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SmugMug Feature Requests #5

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    AndyAndy Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
    edited July 28, 2006
    Comfort wrote:
    Favourites Photos Gallery - Gallery displaying the best photos you like on Smugmug - obviously giving visitors clear informaiton on who the photo belongs to.

    Favourite Photographers - Link to favourite photographers on smugmug.

    Mass Geography - Ability to changedgeography information on mass to a group of photos.

    Recently Added Gallery - A gallery to show the last 50 or so photographs added to your site

    Shortcut Gallery - A gallery of your personally selected photographs.. All photos would be shortcuts only to the original and not duplicates so ranking/comments would remain with the original photos.

    Visitor Count - Total Visitors, Visitors this month.

    Individual view photo views - Total views for that photos (non thumbnails) when showing a medium or greater sized photo.

    Extra Large Photos - Large is just not big enough for higher res screens

    Better Browsing and UI
    - Better utilisation of Ajax/Web 2 abilities


    my 2c worth

    Thanks, Comfort!
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    flyingdutchieflyingdutchie Registered Users Posts: 1,286 Major grins
    edited July 28, 2006
    jh4wvu wrote:
    I personally don't use watermarks because it distract from the images, however, I was looking at another photographers gallery and noticed they had the watermark disappear when you scrolled over the photo. Not sure if that would for most people here but could be a short term solution to custom watermarking.

    --Chris

    It can be done, but it means that the actual version of the picture (the one without the PROOF plastered over the pic) is somewhere on the viewer's hard-drive (in the browser's cache) or on screen (screen captures). So, this means that the viewer can use the pic without the PROOF watermark.... of course, it would only be a small version of that pic.

    If the pic without the watermark is never served up by the web-server, only then can the owner of the pic be sure that a clean version of his pic will never be used by others.
    I can't grasp the notion of time.

    When I hear the earth will melt into the sun,
    in two billion years,
    all I can think is:
        "Will that be on a Monday?"
    ==========================
    http://www.streetsofboston.com
    http://blog.antonspaans.com
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    DJ-S1DJ-S1 Registered Users Posts: 2,303 Major grins
    edited July 29, 2006
    I'm an avid Grinner and Smugger but even I'm not about to wade through 400+ posts in this thread, so I apologize if this is a re-hash but...

    Now that the hard stuff (watermarking, backprinting, download purchases, etc) is taken care of, can we please get to work on the kludgy GUI for simple things like keeping your site organized? I started doing some re-arranging last night and was shocked that the tools are so inconsistent and painful.

    - some dropdown lists are alphabetic sort, some are no-rhyme-or-reason sort
    - when moving a photo, you have to wade through an unsorted listing of every gallery you have, instead of being able to pick cat, then subcat, then gallery.
    - there are cool tools for rearraging photos in a gallery, and similar tools elsewhere on the site. But there's no such tool to show your tree structure and easily move a gallery from one place to another.
    - there needs to be a tree view in general for just finding galleries. Did I put that wedding gallery under Weddings, or Family, or Events?? You can't tell without surfing through them all currently.
    - the customize gallery page needs an update button to the right of each grouping of settings so you don't have to scroll all over to make one change.
    - when you go to a subcat and want to move all of the galleries there to other places (as you have to do currently to reorganize), every time you move a gallery it takes you to the new location and you have to surf back to the subcat you were in. there could be a checkbox to stay or to go.

    There are other things but I can't remember them right now...

    These are just annoyances, and may seem petty, but they are a problem for me. I only have around 80 galleries, as my site grows this will get worse.

    Maybe I just don't know the right way to do these things, and if so feel free to clue me in. ne_nau.gif Either way, it felt good to vent! :D
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    DJ-S1DJ-S1 Registered Users Posts: 2,303 Major grins
    edited July 29, 2006
    oh- thought of another... why can I add cats but not delete or at least hide cats I don't want?

    oh yeah, and why can't I create a cat or sucat or both "on the fly" as I create a gallery instead of forcing me to stop, go to the control panel to create them, then go start making the new gallery again.

    OK, I'll stop!
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    AndyAndy Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
    edited July 29, 2006
    DJ-S1 wrote:
    I'm an avid Grinner and Smugger but even I'm not about to wade through 400+ posts in this thread, so I apologize if this is a re-hash but...

    Now that the hard stuff (watermarking, backprinting, download purchases, etc) is taken care of, can we please get to work on the kludgy GUI for simple things like keeping your site organized? I started doing some re-arranging last night and was shocked that the tools are so inconsistent and painful.

