One more thing - do you have a snapfish converter? I was trying to convert my cousin (verbally) and she said that all her photos are already up on snapfish. Which converters are available, and how hard are they to use?
Jenna
In the hacks forum, I'm aware of:
SmuggLr - Flickr to SmugMug
base2smug - pbase to SmugMug
I'm in complete agreement with DMC. I also only use journal galleries, and I find setting one up tedious. I'm sure there are a number of UI improvements that could be made to streamline the SM user's workflow.
I'm in complete agreement with DMC. I also only use journal galleries, and I find setting one up tedious. I'm sure there are a number of UI improvements that could be made to streamline the SM user's workflow.
in the mean time, use this code from devbobo... it puts a photo tools menu under each pic while in journal style... (while logged in of course) ... makes getting to the tools a little easier...
Inverted customization Probably not a practical request anytime soon, but...
After my first few hours whacking away at customization, I can see what the problem is. Smugmug is (quite sensibly) an HTML hoster that has prescribed customization grafted onto it in the obvious way. This works great when you just want to tweak a few colors or fonts and not have to become some kind of HTML expert. Alas, I'm on the opposite end of the geek spectrum from the principal target customer -- I want to just plop down my own raw HTML and have bits of Smugmug content inserted where and when I direct.
This is kind of the inverse of the current customization system. The same thing crops up when using XSLT to generate HTML. People typically start by trying to supply an overall HTML framework with little bits and pieces that can be customized by the XSLT transformation. But as the number of desired tweaks rises, complexity gets out of hand. At that point, it becomes much cleaner to just say "OK, smarty pants, you give me your HTML template that tells me whether and when you want my wonderful generated code inserted on your behalf."
Lessee, trying to make this sound more like a request...
It would be nice (for me, anyway!) if nickname.smugmug.com/gallery//html.html was a POSTable URL that I could store my own HTML in, which would then be used to generate the HTML code for viewing that gallery. This assumes (with pie-in-the-sky alacrity) that much current functionality (e.g., GenerateMeThatDangFooter()) is abstracted as callable JavaScript functions and modular CSS that I can include via standard .js and .css files on smugmug.com).
in the mean time, use this code from devbobo... it puts a photo tools menu under each pic while in journal style... (while logged in of course) ... makes getting to the tools a little easier...
Suggestion and Questions
I would like to see the image filenames included in the order e-mails we receive. Are suggestions like this relatively easy to program, and if so, how often are desired suggestions typically integrated into the site?
Is there a batch process for image replacement in the works?
BIGGER sometimes is BETTER
I'm really liking the January updates to Smugmug - the fact that everything is so much faster (image viewing) and there's no complete page reload is just great. I also noticed that at some point along the way it became possible for me to re-order my galleries on the home page, which is awesome and in fact the lack of said feature was the sole thing keeping me from uploading many of my older photo shoots. Well done Smugmug!
But...(hey, this is the feedback thread after all)
I can't help but think that some aspects of Smugmug's default image resolutions are stuck in 2003. Monitors have gotten bigger, resolutions higher, and with every upgrade my Smugmug photo page (photos.jasondunn.com) gets smaller and smaller.
Two specifics requests:
1) Allow us to specifiy a bigger default gallery photo size. The current photos size, 67px x 100px, is ridiculously small. Many people in the world are visual (like many photographers for instance) and when they hit a gallery home page they look at the images they see, not the titles of the galleries. Let us have bigger gallery images representing our work! If our templates can support it, why not 150px x 200px or something similar? If the home page with the galleries is the portal to our world of photography, why is everything so teeny-tiny? I've asked for this in the past, and I'm sure I'm not the only one that would like to see it...and I can't think of a single reason why it couldn't be implemented.
2) Bigger size "Large" images. 800px by 536px is a good size on my tiny 10.6" screen laptop, but on my 24" LCD monitors? No way - it's just not large enough. I've seen this mentioned in the forums, that Smugmug is considering adding an "XL" size. I say go for it! But I think the XL size should be a good bump up, not just 20% bigger. I don't know what the magical number is, but I'd guess somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1200px wide.
