MY site in ways that affect MY business without my knowledge. It's not until I stumble across a thread on the forum that I find out. You shouldn't change any settings on a business level account without our knowledge. I love big beautiful images that fill the screen as much as anyone and I may use it in certain cases, but it's a business decision for me to limit the size. If we're busy working and creating new galleries, we don't have to time surf all of the old galleries our own website on a regular basis to find out what new surprises you might have for us. We need to trust that the way we set things up won't change without our knowledge. It's not SmugMug's place to second guess if we did it intentionally or not. Work from the assumption that we did do everything intentionally. The majority of my business is in image licensing, and my experience has shown that there is a direct correlation between the size of the display image and the number of infringements. Watermarking doesn't stop it and right-click protection doesn't stop it. I don't need or want 5120px images floating around loose on the internet. That is sufficient for a 20" print. I might as well enable originals. It's bad enough that you would make this the default for new galleries, but I can't believe it was done to all of our existing galleries.
I'm sorry if I sound angry, but I am.
My Photos
My Blog
On Google+
On DrivingLine
We moved all galleries back before the holidays. Could you send me an example or two of a gallery that didn't get moved back so we can look into why it didn't get flagged?
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
I think I've already found and fixed most of them, but here is one I missed that I haven't fixed yet -
http://www.loricareyphoto.com/Events-1/2015-King-of-the-Hammers/Mel-Wade/i-c35V2M4
My Photos
My Blog
On Google+
On DrivingLine
I think we've identified the issue. Would you mind leaving the gallery set to "All but Original" until Monday when the Engineering team is back in the office and we can verify the solution?
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
All the galleries should be back at X3. I've confirmed that the gallery above was also moved back.
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
Although this isn't the main point of this thread, it's a real issue on dgrin. Could you please resume presenting the actual post dates?
I need to ask Vanilla if there's a way to do this. TBD!
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
Sooo... I'm confused.
Should the maximum available size be larger than original?
I actually tried it, and it does expand the size to be larger than the original. I do have original sizes enabled.
I am not objecting to it, I really see no harm in my case, but it seemed... weird. The example shows the URL that should let you find it in my otherwise unlisted folder. I think it would have been less weird if it had ALL sizes plus original, but it stopped one larger.
I also thought maybe at first one side was smaller, but the original is smaller on both edges than the next size up shown.
As far as I know, the largest display size has always been smaller than the original. Lemme dig in.
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
A follow-up on a related situation. Here is a very heavily cropped picture where, in the lightbox, I can show an X2 that's larger than the original. The original is 1210 x 967. The X2 is 1280 x 1023; an up-scale. I think this is related to a bug I reported to the help desk about a week ago that X2 display copies that are wider than high (landscape orientation) or square seem to be coming out at 1280 x something, even if the something exceeds 960. When I reported to the help desk, all I had were a few too-big X2's. This is the first time I've seen up-scaling.
The issue with X2 sizes displaying larger than their original should now be fixed. Thanks for pointing this out!
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
Thank you for working the up-scaling issue. When I reload to produce new display copies on the case I mentioned, the X2 for my 1210 x 967 original now is an appropriate 1201 x 960.
Do note the other bug is still floating about. With a suitably large landscape-orientation original, the code will still produce an X2 that is 1280 x "whatever" even if that "whatever" exceeds the specified 960. For an example, take a look at the first three photos in this gallery. All have X2's that exceed 960 in height. I even went so far as deleting the photos and re-uploading to make sure I was checking freshly-produced display copies. That's the issue I reported to the help desk last week. It looks like your developers are going to have to dip into the X2 sizing logic again. (Although since you had it right before, the fix shouldn't be hard or mysterious.)
Thanks Jim! This is one I'm going to have to think about with the team. This is one of the reasons why the new sizes (X4, X5, 4k and 5k) went to a square scheme where the height and width have a similar maximum pixel dimension. It seems undesired to shrink the longest edge just because the shorter edge hits its maximum. I'll let you know what we decide.
