How long will it be until "copy" is back in organizer? I use this all the time. I would also love to have sizes back in organizer. I often use organizer to do some additional culling of my final galleries, as well as to download smaller sizes with watermarks. In both cases having the sizes option is extremely helpful. In addition, I literally USE EVERY SINGLE TOOL that Smugmug has removed from the lightbox.
While I appreciate all of the work that must go into maintaining Smugmug, I would also like to add that while I understand the desire to simplify and get rid of features that don't work; I imagine that there are many others like me, who originally chose Smugmug specifically BECAUSE it provided many unusual options and features that other alternatives did not. There were other mainstream photo sharing sites that I specifically did NOT choose because they did not offer all of the possibilities that Smugmug did. For some time now, Smugmug seems to have been intent on trimming many of those wonderful features away, because they assume that most of the customers don't use them. Meanwhile, I have found it frustrating to feel as though many things I use and/or love simply disappear, while feature ideas that have tons of support from Smugmug customers never come to fruition (speaking of which, where did that list go?).
Why bother to take away being able to view sizes in organizer? Why switch to a new lightbox if you aren't ready to add in copy/show/hide/replace?
Smugmug, thank you for everything you've done. I'm sure this isn't easy, but I would really love it if adding new features didn't always seem to involve taking others away?
@corpuzrob said:
How long will it be until "copy" is back in organizer?
Why bother to take away being able to view sizes in organizer? Why switch to a new lightbox if you aren't ready to add in copy/show/hide/replace?
We’re hoping to have Copy, Replace and Show/Hide back in next week.
One of our company values is to Thrill our Customers (you) and that means we want to push improvements out as soon as we can. Copy, Replace, Show and Hide all had workarounds (they’re still in the Gallery lightbox) so we wanted to get the new one out as soon as possible. It also gives us time to collect feedback like this so we can improve the Lightbox before we roll it out everywhere. Ultimately we all end with a better product by launching it in pieces, sooner (provided we still have workarounds which we do).
@corpuzrob said:
In addition, I literally USE EVERY SINGLE TOOL that Smugmug has removed from the lightbox.
There will always be someone who uses one of our tools otherwise what was the point of building it in the first place? By focusing on the tools that the entire community uses we can help add new tools for you much quicker than if we tried to support everything.
@corpuzrob said:
Meanwhile, I have found it frustrating to feel as though many things I use and/or love simply disappear, while feature ideas that have tons of support from Smugmug customers never come to fruition (speaking of which, where did that list go?).
Smugmug, thank you for everything you've done. I'm sure this isn't easy, but I would really love it if adding new features didn't always seem to involve taking others away?
This is precisly why we sometimes make the tough decision to remove unused features — it speeds up our ability to launch new things that help you accomplish your desires. Trying to maintain a huge product slows us down considerably and as photographers who use SmugMug daily ourselves, we’re excited to work on a number of things and get faster at bringing them to all of you. Our intention is to be able to move fast enough that we can build some of the tools that you mentioned here would better suit your needs (for example: I’d much rather work on a better download tool that lets you select watermark/unwatermarked ... or a zoom feature instead of the Sizes. We’ve got some other things to work on first but the faster we can bring them to life, the sooner we can get to these other ones).
I copy a specific watermarked size to post elsewhere. When I do a bunch of these I need them to be all the same size.
How would "zoom" ever be able to zoom to that exact size for every one of these?
@Allen said:
I copy a specific watermarked size to post elsewhere. When I do a bunch of these I need them to be all the same size.
How would "zoom" ever be able to zoom to that exact size for every one of these?
Copying the code to embed photos somewhere else is still found from the “Sharing” action.
BTW, all the examples shown for the crop and zoomed thumbs were created using the current tool.
It's just that the results are reverted back to the original the next day.
Fullscreen is not fullscreen. The whole point of fullscreen is to display the image to fill the screen with no additional page elements in the way!
An additional Close button (X) still appears on the upper-left of the screen and overlaps action buttons.
This is how the fullscreen view appears in the current Lightbox and is what I would expect to see in the new Lightbox (minus, of course, the extra Close (X) button):
The action button labels overlap other elements:
4: The Lightbox as viewed in Chrome on the iPad Pro 11" doesn't even appear to have a fullscreen button.
Please advise as to the planned resolution of these issues. Thanks in advance.
@DJDigitalDave said:
1. Fullscreen is not fullscreen. The whole point of fullscreen is to display the image to fill the screen with no additional page elements in the way!
On the computer the navigation and action buttons will fade away after a few seconds.
On touch devices you can tap once on the photo to hide the other elements and view just the photo.
This works in fullscreen mode and not-in-fullscreen.
The point of fullscreen is to hide the browsers fluff (address bar, tabs, etc) but we still want the rest of lightbox to be usable. You still need to be able to take all the same actions while fullscreen — it’s not meant to be a mode for viewing a single photo with nothing to do on it.
@DJDigitalDave said:
2. An additional Close button (X) still appears on the upper-left of the screen and overlaps action buttons.
Safari is adding their own fullscreen close button. We must have missed this during development. I’ll get with the team to see if we can design around it since I don’t believe iOS lets us hide the Safari close button (the one on the left).
@DJDigitalDave said:
This is how the fullscreen view appears in the current Lightbox and is what I would expect to see in the new Lightbox (minus, of course, the extra Close (X) button):
When in fullscreen mode, with the action/nav buttons hidden, the photo is larger than when not in fullscreen but we still reserve room for the nav/action buttons. It would be very jarring experience to have the photo shrink and expand when those buttons show/hide. The photo will (mostly) fill the screen, minus the space for the navigation buttons. I don’t want to go back to a place where the action buttons overlap the photo — we heard over and over from all of you that you hated having your photo covered; and so far the feedback has been overwhelmingly “YES!” for the new design where the action buttons live just outside the photo.
