Gallery search in the photostream view

Jtring

Some comments about the latest update.

I’m happy to see the latest update to the photostream view includes a gallery search. I wrote of that earlier … and here it is. So a Thank You to SmugMug. I was also interested in what happens when I click on a “found” gallery: I get a photostream view just of that gallery. That’s new. And now I can do photo searches within in a gallery. That’s new too. And good.

A few things still need attention.

First, allow newest- and oldest-first ordering of gallery results. The order now is what the old search identified as being by Photorank. Sorting by oldest or newest is available on the old search page and is much more useful. It would be helpful if the gallery search results follow the ORDER BY field in the filter, just as photos do.

Second, make it possible to always see full gallery names in a search results listing. Whole titles sometimes help me identify exactly which galleries I’m looking at. The initial results view has truncated titles but when one expands the list via the VIEW ALL button, full titles appear. Both the grid and list views, depending on screen size, are quite nice. Unfortunately, if five or fewer galleries are found, there’s no VIEW ALL button and no opportunity to move to the expanded view. In that situation it would be nice just to start with the expanded view with space for full names – probably the grid view until down to really small screens. Alternately, there could be a VIEW DETAILS button on short lists.

Third, offer alternatives to the 1:1 aspect ratio on gallery thumbnails. I’d be happier with at 4:3 aspect ratio or perhaps the original-aspect-ratio gallery thumbnails, at least on the detail view. Seeing the full thumbnail is sometimes helpful in for identifying which gallery is being shown. Different folks think differently, so some sort of set-up option would be best here. Nice to have, not critical.

Fourth, keep tweaking the date filter. I very much like the recent improvements, notably starting the year list from the current year and making the year and day selection more autonomous. I’d still like to see a way to make the beginning and end selection separate, and to be able to edit the two separately. Given I don’t use the date filter that much, this one’s just a nice-to-have too, nothing critical.

One rather more speculative thought. The ability to do a search within a gallery illustrates that the photostream view grows in value when there are more ways to focus it to subsets of the entire collection. A natural follow-on to the gallery-only photostream view would be to find some way to show the stream of galleries and photos “inside” a folder, including levels of nesting. Is that in planning? Organizer or photo site views seem the natural path for identifying a folder to put at the top of such a limited photostream view. Extra buttons in the header would work, but a more straightforward approach might be change the action of the photostream/organizer/photo site menu entries in the header to transfer to the “same place” in the other views. That, after all, is how the old organizer button worked. If the latter happened, there would need to be some way to quickly get to the entire site “top” photostream and pboto site views though. (The SmugMug button can link to one of those, but let the user choose.) I don’t want to push on this one too hard. To be honest, I’m not sure I’d use it. But I’m looking for ways to make the photostream more useful. At the moment, except for gallery searches, which already work acceptably on the current search page, I'll admit I'm not finding the photostream particularly compelling. (Although others may: it certainly offers a nice intermediate step for the Flickr user upgrading to SmugMug, for example.)

I’ll not repeat thoughts from my earlier three postings (here and here and here) on the new header and photostream but I remain interested in items mentioned there: improvements to the search logic, the ability to see larger photo images in the photostream, a narrower header bar, etc.

Allen

Looks to me this photostream is only for the owner to see. Right now in a collage theme it's completely useless having to scroll thru many pages to find anything. And refinding it you'd have to do same, scroll thru many pages. I'd like to see it in Smugmug theme so I can go page by page glancing at thumbs. At least you could jump to a page number to refind the photo.

Jtring

I think you are looking for an easy way to get to a photostream view of a gallery, sort of like I was suggesting for folders. Is that right?

Since I'm almost entirely collage landscape on my site, doing so doesn't add that much for me, but I can see where someone using a very different style -- Smugmug, Journal, or Slideshow -- could find value in that quick trip to the photostream display for the gallery. If you do that, sequencing the photos by Organizer order may be more useful than by capture date or post date (forward or backwards in time). That would take adding another option in the filter's SORT BY list. (And if the photostream shows all the images inside a folder, sorting by Organizer order makes sense too. The date subdivisions would be replaced by gallery subdivisions and galleries would be ordered as in the folders, with some rules TBD for nested folders.)

(1 October 7:25 PDT: Small edit later in the day to clean up errant wording. New phrase is in italics.)

Allen

I have some smart galleries with close to a thousand photos in them. Imagine scrolling thru all those, would takes days. It's bad enough paging thru in Smugmug style. At least I know exactly where I'm at and can return to a specific photo.

BTW, I have not for a use for this yet.

leftquark

@Jtring said:
First, allow newest- and oldest-first ordering of gallery results. The order now is what the old search identified as being by Photorank. Sorting by oldest or newest is available on the old search page and is much more useful. It would be helpful if the gallery search results follow the ORDER BY field in the filter, just as photos do.

I've only just started playing with the recent improvements but isn't this available? If I click on the pyramid lines filter icon I can choose to sort by Capture Date or Upload Date and then can order by Recent First or Earliest First

Jtring

@leftquark said:
I've only just started playing with the recent improvements but isn't this available? If I click on the pyramid lines filter icon I can choose to sort by Capture Date or Upload Date and then can order by Recent First or Earliest First

Those reorder the photos, but the gallery list always remains in the same order, which tracks none of these. Enter your favorite search term and try it!

I agree that's how it should work.

Allen

I click Photos at top but when there can not find anything relating to "gallery list?

Jtring

It only shows when you enter something in the search field (and it finds something).

Allen

I still find it useless having to scroll many pages.