Mobile Keyword Search

toothjockey

I would like to share my entire site with family and friends and allow them to search my photos for keywords. I don't know how to search for keywords on my ios apps. I get the app installed, but where do you search?
Thanks

leftquark

Searching within our apps is available on our Android app but is not currently available within the iOS app. Your friends and family can always visit your site on their web-browser, and add /search to the end or your site URL to search for keywords.

Since we’ve added search to the Android app, and our intention is to have the same features on both apps, I can also tell you that we’ve been hard at work on also adding search to the iOS app. We’re getting really close and expect this to hit the App Store within the next few weeks. Once available, you’ll see a magnifying glass in the upper right of the screen which will allow you, your friends and family to type in a keyword to go to those photos or jump to a gallery. Your friends and family will need to download the iOS app, and then “follow” you to be able to do this ... or they can use their mobile web-browser with the URL to find their photos.

toothjockey

Thanks for your prompt reply. That answers my question.

leftquark

Search is now available in the iOS app. Make sure you have version 3.4.0 (just launched today) or later. Find the magnifying glass in the top right corner of the app. You can search for folders, galleries or photos using titles, captions, keywords or more.

pilotdave

In the Android app, what is the sort order of search results. Just did a little test, and it seems totally random to me, but I haven't studied it. Any chance that search results in the apps will be sortable in a future version?

Dave

leftquark

Certainly an option -- we had mocked it up originally but then pulled it out so that we could simplify and get a version out as quickly as possible. We have a lot of ideas on how we could improve search in the apps and we'll continue to refine and tune-up the implementation in the future.

It's currently sorting by Photo Rank. The other options would be "Newest" or "Oldest" (which is currently determined by Date Uploaded .... though we have a task for the backend team to update it to use the photos Date Taken).

pilotdave

Interesting. And the factors that play into photo rank are still top secret?

More testing reveals... either sort order is broken, or the photo rank algorithm needs a lot of work. My guess is that the vast majority of my photos are given equal rank, so the results end up random. Can you provide some hints as to what plays into photo rank? I'm assuming photo views, but what else? Is it possible for many photos to have the same photo rank?

Dave

Allen

We've been complaining about this for years and Smug refuses to do anything about it. Most want the sort to be by newest first, at least in the forums. But a lot of photos are scanned so probably latest uploaded would work better. "Rant" is completely worthless, been for years.

leftquark

@pilotdave said:
Interesting. And the factors that play into photo rank are still top secret?

I won't go into the exact algorithm that plays into Photo Rank but I can say that Photo Views, comments, and comment ratings are some of the factors that go into Photo Rank. Likes also played into it, until we removed the ability to like a photo.

Most photos, at this point, have the same PhotoRank and that's why it appears they're all the same. As Allen said, it needs a lot of work but so do a ton of other things, and we're prioritizing the things that impact the most people in the most important ways. So far, this hasn't bubbled up high enough.

@Allen said:
Most want the sort to be by newest first, at least in the forums.

That's something we could investigate and change pretty easily if the majority of users prefer sorting by newest, rather than Photo Rank.

@Allen said:
But a lot of photos are scanned so probably latest uploaded would work better.

An extremely small portion of photos on SmugMug are scanned photos. Photos with valid EXIF / metadata make up nearly all the photos on SmugMug and the feedback has been pretty clear that Date Taken would be a much better value for "Newest" or "Oldest"