@leftquark said:
I know this won't work for everyone but I wanted to make sure we were honest with the work we're currently undertaking and what we plan to continue to improve. We're doing our best to make the migration as seamless as possible but unfortunately that means we won't be able to have all the same features that Phanfare had ... and in many cases you get a much richer, deeper product. We're 100% committed to improving the experience for all of you and we'll work for the next year (and more) to make sure all of you become happy SmugMug customers.
That's encouraging to hear and I hope that's a real commitment and that you'll continue to participate in the Phanfare sub-forum here to discuss some of the improvements that can be done to SmugMug. I've held off discussing any of those issues for now, as we need to get through the transfer. So far, I'm encouraged by your involvement and effort to improve the conversion and tell us things. I suspect many of us here have been with Phanfare for a long time. Andrew was often times directly involved with customers and talked a lot about what was going on....then came Carbonite and I think the only customer communication they ever sent us was the email that they're killing Phanfare. I, for one, am grateful for your more personal involvement with the transition.
For those following along, we've completed the migration of Album Date Created and merged it into SmugMug's Gallery Date Created. You can use the Organizer to sort Folders by Date Created to display them in that order, then manually move them around if needed.
@MikeLaurel said:
That's encouraging to hear and I hope that's a real commitment and that you'll continue to participate in the Phanfare sub-forum here to discuss some of the improvements that can be done to SmugMug. I've held off discussing any of those issues for now, as we need to get through the transfer. So far, I'm encouraged by your involvement and effort to improve the conversion and tell us things. I suspect many of us here have been with Phanfare for a long time. Andrew was often times directly involved with customers and talked a lot about what was going on....then came Carbonite and I think the only customer communication they ever sent us was the email that they're killing Phanfare. I, for one, am grateful for your more personal involvement with the transition.
We want your entire experience on SmugMug to be amazing, and while we'd love for our product to speak for itself, we realize that in order to make a product that works for you we need to both communicate with you and support you when you need it. It's one of the reasons why we call our Customer Support team the "Heroes" - our support should be heroic. On our product level, my team cannot build great experiences for you all if we don't speak with you and truely understand the things you're trying to accomplish and the problems you face. Many of our Product Managers are photographers (myself included) but we absolutely have to talk with you all. We're active here on dgrin (you can see I have thousands of posts here), on our Feature Requests page and on our Help Desk. While we are a small company and can't work on everything we do our best to listen, put feedback into the back of our minds, and work with all of you to build something really great.
I for one want to send a huge "kudos" to you and your team here LeftQuark. You have understood what a stressful time this has been for us and our that total anger and frustration is toward Carbonite themselves.
The 5 week deadline before "shutdown" is what has caused the most stress for me - I have had to stop every work and personal project and even took the past week off work just to try and ensure I was able to get this all finalised before the deadline date when I lose access to phanfare completely.
Only then will I start looking at things like display options and blogs and fixes for my subsites etc. I just want to get the migration and my albums all looking the same order that they were first. The pretty stuff can wait!!
But thank you for your patience and your regular presence here to keep us sane !
One thing - and I dont know the complexities or the appropriate words etc - but seeing as how Carbonite is doing nothing with the product - can they hand over or sell the "technicalities" to Smugmug - I am thinking of the useful things like the simple subsite creation and rotating videos. Obviously someone "owns" that technology so it seems a waste to just leave it sitting there in Carbonites basement so to speak.
I don't know why but now that you have implemented "Gallery Date Created" Sort my Gallery Order doesn't seem any different when I choose it. I do the sort from the very top level so I don't know why. I'm curious if others are seeing a difference and maybe I'm doing something incorrectly. Even without this new feature according to what leftquark explained previously it seems that the best strategy is to leave things in "Manual Sort Mode" and then drag the Gallery and Folders how we need and want them to be. I'm creating my Folders by Year, "2017", "2016" and then dragging the Galleries in those folders and them order them in those folders accordingly. After I do this work of reorganizing, at least things will layout how I want it to going forward. So I if I do this I believe I would always leave SmugMug in "Manual Sort" Mode? Do everyone think this way of thinking is correct? Does anyone in this discussion group think they have a better idea for organizing the folders and galleries before I put my head down and just do this? Also I'm not fully understanding what order the SmugMug Mobile App is listing Folders and Galleries? If I setup "Manual Order Sort" on my desktop browser shouldn't he App show the Folders and Galleries in that manual order? It doesn't seem to be doing that so maybe again I am doing something incorrect or misunderstanding. Just looking to everyone else's experiences of doing this and the best methods to bring it all together. I don't want to reinvent the wheel. I appreciate hearing the discussion group's thoughts about all this. -Steve
@KarinaExPhanfare said:
I for one want to send a huge "kudos" to you and your team here LeftQuark. You have understood what a stressful time this has been for us and our that total anger and frustration is toward Carbonite themselves.
