Is there a reason you aren't using a combination of private galleries, categories and featured albums to solve this problem?
I am using private and featured today. 22 of my 36 galleries are private. Categories would be an impact to folks visiting that I'd rather not add. I don't have enough galleries today to make catergories really seem appropriate. I should have mentioned, this is purely for me as the logged in account owner, visitors don't have to wade through them like I do.
SmugMug Sorcerer - Engineering Team Champion for Commerce, Finance, Security, and Data Support http://wall-art.smugmug.com/
I am using private and featured today. 22 of my 36 galleries are private. Categories would be an impact to folks visiting that I'd rather not add. I don't have enough galleries today to make catergories really seem appropriate. I should have mentioned, this is purely for me as the logged in account owner, visitors don't have to wade through them like I do.
If this is just for you and just for private galleries, then I'd suggest you just use a custom sort order for the galleries and put the private ones at the end of the order. This won't affect your viewers since they don't see them, but you can simply ignore the ones at the end of the list when using your own site unless you're looking for them. The public ones will appear first just like your viewers see them.
Smugmug Charities
I haven't posted to dgrin in a long time, but I figure this Idea is worth posting:
Idea: Smugmug shooters shoot on behalf of good causes. Smugmug pays a flat proportion (never changing) of the sale to go to said cause. And advertises that prominently and in a way thats easy to verify. I would say 50% of the proceeds (including SM's 15%) goes to the charity, and the rest goes to the photographer to cover expenses.
This would allow us to raise prices and treat our photography more like fine art than the commodity direction - which I think Smugmug shouldn't be pursuing as much.
Entire Album / Batch Download to ZIP file
It'd be great to see a one-click option to download an entire album, probably via a ZIP archived file. Server-side applications like Menalto's Gallery 2.0 offer this and it works wonderfully for photo distribution to friends after a group event.
Although some people are fine with viewing online, others want to take the photos offline to show to friends more quickly or in a situation where there is no internet access. Or make them into a movie or do all the things you can't do is they're online.
Right now the only way to accomplish this is to download each photo individually. Or burn them a DVD and ship via mail, but that's beside the point.
In the detailed stats section, instead of listing a blank graph for every gallery that has not had hits in a particular month, there should be an option to "hide" these galleries until they register a hit.
Quick Gallery Creation- I photograph horse shows and divide up riders into their own gallery for ease of purchase. For each event I'll need 30-100 or more galleries that are identical aside from their name (same price, same theme, same settings). Although smugmug recently fixed half of the time consuming settings (it remembers the category and subcategory) if the "new gallery" page had a memory of the rest of the settings I last used( theme, quick settings, pricing) so I only had to name the gallery and press ok, it would speed things up.
OR even better would be a bulk gallery creation. The ability to create a bunch of identical galleries at the same time would be awesome
Quick pricing like Quick Settings- I have a sale price and regular price for my prints and its hard for me to keep track of which galleries are priced as which use the settings from and inconvenient to have to scroll through my hundreds of galleries to find the right one. It would be hugely awesome to have the quick pricing set up identical to the quick settings, to be able to save my desired pricing schemes under "sale" and "regular" or whatever.:D
Annoyed by the "Sales to date" order
A few requests - but the major one is that I would LOVE to see the "sales to date" in reverse order from how it shows now. Currently, it shows my oldest order first and my most recent order last. Very annoying. I really dont' care about my really old orders - only my current ones.
I'd also LOVE to be able to filter on the main page to show ONLY the ones that haven't been released for printing. While it's nice to see which I've been paid for and which I haven't, it's much more important to me to see which I still need to edit and release.
Is there any way for me to revers the order in which they're viewed? That would rock!
Sort by Rating, please
I think I've asked for this before, but I still need it for my event shooting. For soccer, I separate the shots by player and upload a gallery for each player. During the season, I have separately rated all the shots with 1-4 stars in Adobe Bridge. I want to present the season's worth of shots for each player sort by rating (highest rating shots first). The easiest way to do that would be to just upload them and then configure the gallery to sort by rating (highest to lowest). This seems like it would be a useful thing for lots of event photographers who want to showcase the best work first, but since you never know what parents will like, you want to include some of the other keepers too.
So, please add "sort by rating".
For anyone else interested in this feature, there is a work-around, though it's kind of a pain. You can sort in Bridge by rating and then redo all the filenames so the filenames are in rating order and then sort by filename in Smugmug. I really don't like using this because I don't want to bastardize my filenames just for a sort order in Smugmug and it's not very flexible. If you're reviewing images before upload and decide you want to change a few ratings, it's a bunch of manual work to make the filenames match the changed rating. And, if you have both RAWs and JPEGs, you have to keep the filenames in sync. All-in-all, my workflow does not want to mess with filenames after card download.
In the sales part of the control panel, it's nice how the orders are separated into paid and unpaid. I'd like to request one additional feature--it would be SO good if at a glance, I could tell if an order is in processing/print/ship mode or not so I'd know whether there was anything I was supposed to be doing like replacing photos. Right now I have to enter each order and look at its status.
Unless I'm missing something! Such as, right now I have around a dozen in my unpaid, all from the same event so they all "look alike". Maybe if there was a border around the thumbnails in the list, so that anything that was NOT in process/print or ship mode would stand out.
A real simple feature request - create a proper help system. As a relatively new smugmugger I found I spent way to much time trying to find out how to customize my gallery simply because the information is spread across so many different resources. The forums are particularly bad as you frequently have to read a large number messages (some of which conflict) to get the desired result.
Personally I would suggest employing a competent technical writer and having them transpose the existing information into the smugmug Wiki and then deleting the original source to avoid confusion.
BTW It is impressive what can be archived on smugmug using some CSS, HTML and Java script; just a pity the effort to figure it out is so complicated.
It'd be great to see a one-click option to download an entire album, probably via a ZIP archived file. Server-side applications like Menalto's Gallery 2.0 offer this and it works wonderfully for photo distribution to friends after a group event.
Although some people are fine with viewing online, others want to take the photos offline to show to friends more quickly or in a situation where there is no internet access. Or make them into a movie or do all the things you can't do is they're online.
Right now the only way to accomplish this is to download each photo individually. Or burn them a DVD and ship via mail, but that's beside the point.
I am new to Smugmug, but I already see some features that I really miss:
-Sub Galleries: Yes we can create categories with sub-categories, but it is a pain to configure. And also limited to two levels. It will be very great to be able to create galleries inside galleries. With unlimited levels. This will really easy the management of large collection.
-Google Map content: Some concurrents has already developed some "Google Map Add-ons" to display photos in your "My Google Map". You should do the same thing. See: http://maps.google.com/ig/directory?synd=mpl
-Real support of UTF-8: You said that support of UTF-8 is implemented, but it is still impossible to use it in Category names. I tried with some accentuated characters and it was rejected.
-Gallery download: It will be nice to be able to download a full gallery instead of just individual files. This was already requested by others...
Here is another suggestion. Maybe more complicated to implement but:
Familly account: It will be nice to have a familly (or group) account. A unique page but with different username and password. One ore more user can be the admin and the others can have some limited access.
Suggestions
I am at the pro level - but relatively new - so if these are solved then I apologize in advance.
I love how easy it is to use, customize and personalize the site. That is one of the reasons I joined. I like the fact that you can create HTML pages and create a totally customized site.
===================================
My biggest issue is that much of my modification is done on a public computer - so I have to check the "public computer" box about 50 times a day. For security reasons the default should be to NOT store passwords. You should have to check the box to store a password - not the opposite. And it should remember the check box for that computer in the future. There should be a cookie to indicate whether that computer is public or not - OR - the lack of a cookie should indicate this. Once you know that a computer is public or not - it should not have to be set again and again and again - but we still need the option to change it.
Next is getting prints that don't come from another country. There should be a local option.
There should be an option to charge a small royalty for each print ordered. (This may be in place - but I didn't find it) ... Since nobody here wants to pay shipping and duty from the U.S. I can't use the order prints feature yet.
There should be the ability to put sub-categories below the galleries without sub-categories.
It would be nice if we could put password on the category level, rather than on every single gallery in the category. I don't know if that is possible without compromising the protection at the gallery level.
It would be nice not to have to hit F5 after I sign in from my domain rather than my smugmug URL. (minor I know).
Suggestions for email accounts
I am at the pro-level but very new.
It would be really great if we can have an email account for registering at smugmug and a separate one for invitations. I don't want to change my emaila ccount every time I send an invitation so that it will not show my private account. This is similar to when you ask for an account for order questions - could you do the same thing for invites? I like that smugmug tracks invites.
Can we also get the invites to use our vanity names instead of the gallery number?
Things I miss a lot, in no specific order:
(on the other hand, there are plenty of things I do not miss, they exist!)