And one last, slightly vague request: I still feel like things are a bit too hard to do on Smugmug. Too many steps, too many clicks, too much head-scratching, not enough optimization. If business is going well enough, please consider hiring someone who specializes in Web workflow stuff to take a hard look at the way Smugmug does things with regards to album creation/uploading - I know it can be made better!
I'm really liking the January updates to Smugmug - the fact that everything is so much faster (image viewing) and there's no complete page reload is just great. I also noticed that at some point along the way it became possible for me to re-order my galleries on the home page, which is awesome and in fact the lack of said feature was the sole thing keeping me from uploading many of my older photo shoots. Well done Smugmug!
But...(hey, this is the feedback thread after all)
I can't help but think that some aspects of Smugmug's default image resolutions are stuck in 2003. Monitors have gotten bigger, resolutions higher, and with every upgrade my Smugmug photo page (photos.jasondunn.com) gets smaller and smaller.
Two specifics requests:
1) Allow us to specifiy a bigger default gallery photo size. The current photos size, 67px x 100px, is ridiculously small. Many people in the world are visual (like many photographers for instance) and when they hit a gallery home page they look at the images they see, not the titles of the galleries. Let us have bigger gallery images representing our work! If our templates can support it, why not 150px x 200px or something similar? If the home page with the galleries is the portal to our world of photography, why is everything so teeny-tiny? I've asked for this in the past, and I'm sure I'm not the only one that would like to see it...and I can't think of a single reason why it couldn't be implemented.
2) Bigger size "Large" images. 800px by 536px is a good size on my tiny 10.6" screen laptop, but on my 24" LCD monitors? No way - it's just not large enough. I've seen this mentioned in the forums, that Smugmug is considering adding an "XL" size. I say go for it! But I think the XL size should be a good bump up, not just 20% bigger. I don't know what the magical number is, but I'd guess somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1200px wide.
And one last, slightly vague request: I still feel like things are a bit too hard to do on Smugmug. Too many steps, too many clicks, too much head-scratching, not enough optimization. If business is going well enough, please consider hiring someone who specializes in Web workflow stuff to take a hard look at the way Smugmug does things with regards to album creation/uploading - I know it can be made better!
Keep up the great work!
We'd love to improve things, if possible - what would greatly help here is to turn this vague requeset into gory, specific details. Thanks!
Rob, thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts. I completely understand what you would like to see happen - but must say that it probably never will.
A lot of our features require us to have complete control over the HTML on the page: to rearrange the order of things, to swap other things out, etc. I understand we could still do this with XSLT - but it would only complicate things on our end and require more testing to make small changes happen.
I won't say never happen, because nothing is impossible. But we have much more on our plate to think about; including making customizing easier for pros .
Thanks again for your thoughts, if you have anything to add - I am all ears.
Probably not a practical request anytime soon, but...
After my first few hours whacking away at customization, I can see what the problem is. Smugmug is (quite sensibly) an HTML hoster that has prescribed customization grafted onto it in the obvious way. This works great when you just want to tweak a few colors or fonts and not have to become some kind of HTML expert. Alas, I'm on the opposite end of the geek spectrum from the principal target customer -- I want to just plop down my own raw HTML and have bits of Smugmug content inserted where and when I direct.
This is kind of the inverse of the current customization system. The same thing crops up when using XSLT to generate HTML. People typically start by trying to supply an overall HTML framework with little bits and pieces that can be customized by the XSLT transformation. But as the number of desired tweaks rises, complexity gets out of hand. At that point, it becomes much cleaner to just say "OK, smarty pants, you give me your HTML template that tells me whether and when you want my wonderful generated code inserted on your behalf."
Lessee, trying to make this sound more like a request...