    - some dropdown lists are alphabetic sort, some are no-rhyme-or-reason sort
    - when moving a photo, you have to wade through an unsorted listing of every gallery you have, instead of being able to pick cat, then subcat, then gallery.
    - there are cool tools for rearraging photos in a gallery, and similar tools elsewhere on the site. But there's no such tool to show your tree structure and easily move a gallery from one place to another.
    - there needs to be a tree view in general for just finding galleries. Did I put that wedding gallery under Weddings, or Family, or Events?? You can't tell without surfing through them all currently.
    - the customize gallery page needs an update button to the right of each grouping of settings so you don't have to scroll all over to make one change.
    - when you go to a subcat and want to move all of the galleries there to other places (as you have to do currently to reorganize), every time you move a gallery it takes you to the new location and you have to surf back to the subcat you were in. there could be a checkbox to stay or to go.

    There are other things but I can't remember them right now...

    These are just annoyances, and may seem petty, but they are a problem for me. I only have around 80 galleries, as my site grows this will get worse.

    Maybe I just don't know the right way to do these things, and if so feel free to clue me in. ne_nau.gif Either way, it felt good to vent! :D

    JT's threatening to do some work on the tools soon so these are great requests and timely!
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    DJ-S1DJ-S1 Registered Users Posts: 2,303 Major grins
    edited July 29, 2006
    Andy wrote:
    JT's threatening to do some work on the tools soon so these are great requests and timely!
    Sweet!
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    AllenAllen Registered Users Posts: 10,011 Major grins
    edited July 29, 2006
    DJ-S1 wrote:
    ...
    - when you go to a subcat and want to move all of the galleries there to other places (as you have to do currently to reorganize), every time you move a gallery it takes you to the new location and you have to surf back to the subcat you were in. there could be a checkbox to stay or to go.
    .:D
    A trick I use is drag a shortcut to my desktop so after being sent
    elsewhere I click the temporary shortcut and are right back. Saves
    alot of surfing.
    Al
    Al - Just a volunteer here having fun
    My Website index | My Blog
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    DJ-S1DJ-S1 Registered Users Posts: 2,303 Major grins
    edited July 29, 2006
    Allen wrote:
    A trick I use is drag a shortcut to my desktop so after being sent
    elsewhere I click the temporary shortcut and are right back. Saves
    alot of surfing.
    Al
    Good idea! I was using multiple Firefox tabs but it got really confusing, your way would be better until they work something out.
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    pecheneypecheney Registered Users Posts: 48 Big grins
    edited July 30, 2006
    Feature "Request" or Suggestion
    Vastly improved eCard functionaility. I would LOVe TO HAVE MY Visitors be able to send really cool SMUGMUG postcards with the photos I TAKE. The system is much closer to this than most think propbably. But with a pro account, I would LOVE to have folks be able to use ANY image to send a postcard to a group of folsk. It woudl BEEF up sales BIG TIME!!!
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    bwgbwg Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 2,119 SmugMug Employee
    edited July 31, 2006
    the new watermarking is great, but why does it reset all my thumbnails when i dont have watermarks being applied to thumbnails?

    can we have it not reset the thumbnails when we arent applying the watermark to thumbnails?
    Pedal faster
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    AndyAndy Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
    edited July 31, 2006
    bigwebguy wrote:
    the new watermarking is great, but why does it reset all my thumbnails when i dont have watermarks being applied to thumbnails?

    can we have it not reset the thumbnails when we arent applying the watermark to thumbnails?
    I've asked - and I could be wrong... but I'm fairly certain that it's because an operation like watermarking creates a new image, and the resized images will have -L-1, -S-1, -Th-1, etc. Don't think we can have -L-2, -M-2, -S-2 and -Th-1, -Ti-1 that might give the system fits.
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    dvdmondvdmon Registered Users Posts: 28 Big grins
    edited August 1, 2006
    Category/subcategory descriptions?
    I would love to have the ability to have descriptions for categories and subcategories that could be optionally displayed both on your main page (if you chose to display categories rather than galleries). Similarly, next to each subcategory within a category page, it could display the description as well. This could basically work just like caption fields for individual images. The descriptions could also be visible at the top of the given category/subcategory index page before galleries are listed...
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    AndyAndy Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
    edited August 1, 2006
    dvdmon wrote:
    I would love to have the ability to have descriptions for categories and subcategories that could be optionally displayed both on your main page (if you chose to display categories rather than galleries). Similarly, next to each subcategory within a category page, it could display the description as well. This could basically work just like caption fields for individual images. The descriptions could also be visible at the top of the given category/subcategory index page before galleries are listed...