@DJDigitalDave said:
3. The action button labels overlap other elements:
Hmm.... those tool tips should only show when a mouse is hovered over the icons. Do you have any steps I could use to try to reproduce this? I couldn’t get the tooltips to appear on my iPad Pro.
@DJDigitalDave said:
4: The Lightbox as viewed in Chrome on the iPad Pro 11" doesn't even appear to have a fullscreen button.
I’ll have to dig into this one ... From a quick search on Google, it looks like it might not have a fullscreen mode built into the browser.
Two updates to the new Lightbox:
1) “Make a Copy” and “Replace” have been added to the Tools menu in the new Lightbox. We’re still working to add Show/Hide back in.
2) We’ve made it a little easier to dismiss the sidebar when it’s open. When a sidebar is open, you can now click on a photo to hide the sidebar. Videos still have to be closed by tapping the icon that’s open, since tapping on the video begins playing it.
Work on the new Lightbox is continuing and we've got a few more small improvements:
You can choose whether a photo is hidden or visible within a gallery: the option to "Show" or "Hide" a photo has now returned to the Tools menu
When viewing the Lightbox from within the Organizer links to Keywords now properly link to your custom domain, if you had one.
Browsing photos on an iPad looks even better -- we now hide the left/right navigation arrows since everyone knows to swipe. Less clutter is better!
When editing a photos Title, Caption or Keyword you can now press the "Esc" key to cancel the edits.
If you make changes to a photos' Title, Caption or Keywords, we now ask you if you're sure you want to cancel. Less chance of losing the story you just wrote!
Annnnnd one more which I wanted to highlight on its own because I think a lot of you will have a sigh of relief....
On desktop you can also Zoom in on a photo. When the sidebar is closed in the New Lightbox the mouse icon will turn into a magnifying glass while your mouse is over the photo. Clicking will zoom in on the portion of the photo you clicked on and the mouse will turn into a hand, allowing you to drag the photo around to where you want. Clicking again will zoom back out.
We'll load the largest possible size, per the Maximum Display Size, for the zoomed photo. For example, if the window is small and only loads an X2 but the gallery allows a 4k photo, when you zoom we'll then load the 4k photo for you to zoom into. If the display size and the max display size are the same, we'll still let you zoom, though it'll end up blowing up the pixels.
The team had a task to improve the way pinch-to-zoom works on iOS and Android devices but I had previously shared all of your feedback around the Sizes button. While our engineering team was working on pinch-to-zoom they realized there was an opportunity to help bring Zoom to you on desktop and thus this improvement was born. SmugMug isn't like other companies where we ignore our customers feedback -- we absolutely hear it -- and although I couldn't promise you when we'd incorporate that feedback, I'm glad that we could take action on it in a reasonable timeframe. We hope you all enjoy this.
The zoom is nice. It's now easier than using sizes! Tried on PC only so far.
I know you would be disappointed if I just left it at "good job" , so some thoughts...
When zoomed, and you go to the next image with the left/right nagivation, how about maintaining the current zoom state? I'm actually not sure how often I would need that, but it seems less confusing, maybe?
Any hope of doing like google photos and letting a mouse wheel roll zoom in and out? Even if it's only binary (in or out) not continuous, matching google's standard means less confusion probably (though frankly a magnifying glass with a + is pretty clear). Not instead of, just as an alternate navigation shortcut.
Why the fly-down white-on-black "X" in the center when you move the mouse near the top, there's already an "X" over on the right corner?
@Ferguson said:
Any hope of doing like google photos and letting a mouse wheel roll zoom in and out? Even if it's only binary (in or out) not continuous, matching google's standard means less confusion probably (though frankly a magnifying glass with a + is pretty clear). Not instead of, just as an alternate navigation shortcut.
That had occurred as well but we wanted to get this out as quickly as possible and to see if additional feedback came in similar to this. We'll evaluate as more of y'all play with it!
@Ferguson said:
Why the fly-down white-on-black "X" in the center when you move the mouse near the top, there's already an "X" over on the right corner?
Any chance you have a screenshot of this? That's not intentional and I can't seem to recreate it. I've got the standard questions: Did you zoom in, then moved the mouse to the top while you were dragging around and the "x" appeared? or before you started dragging? Does it happen on all screen sizes? Which browser?
@Ferguson said:
Why the fly-down white-on-black "X" in the center when you move the mouse near the top, there's already an "X" over on the right corner?
Any chance you have a screenshot of this? That's not intentional and I can't seem to recreate it. I've got the standard questions: Did you zoom in, then moved the mouse to the top while you were dragging around and the "x" appeared? or before you started dragging? Does it happen on all screen sizes? Which browser?
Ah, sorry, I was in full screen mode (invoked with your top left button). It's not a close image as I thought, it appears to be a exit-full-screen. Sorry. Though... frankly I would never have guessed that is what it was for, if I had not just finished trying a ton of things the last of which was full screen to get it to come back.
Using mouse, arrowing to next photo and moving mouse off window, the overlay never hides. Have to click back inside window, not on arrow to hide overlay.
Browsing thru a bunch of photos clicking arrow the overlay never hides. Personally I'd like to look at photos without that huge ugly buy button and file name covering photo. Edit: and not having to click elsewhere to hide overlay on every photo.
Zoom works nice. But blowing up the pixels beyond "uploaded/original" size can look really bad. Why would we want anyone to see that?