But thank you for your patience and your regular presence here to keep us sane !
That's what we're here for. Our main goal has been to Thrill all of you and we'll continue to focus attention in making sure we do that.
@KarinaExPhanfare said:
One thing - and I dont know the complexities or the appropriate words etc - but seeing as how Carbonite is doing nothing with the product - can they hand over or sell the "technicalities" to Smugmug - I am thinking of the useful things like the simple subsite creation and rotating videos. Obviously someone "owns" that technology so it seems a waste to just leave it sitting there in Carbonites basement so to speak.
At this point the technology behind Phanfare is incompatible (and outdated) with what we offer on SmugMug. I believe the subsite functionality should be able to be accomplished via Folders, collecting, or Sharegrounds. There's some improvements we could make to our slideshows in the future that would solve some other differences with SM and PF.
@stevelewis said:
I don't know why but now that you have implemented "Gallery Date Created" Sort my Gallery Order doesn't seem any different when I choose it. I do the sort from the very top level so I don't know why.
Do you have a smaller folder I could test this on? If you're manually sorting your top level folder, I don't want to muck with that order by potentially toggling the sort order, but if there's a folder with 5-10 galleries that you don't mind if I dig into, I'd love to take a peek.
@stevelewis said:
After I do this work of reorganizing, at least things will layout how I want it to going forward. So I if I do this I believe I would always leave SmugMug in "Manual Sort" Mode? Do everyone think this way of thinking is correct?
That's how I do my own site. I have Folders for each year (2017, 2016, 2015, etc), and then I create new galleries using "NAME (YYYY-MM-DD)" and then manually sort them into chronological order. For example, I might have "Yosemite (2017-05-10)", "Skiing (2017-02-16)", "New Years (2017-01-01)" inside there. The sort order stays set to "Manual".
@stevelewis said:
Also I'm not fully understanding what order the SmugMug Mobile App is listing Folders and Galleries? If I setup "Manual Order Sort" on my desktop browser shouldn't he App show the Folders and Galleries in that manual order? It doesn't seem to be doing that so maybe again I am doing something incorrect or misunderstanding.
The SmugMug iOS and Android apps should sort Folders, Galleries and Folders in the same order they are sorted within the SmugMug Desktop website (what you see in the Organizer). If you're not seeing that, shoot me a private message with a link to the Folders/Galleries and our teams will dive in immediately.
I am planning to reorganize everything as leftquark explained in manual sort order. Once it is in manual sort mode there should be no reason to ever change it. In fact, after I get the folders in year order and the galleries ordered manually that should do it. But if I ever try to reorder the galleries in the folder alphabetically and then try to go back to manual sort the order it won't revert back to how I arranged it manually. I'll guess the worst case if this is done is I lose the manual organization in just that folder. If the folders are in years then the sort "Alphabetic Reverse order" will always work for the folders. It's the Galleries inside the folders that have to stay in manual order. Leftquark, if the Galleries in the folders are manual sort order is there any advantage to naming galleries with Name and the date reversed "Skiing(2017-12-16) or is that just how you like to write the dates? It would look funny but if it was "2017-12-16 (Skiiing) then Alphabetic Reverse sort would always work. Is my thinking correct?
You nailed it steve -- putting the date first ("2017-12-16 - Skiing") would work such that sorting by title would get you the proper sorting but visually it was harder for me to find the galleries.
And I was able to confirm that the manual sort order is lost if you change it to an automatic one (title, date, etc).
Comments
That's encouraging to hear and I hope that's a real commitment and that you'll continue to participate in the Phanfare sub-forum here to discuss some of the improvements that can be done to SmugMug. I've held off discussing any of those issues for now, as we need to get through the transfer. So far, I'm encouraged by your involvement and effort to improve the conversion and tell us things. I suspect many of us here have been with Phanfare for a long time. Andrew was often times directly involved with customers and talked a lot about what was going on....then came Carbonite and I think the only customer communication they ever sent us was the email that they're killing Phanfare. I, for one, am grateful for your more personal involvement with the transition.
For those following along, we've completed the migration of
Album Date Createdand merged it into SmugMug'sGallery Date Created. You can use the Organizer to sort Folders byDate Createdto display them in that order, then manually move them around if needed.We want your entire experience on SmugMug to be amazing, and while we'd love for our product to speak for itself, we realize that in order to make a product that works for you we need to both communicate with you and support you when you need it. It's one of the reasons why we call our Customer Support team the "Heroes" - our support should be heroic. On our product level, my team cannot build great experiences for you all if we don't speak with you and truely understand the things you're trying to accomplish and the problems you face. Many of our Product Managers are photographers (myself included) but we absolutely have to talk with you all. We're active here on dgrin (you can see I have thousands of posts here), on our Feature Requests page and on our Help Desk. While we are a small company and can't work on everything we do our best to listen, put feedback into the back of our minds, and work with all of you to build something really great.