It would be nice (for me, anyway!) if nickname.smugmug.com/gallery/<id>/html.html was a POSTable URL that I could store my own HTML in, which would then be used to generate the HTML code for viewing that gallery. This assumes (with pie-in-the-sky alacrity) that much current functionality (e.g., GenerateMeThatDangFooter()) is abstracted as callable JavaScript functions and modular CSS that I can include via standard .js and .css files on smugmug.com).
you know the page where you can update a bunch of keywords or delete a bunch of pics.... make it so that you can select a bunch of pics like that, and then choose from a list the kind of code you would like outputted for that selection.
eg. i just uploaded 131 photos of Lamborghinis, but i only want to show 32 of them on a blog page or forum. i'd like to select them all, and have SmugMug output the required code for me to copy/paste into my selected style - be it small images in HTML format with link to the original image file for my blog or medium images with links to the large images within the gallery for posting on forums.....
Allow option to show thumbnails instead of tiny
I'm using a 4-across display of categories / galleries. I wanted to change it to 3-across and at the same time change the photo shown from tiny to thumb.
Changing to 3-across is easy, but changing the photo from tiny to thumb wasn't possible. Andy answered my query with this:
5 or less, you will get 150px Th Thumbs. 6 or more, you will get 100px Ti Thumbs.
I'd love to see an option added so that I can specify whether to use tiny or thumbs - regardless of the number of categories or galleries.
Single-page HTML Upload
> if you have anything to add - I am all ears.
How about just letting folks replace the home page with their own raw HTML, and letting folks upload additional HTML pages to be stored at URLs of their choosing? It's pretty easy to mimic the color scheme and layout of SmugMug-generated pages enough to blend in well. That leaves SmugMug-coded pages to do what they do best, and lets folks do things those pages were never intended to do without tying themselves into knots fighting the system.
This would make it much easier to create arbitrarily complex organizations of gallerys.
For example, someone could create an HTML home page containing a graphic image of their family tree. Each name box in the genealogical tree could be a hot link to a separately uploaded HTML page that contains lots of detail about that person -- and lists all the galleries containing photos of that person (or links to galleries using the appropriate keyword filters to only show images of that relative, or... whatever you can think of).
This would also open up some creativity for folks who can't code HTML, but can run one of the popular web page authoring tools. It also opens up creativity for designers -- instead of just designing themes, they can design organizational structures as well.
That might also open some partnering opportunities with ISVs. For example, if I already sell genealogy or scrapbooking software that generates web pages, and I can easily make it generate web pages that use SmugMug gallery photos and plug into SmugMug gallery structure, then that's an additional selling point for my software and a few more customers going to check out SmugMug. (E.g., "Go to me.smugmug.com to view our cool family scrapbook -- and at any point you can click on a link that lets you order suitable-for-framing originals of the photos I used in creating the virtual scrapbook.").
All for the price of adding a feature that's essentially just a file copy -- and you already have a file copy service in place! :-)
Of course, people can do this now by hosting the HTML themselves and cross-linking, but that loses SmugMug some branding (you don't send people to SmugMug to look at your SmugMug galleries in that case, you send them to your own pages), and leaves some irritating and unsolvable navigational glitches (hitting the UP button on your Google toolbar doesn't take your visitors back to the original "home page" they came in on).
You already allow enough unbridled JavaScript that I can't see that this adds additional security concerns. It could be some extra work to enforce co-branding on the uploaded pages, but might not be worth the trouble -- the pages either will eventually make use of SmugMug-generated gallery pages, or else the author went to the extra work of using SmugMug for no good reason (and the pages all feature the smugmug.com name in every URL). Probably just saying "You have to have this text w/hotlink visible on every page." would be good enough 90% of the time.
I would LOVE a way to BULK change the gallery categories and subcategories.
I recently changed all my categories per year. It took me all night, because I had to go in one by one and change each category for each gallery. Very time consuming.
If we had a bulk tool, it could be literally done in minutes. Am I missing something because I'm pretty sure there isn't one?