> Virtual Galleries ... so one can upload a photo once and then show it in many places
> Sub-Sub-Galleries ... more levels, at least five
> Photo date ... a way to show the date when the photo was taken. It is available since PHOTO INFO shows it as DATE TAKEN. It should be shown close to where Caption is and whenever the Caption is shown
> Bread-crumbs ... I know they can be hidden. Want I want is a way to control which levels should be hidden. I want to be able to send on a link to a Sub-category and the bread-crumbs for this Category and all Galleries should show. So when a viewer is down into a Gallery he should easily be able to click back to sub-category level ... but not higher. Same thing for Categories
> When I look at a Sub-category page I see a list of Galleries. Here I also want to see the number of photos in each Gallery
Regards, HaraldE
==================
My focus is on digitizing memories
Raw
I forgot to mention ... I would really like to upload my RAW files. Not to show them in galleries ... just as a backup. If I have unlimited space... it would be nice if I could use it.
Things I miss a lot, in no specific order:
(on the other hand, there are plenty of things I do not miss, they exist!)
> Virtual Galleries ... so one can upload a photo once and then show it in many places
> Sub-Sub-Galleries ... more levels, at least five
> Bread-crumbs ... I know they can be hidden. Want I want is a way to control which levels should be hidden. I want to be able to send on a link to a Sub-category and the bread-crumbs for this Category and all Galleries should show. So when a viewer is down into a Gallery he should easily be able to click back to sub-category level ... but not higher. Same thing for Categories
I forgot to mention ... I would really like to upload my RAW files. Not to show them in galleries ... just as a backup. If I have unlimited space... it would be nice if I could use it.
Pilot.smugmug.com
Hi, well now, so that might create a different sort of model than we have now, eh? We're unlimited, for jpgs. And we mean it.
I recommend S3 and Jungledisk, and there are similar offerings out there. All of my RAWs are backed up to Amazon S3, and I pay about $10 a month. Much cheaper than local storage for me
Comment captchas suck - not needed for password-protected galleries/sites
Well, the title pretty much says it all.
Captchas (you know, "To foil spammers, enter this code: AFJY") suck. I understand the need to put them on publicly accessible galleries, and even hidden galleries w/o a password, to prevent comment spam.
But if I am giving a password to somebody to one of my galleries, or to my entire site, then there is an implicit trust that they will not spam my comments.
Or if they do, there is some level of accountability.
So please please, turn them off for password-protected galleries/sites. Or at least give us the option to. It just makes sense.
Captchas (you know, "To foil spammers, enter this code: AFJY") suck. I understand the need to put them on publicly accessible galleries, and even hidden galleries w/o a password, to prevent comment spam.
But if I am giving a password to somebody to one of my galleries, or to my entire site, then there is an implicit trust that they will not spam my comments.
Or if they do, there is some level of accountability.
So please please, turn them off for password-protected galleries/sites. Or at least give us the option to. It just makes sense.
New Guy - Enhancement Requests
Let me first express how much I love Smugmug. I have tried them all, and this is different (read: better) in so many ways (Not that you didn't know this already).
As you can easily imagine, there are some spots where I would like to see
improvement. You will find that these suggestions are not "icing on the cake"-type features requests. They are basic, usability fixes that would significantly improve the end user experience.
By the way, I apologize if these suggestions have been made before. I have found this forum UI busy and difficult to navigate.
Quick Settings
Today (as far as I can tell), you can create a "Quick Setting" to facilitate the configuration of a gallery according to your standards of privacy, functionality, etc. for a given set of photos. I can create a gallery into which I dump a bunch of photos, click "Customize", and select a Quick Setting to get all of the feature configuration that I want. This sounds great except that this album doesn't seem to be ASSOCIATED in any way with this Quick Setting once the user submits the form where they initially selected the Quick Setting. This doesn't seem like a big deal except when you have 200 albums already created and you want to "Hide Owner"
for all of them, or "Allow Originals" for all of them (or at least all of the
gallerys for which I selected Quick Setting "Family" for example). There is no interface for me to modify what it means to be of Quick Setting "Family" - such that a change to this Quick Setting can ripple throughout my Smugmug site modifying all those albums associated with this quick setting. The process of implementing a change like the one above is horrible - extremely time consuming and frustrating.
I am suggesting that like "Categories" and "Subcategories", there should be an interface for the creation and MAINTENANCE of Quick Settings and that gallerys should be associated with Quick Settings in the database for simple and efficient change management.
What do you think?