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
Maybe. Maybe not. Let me toss out a few thoughts, some of which your team, I hope, is already mulling.
It would seem the really critical thing is to have a lot of steps, without big gaps, for width and (especially) height.
Why especially height? On computer monitors (not necessarily tablets), the height is usually the constraint. Monitors are typically in landscape orientation and most are wider than the native aspect ratio of camera sensors. Length is the constraint when the photo wider in aspect than the viewing window. I'm sure that happens, but I suspect it's the less common situation. So some focus on height is in order.
Why lots of steps? It would seem you always want a display copy around that's the same or just a bit bigger than the fill size to limit how much browser scaling you are asking for. Browser scaling may or may not be as good as the Lanczos scaling you use to create display copies. Keeping it limited seems prudent. You may also want a display copy around that's the same or just a bit smaller than the fill. That way the user can pull up a totally un-browser-scaled copy if desired. I do that to proof the images. I do that almost all the time on Chrome where I can see the browser-scaling softening.
As it stands now, you have pretty decent spacing on lengths but a big gap on heights between X3 and X4. Going all-square on the display copy size bounds or going back to all-4:3 would smooth that out. I suspect that's behind some of the desires to go all square. For that matter, just adding a new size or two between X3 and X4 to provide more height steps might suffice. The line of reasoning above also suggests there is benefit in having the display copy sizes match actual monitor resolutions (at least for those looking at SmugMug full screen). Popular new displays have heights of 1440, 1600, and 2160 so if you decide to go for new display copy sizes, these could be candidates for heights.
I'd caution you about making the old X3's, X2's, and below square and thus larger. Folks have limited the sizes they display for photo protection. Changing the sizing means everyone will need to rethink their photo protection needs. You certainly don't want to just do it and see if anybody notices. As your experience with changing the Maximum Size to "All but Original" indicates, some folks have very strong opinions about photo protection.
Because of the latter, I tend to like the "all-4:3" approach that doesn't touch the X3's and below. That does mean re-doing the X4's and above to add steps, but doing so does provide an opportunity to match a few of the common larger monitor sizes. I acknowledge that's kind of a big re-start, though.
The second issue should also now be fixed. Sorry for making you type up a whole long thought
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
In terms of your thoughts, our new engine for displaying photos has gotten really smart. While we don't necessarily generate Display Copies in a bunch of sizes (for obvious storage reasons), we've gotten really speedy at generating and delivering custom image sizes when they're needed. If we need a size in between X3 and X5, we'll use a custom size and you won't notice anything but beautiful photos.
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
I'd like expand on the comment I made earlier about viewing un-scaled display copies. As noted, I like to browse through my own pictures in the lightbox at an X2 setting if I'm not full screen, or X3 if I am, so as to avoid browser re-scaling. My galleries typically mix and match among photos with five different width:height aspect ratios -- 3:2, 4:3, 5:4, 1:1, and 4:5. As things stand now, full screen on my 1920 x 1200 monitor, the X3's all fit, and better, fill the screen vertically except for the the 3:2 which isn't too bad at 1066 high. The X2's have more of a gap around them, but all fit nicely and reasonably consistently inside the browser with the information bar visible up top. If SmugMug moves to equal height and width constraints, whether or not a picture fits depends strongly on its aspect ratio. Here's what would and would not fit, assuming 1600 x 1600 bounds on X3's and 1280 x 1280 bounds on X2's. Note a 1024 x 1024 XL always fits, but is pretty small for 3:2 and 4:3 aspects.
I'd need to jump around between three sizes to browse a gallery with the full range of aspect ratios. Today I just pick one and go. That's a workflow impact. An idiosyncratic concern? Sure, both in my mixing aspect ratios and in wanting to browse a whole gallery of un-scaled display copies. But I might as well toss out the use case since is is one I'd have to work around.
(BTW I'm very happy to see Markdown tables work!)