My friend at beaverhausen.smugmug.com also recently changed his category and subcategory settings. He has put on his homepage a note about it (he shouldn't have to do this):
Welcome to the home of my 40,000+ photographs I've taken over the past 4 years. I recently recategorized this site. I am now placing all galleries which I have done for an assignment in the "Professional" category. All others will go under "Personal Work". I still have to move the 220+ Louisvillemojo.com galleries underneath the appropriate subcategories. These represent a large group of what I've worked on for the past 2 1/2 years. Note: there are some Louisvillemojo.com galleries under some of the other categories as well.
Making sure you know that SmugBrowser and Firefox are really great for this.
Currently, storing a HTML page on our site would be impossible. Customers don't really have a physical directory stored on our server with their pictures inside of it, everything is handled by a database. So mimicking a file/folder would require a lot of backend changes.
Plus, this route would complicate the customization process rather than simplify it. (I have learned that more options does not always make things easier to do). One pros sees your excellent site and now they want it - but don't have the slightest clue about HTML or how to write it (they are a photographer first and foremost, why should they?). They expect example code, 24x7 support, Andy's home phone number, etc.
I will keep it in mind for possible future enhancements, but we have a lot more things that we want to do before then (like customization wizards)
It sounds like you are talented enough though that you may be interested in using our API to create a totally customized site; serialized PHP makes it very easy to do: http://smugmug.jot.com/API
If you have more suggestions, please keep them coming!
JT
How about just letting folks replace the home page with their own raw HTML, and letting folks upload additional HTML pages to be stored at URLs of their choosing? It's pretty easy to mimic the color scheme and layout of SmugMug-generated pages enough to blend in well. That leaves SmugMug-coded pages to do what they do best, and lets folks do things those pages were never intended to do without tying themselves into knots fighting the system.
This would make it much easier to create arbitrarily complex organizations of gallerys.
For example, someone could create an HTML home page containing a graphic image of their family tree. Each name box in the genealogical tree could be a hot link to a separately uploaded HTML page that contains lots of detail about that person -- and lists all the galleries containing photos of that person (or links to galleries using the appropriate keyword filters to only show images of that relative, or... whatever you can think of).
This would also open up some creativity for folks who can't code HTML, but can run one of the popular web page authoring tools. It also opens up creativity for designers -- instead of just designing themes, they can design organizational structures as well.
That might also open some partnering opportunities with ISVs. For example, if I already sell genealogy or scrapbooking software that generates web pages, and I can easily make it generate web pages that use SmugMug gallery photos and plug into SmugMug gallery structure, then that's an additional selling point for my software and a few more customers going to check out SmugMug. (E.g., "Go to me.smugmug.com to view our cool family scrapbook -- and at any point you can click on a link that lets you order suitable-for-framing originals of the photos I used in creating the virtual scrapbook.").
All for the price of adding a feature that's essentially just a file copy -- and you already have a file copy service in place! :-)
Of course, people can do this now by hosting the HTML themselves and cross-linking, but that loses SmugMug some branding (you don't send people to SmugMug to look at your SmugMug galleries in that case, you send them to your own pages), and leaves some irritating and unsolvable navigational glitches (hitting the UP button on your Google toolbar doesn't take your visitors back to the original "home page" they came in on).
You already allow enough unbridled JavaScript that I can't see that this adds additional security concerns. It could be some extra work to enforce co-branding on the uploaded pages, but might not be worth the trouble -- the pages either will eventually make use of SmugMug-generated gallery pages, or else the author went to the extra work of using SmugMug for no good reason (and the pages all feature the smugmug.com name in every URL). Probably just saying "You have to have this text w/hotlink visible on every page." would be good enough 90% of the time.
Comments
In the hacks forum, I'm aware of:
SmuggLr - Flickr to SmugMug
base2smug - pbase to SmugMug
I haven't seen a Snapfish converter, I'm sorry.
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I detailed this request a while back here
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=343774#post343774
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I'm in complete agreement with DMC. I also only use journal galleries, and I find setting one up tedious. I'm sure there are a number of UI improvements that could be made to streamline the SM user's workflow.
