What's cooking?

Baldy · January 14, 2004

Some of you use smugmug for photo sharing and we thought you'd like a place to sound off, debate issues, hear about future plans, etc.

Just like dpreview or any other forum, you can debate smugmug versus its competitors, or just about anything you want.

We're often asked what we're working on. Here are the highest priorities:

1. New Mac uploader that synchs with iPhoto. We haven't made it publicly available, but if you'd like to try it, post a message and we'll see that you get a copy.

2. Version 2 of the print ordering interface. The feedback we're getting is "it's a little tedious" and there's no print preview or ability to adjust cropping.

3. Improved customization where you can do more and choose from pre-designed style sheets. Check out http://www.csszengarden.com to get your imagination running on the possibilities.

We're hearing requests for camera phone interfacing, an improved slide show, and more convenient moving of photos within galleries.

Your thoughts.

Baldy

patch29 · January 14, 2004

I am really happy to have a batch uploader that works well for the mac. I tried it out and it was very easy to use, drag your folders, pick a gallery and let it do all the work. Nicely Done!

Baldy · January 14, 2004

We're currently working on two things, a bug that keeps it from working behind certain corporate firewalls and a change we have to make to get it to synch with the new iPhoto. So far, those are the only issues we know about except for feature requests.

ian408 · January 17, 2004

Baldy wrote:

Some of you use smugmug for photo sharing and we thought you'd like a place to sound off, debate issues, hear about future plans, etc.
Baldy

Well, I'm glad you asked.

Some of the features I love. 1) It's easy to upload. Just drag and drop.
2) different size images. Automatically! 3) I can link to them from other
sites. Very easy to share. 4) Basic tools to manipulate the image. 5) Cost.
The cost of smugmug is very reasonable for the features. 6) Option to
"journal" photos. 7) No ads for viewers to see.

I'd like the option of framing a linked image with a black or white border.

Is there a feature that allows you to set a style for users? For example; if
I make a photo journal, I'd like to insure viewers see it that way.

A bulk download of the original images (acct owner only) would be nice.

I mainly use smugmug to share my photos. I do use photos.yahoo.com.
Originally, because it was free. Honestly, the low cost for smugmug makes
it more attractive than the free service.

Ian

Baldy · January 17, 2004

ian408 wrote:

I'd like the option of framing a linked image with a black or white border.

Is there a feature that allows you to set a style for users? For example; if
I make a photo journal, I'd like to insure viewers see it that way.

A bulk download of the original images (acct owner only) would be nice.

Great feedback, Ian. Power users and pros can force styles, a different one for each gallery.

Here's a guy who forced journal style.

Bulk download would be way cool, and we plan it. It's a big job because people want to preserve captions, arrangements, etc. Ironically, we'll probably have it first for iPhoto because all we have to do is synch the other way.

People also ask for burned CDs with their photo albums on them, shipped to their address.

ian408 · January 17, 2004

Baldy wrote:

Great feedback, Ian. Power users and pros can force styles, a different one for each gallery.

Here's a guy who forced journal style.

Bulk download would be way cool, and we plan it. It's a big job because people want to preserve captions, arrangements, etc. Ironically, we'll probably have it first for iPhoto because all we have to do is synch the other way.

People also ask for burned CDs with their photo albums on them, shipped to their address.

Doh! I should've looked at the "Style" section of customize gallery!

A burned CD is a cool idea. Especially if it came with a player. Something
like Adobe is doing. Pop the disk in, instant slide show--no software needed.

Thanks!

Ian

ian408 · January 18, 2004

I thought of something else that would be cool.

An option to thumbnail pictures with their URL listed
below them in a "cut and paste" friendly way. Not for
viewers though.

ian

patch29 · January 21, 2004

ian408 wrote:

I thought of something else that would be cool.

An option to thumbnail pictures with their URL listed
below them in a "cut and paste" friendly way. Not for
viewers though.

ian

That is a very good idea. I just helped Ara with posting his photos and that would have made it much easier.

He also was looking for a way to keep his description he wrote with the photo to follow his photo when it was posted in a thread. That way he could tell his story but not have to explain the photo twice. For example you can be telling about your great trip and how you were at xyz cafe, link the photo and it keeps your description (cafe at 4th and main in Hilliard, OH). It was an interesting idea. I know it would probably be technically difficult, but if it worked I think many users would use a feature like that.

Baldy · January 22, 2004

Great ideas. We want some closer integration with forums so we'll noodle on this and see what we can think of.

patch29 · January 22, 2004

Baldy wrote:

Great ideas. We want some closer integration with forums so we'll noodle on this and see what we can think of.