I try to never upload a size that the subject is not reasonably in focus.
We'll load the largest possible size, per the Maximum Display Size, for the zoomed photo. For example, if the window is small and only loads an X2 but the gallery allows a 4k photo, when you zoom we'll then load the 4k photo for you to zoom into. If the display size and the max display size are the same, we'll still let you zoom, though it'll end up blowing up the pixels.
First, of all, I agree with Allen. Upscaling an already max size image -- "blowing the pixels" -- is just going to make the photos (and the photographer!) look bad. Please rethink this.
Second, when the basic lightbox displayed image is well below max size, the zooms seemed fuzzier than I would have expected. They are not awful, but they don't seem to have the extra detail I'd expect in a higher-resolution image. I may be overreaching on my understanding of HTML and CSS, but when I look at the HTML for a zoomed image, I think I see a problem. See if this sounds right. You load the higher resolution original, but with an inline HTML style command to set the width and height to fit in the window. This is inside a div with an Inline HTML transform command that scales content up by a factor of two. I think what the first does is to ask the browser to downscale (reduce the resolution) of the original. The second (the div) then upscales that reduced-resolution image to a suitably large size, but there is no recovery of the detail lost from the downscale. Am I misunderstanding what happens? I don't think the browsers are smart enough to optimize across statements. Maybe better to just load the larger image with width and height set to the final 2X size (or the size of the image you are working with, whatever is smaller) and then set the overflow to hidden.
@Allen said:
Using mouse, arrowing to next photo and moving mouse off window, the overlay never hides. Have to click back inside window, not on arrow to hide overlay.
Browsing thru a bunch of photos clicking arrow the overlay never hides. Personally I'd like to look at photos without that huge ugly buy button and file name covering photo. Edit: and not having to click elsewhere to hide overlay on every photo.
If you leave your mouse over anything that could be clickable we don’t hide the overlay since it would be jarring to have items you’re about to press hide on you. So if you have your mouse anywhere in the sidebar or the area where the nav buttons/action buttons are, the overlay will stay visible. We actually have complaints about the overlay hiding too quickly and we’ll probably slow it down a little.
Can you confirm where your mouse is when you’re seeing the overlay stay visible? If it’s in the middle of the photo and it doesn’t hide can you share your browser / OS details?
@Allen said:
Zoom works nice. But blowing up the pixels beyond "uploaded/original" size can look really bad. Why would we want anyone to see that?
I try to never upload a size that the subject is not reasonably in focus.
Because people may still want to zoom in on parts of an image even if it doesn’t load higher resolution pixels. There still may be visible views even if we are just pixel zooming.
For example, this photo has loaded the max display size (an X3) to display it.
But I still may want to zoom in on the waterfall and see if there’s more details. Zooming in still looks good and I can really enjoy the details.
You can’t zoom in as much as you could if a higher Rez max display size was allowed but it still allows a viewer to enjoy the photo in ways that wouldn’t be possible if we disabled zoom.
@Jtring said:
Second, when the basic lightbox displayed image is well below max size, the zooms seemed fuzzier than I would have expected. They are not awful, but they don't seem to have the extra detail I'd expect in a higher-resolution image.
I tested this fairly extensively tonight and I have to say: it's really really tough to tell. The first 3 photos I tested looked identical while I was logged in as the owner and the Original photo (the full resolution) was getting loaded for the zoom. I tested it on a development platform where I could try logged-out so the Original didn't load (it loaded a 4k version, for example) and I was finally able to notice a small amount of degradation on the zoomed in version ... though I really had to pixel peep to tell. I'll talk with the Engineering team and see if improvements can be made.
@leftquark said:
Can you confirm where your mouse is when you’re seeing the overlay stay visible? > If it’s in the middle of the photo and it doesn’t hide can you share your
browser / OS details?
After clicking arrow to next photo, moving mouse to right off browser to desktop outside browser window overlay does not hide.
Firefox 67.0.3 Win7
I think a more logical scenario would be as follows when using the arrow nav.
With side panel open, using arrows, the overlay and side panel stay open/active.
With side panel closed, using arrows, the overlay hides and stays hidden until mouse movement off the arrow area.
This would allow continuous browsing with nothing covering photos.
When the mouse is not placed over any action buttons, the overlay will hide after a few seconds. You can tap the left/right arrow keys to browse photos and the Lights Out mode will stay active (overlay is hidden).
The only time the overlay doesn't auto-hide when the mouse isn't over any buttons is when the mouse was last over the nav arrows and the mouse is moved just barely off the screen but still within the vertical height of the nav arrows.
We did this because if the mouse is still near the nav buttons we assume the viewer will want to navigate soon. Make sure the mouse isn't in the vertical space of the left/right button and the Lightbox will go into Lights Out mode and you can browse clutter free.
@DJDigitalDave said:
1. Fullscreen is not fullscreen. The whole point of fullscreen is to display the image to fill the screen with no additional page elements in the way!
On the computer the navigation and action buttons will fade away after a few seconds.
On touch devices you can tap once on the photo to hide the other elements and view just the photo.
This works in fullscreen mode and not-in-fullscreen.
The problem is not with hiding the action buttons; that works fine. The problem is that on tablets, at least, the image does not truly maximize to fullscreen (See examples below.) I have absolutely no problem with the Lightbox functionality on desktop screens; everything works as expected in fullscreen. But at least on my 11" iPad Pro, there's no difference in the size of the image in fullscreen vs. non-fullscreen.
The point of fullscreen is to hide the browsers fluff (address bar, tabs, etc) but we still want the rest of lightbox to be usable. You still need to be able to take all the same actions while fullscreen — it’s not meant to be a mode for viewing a single photo with nothing to do on it.