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 for one want to send a huge "kudos" to you and your team here LeftQuark. You have understood what a stressful time this has been for us and our that total anger and frustration is toward Carbonite themselves.
The 5 week deadline before "shutdown" is what has caused the most stress for me - I have had to stop every work and personal project and even took the past week off work just to try and ensure I was able to get this all finalised before the deadline date when I lose access to phanfare completely.
Only then will I start looking at things like display options and blogs and fixes for my subsites etc. I just want to get the migration and my albums all looking the same order that they were first. The pretty stuff can wait!!
But thank you for your patience and your regular presence here to keep us sane !
One thing - and I dont know the complexities or the appropriate words etc - but seeing as how Carbonite is doing nothing with the product - can they hand over or sell the "technicalities" to Smugmug - I am thinking of the useful things like the simple subsite creation and rotating videos. Obviously someone "owns" that technology so it seems a waste to just leave it sitting there in Carbonites basement so to speak.
I don't know why but now that you have implemented "Gallery Date Created" Sort my Gallery Order doesn't seem any different when I choose it. I do the sort from the very top level so I don't know why. I'm curious if others are seeing a difference and maybe I'm doing something incorrectly. Even without this new feature according to what leftquark explained previously it seems that the best strategy is to leave things in "Manual Sort Mode" and then drag the Gallery and Folders how we need and want them to be. I'm creating my Folders by Year, "2017", "2016" and then dragging the Galleries in those folders and them order them in those folders accordingly. After I do this work of reorganizing, at least things will layout how I want it to going forward. So I if I do this I believe I would always leave SmugMug in "Manual Sort" Mode? Do everyone think this way of thinking is correct? Does anyone in this discussion group think they have a better idea for organizing the folders and galleries before I put my head down and just do this? Also I'm not fully understanding what order the SmugMug Mobile App is listing Folders and Galleries? If I setup "Manual Order Sort" on my desktop browser shouldn't he App show the Folders and Galleries in that manual order? It doesn't seem to be doing that so maybe again I am doing something incorrect or misunderstanding. Just looking to everyone else's experiences of doing this and the best methods to bring it all together. I don't want to reinvent the wheel. I appreciate hearing the discussion group's thoughts about all this. -Steve
That's what we're here for. Our main goal has been to Thrill all of you and we'll continue to focus attention in making sure we do that.
At this point the technology behind Phanfare is incompatible (and outdated) with what we offer on SmugMug. I believe the subsite functionality should be able to be accomplished via Folders, collecting, or Sharegrounds. There's some improvements we could make to our slideshows in the future that would solve some other differences with SM and PF.
Do you have a smaller folder I could test this on? If you're manually sorting your top level folder, I don't want to muck with that order by potentially toggling the sort order, but if there's a folder with 5-10 galleries that you don't mind if I dig into, I'd love to take a peek.
That's how I do my own site. I have Folders for each year (2017, 2016, 2015, etc), and then I create new galleries using "NAME (YYYY-MM-DD)" and then manually sort them into chronological order. For example, I might have "Yosemite (2017-05-10)", "Skiing (2017-02-16)", "New Years (2017-01-01)" inside there. The sort order stays set to "Manual".
The SmugMug iOS and Android apps should sort Folders, Galleries and Folders in the same order they are sorted within the SmugMug Desktop website (what you see in the Organizer). If you're not seeing that, shoot me a private message with a link to the Folders/Galleries and our teams will dive in immediately.
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 am planning to reorganize everything as leftquark explained in manual sort order. Once it is in manual sort mode there should be no reason to ever change it. In fact, after I get the folders in year order and the galleries ordered manually that should do it. But if I ever try to reorder the galleries in the folder alphabetically and then try to go back to manual sort the order it won't revert back to how I arranged it manually. I'll guess the worst case if this is done is I lose the manual organization in just that folder. If the folders are in years then the sort "Alphabetic Reverse order" will always work for the folders. It's the Galleries inside the folders that have to stay in manual order. Leftquark, if the Galleries in the folders are manual sort order is there any advantage to naming galleries with Name and the date reversed "Skiing(2017-12-16) or is that just how you like to write the dates? It would look funny but if it was "2017-12-16 (Skiiing) then Alphabetic Reverse sort would always work. Is my thinking correct?
You nailed it steve -- putting the date first ("2017-12-16 - Skiing") would work such that sorting by title would get you the proper sorting but visually it was harder for me to find the galleries.
And I was able to confirm that the manual sort order is lost if you change it to an automatic one (title, date, etc).
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations