Help SmugMug think through XL display puzzles
Baldy
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The good news: we're working on larger display sizes. :ivar
I get to test and, y'know, there are just some images that want to be BIG.
(This one is courtesy Chris Michel.)
I get to test and, y'know, there are just some images that want to be BIG.
(This one is courtesy Chris Michel.)
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First, watermarks: many people uploaded 800px images for watermarks, designing them to work well with the large display size.
The way we're handing that is to upres them proportionally to fit the larger display sizes, up to 1600px. We have experimented with some of your watermarks and generally they look good (I'll post examples in a sec), but the nature of great photographers is to be great perfectionists.
I don't know any other way to handle this issue besides (a) give a heads-up well in advance; (b) use the upres'd watermarks in the case of people who enable the larger sizes and haven't provided larger watermarks.
Before we address what to do about older galleries (we'll get to that), I'll post some example upres'd watermarks in a few minutes.
Is there some better way to handle it we're not thinking of?
Our plan is to email all pros, be transparent in the forum, leave them messages in their SmugMug accounts, post a news item there, but many people will be caught by surprise anyway.
The plan is, if anyone has blocked either large or original, keep the larger display sizes off. Otherwise, enable them.
This means that anyone who blocks original will have to proactively turn on larger display sizes to get them to show.
Not addressing past galleries yet, are there problems with this?
So far, so good. They will generally look decent. If anybody ignores the notifications and gets bothered by it, the fix is pretty easy right and totally within their control? Don't they just upload a higher res watermark or disable the XL size?
The only other thing I could think of would be to make the XL size be "opt-in" (e.g. default to off) for existing watermarked galleries. I wouldn't recommend that since I think you want most people to just inherit the new functionality, but that's the only other option I can think of.
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This sounds like you're proposing that XL and originals are on the same switch and there's no way to have XL, but not originals. That, it seems will need the opinion of many other pros who protect their originals. XL is a beautiful display size, but obviously it's big enough to make some nice prints from if it's not watermarked.
Are you thinking the XL size is big enough that anyone who blocks originals is, for sure, going to want to block XLs? I'm not sure about that one yet.
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The mantras we hope to adhere to are first, do no harm. We know that there will always be people who like it just the way it is.
On the other hand, we want to make it so people who do like the larger image sizes can enable them on older galleries and at a pace where we can actually do it when they ask us to—without messing with new image processing, which is going to get harder.
No one has the compute power and bandwidth to rework 130,000,000 originals across multiple data centers very quickly, especially when you're talking about display copies this big with watermarking. Ow. :cool
We do plan to make the larger display sizes when you upload new images to old galleries and when you replace photos.
If that was the only way in the beginning to generate large photos in old galleries while we made sure all sytems were bullet proof for the 30,000 images we receive an hour now, would the world end?
Would it cause people to delete old albums and re-upload the same photos to new ones? We want to avoid the issue we have now, that when we fall behind on image processing, some people keep uploading the same batch repeatedly, making it harder to catch up.
Your thoughts.
Thanks!
Chris
Pros will be able to choose which display sizes they want: L, XL, O independently like they do now for L & O.
This brings up a good point, tho. Other account levels can only block O. There may be people who are okay with displaying L but are not comfortable with XL....
As an aside would it be possible to include a site-wide bulk watermarking and zoom thumbs since a) it's frustrating to have to watermark each individual gallery and b) zooming thumbs one at a time is impossible and even with the BZT is annoying since I have to make the gallery private, all thumbs, and originals enabled, BZT it, and then reset the gallery to my default settings.
My concerns with XL is protection mainly. As it stands, I'm not 100% sure that I'd use it, though I probably would. If I did use XL, it'd most certainly be with a fairly intrusive watermark. I don't get a lot of sales by any means, but I get a lot of "Hey can I use your image for free for my book / website / whatever? I'll give you a photo credit of course." type inquiries. (Incidentally the answer is always no you may not use my image for free.) I'd hate to think my XL images would make it more likely that my images would get stolen and used without my permission and/or proper compensation. Alas, if only there was a way to lock down images on the internets.
http://photos.mikelanestudios.com/
I was in a computer shop today and opened this thread on a 23" display. The salesperson was awestruck !! as was I
I would rather have the default set to off for xl on existing galleries and then manually choose which galleries I want displayed at the new size. I presume that it will be an option to display xl pics for new galleries as are the original and large sizes at present.
Correct. Count me in that group. I don't think you can get very good sized prints with the larges, but if XL is available, people start printing on their own. I only have a power account, so I'd be annoyed. (If need be, I can explain somewhere else why I want to block originals for prints I don't sell.)
Thanks for working through this issue so transparently!
Are there going to be any new styles that rely on L and/or XL sizes?
I personally do not watermark, but it might be a good idea sure - I can fully understand why someone would want to watermark the larger images. (i just hate seeing them).
Any thoughts to having galleries that allow you to view XL? (say for example, a XL image in the middle, a row of thums below, or above the XL image so that the XL image can go wide.
If I only have ONE image in a gallery, will I be able to set it to if you go to that one gallery (with the ONE image), it displays XL assuming your screen widthe allows? (I HATE scrolling).
Is the XL a preset minumum/max size? Will it be dependent on your screen/browser width? Now, with the new upgrade, if I open up my galleries with a smaller browser window, it automatically sets the photo size to SM small until you open it up wider. WIth the XL work the same?
Will I be able to choose: Originals y/n XL y/n or will it be if I choose not to display originals, that I can't display XL? Are we able to ONLY watermark XL and ororiginals? (never done it, so don't know if this is already possible, and if so - how)
Derek
BTW: I love the idea of XL images!
What did Cinderella say when she left the photo shop? "One day my prints will come."
There would be an expandable, fluid style, SmugMug XL, which would fill your screen with giant photo goodness.
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I agree Andy - some photos only look their best when viewed HUGE.
What did Cinderella say when she left the photo shop? "One day my prints will come."
We love to watch jaws drop with X3, but the more popular sizes are gonna be L and XL in the beginning because of the monitors people own.
The good news is the new image sizes aren't far off, so we need to get cracking and make sure these issues are nailed and people know.
The bad news is incorporating them into galleries is going to take time because we have to modify all themes. It's gonna mean art, CSS changes, etc. Those changes could take a long time. :cry
No. We don't watermark originals now because we don't want to alter originals. We won't have the option to watermark certain sizes and not others, sorry. That feature would significantly delay the release.
cus if it does: I'm sure glad I won't be one of you Smuggies that geta billion e-mails/questions!
I for one am looking forward to the release (and thanks for answering my questions!)
Derek
What did Cinderella say when she left the photo shop? "One day my prints will come."
The plan would be no breakage. But we can't know every site's customization - so - folks may have to make some accomodations. Just like we will be doing for the 46 themes that exist today.... We hope to have it on the Beta server so that customizers can test out their customizations. And we'll do plenty of education, and step-by-step stuff in advance.
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So your photo pages just BLEW UP, eh? We know how you feel. Andy upsets us too and like many things, this is his fault. Here's his home phone number: ______.
Sincerely,
The executive management shareholder value strategic vision market segment Total Quality Management synergy alliance team."
Baldy you are a funny man
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Keep us posted.
http://photos.mikelanestudios.com/
By the way... thanks for all the new stuff...
http://photos.mikelanestudios.com/
Change is good for most (I'm a big fan of the XL sizes). Change creates anxiety for a few. If you wanted to introduce the new feature, but avoid problems in as many cases as possible, this is what I think you could do:
On watermarks, it appears that the blown-up watermarks will be good enough so I don't think you need to do anything special here other than scale the watermarks to the appropriate size. An advance email that reminds them to upload larger watermarks if they are concerned should be enough.
On access control, if you turn XL sizes off whenever originals are off, you'll be safe here for all account levels. It's a bit of a bummer that you can't do more, but you really have no way of knowing whether a customer who has turned originals off is OK with the XL sizes or not. For pros, if larges are also off, then you know the XL sizes should be off. For the other account levels, I think you have to disable XL if originals are off. I presume that all account levels will have a per-gallery customization that lets them turn the XL sizes on so people won't really have anything to complain about. If they want them on, they can just turn them on. For newly created galleries, galleries will default to have XL on, just like they default to having all sizes on today.
For galleries that are watermarked and larges are on, I think it would be safe to enable XL since they too will be watermarked.