When I was helping him he also asked for a way to automatically link an entire gallery. To take it one step further what if a user set the order for their images, added a description, then could click a magic button and their post would be created for them, photos in order with descriptions in-between. Then they could add a little text to the beginning and end and their post would be complete. A tall order indeed, but it would add to the smugmug way of making everything easier.

GadgetDon · January 22, 2004

I want the mac uploader
Please let me give it a try. gadgetdon@mac.com

Baldy · January 23, 2004

GadgetDon wrote:

Please let me give it a try. gadgetdon@mac.com

Hey GadgetDon,

Here's a link to a help page that has it:

http://www.smugmug.com/help/macs

(The reason you didn't see that help page is it isn't really linked publicly yet. We have about a week of testing more before we promote it too far and wide.)

I need to write on that page that it's 0.9 and best installed using Safari.

The idea is to provide an easy native uploader for OS X and also to synch with iPhoto, which is ever-so-cool but lacking online sharing.

Expectation setting: we just wanted to get something simple out for 1.0 and then collect feedback for what goes into 2.0.

Let us know what you think!

Baldy

wxwax · January 24, 2004

I'm using Firebird. I haven't found it easy to use plug-ins for Java etc. When I download the software, it prompts me for a plug-in folder, and provides the Netscape folder as the default. When I point it to the Firebird plug-in folder, it balks. My machine has a 2.6 pentium and 1gb of memory.

The above may have something to do with what follows.

I cannot use any but the most primitive of the upload options for smugmug. Here's an illustrated step-by-step description.

First, on the smugmug upload page, I select the third option - "Other Platforms - Java based batch uploading."

Having clicked on that, a couple of things happen. First, this box appears at the front of my screen. When I ignored it for a moment, and opened Photoshop to start saving pictures of what was happening, Firebird locked-up completely, and I had to close all browser windows and start from scratch.

Next time through, I click "Yes." In the background, I see this.

But in the foreground, I get this annoying and incorrect message. It takes several clicks to finally get rid of it. I assume that my problems in accurately downloading Java have something to do with it. And I'm flummoxed at how to better handle the Java etc. downloads. I've tried on three machines with the same results. Isn't that a definition of insanity - trying the same thing over and over and expecting the results to be different?

I finally surmount this barrier, and am now presented with the upload screen. Like any red blooded American, I click on "Add."

Then I do the somewhat tedious navigation to the folder of my choice. I wish the "My Documents" folder was on the front page, rather than having to dig through a few layers first.

Anyway, my journey is close to an end at this point. A premature end, unfortunately. I click through to "My Documents" only to be presented with an empty screen when I finally open the folder. I tried selecting All Files from the dropdown, no change.

At this point I recognise that I have one again been outsmarted by a machine, sigh heavily, give it the evil eye

and go to my least favorite option, the Standard upload format. Which is what I did to upload the shots for this report.

patch29 · January 24, 2004

Sid, why not have and use IE for bulk uploading to smugmug? That is what I did on my Mac until they came out with the dedicated uploader for the mac.

wxwax · January 24, 2004

I have it but try not to use it. Razorback suggested the same thing. I guess I should.

ian408 · January 25, 2004

patch29 wrote:

When I was helping him he also asked for a way to automatically link an entire gallery. To take it one step further what if a user set the order for their images, added a description, then could click a magic button and their post would be created for them, photos in order with descriptions in-between. Then they could add a little text to the beginning and end and their post would be complete. A tall order indeed, but it would add to the smugmug way of making everything easier.

It's funny you should mention this. I tried earlier and you can't

You could do this if a journal could be posted using an img tag. But then,
you'd probably piss off the dialup folks.

Ian

rutt · February 3, 2004

Better statistics
I'd very much like to get better statistics from smugmug.

Hits from unique IP addresses. The way things are, I can't guess how many different people are looking at my galleries vs how many are looking at all the photos in my galleries. I'd like something like a count of visits from new IPs. Or a cookie could be used to identify visitors.
Summary statistics for categories, subcategories as well as galleries.
Time based statistics. Are more people looking today than yesterday.
Sorting galleries by statistics.

dkapp · February 4, 2004

rutt wrote:

I'd very much like to get better statistics from smugmug.
Hits from unique IP addresses. The way things are, I can't guess how many different people are looking at my galleries vs how many are looking at all the photos in my galleries. I'd like something like a count of visits from new IPs. Or a cookie could be used to identify visitors.

Summary statistics for categories, subcategories as well as galleries.

Time based statistics. Are more people looking today than yesterday.

Sorting galleries by statistics.

I think being able to track unique visitors would be a great feature.