I understand that, but must it be at the expense of not being able to display an image corner-to-corner on a tablet? That would be an unfortunate trade-off. Displaying a maximized image seems to be what viewers would expect in a mode called "fullscreen" and tablets are the perfect devices for that due to the typical aspect-ratio of their screens. Not to mention the fullscreen slideshow, which is a common way people view a gallery and would be far less impactful with photos that were "not quite fullscreen." The action buttons would be easily available again by simply closing out of fullscreen. Photos at least display fully top to bottom in fullscreen on desktop screens; not so on my tablet (as seen in the screen caps below).
@DJDigitalDave said:
2. An additional Close button (X) still appears on the upper-left of the screen and overlaps action buttons.
Safari is adding their own fullscreen close button. We must have missed this during development. I’ll get with the team to see if we can design around it since I don’t believe iOS lets us hide the Safari close button (the one on the left).
I'm surprised this went unnoticed during development. Were you using real iPads and other mobile devices during development, or emulating them on a desktop? I would hope there was a thorough emphasis on testing for mobile devices because, like it or not (I don't) those are the devices that the vast majority of users view the Web on these days. Hopefully you can indeed design around it if the "X" can't be removed in Safari. Maybe the action buttons can be pushed down a taste? Would appreciate it if you'd keep us informed as to the resolution of this particular issue.
@DJDigitalDave said:
This is how the fullscreen view appears in the current Lightbox and is what I would expect to see in the new Lightbox (minus, of course, the extra Close (X) button):
When in fullscreen mode, with the action/nav buttons hidden, the photo is larger than when not in fullscreen but we still reserve room for the nav/action buttons. It would be very jarring experience to have the photo shrink and expand when those buttons show/hide. The photo will (mostly) fill the screen, minus the space for the navigation buttons. I don’t want to go back to a place where the action buttons overlap the photo — we heard over and over from all of you that you hated having your photo covered; and so far the feedback has been overwhelmingly “YES!” for the new design where the action buttons live just outside the photo.
I'm on the same page as you about not having photos covered by action buttons and I certainly get it that it would be jarring to have photos contract and expand to accommodate them. But this again speaks to the notion that fullscreen would be to view an unfettered, maximized image vs. a non-fullscreen view that would display all the action buttons - at least on tablets.
As to the photo being larger (as expected) in fullscreen with the action buttons hidden, this is disappointingly NOT true on the 11" iPad Pro:
In fact, the lack of a larger image in fullscreen was the first thing that caught my eye when I began to examine the new Lightbox. Was expecting to see a beautiful, screen-filling photo on the amazing 11" iPad Pro screen!
@DJDigitalDave said:
3. The action button labels overlap other elements:
Hmm.... those tool tips should only show when a mouse is hovered over the icons. Do you have any steps I could use to try to reproduce this? I couldn’t get the tooltips to appear on my iPad Pro.
I simply touched and released the action icons and the tool tips appeared (and persisted). Seems to happen intermittently. Wish I could be of more help here.
@DJDigitalDave said:
4: The Lightbox as viewed in Chrome on the iPad Pro 11" doesn't even appear to have a fullscreen button.
I’ll have to dig into this one ... From a quick search on Google, it looks like it might not have a fullscreen mode built into the browser.
Desktop Chrome has it. Don't know about mobile Chrome. It'd be a shame if it doesn't.
One additional question: Is it etched in stone that a photo's caption will only be viewable among the clutter of all the other photo info in the sidebar?
Just noticed after LB goes to "full screen" from a "windowed" size, when I click the "X" to close full screen, the the browser does not return to the starting window size but remains in full screen. I have to first click the "full screen" button to return to windowed size then close LB.
@leftquark said:
When the mouse is not placed over any action buttons, the overlay will hide after a few seconds. You can tap the left/right arrow keys to browse photos and the Lights Out mode will stay active (overlay is hidden).
The overlay does hide when not over any actions buttons, true.
But, any mouse movement anywhere on the screen immediately brings back the overlay.
Any mouse movement in zoomed view also brings back the overlay.
FF v67.0.3 Win 7
@DJDigitalDave said:
I understand that, but must it be at the expense of not being able to display an image corner-to-corner on a tablet? That would be an unfortunate trade-off. Displaying a maximized image seems to be what viewers would expect in a mode called "fullscreen" and tablets are the perfect devices for that due to the typical aspect-ratio of their screens. Not to mention the fullscreen slideshow, which is a common way people view a gallery and would be far less impactful with photos that were "not quite fullscreen." The action buttons would be easily available again by simply closing out of fullscreen. Photos at least display fully top to bottom in fullscreen on desktop screens; not so on my tablet (as seen in the screen caps below).
I know it's not the answer you want to hear but: Yes. The purpose of Fullscreen mode, just like almost every app in the world, is to make the app fullscreen (without any other scrim or things from the OS, browser, etc). It is not meant to make just part of the app (in this case the photo) fullscreen. There are still many people who browse with their browser in fullscreen mode but want to take all the actions of the app without having features hidden just because they got rid of their browser buttons.
With that said, I do agree that there's a valid desire to a fullscreen photo display in addition to the other mode. We won't change the behavior of the existing fullscreen mode but I'll talk to the team about an additional feature in which the photo itself is fullscreen. I'll be honest and say that this is much lower on our priority list than some other items (for example: updating the sharing sidebar, giving the comments screen a visual refresh in the Lightbox, adding the map back in to the photo details, etc).
Another small update to the Lightbox has gone live:
It’s now really easy to tell if you’re viewing the Photo Details, Sharing, or Commenting thanks to a colored border next to the icon of the mode you’re in. In the Organizer this will be a green left-border; outside of the Organizer this will inherit your themes “accent” color.
I've just looked at the new Lightbox for the 1st time. I like what has been done and didn't find any technical issues. I do have a suggestion for improving usability in the future for these specific use cases: Buy, Share, and Download multiple photos. I think it would be really useful if you could tag photos as you scroll through them, then switch to a grid view of all tagged photos. From the grid view you should then be able to untag any photos that are not actually desired, then buy, share, and/or download the remaining tagged photos. Even better would be if this tagged view could be built across multiple galleries.
@Teetime said:
I've just looked at the new Lightbox for the 1st time. I like what has been done and didn't find any technical issues. I do have a suggestion for improving usability in the future for these specific use cases: Buy, Share, and Download multiple photos. I think it would be really useful if you could tag photos as you scroll through them, then switch to a grid view of all tagged photos. From the grid view you should then be able to untag any photos that are not actually desired, then buy, share, and/or download the remaining tagged photos. Even better would be if this tagged view could be built across multiple galleries.
Thanks for the request. For customers on the "Pro" plan (formerly called "Business"), you can mostly do this using the Events feature, where photos can be Favorited and then you can view that list of Favorites to download, buy, etc. We've wanted to bring that functionality to everyone and not just people using "Events" at some point in the future.
I've just studied this thread and spent some time with the Organizer Lightbox. I have questions/wishes concerning a few features.
1) is there going to be an option or customization that will allow us to show captions instead of titles in the photo overlay? Or to show neither?
2) same goes for showing/not showing keywords and the "from gallery_xxxx" on Smart Galleries
3) personally, in the "info sidebar" I would also like to only show the camera info and map info (hopefully this will come back sooner rather than later) when the user clicks to expand a button or tab. The "info sidebar" would be a lot cleaner without this info showing up right away.
@sarasphotos said:
1) is there going to be an option or customization that will allow us to show captions instead of titles in the photo overlay? Or to show neither?
Not at this time. Captions, which are typically much longer will always be displayed in the sidebar. The intent was to keep as little overlap over the photo and titles are usually much shorter while captions are longer, thus we opted to allow the title to overlap so it draws your viewers in to read more about the photo. A caption would need some kind of “read more” or other indication when it overruns the space allocated and that added clutter we are keeping away.
@sarasphotos said:
2) same goes for showing/not showing keywords and the "from gallery_xxxx" on Smart Galleries
The existing Lightbox settings (buried in the Customizer when you’re on a gallery and go to Customize -> Content & Design, then select “Lightbox”) allow you to control Title, Caption, Keywords, etc. Title will be obeyed in both the sidebar and the overlay, while Caption and Title will be displayed or not in the sidebar. You can turn keywords off, though the gallery attribution for collected photos (including Smart Galleries) cannot be disabled with a setting.
If you’d like to hide the gallery attribution you can always use CSS to disable that.
@sarasphotos said:
3) personally, in the "info sidebar" I would also like to only show the camera info and map info (hopefully this will come back sooner rather than later) when the user clicks to expand a button or tab. The "info sidebar" would be a lot cleaner without this info showing up right away.
You can turn off the caption and keywords to display just the metadata and map. We’re hoping to have the map back within the next few weeks.
@sarasphotos said:
3) personally, in the "info sidebar" I would also like to only show the camera info and map info (hopefully this will come back sooner rather than later) when the user clicks to expand a button or tab. The "info sidebar" would be a lot cleaner without this info showing up right away.
You can turn off the caption and keywords to display just the metadata and map. We’re hoping to have the map back within the next few weeks.
Aaron, thanks for the info. In the last question I think you misunderstood me. Instead of showing only info and map with no captions and keywords, I'd like the option to only display the info and map sections when they are clicked. I truly believe that the average user is not particularly interested in my camera info and marginally in the map info and that the title and caption should be clearly presented without clutter. But that being said, I'd like the info and map options to be readily availabe for the people who are interested.
Thanks!
Comments
How long will it be until "copy" is back in organizer? I use this all the time. I would also love to have sizes back in organizer. I often use organizer to do some additional culling of my final galleries, as well as to download smaller sizes with watermarks. In both cases having the sizes option is extremely helpful. In addition, I literally USE EVERY SINGLE TOOL that Smugmug has removed from the lightbox.
While I appreciate all of the work that must go into maintaining Smugmug, I would also like to add that while I understand the desire to simplify and get rid of features that don't work; I imagine that there are many others like me, who originally chose Smugmug specifically BECAUSE it provided many unusual options and features that other alternatives did not. There were other mainstream photo sharing sites that I specifically did NOT choose because they did not offer all of the possibilities that Smugmug did. For some time now, Smugmug seems to have been intent on trimming many of those wonderful features away, because they assume that most of the customers don't use them. Meanwhile, I have found it frustrating to feel as though many things I use and/or love simply disappear, while feature ideas that have tons of support from Smugmug customers never come to fruition (speaking of which, where did that list go?).
Why bother to take away being able to view sizes in organizer? Why switch to a new lightbox if you aren't ready to add in copy/show/hide/replace?
Smugmug, thank you for everything you've done. I'm sure this isn't easy, but I would really love it if adding new features didn't always seem to involve taking others away?
We’re hoping to have Copy, Replace and Show/Hide back in next week.
One of our company values is to Thrill our Customers (you) and that means we want to push improvements out as soon as we can. Copy, Replace, Show and Hide all had workarounds (they’re still in the Gallery lightbox) so we wanted to get the new one out as soon as possible. It also gives us time to collect feedback like this so we can improve the Lightbox before we roll it out everywhere. Ultimately we all end with a better product by launching it in pieces, sooner (provided we still have workarounds which we do).
There will always be someone who uses one of our tools otherwise what was the point of building it in the first place? By focusing on the tools that the entire community uses we can help add new tools for you much quicker than if we tried to support everything.
This is precisly why we sometimes make the tough decision to remove unused features — it speeds up our ability to launch new things that help you accomplish your desires. Trying to maintain a huge product slows us down considerably and as photographers who use SmugMug daily ourselves, we’re excited to work on a number of things and get faster at bringing them to all of you. Our intention is to be able to move fast enough that we can build some of the tools that you mentioned here would better suit your needs (for example: I’d much rather work on a better download tool that lets you select watermark/unwatermarked ... or a zoom feature instead of the Sizes. We’ve got some other things to work on first but the faster we can bring them to life, the sooner we can get to these other ones).
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 copy a specific watermarked size to post elsewhere. When I do a bunch of these I need them to be all the same size.
How would "zoom" ever be able to zoom to that exact size for every one of these?
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Copying the code to embed photos somewhere else is still found from the “Sharing” action.
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 added another example to the bottom of this post.
It shows the crop and zoom effect for the thumb on the map page.
https://dgrin.com/discussion/comment/2094975/#Comment_2094975
BTW, all the examples shown for the crop and zoomed thumbs were created using the current tool.
It's just that the results are reverted back to the original the next day.
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Still problems with the iPad Pro 11"/Safari.
This is how the fullscreen view appears in the current Lightbox and is what I would expect to see in the new Lightbox (minus, of course, the extra Close (X) button):
4: The Lightbox as viewed in Chrome on the iPad Pro 11" doesn't even appear to have a fullscreen button.
Please advise as to the planned resolution of these issues. Thanks in advance.
~ Dave
www.djdigitaldave.net
www.djdigitaldave.net
On the computer the navigation and action buttons will fade away after a few seconds.
On touch devices you can tap once on the photo to hide the other elements and view just the photo.
This works in fullscreen mode and not-in-fullscreen.
The point of fullscreen is to hide the browsers fluff (address bar, tabs, etc) but we still want the rest of lightbox to be usable. You still need to be able to take all the same actions while fullscreen — it’s not meant to be a mode for viewing a single photo with nothing to do on it.
Safari is adding their own fullscreen close button. We must have missed this during development. I’ll get with the team to see if we can design around it since I don’t believe iOS lets us hide the Safari close button (the one on the left).
When in fullscreen mode, with the action/nav buttons hidden, the photo is larger than when not in fullscreen but we still reserve room for the nav/action buttons. It would be very jarring experience to have the photo shrink and expand when those buttons show/hide. The photo will (mostly) fill the screen, minus the space for the navigation buttons. I don’t want to go back to a place where the action buttons overlap the photo — we heard over and over from all of you that you hated having your photo covered; and so far the feedback has been overwhelmingly “YES!” for the new design where the action buttons live just outside the photo.
Hmm.... those tool tips should only show when a mouse is hovered over the icons. Do you have any steps I could use to try to reproduce this? I couldn’t get the tooltips to appear on my iPad Pro.
I’ll have to dig into this one ... From a quick search on Google, it looks like it might not have a fullscreen mode built into the browser.
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
Two updates to the new Lightbox:
1) “Make a Copy” and “Replace” have been added to the
Toolsmenu in the new Lightbox. We’re still working to add Show/Hide back in.2) We’ve made it a little easier to dismiss the sidebar when it’s open. When a sidebar is open, you can now click on a photo to hide the sidebar. Videos still have to be closed by tapping the icon that’s open, since tapping on the video begins playing it.
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
Work on the new Lightbox is continuing and we've got a few more small 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
Annnnnd one more which I wanted to highlight on its own because I think a lot of you will have a sigh of relief....
On desktop you can also Zoom in on a photo. When the sidebar is closed in the New Lightbox the mouse icon will turn into a magnifying glass while your mouse is over the photo. Clicking will zoom in on the portion of the photo you clicked on and the mouse will turn into a hand, allowing you to drag the photo around to where you want. Clicking again will zoom back out.
We'll load the largest possible size, per the Maximum Display Size, for the zoomed photo. For example, if the window is small and only loads an X2 but the gallery allows a 4k photo, when you zoom we'll then load the 4k photo for you to zoom into. If the display size and the max display size are the same, we'll still let you zoom, though it'll end up blowing up the pixels.
The team had a task to improve the way pinch-to-zoom works on iOS and Android devices but I had previously shared all of your feedback around the Sizes button. While our engineering team was working on pinch-to-zoom they realized there was an opportunity to help bring Zoom to you on desktop and thus this improvement was born. SmugMug isn't like other companies where we ignore our customers feedback -- we absolutely hear it -- and although I couldn't promise you when we'd incorporate that feedback, I'm glad that we could take action on it in a reasonable timeframe. We hope you all enjoy this.
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
The zoom is nice. It's now easier than using sizes! Tried on PC only so far.
I know you would be disappointed if I just left it at "good job"
, so some thoughts...
When zoomed, and you go to the next image with the left/right nagivation, how about maintaining the current zoom state? I'm actually not sure how often I would need that, but it seems less confusing, maybe?
Any hope of doing like google photos and letting a mouse wheel roll zoom in and out? Even if it's only binary (in or out) not continuous, matching google's standard means less confusion probably (though frankly a magnifying glass with a + is pretty clear). Not instead of, just as an alternate navigation shortcut.
Why the fly-down white-on-black "X" in the center when you move the mouse near the top, there's already an "X" over on the right corner?