    wave.gif does this help?
    From my FAQ
    http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=26043

    http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=241923#post241923
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    dvdmondvdmon Registered Users Posts: 28 Big grins
    edited August 1, 2006
    Andy wrote:

    Ugh! I knew it would be a CSS thing! Should have searched in the customizations first, sorry! Thanks.
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    AndyAndy Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
    edited August 1, 2006
    dvdmon wrote:
    Ugh! I knew it would be a CSS thing! Should have searched in the customizations first, sorry! Thanks.
    No problemo, happy to help!
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    zerobuttonszerobuttons Registered Users Posts: 68 Big grins
    edited August 3, 2006
    DJ-S1 wrote:
    .....<snip>.....
    Now that the hard stuff (watermarking, backprinting, download purchases, etc) is taken care of
    .....<snip>.....
    I've come back after having been out of circulation for a couple of days, and see that backprinting and other things are indeed taken care of now. Good work.

    However, DJ-S1 mentions download purchases also. I cannot find anything in any thread about that being implemented now. Has any in-house SmugMug person promised that it would be implemented soon?

    Best regards,
    David List
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    zerobuttonszerobuttons Registered Users Posts: 68 Big grins
    edited August 3, 2006
    I cannot find anything in any thread about that being implemented now. Has any in-house SmugMug person promised that it would be implemented soon?

    Never mind. Just found the new forum with support threads about all these things. Great work.

    Best regards,
    David List
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    L84CABOL84CABO Registered Users Posts: 37 Big grins
    edited August 3, 2006
    Two Ideas
    Apologies if this has already been requested:

    1) There may be times where I would like to use my own lab as opposed to SmugMug's. It would be nice if the site somehow allowed customers to select their images (qty, size, etc.) and then stored or fowarded this informaiton on to me. This could be triggered by a gallery setting or something.

    2) I'd like to see SmugMug add calendars and photo Christmas cards to their product offering. The functionality for calendars would need to enable the customer to select 12 photos and assign them each to a specific month.

    With regard to the photo christmas cards, I'm thinking of two variations. The first would be a real folded greeting card where customers could choose a picture for the front of the card. The cards could either be blank inside or they could specify some type of short custom message. Maybe offer a blank card and then a few with a canned message such as Seasons Greetings, Happy Birthday, etc.

    The second variation is the standard, simple photo card with some white space off to the right where customers could enter in their own custom message such as, "Seasons Greetings from the Smith Family." Maybe you could offer a couple of different borders like holly or little christmas lights that encircle the card. Price wise this card should be a lot closer to the 4x6 $0.19 cost than the $1.99 post card price.
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    rainforest1155rainforest1155 Registered Users Posts: 4,566 Major grins
    edited August 6, 2006
    promoting communities, friends and family functions
    Okay, this is going to be a little longer request. In short it's about offering limited free accounts for friends/family like smugmug is already doing for the military community to include a much wider range of people in smugmug, like friends/family adding captions and keywords your photos.

    What makes free services like flickr so interesting for people? First of all I would say the free-part, but I think for many the huge community as a side effect is the real reason why they sign up. For example they get invited by their friends and family or they're off to meet new people and heard about the cool community in the press.

    While smugmug already has been offering family/friends-edit functions (captions, keywords, gallery descriptions) for a very long time, I don't find myself using them very much if at all. My friends/family just isn't into photo sharing that much to spent money on a photo sharing service. Many aren't even able to use it at all due to the lack of a credit card here in Europe.

    Ever since you started cooperating with military.com I came across the limited free accounts. One time someone here at dgrin asked how to create multiple user logins for his accounts. This was the first time the following crossed my mind: I suggested him directing his friends/family to military.com and get a free smugmug account to edit keywords and captions.

    Yesterday this thought hit me even harder. Why not offer a limited free account for everybody? 50MB per user aren't that much for smugmug I guess - of course then also comes the higher demand on the support, but you already had a testrun on this with the ~12,000 members of the military community. Plus if 50MB are to much you can just make it smaller. Just give it a thought on what that would do to smugmug popularity and presence in the photo sharing domain.