Dave

Baldy · February 8, 2004

rutt wrote:

I'd very much like to get better statistics from smugmug.
Hits from unique IP addresses. The way things are, I can't guess how many different people are looking at my galleries vs how many are looking at all the photos in my galleries. I'd like something like a count of visits from new IPs. Or a cookie could be used to identify visitors.

Summary statistics for categories, subcategories as well as galleries.

Time based statistics. Are more people looking today than yesterday.

Sorting galleries by statistics.

Good feedback, Rutt. Currently we reset statistics every month but we've been keeping the old stuff. The plan is to eventually show cumulative plus monthly.

The logging stuff is a big challenge because it involves an insane amount of data, but we'll see what we can do. We don't feel we can display people's IP address because it feels like an invasion of privacy.

Thanks,
Baldy

ian408 · February 8, 2004

Baldy wrote:

Good feedback, Rutt. Currently we reset statistics every month but we've been keeping the old stuff. The plan is to eventually show cumulative plus monthly.

The logging stuff is a big challenge because it involves an insane amount of data, but we'll see what we can do. We don't feel we can display people's IP address because it feels like an invasion of privacy.

Thanks,
Baldy

Stats that included right-click "save as" would be cool.

Ian

rutt · February 8, 2004

Baldy wrote:

The logging stuff is a big challenge because it involves an insane amount of data, but we'll see what we can do. We don't feel we can display people's IP address because it feels like an invasion of privacy.

You don't keed to display any private information, or even save it, in order to do this. For each hit, you want to answer this question:

Is this the first hit from this IP address on this gallery (or on this person's galleries, or on this persons category or subcategory)?

If it not the first hit, you do nothing. If it is the first hit, you enter the IP address in some sort of dictionary and increment a counter. The value of the counter is the only thing displayed to users, and so there is no privacy violation.

You can implement this scheme without actually saving all the IP addresses. One old spelling dictionary trick (from when computer memory was much more expensive and limited than now) isto represent the dictionary as a farly large bit vector. Properly spelled words are entered into thte dictionary by hashsing them with multiple different hash functions and setting the resulting bits (perhaps 10 different hash functions are used.) A word is in the dictionary if the corresponding bit for all 10 of the hash functions is set. A suprisngly small bit vector can represent a suprisingly large number of words with a very low likelyhood of error (a false positive in this case.) I think websters required something like 10kB 10 get 99.99 accuracy, but my memory isn't really that good.

The real point of this example algorithm, is that nobody's privacy need be compromised in any way in order to collect and display this information. You don't even have to save the IP addresses on your server, let alone make them visible to your users.

But the result would be a lot more interesting to me (and I suspect to others) than what smugmug now offers. I could know how larege my "fan base" is. Right now I can't tell if my mother just clicks on every photo I post, or if the parents of every kid I photograph is looking at their child. If there are only a few people looking at all my pictures it is a very different thing from many people looking and choosign different things to view.

Baldy · February 8, 2004

Interesting feedback. Thanks. What about people with dynamic IP addresses? It sounds like we would need to put up a disclaimer about objects in the mirror are a little bigger than they appear, as some people would be counted multiple times.

ian408 · February 8, 2004

Baldy wrote:

Interesting feedback. Thanks. What about people with dynamic IP addresses? It sounds like we would need to put up a disclaimer about objects in the mirror are a little bigger than they appear, as some people would be counted multiple times.

That's the problem. Most people will come to the site on a dynamically
assigned address.

Ian

fish · February 8, 2004

rutt wrote:

But the result would be a lot more interesting to me (and I suspect to others) than what smugmug now offers. I could know how larege my "fan base" is. Right now I can't tell if my mother just clicks on every photo I post, or if the parents of every kid I photograph is looking at their child. If there are only a few people looking at all my pictures it is a very different thing from many people looking and choosign different things to view.

How would this information impact what you do?

rutt · February 13, 2004

Dynamic IPs and statistics

ian408 wrote:

That's the problem. Most people will come to the site on a dynamically
assigned address.

Ian

We could use cookies, in which case we might double count users who use multiple browsers or computers. I think a lot of commercial sites do this in order to collect accurate click-through statistics and the like.

Broadband users don't get new IP addresses that often, but what about NAT'ed subnets? Then we might single count when should be counting multiple times.

What about network caches, like squid, that serve an entire university or broadband community? These perturb even the current statistics.

The point is that we are unlikely to do something perfect. The statistics we get now are somewhat useful as an indication of how popular a particular album is. They could be better, though. Using cookies, they would be approximately as good as those supplied to advertisers by the likes of Google, Yahoo, &etc. Even using IP addresses would be a useful refinement.

For people who like statistics, the more information, the better. Often there is no single right way of measuring. I crave multiple correctly described data sets.

rutt · February 13, 2004

fish wrote:

How would this information impact what you do?

How does applause impact an actor?

cmr164 · February 13, 2004

rutt wrote:

We could use cookies, in which case we might double count users who use multiple browsers or computers. I think a lot of commercial sites do this in order to collect accurate click-through statistics and the like.

Broadband users don't get new IP addresses that often, but what about NAT'ed subnets? Then we might single count when should be counting multiple times.

What about network caches, like squid, that serve an entire university or broadband community? These perturb even the current statistics.

The point is that we are unlikely to do something perfect. The statistics we get now are somewhat useful as an indication of how popular a particular album is. They could be better, though. Using cookies, they would be approximately as good as those supplied to advertisers by the likes of Google, Yahoo, &etc. Even using IP addresses would be a useful refinement.

For people who like statistics, the more information, the better. Often there is no single right way of measuring. I crave multiple correctly described data sets.

So really the info is no more reliable than the "views" data is here. But it is still 'nice to know'

rutt · February 13, 2004

cmr164 wrote:

So really the info is no more reliable than the "views" data is here. But it is still 'nice to know'

Different doesn't mean more or less reliable. The current information tells how many unique views of each image there was. You can read the disclamier at the bottom of the page for the exact information.

I also want to know how many unique visitors my galleries have had. For example, suppose I shoot a little league game and post 18 shots, one of each player. A friend of mine who shares an interest in photography looks once at every image I post. That gives 18 hits on the current "scoreboard". I'll get the same score if the mother of each player looks at her child.
But, to me these are quite different situations.

The current statistics don't give any idea of how wide my audience is versus how deep it is. Any of the things I've suggested would address this with more or less precision.
The current system has a certain amount of built in error because of browser (and other caches). So do the things that I've proposed. But they measure fundementally different things.

cmr164 · February 13, 2004

rutt wrote:

Different doesn't mean more or less reliable. The current information tells how many unique views of each image there was. You can read the disclamier at the bottom of the page for the exact information.

Typical server info looks like:

195.101.94.101 - - [13/Feb/2004:10:31:41 -0500] "GET /Marathon/pages/26678860.htm HTTP/1.1" 200 1094 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 95) VoilaBot BETA 1.2 (http://www.voila.com/)"
207.92.21.2 - - [13/Feb/2004:10:32:10 -0500] "GET /dgrin/florida04feb34_s.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 52584 "http://www.digitalgrin.com/showthread.php?t=481" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0)"

So I know that system 195.101.94.101 looked at one of my Boston Marathon pics and that system 207.92.21.2 looked at florida04feb34_s.jpg from Dgrin. But there is a fair amount of additional work required to make more sense out of that. For instance the 195... is x1crawler2-1-0.x-echo.com so is presumably a search engine indexer and not a real look. The 207... is neptune.cohr.com where cohr.net is Corent Inc and is really Earthlink. All of this info requires a certain amount of intelligence in the parsing. So I own the server and can do this for myself but a program that can differentiate the info you want has to have a fair bit of AI so I am not likely to run that for my users.

By running the following...
$> grep digitalgrin acc*|grep -i jpg |wc
537 10456 128035
$> grep digitalgrin acc*|grep -i s.jpg |wc
386 7515 92154

I can see that there were 537 hits on images that I posted to dgrin and there were 386 click throughs to the larger images. With additional work I could build a library of scripts and package them up into cgi but there is a real effort and a security danger in exposing such scripts to offsite users.

rutt · February 13, 2004

cmr164 wrote:

I can see that there were 537 hits on images that I posted to dgrin and there were 386 click throughs to the larger images. With additional work I could build a library of scripts and package them up into cgi but there is a real effort and a security danger in exposing such scripts to offsite users.

How about allowing pro and power users to download the log entries for their own galleries? Then geeks like me can do any amount of scripting without a security issue.

There might be a privacy issue in exposing the IPs to your users. But really nothing is different than if the pictures were on my own server. ..

cmr164 · February 13, 2004

rutt wrote:

How about allowing pro and power users to download the log entries for their own galleries? Then geeks like me can do any amount of scripting without a security issue.

There might be a privacy issue in exposing the IPs to your users. But really nothing is different than if the pictures were on my own server. ..

The pictures are on my own server. that is how I see that data. I host all kinds interesting things like the Boston Sushi Society http://www.iisc.com/sushi/ and I don't want to violate the privacy of the folks browsing or the users. It is a huge task to massage the log data in a way that respects the moral and legal constaints and the separations between people and groups. I imagine that Andy/Baldy/et al feel the same way.

What's cooking?

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