ShutterGlass.com
OnlyBegotten.com
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=413337#post413337
looks like this
Probably not a practical request anytime soon, but...
After my first few hours whacking away at customization, I can see what the problem is. Smugmug is (quite sensibly) an HTML hoster that has prescribed customization grafted onto it in the obvious way. This works great when you just want to tweak a few colors or fonts and not have to become some kind of HTML expert. Alas, I'm on the opposite end of the geek spectrum from the principal target customer -- I want to just plop down my own raw HTML and have bits of Smugmug content inserted where and when I direct.
This is kind of the inverse of the current customization system. The same thing crops up when using XSLT to generate HTML. People typically start by trying to supply an overall HTML framework with little bits and pieces that can be customized by the XSLT transformation. But as the number of desired tweaks rises, complexity gets out of hand. At that point, it becomes much cleaner to just say "OK, smarty pants, you give me your HTML template that tells me whether and when you want my wonderful generated code inserted on your behalf."
Lessee, trying to make this sound more like a request...
It would be nice (for me, anyway!) if nickname.smugmug.com/gallery//html.html was a POSTable URL that I could store my own HTML in, which would then be used to generate the HTML code for viewing that gallery. This assumes (with pie-in-the-sky alacrity) that much current functionality (e.g., GenerateMeThatDangFooter()) is abstracted as callable JavaScript functions and modular CSS that I can include via standard .js and .css files on smugmug.com).
I know... I'll go back to flailing away now :-).
Thanks, DMC. That'll save me some clicks.
ShutterGlass.com
OnlyBegotten.com
I would like to see the image filenames included in the order e-mails we receive. Are suggestions like this relatively easy to program, and if so, how often are desired suggestions typically integrated into the site?
Is there a batch process for image replacement in the works?
Thanks,
David
I'm really liking the January updates to Smugmug - the fact that everything is so much faster (image viewing) and there's no complete page reload is just great. I also noticed that at some point along the way it became possible for me to re-order my galleries on the home page, which is awesome and in fact the lack of said feature was the sole thing keeping me from uploading many of my older photo shoots. Well done Smugmug!
But...(hey, this is the feedback thread after all)
I can't help but think that some aspects of Smugmug's default image resolutions are stuck in 2003. Monitors have gotten bigger, resolutions higher, and with every upgrade my Smugmug photo page (photos.jasondunn.com) gets smaller and smaller.
Two specifics requests:
1) Allow us to specifiy a bigger default gallery photo size. The current photos size, 67px x 100px, is ridiculously small. Many people in the world are visual (like many photographers for instance) and when they hit a gallery home page they look at the images they see, not the titles of the galleries. Let us have bigger gallery images representing our work! If our templates can support it, why not 150px x 200px or something similar? If the home page with the galleries is the portal to our world of photography, why is everything so teeny-tiny? I've asked for this in the past, and I'm sure I'm not the only one that would like to see it...and I can't think of a single reason why it couldn't be implemented.
2) Bigger size "Large" images. 800px by 536px is a good size on my tiny 10.6" screen laptop, but on my 24" LCD monitors? No way - it's just not large enough. I've seen this mentioned in the forums, that Smugmug is considering adding an "XL" size. I say go for it! But I think the XL size should be a good bump up, not just 20% bigger. I don't know what the magical number is, but I'd guess somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1200px wide.
And one last, slightly vague request: I still feel like things are a bit too hard to do on Smugmug. Too many steps, too many clicks, too much head-scratching, not enough optimization. If business is going well enough, please consider hiring someone who specializes in Web workflow stuff to take a hard look at the way Smugmug does things with regards to album creation/uploading - I know it can be made better!
Keep up the great work!
The Photos: photos.jasondunn.com
The Blog: www.jasondunn.com
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=32241
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=54157
We'd love to improve things, if possible - what would greatly help here is to turn this vague requeset into gory, specific details. Thanks!