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Unique Names for Galleries
When my wife and I go on vacation, we both have cameras around our necks the whole time (yes, we are those kinds of tourists ). When we get home, we load our Windows Home Server up with these photos, in most cases keeping our work in separate folders. For example, I might have a folder called "Vacation" with a Subfolder folder called
"2006 08 -Vietnam" (child of "Vacation") with a Subfolder called "Brandon" (child of "Vietnam") with a Subfolder called "Bai Tu Long Bay"
(child of "Brandon"). So the folder structure looks like this in my scenario:
Vacation/2006 08 - Vietnam/Brandon/Bai Tu Long Bay
For the moment, let's ignore the fact that in Smugmug I can't implement the
structure above even though I really, really want to (I am severely limited by the current Category/Subcategory/Gallery paradigm for nesting Galleries) and focus on the "Brandon" tier of the aforementioned hierarchical structure. As you can imagine, I have more than one "Brandon" folder on disk. Here is another example:
Vacation/2006 07 - Cambodia/Brandon/Angkor Thom
When I translate these stuctures into Smugmug, the best I can do is to have a Category called "Vacation", a Subcategory called "2006 08 - Vietnam", and a gallery called "Brandon" (yeah, yeah, I can try to combine our pics but this is a nightmare for us because of filenames, etc). You can probably see the trouble brewing here already... This means that I end up with many galleries called "Brandon" which seems okay because they are part of different Categories/Subcategories. The trouble comes when I try to do any task for which I must make reference to a "Brandon" gallery. The dropdowns in the Web UI do not display unique gallery names. Using the entire hierarchy in the name of the gallery would guarantee a dropdown full of unique gallery names. For example you might see a dropdown with the following:
BTW - I realize that there is a unique gallery ID in the database (and therefore in the gallery URL), but for obvious reasons, you can't expose this integer ID to the end user.
Am I making sense here?
Oh yeah, and about that limiting Category/Subcategory/Gallery paradigm... any thoughts here on making this more flexible to accomodate n-tier stuctures, or at least say ... 5 levels?
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Meta data-driven Galleries (I am calling them "Virtual Galleries" for lack of a better name)
The way Smugmug is engineered today as it relates to galleries is very limiting. You create a gallery > you upload photos to this gallery > this photos get written out to a folder > when you navigate to a gallery, you can view the photos contained therein (I am simplifying obviously, but this is it from a high level (I wish I had an architecture diagram of Smugmug )).
What I would like to be able to do is create NEW galleries a la carte from
existing photos within other galleries. Here's the use case: I have a whole bunch of photos of my gradmother in say... 25 different galleries. Some are galleries of my grandmother and only my grandmother while others are sort of "incidental" photos of my her (she isn't the subject of the gallery but there are photos of her in the context of other family members). I want to be able to quickly create and *feature* a new Virtual Gallery called "Grammy's Greatest Hits", the pictures for which are derived from these 25 galleries. This requires a meta-data driven approach to galleries instead of the "photos in a folder" approach that I see now. IMO, all galleries should work this way for increased flexibility and speed of moving photos around, etc (because you aren't physically moving photos) but this could be phased in by allowing users in the short term to create a new kind of gallery - a "Virtual Gallery". Then you integrate tools into the < photo tools >
dropdown to allow site managers to add the current photo to their UNIQUELY NAMED Virtual Gallery. In the future, this "Add to Virtual Gallery" control could be integrated into the "Photo Sizes" fly-in if you are logged in as the site owner or with right-click using AJAX.
This feature will facilitate the creation of "composite" galleries to maximize
convenience for site managers, revenue potential for pros (because they will be able to essentially repackage photos into new "products" or contexts to create value where there was none), convenience for end users as in my case, my family will be able to quickly see what I figure are the best pictures of my grandmother across all galleries, and maybe most importantly, revenue for Smugmug (from prints). I think that my family for example would be far more likely to buy prints if I could create Virtual Galleries of them rather than asking them to navigate the whole site. This meta-data driven approach will create all of this value without increasing Smugmug's expense as it relates to storage and it doesn't force me to upload the same photo 5 times for the 5 different contexts in which it
is used. I am not a pro but I want to able to quickly create/destroy Virtual
Galleries/Slideshows for birthdays, anniversaries, vacation "quick views", "best of's", etc.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Show/hide within a Gallery
What I find so compelling about smugmug is that first and foremost, you store my originals. Sometimes I want you to store all of my originals but for the sake of simplifying the end user experience of my vacation for example, I want to "hide" many of the photos in a gallery. Again, the goal is to display the best photos but have you store all of the originals. No, I do not want to create a hidden gallery into which I upload all of the ones I don't wish to display. That is a maintenance nightmare. I just want to be able to switch photos on and off.
The meta-data driven approach to gallery composition would be a tremendous help in making this happen.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
More use of Web 2.0 Features
Take for example the "smugmug" style ... sometimes it takes a long time to load the main photo on the right side of the screen. Rather than display what appears to be a dead image reference, why not use ajax to display a "Loading" message?
More another time... Sorry if these are unoriginal.
Look at the code uses in the sub-gallery technique for adding an extra level to the breadcrumb. A very similar technique can be used to delete levels from the breadcrumb. It's very hacky, so I leave it as an exercise for the reader.
Look at the code uses in the sub-gallery technique for adding an extra level to the breadcrumb. A very similar technique can be used to delete levels from the breadcrumb. It's very hacky, so I leave it as an exercise for the reader.
Thanks for the keyword workaround idea for virtual galleries. However I see this as a hack and a major inconvenience. It will be extremely labor intensive to clean up one of these virtual galleries as I don't want to reduce the effectiveness of keyword-ing for search, etc. This is an abuse of that functionality and will just create more work in the long run.
Comments
I am using private and featured today. 22 of my 36 galleries are private. Categories would be an impact to folks visiting that I'd rather not add. I don't have enough galleries today to make catergories really seem appropriate. I should have mentioned, this is purely for me as the logged in account owner, visitors don't have to wade through them like I do.
http://wall-art.smugmug.com/
If this is just for you and just for private galleries, then I'd suggest you just use a custom sort order for the galleries and put the private ones at the end of the order. This won't affect your viewers since they don't see them, but you can simply ignore the ones at the end of the list when using your own site unless you're looking for them. The public ones will appear first just like your viewers see them.
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I'm missing two features:
1. Tag single pictures in a gallery to be private
2. Adding geography coordinates for a complete gallery
Especially the first point is very important I think and would be a reason for me to return to the service I used before were it was possible.
Beside of that smugmug is just perfect for me.
Would be great if this could be added.
It's a lack of customer information on the pro sales index page.
For whatever reason I sometimes need to go and pull up the details of a previous sale, but finding it is a real PITA.
You REALLY need to display customer names/emails alongside the particular order number(s) to make this easier to manage.
--David Tomic
www.davidtomic.com
I haven't posted to dgrin in a long time, but I figure this Idea is worth posting:
Idea: Smugmug shooters shoot on behalf of good causes. Smugmug pays a flat proportion (never changing) of the sale to go to said cause. And advertises that prominently and in a way thats easy to verify. I would say 50% of the proceeds (including SM's 15%) goes to the charity, and the rest goes to the photographer to cover expenses.
This would allow us to raise prices and treat our photography more like fine art than the commodity direction - which I think Smugmug shouldn't be pursuing as much.
What are your thoughts?
It'd be great to see a one-click option to download an entire album, probably via a ZIP archived file. Server-side applications like Menalto's Gallery 2.0 offer this and it works wonderfully for photo distribution to friends after a group event.
Although some people are fine with viewing online, others want to take the photos offline to show to friends more quickly or in a situation where there is no internet access. Or make them into a movie or do all the things you can't do is they're online.
Right now the only way to accomplish this is to download each photo individually. Or burn them a DVD and ship via mail, but that's beside the point.
Any plans for this?
Come visit me at...
www.brickstreetphotos.com
Quick Gallery Creation- I photograph horse shows and divide up riders into their own gallery for ease of purchase. For each event I'll need 30-100 or more galleries that are identical aside from their name (same price, same theme, same settings). Although smugmug recently fixed half of the time consuming settings (it remembers the category and subcategory) if the "new gallery" page had a memory of the rest of the settings I last used ( theme, quick settings, pricing) so I only had to name the gallery and press ok, it would speed things up.
OR even better would be a bulk gallery creation. The ability to create a bunch of identical galleries at the same time would be awesome
Quick pricing like Quick Settings- I have a sale price and regular price for my prints and its hard for me to keep track of which galleries are priced as which use the settings from and inconvenient to have to scroll through my hundreds of galleries to find the right one. It would be hugely awesome to have the quick pricing set up identical to the quick settings, to be able to save my desired pricing schemes under "sale" and "regular" or whatever.:D
Hope all that makes sense
The blog :-)
A few requests - but the major one is that I would LOVE to see the "sales to date" in reverse order from how it shows now. Currently, it shows my oldest order first and my most recent order last. Very annoying. I really dont' care about my really old orders - only my current ones.
I'd also LOVE to be able to filter on the main page to show ONLY the ones that haven't been released for printing. While it's nice to see which I've been paid for and which I haven't, it's much more important to me to see which I still need to edit and release.
Is there any way for me to revers the order in which they're viewed? That would rock!
Thanks!
www.tippiepics.com
If you have Picasa, you can geotag mutiple photos at once in it, then use the Picasa uploader.
I think I've asked for this before, but I still need it for my event shooting. For soccer, I separate the shots by player and upload a gallery for each player. During the season, I have separately rated all the shots with 1-4 stars in Adobe Bridge. I want to present the season's worth of shots for each player sort by rating (highest rating shots first). The easiest way to do that would be to just upload them and then configure the gallery to sort by rating (highest to lowest). This seems like it would be a useful thing for lots of event photographers who want to showcase the best work first, but since you never know what parents will like, you want to include some of the other keepers too.
So, please add "sort by rating".
For anyone else interested in this feature, there is a work-around, though it's kind of a pain. You can sort in Bridge by rating and then redo all the filenames so the filenames are in rating order and then sort by filename in Smugmug. I really don't like using this because I don't want to bastardize my filenames just for a sort order in Smugmug and it's not very flexible. If you're reviewing images before upload and decide you want to change a few ratings, it's a bunch of manual work to make the filenames match the changed rating. And, if you have both RAWs and JPEGs, you have to keep the filenames in sync. All-in-all, my workflow does not want to mess with filenames after card download.
So, please add "sort by rating".
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Unless I'm missing something!
Galleries here Upcoming Ranch/Horse Workshop
Personally I would suggest employing a competent technical writer and having them transpose the existing information into the smugmug Wiki and then deleting the original source to avoid confusion.
BTW It is impressive what can be archived on smugmug using some CSS, HTML and Java script; just a pity the effort to figure it out is so complicated.
Gareth
www.eyeforphotos.co.uk
AlbumFetcher
FriendSync
www.ivarborst.nl & smugmug
-Sub Galleries: Yes we can create categories with sub-categories, but it is a pain to configure. And also limited to two levels. It will be very great to be able to create galleries inside galleries. With unlimited levels. This will really easy the management of large collection.
-Google Map content: Some concurrents has already developed some "Google Map Add-ons" to display photos in your "My Google Map". You should do the same thing. See: http://maps.google.com/ig/directory?synd=mpl
-Real support of UTF-8: You said that support of UTF-8 is implemented, but it is still impossible to use it in Category names. I tried with some accentuated characters and it was rejected.
-Gallery download: It will be nice to be able to download a full gallery instead of just individual files. This was already requested by others...
Thierry
Familly account: It will be nice to have a familly (or group) account. A unique page but with different username and password. One ore more user can be the admin and the others can have some limited access.
Thierry
I am at the pro level - but relatively new - so if these are solved then I apologize in advance.
I love how easy it is to use, customize and personalize the site. That is one of the reasons I joined. I like the fact that you can create HTML pages and create a totally customized site.
===================================
My biggest issue is that much of my modification is done on a public computer - so I have to check the "public computer" box about 50 times a day. For security reasons the default should be to NOT store passwords. You should have to check the box to store a password - not the opposite. And it should remember the check box for that computer in the future. There should be a cookie to indicate whether that computer is public or not - OR - the lack of a cookie should indicate this. Once you know that a computer is public or not - it should not have to be set again and again and again - but we still need the option to change it.
Next is getting prints that don't come from another country. There should be a local option.
There should be an option to charge a small royalty for each print ordered. (This may be in place - but I didn't find it) ... Since nobody here wants to pay shipping and duty from the U.S. I can't use the order prints feature yet.
There should be the ability to put sub-categories below the galleries without sub-categories.
It would be nice if we could put password on the category level, rather than on every single gallery in the category. I don't know if that is possible without compromising the protection at the gallery level.
It would be nice not to have to hit F5 after I sign in from my domain rather than my smugmug URL. (minor I know).
Pilot.smugmug.com
Steve
I am at the pro-level but very new.
It would be really great if we can have an email account for registering at smugmug and a separate one for invitations. I don't want to change my emaila ccount every time I send an invitation so that it will not show my private account. This is similar to when you ask for an account for order questions - could you do the same thing for invites? I like that smugmug tracks invites.
Can we also get the invites to use our vanity names instead of the gallery number?
Brian
http://photos.katzclix.com
blog - http://blog.katzclix.com
(on the other hand, there are plenty of things I do not miss, they exist!)
> Virtual Galleries ... so one can upload a photo once and then show it in many places
> Sub-Sub-Galleries ... more levels, at least five
> Photo date ... a way to show the date when the photo was taken. It is available since PHOTO INFO shows it as DATE TAKEN. It should be shown close to where Caption is and whenever the Caption is shown
> Bread-crumbs ... I know they can be hidden. Want I want is a way to control which levels should be hidden. I want to be able to send on a link to a Sub-category and the bread-crumbs for this Category and all Galleries should show. So when a viewer is down into a Gallery he should easily be able to click back to sub-category level ... but not higher. Same thing for Categories
> When I look at a Sub-category page I see a list of Galleries. Here I also want to see the number of photos in each Gallery
Regards, HaraldE
My focus is on digitizing memories
I forgot to mention ... I would really like to upload my RAW files. Not to show them in galleries ... just as a backup. If I have unlimited space... it would be nice if I could use it.
Pilot.smugmug.com
Steve
All of these can be done by Power Users
I recommend S3 and Jungledisk, and there are similar offerings out there. All of my RAWs are backed up to Amazon S3, and I pay about $10 a month. Much cheaper than local storage for me
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
Well, the title pretty much says it all.
Captchas (you know, "To foil spammers, enter this code: AFJY") suck. I understand the need to put them on publicly accessible galleries, and even hidden galleries w/o a password, to prevent comment spam.
But if I am giving a password to somebody to one of my galleries, or to my entire site, then there is an implicit trust that they will not spam my comments.
Or if they do, there is some level of accountability.
So please please, turn them off for password-protected galleries/sites. Or at least give us the option to. It just makes sense.
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
Interesting, then I should be able to do it ... can you tell me where to look for these features, thanks
Regards, HaraldE
My focus is on digitizing memories
email regarding resetting 'popular pictures'
Let me first express how much I love Smugmug. I have tried them all, and this is different (read: better) in so many ways (Not that you didn't know this already).
As you can easily imagine, there are some spots where I would like to see
improvement. You will find that these suggestions are not "icing on the cake"-type features requests. They are basic, usability fixes that would significantly improve the end user experience.
By the way, I apologize if these suggestions have been made before. I have found this forum UI busy and difficult to navigate.
Quick Settings
Today (as far as I can tell), you can create a "Quick Setting" to facilitate the configuration of a gallery according to your standards of privacy, functionality, etc. for a given set of photos. I can create a gallery into which I dump a bunch of photos, click "Customize", and select a Quick Setting to get all of the feature configuration that I want. This sounds great except that this album doesn't seem to be ASSOCIATED in any way with this Quick Setting once the user submits the form where they initially selected the Quick Setting. This doesn't seem like a big deal except when you have 200 albums already created and you want to "Hide Owner"
for all of them, or "Allow Originals" for all of them (or at least all of the
gallerys for which I selected Quick Setting "Family" for example). There is no interface for me to modify what it means to be of Quick Setting "Family" - such that a change to this Quick Setting can ripple throughout my Smugmug site modifying all those albums associated with this quick setting. The process of implementing a change like the one above is horrible - extremely time consuming and frustrating.
I am suggesting that like "Categories" and "Subcategories", there should be an interface for the creation and MAINTENANCE of Quick Settings and that gallerys should be associated with Quick Settings in the database for simple and efficient change management.
What do you think?
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Unique Names for Galleries
When my wife and I go on vacation, we both have cameras around our necks the whole time (yes, we are those kinds of tourists
"2006 08 -Vietnam" (child of "Vacation") with a Subfolder called "Brandon" (child of "Vietnam") with a Subfolder called "Bai Tu Long Bay"
(child of "Brandon"). So the folder structure looks like this in my scenario:
Vacation/2006 08 - Vietnam/Brandon/Bai Tu Long Bay
For the moment, let's ignore the fact that in Smugmug I can't implement the
structure above even though I really, really want to (I am severely limited by the current Category/Subcategory/Gallery paradigm for nesting Galleries) and focus on the "Brandon" tier of the aforementioned hierarchical structure. As you can imagine, I have more than one "Brandon" folder on disk. Here is another example:
Vacation/2006 07 - Cambodia/Brandon/Angkor Thom
When I translate these stuctures into Smugmug, the best I can do is to have a Category called "Vacation", a Subcategory called "2006 08 - Vietnam", and a gallery called "Brandon" (yeah, yeah, I can try to combine our pics but this is a nightmare for us because of filenames, etc). You can probably see the trouble brewing here already... This means that I end up with many galleries called "Brandon" which seems okay because they are part of different Categories/Subcategories. The trouble comes when I try to do any task for which I must make reference to a "Brandon" gallery. The dropdowns in the Web UI do not display unique gallery names. Using the entire hierarchy in the name of the gallery would guarantee a dropdown full of unique gallery names. For example you might see a dropdown with the following:
"Vacation > 2006 08 - Vietnam > Brandon"
"Vacation > 2006 07 - Cambodia > Brandon"
"Vacation > 2007 07 - Ireland > Brandon"
Rather than the following:
"Brandon"
"Brandon"
"Brandon"
BTW - I realize that there is a unique gallery ID in the database (and therefore in the gallery URL), but for obvious reasons, you can't expose this integer ID to the end user.
Am I making sense here?
Oh yeah, and about that limiting Category/Subcategory/Gallery paradigm... any thoughts here on making this more flexible to accomodate n-tier stuctures, or at least say ... 5 levels?
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Meta data-driven Galleries (I am calling them "Virtual Galleries" for lack of a better name)
The way Smugmug is engineered today as it relates to galleries is very limiting. You create a gallery > you upload photos to this gallery > this photos get written out to a folder > when you navigate to a gallery, you can view the photos contained therein (I am simplifying obviously, but this is it from a high level (I wish I had an architecture diagram of Smugmug
What I would like to be able to do is create NEW galleries a la carte from
existing photos within other galleries. Here's the use case: I have a whole bunch of photos of my gradmother in say... 25 different galleries. Some are galleries of my grandmother and only my grandmother while others are sort of "incidental" photos of my her (she isn't the subject of the gallery but there are photos of her in the context of other family members). I want to be able to quickly create and *feature* a new Virtual Gallery called "Grammy's Greatest Hits", the pictures for which are derived from these 25 galleries. This requires a meta-data driven approach to galleries instead of the "photos in a folder" approach that I see now. IMO, all galleries should work this way for increased flexibility and speed of moving photos around, etc (because you aren't physically moving photos) but this could be phased in by allowing users in the short term to create a new kind of gallery - a "Virtual Gallery". Then you integrate tools into the < photo tools >
dropdown to allow site managers to add the current photo to their UNIQUELY NAMED Virtual Gallery. In the future, this "Add to Virtual Gallery" control could be integrated into the "Photo Sizes" fly-in if you are logged in as the site owner or with right-click using AJAX.
This feature will facilitate the creation of "composite" galleries to maximize
convenience for site managers, revenue potential for pros (because they will be able to essentially repackage photos into new "products" or contexts to create value where there was none), convenience for end users as in my case, my family will be able to quickly see what I figure are the best pictures of my grandmother across all galleries, and maybe most importantly, revenue for Smugmug (from prints). I think that my family for example would be far more likely to buy prints if I could create Virtual Galleries of them rather than asking them to navigate the whole site. This meta-data driven approach will create all of this value without increasing Smugmug's expense as it relates to storage and it doesn't force me to upload the same photo 5 times for the 5 different contexts in which it
is used. I am not a pro but I want to able to quickly create/destroy Virtual
Galleries/Slideshows for birthdays, anniversaries, vacation "quick views", "best of's", etc.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Show/hide within a Gallery
What I find so compelling about smugmug is that first and foremost, you store my originals. Sometimes I want you to store all of my originals but for the sake of simplifying the end user experience of my vacation for example, I want to "hide" many of the photos in a gallery. Again, the goal is to display the best photos but have you store all of the originals. No, I do not want to create a hidden gallery into which I upload all of the ones I don't wish to display. That is a maintenance nightmare. I just want to be able to switch photos on and off.
The meta-data driven approach to gallery composition would be a tremendous help in making this happen.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
More use of Web 2.0 Features
Take for example the "smugmug" style ... sometimes it takes a long time to load the main photo on the right side of the screen. Rather than display what appears to be a dead image reference, why not use ajax to display a "Loading" message?
More another time... Sorry if these are unoriginal.
Brandon
Have you tried searching the dgrin forums?
> Virtual Galleries
Add a keyword to the photos which you would like to display in a given virtual gallery, and use a gallery redirect to the keyword URL.
> Sub-Sub-Galleries
Use the sub-gallery technique
> Hiding part of a breadcrumb
Look at the code uses in the sub-gallery technique for adding an extra level to the breadcrumb. A very similar technique can be used to delete levels from the breadcrumb. It's very hacky, so I leave it as an exercise for the reader.
Thanks for the keyword workaround idea for virtual galleries. However I see this as a hack and a major inconvenience. It will be extremely labor intensive to clean up one of these virtual galleries as I don't want to reduce the effectiveness of keyword-ing for search, etc. This is an abuse of that functionality and will just create more work in the long run.
Thanks!