On past galleries, there are lots of possibilities. The first choice is whether you intend to eventually get all galleries upgraded to include the XL size. I presume you do, but you could also only upgrade galleries that get "touched" in some way (new images added, image replaced, etc...). I'd hope you upgrade everything over time, but that is a business call for you.
The second choice is how many galleries are already upgraded to include XL sizes when you launch the feature. At one end of the spectrum, you wouldn't launch the feature until XL sizes were created for all past galleries. At the other end of the spectrum, you wouldn't have XL sizes for any past galleries at launch and would just start doing them for new. A point in between those two is where you'd have XL sizes created for 2-3 months of the most recent galleries, but not everything yet. Which of these points to choose kind of depends upon how long you think it's going to take to create the XL sizes for past galleries.
If it's a month or two, then you might just consider waiting to launch the feature until the past galleries are fully upgraded. At time T0, you'd start create XL sizes for all new galleries, but not showing the XL sizes in the UI or serving them up to anyone. At time T1, once you were confident that the XL size generation was working well, you'd start upgrading past galleries, again still not showing this to anyone. Then, at time T2, you'd go public and start serving the XL sizes. While this obviously keeps the new feature out of the public's eye for a little longer, it's the safest way to do it because you fully control the rate of generation of new XL sizes and no customer actions will mess with your ability to control it. This would be the most conservative approach to the upgrade.
If it's going to take a lot longer to upgrade past galleries, then you could consider pre-upgrading just a few months of galleries before launch. This would tend to lessen the number of galleries that customers would go touch manually to cause an upgrade, but not eliminate it entirely. Left my own devices and without any other guidance from you all, I would probably go immediately touch 10-15 galleries and let the rest wait for the automatic process as long as the automatic process wasn't going to be a long, long time.
If you don't launch with all galleries already upgraded to XL, then the third choice is whether you let people "touch" galleries to cause an upgrade to XL sizes. The reason to prevent it is so that you can completely control the upgrade rate and customers can't overload you with too many "touched" galleries. If you don't let them touch galleries to cause an upgrade, but new galleries are getting the XL sizes, then some people will just re-upload the whole gallery which is even worse, but it's so much more difficult to to re-upload lots that this won't happen as much. If you're worried about the upgrade load (which it sounds like you are), I would tend to want to protect the integrity of the service and not let my customers control the XL upgrade load so I'd probably prevent "touch" upgrades and only do the upgrades on my own schedule.
On custom CSS styling, I think you want to minimize customer custom style breakage here. I assume that there's no way you can change the site to a wider design and not break some customer's custom CSS. Try as you will, there will be lots of customers who will not participate in the beta program (it's a pain to move all your custom style stuff over to the beta to try it) either because they don't hear about it or because they don't really know what to do or just don't think it's their responsibility. You can over communicate as much as possible, but it's just human nature that many will not participate. We know from previous feedback that some customers consider it your responsibility to do the right thing with an upgrade, not theirs.
So, the truly safe thing to do here is to not enable XL sizes for any customer with custom CSS. That will probably end up including most power and pro users. The only other thing I can think of is to try to scan the CSS to see if there's any width related directives, but that's probably hard. You'd then send out a communication to tell them that if they want XL sizes and have tested their own customizations with the XL format, then they can switch a setting in their account and their galleries will be enabled for XL as per the rules above. If you don't want to maintain this forever (since you'd probably have to be generating old CSS for their accounts), you could give customers X months to convert before you flip the switch for them.
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Taking advantage of the space allowed on larger displays will be great!
Just, PLEASE, be sure you somehow achieve the "goodness" without confusing non-subscriber visitors/guests/customers too much.
I've noticed on a friend's monitor that he has multiple tool bar rows which reduce the vertical space available to view images. So a super large image may fit horizontally, but not vertically in a single view.
Hopefully, a simple "Make Picture(s) Larger" (or Smaller) link close to the displayed pic would be a user-friendly aid, rather than cryptic X, XL, O, S type designations which mean little or nothing to someone not familiar with the site. Repeated "clicks", bigger or smaller, would allow the viewer to dynamically resize the image on the display until it "fits" the viewable space at the largest possible size without having to scroll.