That had occurred as well but we wanted to get this out as quickly as possible and to see if additional feedback came in similar to this. We'll evaluate as more of y'all play with it!
Any chance you have a screenshot of this? That's not intentional and I can't seem to recreate it. I've got the standard questions: Did you zoom in, then moved the mouse to the top while you were dragging around and the "x" appeared? or before you started dragging? Does it happen on all screen sizes? Which browser?
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
Ah, sorry, I was in full screen mode (invoked with your top left button). It's not a close image as I thought, it appears to be a exit-full-screen. Sorry. Though... frankly I would never have guessed that is what it was for, if I had not just finished trying a ton of things the last of which was full screen to get it to come back.
Using mouse, arrowing to next photo and moving mouse off window, the overlay never hides. Have to click back inside window, not on arrow to hide overlay.
Browsing thru a bunch of photos clicking arrow the overlay never hides. Personally I'd like to look at photos without that huge ugly buy button and file name covering photo. Edit: and not having to click elsewhere to hide overlay on every photo.
Zoom works nice. But blowing up the pixels beyond "uploaded/original" size can look really bad. Why would we want anyone to see that?
I try to never upload a size that the subject is not reasonably in focus.
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First, of all, I agree with Allen. Upscaling an already max size image -- "blowing the pixels" -- is just going to make the photos (and the photographer!) look bad. Please rethink this.
Second, when the basic lightbox displayed image is well below max size, the zooms seemed fuzzier than I would have expected. They are not awful, but they don't seem to have the extra detail I'd expect in a higher-resolution image. I may be overreaching on my understanding of HTML and CSS, but when I look at the HTML for a zoomed image, I think I see a problem. See if this sounds right. You load the higher resolution original, but with an inline HTML style command to set the width and height to fit in the window. This is inside a div with an Inline HTML transform command that scales content up by a factor of two. I think what the first does is to ask the browser to downscale (reduce the resolution) of the original. The second (the div) then upscales that reduced-resolution image to a suitably large size, but there is no recovery of the detail lost from the downscale. Am I misunderstanding what happens? I don't think the browsers are smart enough to optimize across statements. Maybe better to just load the larger image with width and height set to the final 2X size (or the size of the image you are working with, whatever is smaller) and then set the overflow to hidden.
If you leave your mouse over anything that could be clickable we don’t hide the overlay since it would be jarring to have items you’re about to press hide on you. So if you have your mouse anywhere in the sidebar or the area where the nav buttons/action buttons are, the overlay will stay visible. We actually have complaints about the overlay hiding too quickly and we’ll probably slow it down a little.
Can you confirm where your mouse is when you’re seeing the overlay stay visible? If it’s in the middle of the photo and it doesn’t hide can you share your browser / OS details?
Because people may still want to zoom in on parts of an image even if it doesn’t load higher resolution pixels. There still may be visible views even if we are just pixel zooming.
For example, this photo has loaded the max display size (an X3) to display it.
But I still may want to zoom in on the waterfall and see if there’s more details. Zooming in still looks good and I can really enjoy the details.
You can’t zoom in as much as you could if a higher Rez max display size was allowed but it still allows a viewer to enjoy the photo in ways that wouldn’t be possible if we disabled zoom.
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 tested this fairly extensively tonight and I have to say: it's really really tough to tell. The first 3 photos I tested looked identical while I was logged in as the owner and the Original photo (the full resolution) was getting loaded for the zoom. I tested it on a development platform where I could try logged-out so the Original didn't load (it loaded a 4k version, for example) and I was finally able to notice a small amount of degradation on the zoomed in version ... though I really had to pixel peep to tell. I'll talk with the Engineering team and see if improvements can be made.
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
After clicking arrow to next photo, moving mouse to right off browser to desktop outside browser window overlay does not hide.
Firefox 67.0.3 Win7
I think a more logical scenario would be as follows when using the arrow nav.
With side panel open, using arrows, the overlay and side panel stay open/active.
With side panel closed, using arrows, the overlay hides and stays hidden until mouse movement off the arrow area.
This would allow continuous browsing with nothing covering photos.
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When the mouse is not placed over any action buttons, the overlay will hide after a few seconds. You can tap the left/right arrow keys to browse photos and the Lights Out mode will stay active (overlay is hidden).
The only time the overlay doesn't auto-hide when the mouse isn't over any buttons is when the mouse was last over the nav arrows and the mouse is moved just barely off the screen but still within the vertical height of the nav arrows.
We did this because if the mouse is still near the nav buttons we assume the viewer will want to navigate soon. Make sure the mouse isn't in the vertical space of the left/right button and the Lightbox will go into Lights Out mode and you can browse clutter free.
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
The problem is not with hiding the action buttons; that works fine. The problem is that on tablets, at least, the image does not truly maximize to fullscreen (See examples below.) I have absolutely no problem with the Lightbox functionality on desktop screens; everything works as expected in fullscreen. But at least on my 11" iPad Pro, there's no difference in the size of the image in fullscreen vs. non-fullscreen.
I understand that, but must it be at the expense of not being able to display an image corner-to-corner on a tablet? That would be an unfortunate trade-off. Displaying a maximized image seems to be what viewers would expect in a mode called "fullscreen" and tablets are the perfect devices for that due to the typical aspect-ratio of their screens. Not to mention the fullscreen slideshow, which is a common way people view a gallery and would be far less impactful with photos that were "not quite fullscreen." The action buttons would be easily available again by simply closing out of fullscreen. Photos at least display fully top to bottom in fullscreen on desktop screens; not so on my tablet (as seen in the screen caps below).