    I know that you probably don't want to follow in flickr's footsteps and you're having your very own business model, but this would attract so much more people that would never have signed up on a trial basis. Also you would interest those that have never thought of joining any photo sharing site, like grandma/grandpa (my 91 year old grandpa occasionally browses through some of my photos), and won't upload photos themselves in the beginning, but just do it because their family/children posting pictures there. Eventually those passive users get to know smugmug and perhaps decide to upgrade, because they already had a small look behind the facades with captioning and keywording some photos.

    If you don't want to open the free accounts to the public there's also the way of establishing an invite system for free accounts. It's like the gift account thingy, but doesn't cost the account owner his referrel credits. For example smugmug could determine that every account owner has got 10 invites. Then the user could sent out those to his friends/family in order for them to acquire a limited free smugmug account. Occasionally smugmug could give out more or perhaps the account owner could buy some from his referral credits. This system would make sure that smugmug isn't flooded with new users while still providing a more community like feel where your whole family has an account and you can comment on each others photos. It would add an important level to the current 'smugmug family' - a more personal level, because there're no barriers like money or credit cards that keep your loved ones from joining and participating.

    Whatever path smugmug decides to go if they want to give this a try I would suggest that anyone signs up for a free accounts gets the choice between just taking the free account or having a full 7-day trial run, while only in case of the trial he has to enter any credit card data. In case he decides against a payed account after the trial just wanting the free account and has uploaded more than a free account allows, just tell the user that he's got like two weeks to remove pictures so he gets below his quota.

    Maybe we could also get a function to disable the captcha for comments on our own photos and when friends/family comment on them. If there happens to be a SPAM occurrence on my site I'm responsible on my own for partly disabling the captcha and always can turn it back on.

    Congratulations if you managed to keep reading until here. Do you find my idea useful or not? Please add your thoughts and comments.

    Thanks,
    Sebastian

    EDIT: One should also be able to determine if friends/family are able to see private galleries. Even though this would be similar to sharegroups I think it should be offered as an option when you don't want your friends to remember those sharegroup urls. Plus you can also password protect the private galleries you don't want to be seen by your friends/family. The huge benefit for example would be that my family just had to remember their login in order to find any of my private family galleries, where they than can add comments, captions etc.
    Sebastian
    SmugMug Support Hero
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    AndyAndy Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
    edited August 6, 2006

    Congratulations if you managed to keep reading until here. Do you find my idea useful or not? Please add your thoughts and comments.

    Thanks,
    Sebastian
    Thanks Sebastian - I've made sure that the team sees this.
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    pat.kanepat.kane Registered Users Posts: 332 Major grins
    edited August 6, 2006
    Sebastian, I don't like the idea of opening the floodgates for free users because of the potential drain on smugmug's resources, e.g., deleting porn, solving noob's problems, auction photo hosting, honoring print guarantees for the crappy pics that people uploaded, etc.

    Free doesn't typically establish a long term relationship and I imagine it would lead to a lot of abuse.

    HOWEVER, I really like what you've suggested here:
    If you don't want to open the free accounts to the public there's also the way of establishing an invite system for free accounts. ... Then the user could sent out those [10 invites] to his friends/family in order for them to acquire a limited free smugmug account. ... account owner could buy some from his referral credits. This system would make sure that smugmug isn't flooded with new users...

    I've been struggling with trying to get my family to become more active in uploading and commenting on pictures. I know I'd be able to hook my dad if he could easily update the captions on old family photos that I've uploaded. I think a basic, limited (e.g., no external linking, 50MB or less, etc.) account would go a long way to creating a broader, but controlled community experience.

    Regards,
    Pat
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    rainforest1155rainforest1155 Registered Users Posts: 4,566 Major grins
    edited August 6, 2006
    pat.kane wrote:
    Sebastian, I don't like the idea of opening the floodgates for free users because of the potential drain on smugmug's resources, e.g., deleting porn[...]
    Thanks for this! Haven't really thought of all these downsides, but as I've written smugmug already has acquired ~12,000 not paying members through the military deal. So it would be interesting to see their insights/experiences from this partnership. There should be some as already some timed passed since they introduced this.
    pat.kane wrote:
    HOWEVER, I really like what you've suggested here:
    [idea for an invite system]
    I've been struggling with trying to get my family to become more active in uploading and commenting on pictures. I know I'd be able to hook my dad if he could easily update the captions on old family photos that I've uploaded.
    That's exactly what I'm talking about! Once they're hooked they can't live without it anymore and perhaps even get a full account themselves.

