Announcing Smugfoto for Facebook

ebswift

Smugfoto is an application for facebook that will display photos on your profile, as well as in a tab for your personal profile or fan page. Photos on your profile can be either four random images, or one chosen image. Smugfoto is unique in that it will display all categories in the order that you have them on SmugMug, along with featured photos for each category. It is (and always will be) free for both personal page and fan page use.

Smugfoto will reproduce your public SmugMug albums on facebook how you want them to look according to your settings in SmugMug whilst respecting security and visibility settings without giving up your password. Options such as right-click protection and watermarking are delivered to help you keep your rights to your images.

You are welcome to test the application for yourself, the facebook app URL is:

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=8226496548

Check out the fan page option at work here:

ebswift.com fan page

Please report suggestions and issues directly to me and I'll ensure they receive proper attention. Thanks for looking!

ebswift

I ran a test against the dgrin gallery, it seemed to work pretty well.

ebswift

Sub-categories at work:

ebswift

Galleries within a sub-category:

ebswift

Gallery images:

ebswift

Finally, the selected image:

ebswift

OK, now I understand both why the 'other' smugmug->facebook applications were failing, and the challenge.

It appears facebook recently lowered its API timeout threshold which means unless you can process the galleries lightning fast you're toast.

Fortunately I was able to optimise my code so that it has a *reasonable* chance of success. In my recent testing it appears that it does work 100% of the time, however I can't rule out that users will need to press the 'Try Again' button on facebook occasionally if there is a timeout.

What I found is that when I retrieve the tree from SmugMug it returns a whole lot of redundant (unused) categories which both add to the retrieval time and the loop-thru time. I hardly believe loop-through to be a problem, I suspect it is more in the retrieval.

I will continue to optimise the code to minimise any chance of a timeout.

To anyone who attempted to access this application in the last several hours and found timeouts and coding bugs this should be rectified - I was working on the optimisation. For future work I might consider making a dummy mirror app for testing, then migrate to production when I'm ready.

fiatsurf

I gave it a shot and it seems to work fine (but I have a pretty fast connection at home). And I couldn't access the private galleries (which I like) and it seems to 'obey' whatever image size I have as largest (think I go up to 2X)... so when I hit original, it doesn't actually show the original. I'll have to give it a shot with a slower connection to see how it goes but looks good so far. It doesn't have the right-click protect but I'm not too worried about that as I allow photo sharing and savvy hackers can mine the image anyway (I use a rather large watermark). If I see any bugs I'll give you a shout. Thanks!

Toby

p.s. One thing, could you make it so it automatically, magically fixes any 'soft focus' shots I have? Thanks in advance.

ebswift

Thanks for trying out the app Toby, at least I know it's working for others now ! BTW, I can't see that Smugfoto is going to perform any image manipulation anytime soon, I'll leave that to the good folks at SmugMug and their API .

One bit of frustrating behaviour I've discovered (which is probably well known to API developers) is that images for some galleries are not being rendered in Smugfoto, and instead I'm getting the browser default 'no image' marker. The real strangeness takes place when I get the address of the 'no image' and place it into the address bar, it renders! Even stranger, is that after it renders, the picture is correctly shown in Smugfoto.

The only way I can explain this is that SmugMug does not render image sizes from some images until there has been a request for that image. Going further still, I'm speculating that SmugMug is referer-aware and will only render requests called directly to its own servers. Therefore, a call which comes from the facebook application host is not a SmugMug server and therefore the image rendering does not take place. A direct call from the address bar generates a null referer so SmugMug says that's ok and renders the image. Of course, I could be completely off the mark.

Without wanting to annoy the nice SmugMug people I probably won't start referer spoofing, so I await hopefully a nice simple answer to the problem!

ebswift

For anyone who added Smugfoto, please remove it and re-add it. Being a newbie I didn't realise that facebook hides the id of the profile you are viewing from applications, so the only way you can get that particular id is to record it in the URL that is constructed on the profile page. The effect is that the app will attempt to show your pictures when you are viewing someone else's profile.

ebswift

There is now an option to restrict larger image sizes so you can protect your originals from facebook users. This was a concern of several users and an absolute showstopper for some. SmugMug gallery links are also now provided.

ebswift

Ok, more bazarro effects corrected. Facebook's API, like SmugMug's, is pretty simple - it's the understanding of Facebook that is actually difficult. Cross-wiring was occuring when looking at the current user and updating the profile page. All is well now after thorough, hair-pulling testing. If all is bad, pls remove-add again and all should be fixed.

Dramatapix®

Great application, but when I go to view the Smugmug galleries, there are galleries that don't load, and end up with a Question Mark icon for the gallery.

ebswift

Dramatapix® wrote:

Great application, but when I go to view the Smugmug galleries, there are galleries that don't load, and end up with a Question Mark icon for the gallery.

Thanks for trying Smugfoto. I had a look at the issues, and all the galleries appear to be available - I counted them inside the categories for a good random sample of the available categories. One small issue I have to overcome is that empty sub-categories are counted within a gallery from the main page so if eg. 2 Sub-Categories are reported on the first Smugfoto page, but when you go to that Category there are no Sub Categories, it means 2 are defined but they are empty (or private). I can overcome this by looping through all sub-categories on the main page to ensure phantom sub-categories are filtered out, however at this stage the operation takes too long and causes facebook to kill Smugfoto and bring up their standard error screen.

As far as question-marks displaying in some galleries this is something I'll try and take up with SmugMug. Even though they provide the mechanism to retrieve images externally, some of those images aren't 'rendered' at the SmugMug server. I tested this by taking the address of a 'no image' placeholder and putting it into the browser address - the image loads correctly. Now when you go back to SmugPhoto the image is available. It hasn't done that on any of my galleries, so maybe it only happens on certain accounts or images uploaded some time ago?

I'll try to get these issues sorted out soon.

shann039

I just added this app, and one there's a couple of things I noted. It would be great if there was some way to highlight featured galleries--otherwise people have to wade through a couple of categories before finding my most recent pics. Also, any hope of video support for this anytime soon?

I appreciate being able to have these accessible on Facebook, though!

ebswift

shann039 wrote:

I just added this app, and one there's a couple of things I noted. It would be great if there was some way to highlight featured galleries--otherwise people have to wade through a couple of categories before finding my most recent pics. Also, any hope of video support for this anytime soon?

I appreciate being able to have these accessible on Facebook, though!

Thankyou for the suggestions, I'll look into them.

rms

Feature Request
One feature that would be great for SmugFoto would be to have SmugFoto respect my Featured Galleries setting for the thumbnails that show on the profile page, or otherwise to let me pick out the pictures that I specifically want to highlight in my profile. As it stands now, the photos that show up seem random -- I am sure that there's a specific basis on which they're selected, but I just haven't figured it out. Any thoughts?

Thanks!

ebswift

rms wrote:

One feature that would be great for SmugFoto would be to have SmugFoto respect my Featured Galleries setting for the thumbnails that show on the profile page, or otherwise to let me pick out the pictures that I specifically want to highlight in my profile. As it stands now, the photos that show up seem random -- I am sure that there's a specific basis on which they're selected, but I just haven't figured it out. Any thoughts?

Thanks!

The pics on the profile page are selected totally at random. I will look into having the option of either choosing pics to place there, or letting Smugfoto just randomly select.

darryl

Heya -- SmugFoto seems borked with the new Facebook layout:

Notice: Trying to get property of non-object in C:\Clients\C3193\ebswift.com\public_html\SmugFoto\sfcommon.php on line 94

Notice: Trying to get property of non-object in C:\Clients\C3193\ebswift.com\public_html\SmugFoto\sfcommon.php on line 94

Fatal error: Call to a member function attributes() on a non-object in C:\Clients\C3193\ebswift.com\public_html\SmugFoto\sfcommon.php on line 94

Or has that bug been there prior to the new Facebook update? I was using MySmugMug, but it also had some settings issues, so I figured I'd try SmugFoto, but no go. :-{

ebswift

darryl wrote:

Heya -- SmugFoto seems borked with the new Facebook layout:

Notice: Trying to get property of non-object in C:\Clients\C3193\ebswift.com\public_html\SmugFoto\sfcommon.php on line 94

Notice: Trying to get property of non-object in C:\Clients\C3193\ebswift.com\public_html\SmugFoto\sfcommon.php on line 94

Fatal error: Call to a member function attributes() on a non-object in C:\Clients\C3193\ebswift.com\public_html\SmugFoto\sfcommon.php on line 94

Or has that bug been there prior to the new Facebook update? I was using MySmugMug, but it also had some settings issues, so I figured I'd try SmugFoto, but no go. :-{

It seems to be working properly at my end... anyone else having issues?

raulpesch

This is the Facebook app I've been waiting for! And it is working GREAT!
Thanks Ebswift!!!

darryl

Hi - no more odd PHP errors, but now that I've been switched to the new Facebook layout, I've noticed that SmugFoto, among many other apps, are unable to be shown on a user's "main page" (wall, profile, whatever they call it), and instead can only be shown in the "Boxes" ghetto tab, which I'm sure nobody looks at.

Apparently the new Facebook layout requires some additional coding to allow an app to be on your main profile page (far left column). Otherwise your app is essentially invisible, which really sucks:

http://forum.developers.facebook.com/viewtopic.php?id=18801

ebswift

darryl wrote:

Hi - no more odd PHP errors, but now that I've been switched to the new Facebook layout, I've noticed that SmugFoto, among many other apps, are unable to be shown on a user's "main page" (wall, profile, whatever they call it), and instead can only be shown in the "Boxes" ghetto tab, which I'm sure nobody looks at.

Apparently the new Facebook layout requires some additional coding to allow an app to be on your main profile page (far left column). Otherwise your app is essentially invisible, which really sucks:

http://forum.developers.facebook.com/viewtopic.php?id=18801

Thanks for the heads-up, I hadn't switched over to the new layout, but I've checked it out and I see what you mean. I'll have a look at this today. At this stage I don't think too many people have been badly affected but I should have it fixed soon unless facebook has made it difficult or impossible.

ebswift

Smugfoto has now been completely re-written to address the new facebook api, and to resolve some old issues. Feedback so far is good, check it out if you want to try a SmugMug->Facebook app.

darryl

Hrm, now I'm getting a lot of missing images (they appeared with the "broken image" icon in Chrome). See attached screenshot from Firefox 3.

These are all public albums from http://darryl.smugmug.com/

ebswift

darryl wrote:

Hrm, now I'm getting a lot of missing images (they appeared with the "broken image" icon in Chrome). See attached screenshot from Firefox 3.

These are all public albums from http://darryl.smugmug.com/

I suspect (but not sure) that the albums showing empty pics have the external link option turned off? Please have a look at that and get back to me. If it is the case there is no way to detect that via the SmugMug API for now - I have placed a request for that flag to be added to gettree.

darryl

ebswift wrote:

I suspect (but not sure) that the albums showing empty pics have the external link option turned off? Please have a look at that and get back to me. If it is the case there is no way to detect that via the SmugMug API for now - I have placed a request for that flag to be added to gettree.

Thanks -- I flipped the external link option on for all of my galleries last night, but SmugFoto seemed to be having other issues where the page would not load at all (it said a report was being sent). I guess your server had some problems?

Anyways, today all the gallery thumbnails are showing up properly, so that external link thing must've been the problem.

Thanks!

ebswift

Great stuff, thankyou. There are performance issues, though I'm not entirely sure whether it's from facebook's end or mine - they did mention a lot of heavy traffic. I am beginning some tutorials on AJAX to see if I can reduce initial loadup time that way.

ebswift

Thanks to David Parry of SmugMug, the broken images are now a thing of the past. I have "tuned" the performance of Smugfoto and in testing I have not seen it timeout since I tuned it up. The tuning involved a complete rewrite of the REST read strategy (again), a complete rewrite of all my database views, and a few tweaks here and there. The album and category counts may show up a bit out at the moment, but that's pretty minor and I should have that fixed shortly.

shrekie

Stats?
Hi,

This is a great app...thanks!
I was just wondering if hits via this Facebook app will show up on Google Analytics for the total number of hits to the photo's stats? How about Smugmug's stats as well (seeing as there is usually a big discrepancy between google analytics and smugmug stats).

Thanks:)

Nelson

ebswift

Glad you like the app Shrekie. I answered the same question over at Smugfoto, and I'll add the reply here for the benefit of anyone here wondering the same thing:

"I haven't looked at the impact that Smugfoto has on Google Analytics, nor SmugMug's stats. Smugfoto doesn't really leave a 'footprint', but perhaps facebook may turn up as a referer. So... it's a distinct unknown at this point.

If you have any suggestions as to an optional parameter (or something) you want to pass through for album/image viewing I'd certainly consider it. The possibility may even be there for a custom include, but facebook may inhibit such attempts; once again, I'm unsure."