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A lot of our features require us to have complete control over the HTML on the page: to rearrange the order of things, to swap other things out, etc. I understand we could still do this with XSLT - but it would only complicate things on our end and require more testing to make small changes happen.
I won't say never happen, because nothing is impossible. But we have much more on our plate to think about; including making customizing easier for pros .
Thanks again for your thoughts, if you have anything to add - I am all ears.
JT
I'm using a 4-across display of categories / galleries. I wanted to change it to 3-across and at the same time change the photo shown from tiny to thumb.
Changing to 3-across is easy, but changing the photo from tiny to thumb wasn't possible. Andy answered my query with this: I'd love to see an option added so that I can specify whether to use tiny or thumbs - regardless of the number of categories or galleries.
In case it's of any use, here's a link to the original conversation: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=57372
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
> if you have anything to add - I am all ears.
How about just letting folks replace the home page with their own raw HTML, and letting folks upload additional HTML pages to be stored at URLs of their choosing? It's pretty easy to mimic the color scheme and layout of SmugMug-generated pages enough to blend in well. That leaves SmugMug-coded pages to do what they do best, and lets folks do things those pages were never intended to do without tying themselves into knots fighting the system.
This would make it much easier to create arbitrarily complex organizations of gallerys.
For example, someone could create an HTML home page containing a graphic image of their family tree. Each name box in the genealogical tree could be a hot link to a separately uploaded HTML page that contains lots of detail about that person -- and lists all the galleries containing photos of that person (or links to galleries using the appropriate keyword filters to only show images of that relative, or... whatever you can think of).
This would also open up some creativity for folks who can't code HTML, but can run one of the popular web page authoring tools. It also opens up creativity for designers -- instead of just designing themes, they can design organizational structures as well.
That might also open some partnering opportunities with ISVs. For example, if I already sell genealogy or scrapbooking software that generates web pages, and I can easily make it generate web pages that use SmugMug gallery photos and plug into SmugMug gallery structure, then that's an additional selling point for my software and a few more customers going to check out SmugMug. (E.g., "Go to me.smugmug.com to view our cool family scrapbook -- and at any point you can click on a link that lets you order suitable-for-framing originals of the photos I used in creating the virtual scrapbook.").
All for the price of adding a feature that's essentially just a file copy -- and you already have a file copy service in place! :-)
Of course, people can do this now by hosting the HTML themselves and cross-linking, but that loses SmugMug some branding (you don't send people to SmugMug to look at your SmugMug galleries in that case, you send them to your own pages), and leaves some irritating and unsolvable navigational glitches (hitting the UP button on your Google toolbar doesn't take your visitors back to the original "home page" they came in on).
You already allow enough unbridled JavaScript that I can't see that this adds additional security concerns. It could be some extra work to enforce co-branding on the uploaded pages, but might not be worth the trouble -- the pages either will eventually make use of SmugMug-generated gallery pages, or else the author went to the extra work of using SmugMug for no good reason (and the pages all feature the smugmug.com name in every URL). Probably just saying "You have to have this text w/hotlink visible on every page." would be good enough 90% of the time.
Making sure you know that SmugBrowser and Firefox are really great for this.
http://smugmug.jot.com/WikiHome/SmugMugHacksAndApps
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Plus, this route would complicate the customization process rather than simplify it. (I have learned that more options does not always make things easier to do). One pros sees your excellent site and now they want it - but don't have the slightest clue about HTML or how to write it (they are a photographer first and foremost, why should they?). They expect example code, 24x7 support, Andy's home phone number, etc.
I will keep it in mind for possible future enhancements, but we have a lot more things that we want to do before then (like customization wizards)
It sounds like you are talented enough though that you may be interested in using our API to create a totally customized site; serialized PHP makes it very easy to do:
http://smugmug.jot.com/API
If you have more suggestions, please keep them coming!
JT
It's probably do-able via customization - make a post in the customizing forum when you are ready
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