    Thanks for your support,
    Sebastian
    Sebastian
    SmugMug Support Hero
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    fashionfashion Registered Users Posts: 8 Beginner grinner
    edited August 7, 2006
    Flash based galleries
    All this HTML / Ajax is great but any word and when you might have macromedia flash based galleries? Flash offers a much smoother presentation than even the best Ajax??? One site I use for my fashion photography http://www.solomodels.com has flash based galleries but I would definitely use smugmug if I could have it in flash.

    Also, how about creating flash widgets so we can incorporate photo galleries into our website? Kind of like www.slide.com and ther others that are creating flash based widgets using flash? Even that phanfare.com has some flash thought its not done very nicely?
  • Options
    AndyAndy Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
    edited August 7, 2006
    fashion wrote:
    All this HTML / Ajax is great but any word and when you might have macromedia flash based galleries? Flash offers a much smoother presentation than even the best Ajax??? One site I use for my fashion photography http://www.solomodels.com has flash based galleries but I would definitely use smugmug if I could have it in flash.

    Also, how about creating flash widgets so we can incorporate photo galleries into our website? Kind of like www.slide.com and ther others that are creating flash based widgets using flash? Even that phanfare.com has some flash thought its not done very nicely?

    Thanks for the feature request!
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    heinz eheinz e Registered Users Posts: 5 Beginner grinner
    edited August 8, 2006
    Flipping photos in an album with arrow keys (as in picasaweb)
    Andy wrote:
    Please put your feature requests in this thread.
    ChrisJ wrote:


    In "picasaweb" you can move to previous/next photo with arrow keys:

    Flipping around photos with left/right arrow in the web album
    is very convenient. That is not available for Smugmug is it?

    Up/down arrow could also be put to use for moving 10 photos
    up/down or alternatively switching album.

    /h
  • Options
    DnaDna Registered Users Posts: 435 Major grins
    edited August 8, 2006
    fashion wrote:
    All this HTML / Ajax is great but any word and when you might have macromedia flash based galleries? Flash offers a much smoother presentation than even the best Ajax??? One site I use for my fashion photography http://www.solomodels.com has flash based galleries but I would definitely use smugmug if I could have it in flash.

    Also, how about creating flash widgets so we can incorporate photo galleries into our website? Kind of like www.slide.com and ther others that are creating flash based widgets using flash? Even that phanfare.com has some flash thought its not done very nicely?
    http://www.davidplant.net/design/technology/flash.htm
    http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001029.html

    I think that the site is heavy enough with javascript that it doesn't need flash.

    Dna
  • Options
    AndyAndy Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
    edited August 8, 2006
    heinz e wrote:
    Andy wrote:
    Please put your feature requests in this thread.
    ChrisJ wrote:


    In "picasaweb" you can move to previous/next photo with arrow keys:

    Flipping around photos with left/right arrow in the web album
    is very convenient. That is not available for Smugmug is it?

    Up/down arrow could also be put to use for moving 10 photos
    up/down or alternatively switching album.

    /h

    Hi h, if you are a power or pro customer, you can use cool hacks like this:

    http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=39270
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    sudermattsudermatt Registered Users Posts: 38 Big grins
    edited August 9, 2006
    Comments List on Galleries, Categories,
    I want to be able to view, and show a list of comments that have been entered on a picture in a gallery.

    Comment List for "Our Wedding"

    Picture Comment Writer
    3444.jpg "What a great picture" JIm
    3456.jpg "can't believe you jumped in" Matt
    2344.jpg "picture of things to come"
    .....

    You get the idea.

    I think this would be really cool.
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    marlinspikemarlinspike Registered Users Posts: 2,095 Major grins
    edited August 9, 2006
    Better photo replace
    Now that I got my first order where I had set up give me a day to do proofs, I see that we need a better set up for replacing photos. Something where I select my photo, say replace photo, and then just drag the replacement photo onto a box, rather than saying browse and finding the file.
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    AndyAndy Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
    edited August 9, 2006
    Now that I got my first order where I had set up give me a day to do proofs, I see that we need a better set up for replacing photos. Something where I select my photo, say replace photo, and then just drag the replacement photo onto a box, rather than saying browse and finding the file.
    Thanks for the feature request, Richard.
This discussion has been closed.