Searching your description or keywords

episodic

Probably a dumb question.

I've been captioning some family photos.

For instance in the Caption I'll write "Mom", "Uncle Phil", etc. . .


Where is it that I or a visitor can search my captions or keywords?

I tried the search box at the top of my page, but that told me "Mom" was too short to search by.

So If I've captioned 70 of my photos mom across three different albums, how do I search and display those pictures?

Barb

episodic wrote:

Probably a dumb question.

I've been captioning some family photos.

For instance in the Caption I'll write "Mom", "Uncle Phil", etc. . .


Where is it that I or a visitor can search my captions or keywords?

I tried the search box at the top of my page, but that told me "Mom" was too short to search by.

So If I've captioned 70 of my photos mom across three different albums, how do I search and display those pictures?

Hi

See if this thread will help you out:

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=30813

episodic

Thanks Barb.

I've added the html code to my page now for keywords.


However, I guess I did a dumb thing, and put most of the information into the captions instead. I take it you can't search captions?

Barb

episodic wrote:

Thanks Barb.

I've added the html code to my page now for keywords.


However, I guess I did a dumb thing, and put most of the information into the captions instead. I take it you can't search captions?

Captions work, too. NOTE: Keywords, captions, descriptions, etc., in password protected or private galleries WILL NOT be searched.

episodic

So even logged in as the account owner, I can't search my private galleries?

That seems a major limitation if true.

papajay

Join the "Club"

episodic wrote:

So even logged in as the account owner, I can't search my private galleries?

That seems a major limitation if true.

It's true, Episodic. The fact that you have now made a point of it (as a new subscriber) will keep this long-debated topic fresh in the minds of the "new feature request" gods at SmugMug...it would be very difficult to ignore such a "hot topic" forever. I doubt it's truly being ignored...it just hasn't yet risen to the "gotta-do-something-about-this" priority (but now, perhaps, it will finally get there).

Rando

papajay wrote:

It's true, Episodic. The fact that you have now made a point of it (as a new subscriber) will keep this long-debated topic fresh in the minds of the "new feature request" gods at SmugMug...it would be very difficult to ignore such a "hot topic" forever. I doubt it's truly being ignored...it just hasn't yet risen to the "gotta-do-something-about-this" priority (but now, perhaps, it will finally get there).

Also, unfortunatley too if you make a gallery public in order to be searcheable, the way smugmug forces meta tags there's no way to prevent google and other search engines from indexing your public galleries (do you really want pics of your mom indexed by google?) Even with power or pro accounts you can't delete/change that meta tag.

Allen

I would think that the present search would search in all galleries. If you have
passworded galleries that would block search because they would not be
accessible, but if you had previously entered the password then they
should be searched also.

System

Allen wrote:

I would think that the present search would search in all galleries. If you have passworded galleries that would block search because they would not be accessible, but if you had previously entered the password then they
should be searched also.

I doubt it.

I infer, from things people have said, that password protected galleries are not *indexed*; that's a much more efficient way of keeping them out of search, though it does have the disadvantages noted in this thread.

It's quite a bit more difficult to flag password protected galleries, and only show those results to the appropriate people -- because who *are* the appropriate people?

The only practical way I could see to do that is to mark those entries "owner only", and only show them when the logged in owner is doing the search -- which is, of course, what many of you are asking for, but it's not necessarily the obvious design one might pick -- it's easy to get tangled up in things like wanting to store the passwords themselves in the index, so that anyone passworded into a gallery could search it.

strangely

papajay wrote:

It's true, Episodic. The fact that you have now made a point of it (as a new subscriber) will keep this long-debated topic fresh in the minds of the "new feature request" gods at SmugMug...it would be very difficult to ignore such a "hot topic" forever. I doubt it's truly being ignored...it just hasn't yet risen to the "gotta-do-something-about-this" priority (but now, perhaps, it will finally get there).

I'm another new subscriber who's only just discovered this limitation, and I'm not too impressed by it. Most of my galleries are (and will be) private; they are only meant for family and friends to see. So yes, I want them to be hidden from external search engines. But why should they be hidden from SmugMug's own spider? If a visitor comes along and has permissions to view a gallery (typically via a ShareGroup) then they should should get the relevant set of private galleries returned in the search results. If they came in through a another route (e.g. the main page, or perhaps a direct link to a single private gallery) then all of the other private pages should not be included in the results.

And just to be clear it's both sides of this that I'd like to see working:
-- the ability to search by descriptions, not just tags / keywords
-- the ability to search inside private galleries, if authorised.

Of course, there's lots of other stuff about SmugMug that I really like (or I wouldn't have signed up), but not searching. And it's not that it's not important enough to prevent me from joining -- I didn't realise until afterwards.

Cheery,
Jason.

Rando

To be able to toggle that one meta tag to prevent external search engines from indexing would go a long way for me.

System

jason wrote:

If a visitor comes along and has permissions to view a gallery (typically via a ShareGroup) then they should should get the relevant set of private galleries returned in the search results.

Sure. But as I implied above, that ability vastly complicates the search engine... That's likely why it hasn't been implemented [, yet :-)].

episodic

Ok, so I'm officially complaining now . . .
What is the sense of tagging my pics and stuff if I can't even search them?


Boy, I wish I had known this one first.

Any chance of getting this fixed, or is it truely a problem that isn't getting any attention?

Dna

episodic wrote:

What is the sense of tagging my pics and stuff if I can't even search them?
Boy, I wish I had known this one first.
Any chance of getting this fixed, or is it truely a problem that isn't getting any attention?

It's not a limitation, it is designed this way.
Personally I don't want my passworded galleries searchable, even by me. They are organised by club, date and event and those who buy photos have the password and don't need to search.

If you need to search your own private photos then you haven't organised them correctly.

Andrew

episodic

Dna wrote:

It's not a limitation, it is designed this way.
Personally I don't want my passworded galleries searchable, even by me. They are organised by club, date and event and those who buy photos have the password and don't need to search.

If you need to search your own private photos then you haven't organised them correctly.

Andrew

What would anyone care that I wanted to search my pics? It is not like anyone would make someone tag pics and use it.

I would expect this to work for me when I was logged in. I may have my folders organized - but what if I wanted to see all of my pictures of "Sandy" or "John" scattered across the folders and years. Or what if I want to bring up all my photos entitled workshops - to see all the various workshops I had been in or taught?

Tagging is exactly what that scenario is for. Just cause someone wouldn't use it doesn't make the need invalid.

Rando

I use smugmug as backup to all my photos given the unlimited storage space(I suspect there's quite a few others who do the same). When you only have a few thousand, organizing by category/gallery is manageable. When you start to approach tens of thousands keywording/captioning is really the only thing scalable to handle that amount of photos.

Unfortunatley the way smugmug is setup now, I have to give up the keywording feature in order for my thousands and thousands of photos remain private/passworded.

pat.kane

Dna wrote:

If you need to search your own private photos then you haven't organised them correctly.

What?! You're kidding, right?

Why wouldn't you take advantage of your images' metadata through powerful database searches?

I assign metadata to my images before upload, so most of my searching is done offline. If I want to find a picture of my daughter, I can search the whole database and it will retrieve pictures that contain her. If I want pictures that contain both her and my son, I can search that as well. I can also narrow the search based on a variety of other parameters (e.g., date range, landscape or portrait, etc.). smugmug can do most of this as well.

An organized hierarchical structure is a good start, but it isn't nearly as powerful as one combined with a database search capability.