I'm surprised this went unnoticed during development. Were you using real iPads and other mobile devices during development, or emulating them on a desktop? I would hope there was a thorough emphasis on testing for mobile devices because, like it or not (I don't) those are the devices that the vast majority of users view the Web on these days. Hopefully you can indeed design around it if the "X" can't be removed in Safari. Maybe the action buttons can be pushed down a taste? Would appreciate it if you'd keep us informed as to the resolution of this particular issue.
I'm on the same page as you about not having photos covered by action buttons and I certainly get it that it would be jarring to have photos contract and expand to accommodate them. But this again speaks to the notion that fullscreen would be to view an unfettered, maximized image vs. a non-fullscreen view that would display all the action buttons - at least on tablets.
As to the photo being larger (as expected) in fullscreen with the action buttons hidden, this is disappointingly NOT true on the 11" iPad Pro:
In fact, the lack of a larger image in fullscreen was the first thing that caught my eye when I began to examine the new Lightbox. Was expecting to see a beautiful, screen-filling photo on the amazing 11" iPad Pro screen!
I simply touched and released the action icons and the tool tips appeared (and persisted). Seems to happen intermittently. Wish I could be of more help here.
Desktop Chrome has it. Don't know about mobile Chrome. It'd be a shame if it doesn't.
One additional question: Is it etched in stone that a photo's caption will only be viewable among the clutter of all the other photo info in the sidebar?
Thanks,
~ Dave
dave@djdigitaldave.net
www.djdigitaldave.net
Just noticed after LB goes to "full screen" from a "windowed" size, when I click the "X" to close full screen, the the browser does not return to the starting window size but remains in full screen. I have to first click the "full screen" button to return to windowed size then close LB.
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The overlay does hide when not over any actions buttons, true.
But, any mouse movement anywhere on the screen immediately brings back the overlay.
Any mouse movement in zoomed view also brings back the overlay.
FF v67.0.3 Win 7
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I know it's not the answer you want to hear but: Yes. The purpose of Fullscreen mode, just like almost every app in the world, is to make the app fullscreen (without any other scrim or things from the OS, browser, etc). It is not meant to make just part of the app (in this case the photo) fullscreen. There are still many people who browse with their browser in fullscreen mode but want to take all the actions of the app without having features hidden just because they got rid of their browser buttons.
With that said, I do agree that there's a valid desire to a fullscreen photo display in addition to the other mode. We won't change the behavior of the existing fullscreen mode but I'll talk to the team about an additional feature in which the photo itself is fullscreen. I'll be honest and say that this is much lower on our priority list than some other items (for example: updating the sharing sidebar, giving the comments screen a visual refresh in the Lightbox, adding the map back in to the photo details, 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
Another small update to the Lightbox has gone live:
It’s now really easy to tell if you’re viewing the Photo Details, Sharing, or Commenting thanks to a colored border next to the icon of the mode you’re in. In the Organizer this will be a green left-border; outside of the Organizer this will inherit your themes “accent” color.
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've just looked at the new Lightbox for the 1st time. I like what has been done and didn't find any technical issues. I do have a suggestion for improving usability in the future for these specific use cases: Buy, Share, and Download multiple photos. I think it would be really useful if you could tag photos as you scroll through them, then switch to a grid view of all tagged photos. From the grid view you should then be able to untag any photos that are not actually desired, then buy, share, and/or download the remaining tagged photos. Even better would be if this tagged view could be built across multiple galleries.
Thanks for the request. For customers on the "Pro" plan (formerly called "Business"), you can mostly do this using the Events feature, where photos can be Favorited and then you can view that list of Favorites to download, buy, etc. We've wanted to bring that functionality to everyone and not just people using "Events" at some point in the future.
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've just studied this thread and spent some time with the Organizer Lightbox. I have questions/wishes concerning a few features.
1) is there going to be an option or customization that will allow us to show captions instead of titles in the photo overlay? Or to show neither?
2) same goes for showing/not showing keywords and the "from gallery_xxxx" on Smart Galleries
3) personally, in the "info sidebar" I would also like to only show the camera info and map info (hopefully this will come back sooner rather than later) when the user clicks to expand a button or tab. The "info sidebar" would be a lot cleaner without this info showing up right away.
Not at this time. Captions, which are typically much longer will always be displayed in the sidebar. The intent was to keep as little overlap over the photo and titles are usually much shorter while captions are longer, thus we opted to allow the title to overlap so it draws your viewers in to read more about the photo. A caption would need some kind of “read more” or other indication when it overruns the space allocated and that added clutter we are keeping away.
The existing Lightbox settings (buried in the Customizer when you’re on a gallery and go to Customize -> Content & Design, then select “Lightbox”) allow you to control Title, Caption, Keywords, etc. Title will be obeyed in both the sidebar and the overlay, while Caption and Title will be displayed or not in the sidebar. You can turn keywords off, though the gallery attribution for collected photos (including Smart Galleries) cannot be disabled with a setting.
If you’d like to hide the gallery attribution you can always use CSS to disable that.
You can turn off the caption and keywords to display just the metadata and map. We’re hoping to have the map back within the next few weeks.
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
Aaron, thanks for the info. In the last question I think you misunderstood me. Instead of showing only info and map with no captions and keywords, I'd like the option to only display the info and map sections when they are clicked. I truly believe that the average user is not particularly interested in my camera info and marginally in the map info and that the title and caption should be clearly presented without clutter. But that being said, I'd like the info and map options to be readily availabe for the people who are interested.
Thanks!
Gotcha! Thanks for the feedback. I'll keep an eye out for similar thoughts from other customers
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations