Frankly, this issue really bothers me. I begin to wonder if the "we know what you want to do better than you do" mindset is impossible to over come. I wonder if it has to do with management's relationship with Apple/NeXT/Cuppertino. This is a mindset that I see with Apple and it is a total turnoff (and part of the reason I refuse to use their products). Both Apple and SmugMug seem to reject features requested by some users on the grounds that "most people don't want them", "most people don't care", or (here is the most common one) "most people would be confused by having this feature". This is a bogus line of thinking, especially when no one is asking for the entire user interface to be changed, just an extra feature that no one would even be forced to use. Hell, as it stands, I don't even use subcategories, so I don't need another level, but I can see why many people do need it.
-r
I can really sympathize with this. Having fallen on my sword for many features requested here, I might be willing to go to war for this one too but I fear this chart:
The reason I fear it is we get some smiles and kudos here when we add more features, which we love, but then have to deal with the consequences of complexity. One is we have to handle the people who say I love SmugMug but do you really have to give me so many options? My eyes!
I believe the most important answer is to take our UI design to the next level, because some of the confusion we create with new features is our own fault for not nailing the UI. This has become our biggest priority and when the UI design is really superb, my bet is we'll be able to offer more advanced features without confusing people.
Case in point is the way the UI currently works for categories and subcategories. We re-did it and it will go live soon, and what a difference.
I went out of town for a few days and didn't get back to this thread until today but WOW. Many product sites have customer forums but you guys seriously go above and beyond to respond. You say that feedback is like gold to you and I absolutely agree but unfortunately not many other companies agree.
That being said.... after trying Sheaf's recommendations on page 1 of the thread, I'm still not satisfied. It looks messy and it's not easy for me to see what belongs where after many galleries are uploaded. I don't know html or other programming so I don't know how to do the work-arounds some people suggested. I tried Zenfolio and after using it with "Photo Guru Backup", this tandem works flawlessly for me. I'll likely end up buying an account there.
I hear what you've said about Flickr and MySpace and I agree 100%. It's also true that you generally don't want people with 8 galleries having them in 6 different places. But while I don't know the stats and you do, I'd have to assume that the average SM user has lots of galleries, not just 8. Also, speaking for myself, many people are not sellers. I just want to use this as a backup option and to share folder links to other people. More subfolders is the only way to do this, IMHO.
It does pain me a bit since I love the community here. I'll keep a close eye on the forum and check out the new features that come out. As soon as more hierarchy becomes supported, you guys get my $. Cheers.
Many other reasons sub-galleries are useful
I was just reading over this thread because I'm also interested in another level of hierarchy, but for a different reason to what's been mentioned. Some of us would LOVE to sort our images by Year, as in year>category>sub-category>gallery>sub-gallery. For example 2008>Families>Bob's family>birthdays>Sue's birthday. I migrated from Phanfare, which essentially allows you to start your breadcrumb with your category already in a year. It's a given basically, so the year is basically a preset category, and you add a sub-category, a gallery, and sub galleries. I find this system of categorization to be very very helpful, as do most of my friends and family.
In addition, a fair number of people seem to be using smugmug for both pro and personal photos, and if you want to "hide" your personal photos by creating a category that is hidden (but with an address known to friends and family) then it becomes impossible to sort your photos properly. For example, if you have www.blahphotos com/ personal, where Personal is already a category. You can't sort past Personal/Travel/UK, when what you need is Personal/Travel/UK/Scotland and Personal/Travel/UK/Wales to prevent there being all 500 travel photos from your 4 weeks in the UK all in one gallery.
I know that feature bloat is always an issue with a site like Smugmug, and I thought the 3 diagrams that someone posted were hilarious. But it still seems strange to me that if a person wants this level of usability (which most other sites have built in) we need to go to an Advanced Thread and be a bit of a code monkey to get it. Many non code monkeys would like to sort in this way (myself included), and absolutely can't follow the advanced code level. What are we to do?
Admittedly I almost did not join Smugmug because of this issue of not enough levels for sorting- all of the other sites that I looked into had more sorting levels, but when it came right down to it the sites were simply not as good. So I was forced to sacrifice my sorting levels. And truthfully my Personal galleries are all a mess still, a month after migrating, because I still can't figure out a work around for the lack of sub-galleries. I looked at sharegroups, but they're not as easy to categorize (in my opinion) and who wants to send their family a link for www.blahphotos.com/T123H435KJDEIM4432 ?
Can I just say though that Smugmug has the absolute best service, and dGrinners you are all amazing- your dedication to helping all of us poor newbies, even when asked the same questions day after day, has made me thankful that I joined Smugmug and determined to stay despite the sorting issues. I love the community here, and I'm glad I joined it. I do still hope that you'll allow sub-galleries, but if not at least my professional site will look awesome, even if my personal photos are a mess.
...
Some of us would LOVE to sort our images by Year, as in year>category>sub-category>gallery>sub-gallery. For example 2008>Families>Bob's family>birthdays>Sue's birthday.
...
Kristi
This would be easy to set up. Create an html gallery with a thumb for each
year. Each thumb links to an html gallery with all that year family name
categories. You got your levels. Codes already created here, just need to
add in your data.
2008 (1st html gallery)
.... Bob's 2008 family (category) (2nd html gallery)
....... birthdays (sub-cat)
............ Sue's birthday (gallery)
.... Joe's family 2008 (category) (2nd html gallery)
.... Liz's family 2008 (category) (2nd html gallery)
2007 (1st html gallery)
.... Bob's 2007 family (category) (3rd html gallery)
....... birthdays (sub-cat)
............ Sue's birthday (gallery)
.... Joe's family 2007 (category) (3rd html gallery)
.... Liz's family 2007 (category) (3nd html gallery)
Admittedly I almost did not join Smugmug because of this issue of not enough levels for sorting- all of the other sites that I looked into had more sorting levels, but when it came right down to it the sites were simply not as good. So I was forced to sacrifice my sorting levels.
Kristi, I don't want to turn this into a thread on alternatives (I read the long SM vs. Zenfolio thread) to SM but since we have the same subfolder desires, I'm curious about what you didn't like about Zenfolio.
Apple and Google need to be simple. They are aimed at the masses. There is a reason why business users dont use iphones and gmail. the iphone doesnt even have a Todo list on it. The point is that professional users need a bit more power depth and flexibility. I wonder what percentage of Smugmug's 200 million photos are from professional users as against hobbyist amateurs. I suspect it will be something like a 10% / 90% split.
I would add my vote for one more level of hierarchy.
I can really sympathize with this. Having fallen on my sword for many features requested here, I might be willing to go to war for this one too but I fear this chart:
The reason I fear it is we get some smiles and kudos here when we add more features, which we love, but then have to deal with the consequences of complexity. One is we have to handle the people who say I love SmugMug but do you really have to give me so many options? My eyes!
I believe the most important answer is to take our UI design to the next level, because some of the confusion we create with new features is our own fault for not nailing the UI. This has become our biggest priority and when the UI design is really superb, my bet is we'll be able to offer more advanced features without confusing people.
Case in point is the way the UI currently works for categories and subcategories. We re-did it and it will go live soon, and what a difference.
The magic point to hit is where simple things are simple to find, learn and use yet more powerful things are there to discover and use efficiently - all without reading help files, dgrin or wikis. I've never believed that the only way to make things simple is to limit features. Great UI design doesn't have to limit features to keep things simple. Unplanned addition of new features by just tacking them on without fully thinking their UI through does make a mess. But, as I'm sure you know, there are better ways.
Kristi, I don't want to turn this into a thread on alternatives (I read the long SM vs. Zenfolio thread) to SM but since we have the same subfolder desires, I'm curious about what you didn't like about Zenfolio.
The reason I chose Smugmug was because of it's Pro level capabilities, including customization. I wanted my site to be highly customizable, and I found that most of the Zenfolio sites looked just a little too similiar to each other for my taste. In fact, they all look exactly the same to me. That said, I didn't have a clear idea just how difficult customizing would turn out to be, and I wouldn't have been able to do it if it wasn't for the very helpful dgrinners who must spend most of their days helping poor newbies like myself. The Zenfolio sites that I saw looked great for personal use, but in researching high level professional photographers' sites to decide what sort of site I would like, I discovered that none of them used site styles like what I saw on Zenfolio. In looking into other sites, I found that only Smugmug would allow me to customize how I saw fit. I knew that it would be difficult at first, but Smugmug's customization allows me the opportunity to grow and change my site as my business and interests grow and change. I recommended Smugmug to a friend for the same reason.
I also looked at some interesting reviews, namely:
And I looked at this thread on Digital Photography Review, which had a number of people with sites on both Zenfolio and Smugmug whose sites I could compare (it's a few months old now so some people have ended either one or the other service and the links might be dead now):
I'm glad I chose Smugmug, because I love the customization, and I love the community of photographers here. My site is coming along, albeit slowly, and I'm learning to code in the process- I'm even thinking of taking a web design class now.
Why did you choose Smugmug? Or do you have both and are considering which one to go with?
This would be easy to set up. Create an html gallery with a thumb for each
year. Each thumb links to an html gallery with all that year family name
categories. You got your levels. Codes already created here, just need to
add in your data.
2008 (1st html gallery)
.... Bob's 2008 family (category) (2nd html gallery)
....... birthdays (sub-cat)
............ Sue's birthday (gallery)
.... Joe's family 2008 (category) (2nd html gallery)
.... Liz's family 2008 (category) (2nd html gallery)
2007 (1st html gallery)
.... Bob's 2007 family (category) (3rd html gallery)
....... birthdays (sub-cat)
............ Sue's birthday (gallery)
.... Joe's family 2007 (category) (3rd html gallery)
.... Liz's family 2007 (category) (3nd html gallery)
Al, I just followed your link and I had no idea that you had put html tutors for various things on your site! Thank you!! The code there is definitely enough to get me started on this project of a split "identity" site. I had no idea that there was code available to help us do this very thing- I'm so glad that I asked!
Al, I just followed your link and I had no idea that you had put html tutors for various things on your site! Thank you!! The code there is definitely enough to get me started on this project of a split "identity" site. I had no idea that there was code available to help us do this very thing- I'm so glad that I asked!
Okay, we cleaned up the (inexcusable) UI for categories & subcategories and I'm interested in solving this in the simplest way we can.
Can others confirm that one more level of hierarchy is sufficient? Or do we need to go N levels deep?
Most of the requests that I've seen have been for one extra level. But perhaps you should go overboard, and allow unlimited extensions.
In terms of how to write the URLs, I like the idea of having
username.smugmug.com/name1/name2/name3/
etc
However, I appreciate that this would be difficult if there were any special characters in the category / sub-category names.
How about using the current sub-category URL style, and make it equally applicable for sub-sub-categories etc?
Okay, we cleaned up the (inexcusable) UI for categories & subcategories and I'm interested in solving this in the simplest way we can.
Can others confirm that one more level of hierarchy is sufficient? Or do we need to go N levels deep?
First off, serious kudos for responding to this problem. Speaking for myself, adding one level would help but would not help enough for me to buy an account. The majority of my collection could be categorized properly but there still would be folders that wouldn't. SM is great, so why should Zenfolio be able to go deeper without a problem but SMers should be limited?
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BaldyRegistered Users, Super ModeratorsPosts: 2,853moderator
First off, serious kudos for responding to this problem. Speaking for myself, adding one level would help but would not help enough for me to buy an account. The majority of my collection could be categorized properly but there still would be folders that wouldn't. SM is great, so why should Zenfolio be able to go deeper without a problem but SMers should be limited?
Zenfolio's scale is tiny and there are already signs of performance problems:
But I certainly hear you. I haven't heard Don say he's sweating over scalability problems with a deeper hierarchy like we had to battle with SmugIslands, so maybe it's just me sweating over UI and support (like we get killed with over SmugIslands).
But I certainly hear you. I haven't heard Don say he's sweating over scalability problems with a deeper hierarchy like we had to battle with SmugIslands, so maybe it's just me sweating over UI and support (like we get killed with over SmugIslands).
Oh, c'mon now. You pick one single thread where two people are having speed issues for a day (which could have been anything) & all of a sudden Zen has "performance problems"?? You're smarter (& better) than that, Baldy.
BTW, way to take the reigns & come through for the users here with more levels in the breadcrumb. Just let them make it as deep as they want. The problem before was restricting it in the first place, so don't just put a band-aid on it. Fix it for good. Longer breadcrumbs are a non-issue.
Okay, we cleaned up the (inexcusable) UI for categories & subcategories and I'm interested in solving this in the simplest way we can.
Can others confirm that one more level of hierarchy is sufficient? Or do we need to go N levels deep?
Just to add my 2 cents... I'd love to see N levels available. I actually really love how Flickr allows you to put the same photo in many galleries--and delete from any of them without really deleting the photo (until it's finally removed from the last place). It helps organizing IMHO.
I can have a photo of my cat; that photo can equally be put into my Family gallery, my pet gallery, cat gallery, mammal gallery, etc.. Basically, it lets my visitors find that photo from multiple places.
Now, is that the best UI I can provide my users? Probably not.... But, it does allow me the flexibility to do it (which is nice). Eventually, people realize that they're doing dumb things and fix it. But, there's no need to limit it artificially.
Oh, c'mon now. You pick one single thread where two people are having speed issues for a day (which could have been anything) & all of a sudden Zen has "performance problems"?? You're smarter (& better) than that, Baldy.
BTW, way to take the reigns & come through for the users here with more levels in the breadcrumb. Just let them make it as deep as they want. The problem before was restricting it in the first place, so don't just put a band-aid on it. Fix it for good. Longer breadcrumbs are a non-issue.
Hahaha, thanks for calling me on that peestandingup, but honestly we have a very long and bitter history with the way they do their slideshow. We had so many customers say on forums that their slideshow was great that we built one the same way, only to get destroyed in user testing and having to start over from scratch.
If you sit someone down in front of Phanfare or Flickr's Flash slideshows, they will say they're smooth and fast, but they will say Zenfolio's is slow and choppy. I've never been able to understand why what we had read in forums and what we experienced watching users was 180 degrees out in this case, but we wasted a lot of time getting that one wrong.
If you watch users struggle with breadcrumbs, it puts the fear of God in your heart. Once you get them, it seems impossible that anyone wouldn't. But I really sympathize with the need and we're gonna do something about it, I just hope we're not gonna strand grandmas who don't know for breadcrumbs 5 levels deep.
If you watch users struggle with breadcrumbs, it puts the fear of God in your heart. I really sympathize with the need and we're gonna do something about it, I just hope we're not gonna strand grandmas who don't know for breadcrumbs 5 levels deep.
Funny.... I sometimes talk about breadcrumbs to my clients; a lot don't have a clue what I'm talking about. Takes a few minutes to clear it up and get them clued in.
Could I suggest a AJAX based organization system for galleries/cat/sub-cat, etc..? So I can drag and drop, right click and add, etc galleries, categories, sub-categories, etc... It should work like one big directory tree IMHO. That would be a KILLER UI!
Okay, we cleaned up the (inexcusable) UI for categories & subcategories and I'm interested in solving this in the simplest way we can.
Can others confirm that one more level of hierarchy is sufficient? Or do we need to go N levels deep?
I have an assumption that you are going to do some form of virtual galleries at some point where the categorization and display of the photos can be truly independent of any sort of container that a photo is put in. I can't use any of the keyword hacks for this today beacause I need it to work with password protected galleries.
If that assumption is right, then I'd suggest that you do that first before working on more levels of container hierarchy because that's an even more powerful organizational tool and only then will you have a good picture of what else in gallery organization really needs to be done. I'm not arguing against more levels (I myself can see how I'd want one more level than we have now).
But, I would rather totally rethink how I organize and display my event photography with real virtual galleries and it might even render additional levels of container hierarchy irrelevant for me.
Can others confirm that one more level of hierarchy is sufficient? Or do we need to go N levels deep?
I, personally, see how one more level would be beneficial. But, I don't see how I would ever use more than one more.
Unfortunately, all you're going to do by adding just one more level is reduce the number of people asking for more. But, I'm sure you know that already.
Just to add my 2 cents... I'd love to see N levels available. I actually really love how Flickr allows you to put the same photo in many galleries--and delete from any of them without really deleting the photo (until it's finally removed from the last place). It helps organizing IMHO.
Thanks, David. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we're talking about two different things.
Putting the same photo in many galleries is a good idea that we're working on but it's different than having N levels of hierarchy, no? Flickr enables you to nest collections 5 deep. I dunno why the restriction but my guess is it's both for usability and scalability.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't go deeper than them, I'm just wondering if some fixed integer is more reasonable than N. For example, we allow N galleries and have users with more than 300,000 of them. You can't imagine what that does to scalability and navigation.
When I hear that Flickr can go 5 deep, my response is respect. They have been able to scale to very high levels of traffic and users. When I hear that Zenfolio is N, I think hmmm, maybe we should check back and see how that scales.
Thanks, David. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we're talking about two different things.
Putting the same photo in many galleries is a good idea that we're working on but it's different than having N levels of hierarchy, no? Flickr enables you to nest collections 5 deep. I dunno why the restriction but my guess is it's both for usability and scalability.
Just change how the photos are stored. Yes, it's a big job, but, here's my thought...
Each photo has an ID number. Make categories/subs, etc.. completely seperate from the images. Image #'s are related to galleries which would be related to a "category". Categories are related to each other (parent/child) or to the home. So, basically everything is related to everything else. The end result is that you can scale to N categories because it's all just related to each other and you itterate through it, only looking one up or one down the tree at any one time. Photos are related to the galler(y|ies), and indexed on that. So, you do something like a select images where images exist in gallery # x (yeah, that's some fantastic SQL there.. )
Sure, it's complicated to create the query, and to create the tables to make it work, but, once it's done, the scalability would be amazing.
So, no.. We're not talking about two things really. If you make photos related to galleries only because a lookup table says they are, then, the number of categories doesn't matter any longer. AND, you can have one photo in multiple galleries, without worrying about how to store the images, etc.. You ARE storing the photos in the database itself and not in a filesystem... Right???
Check out how vbulletin does categories/subcategories, etc.. (Look at the newest release for it.. I don't know how this version does it, I only know the 3.6.x tree). They do a good job, and it is FAST--even with tens of thousands of people using it at a time.
But, I would rather totally rethink how I organize and display my event photography with real virtual galleries and it might even render additional levels of container hierarchy irrelevant for me.
Hmmm, this is interesting.
I went back a read all of your posts about virtual galleries that I could find and as always they were compelling. One thing I don't understand is, wouldn't the creation of virtual galleries increase the need for hierarchies?
It seems to me you want to create extra galleries of say, a school play. One for a certain act, one for a child, etc., resulting in more galleries in a given category. I've probably missed something fundamental.
Let me ask another question: we're working on a tools upgrade at the moment and a reasonably easy addition would be to copy photos into other galleries. Actual, physical copies, not links.
I can see that for many people this would be useful but one downside would be that adding comments to one does not propagate it to the other copies, for example.
It sounds like for the problem you want to solve, John, there'd be a whole lot of copying.
Let me ask another question: we're working on a tools upgrade at the moment and a reasonably easy addition would be to copy photos into other galleries. Actual, physical copies, not links.
I can see that for many people this would be useful but one downside would be that adding comments to one does not propagate it to the other copies, for example.
<Head explodes!>
This has been asked for for years! :bash
My Pictures : My Gear
I Reject Your Reality And Substitute My Own - Adam Savage
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BaldyRegistered Users, Super ModeratorsPosts: 2,853moderator
Yeah, I posted about it way back when it had the potential to break us because storage was so expensive.
My question was directed at John, because I've seen him request virtual galleries often but didn't seem to be able to find posts from him on copying photos and the tradeoffs with virtual galleries.
I went back a read all of your posts about virtual galleries that I could find and as always they were compelling. One thing I don't understand is, wouldn't the creation of virtual galleries increase the need for hierarchies?
It seems to me you want to create extra galleries of say, a school play. One for a certain act, one for a child, etc., resulting in more galleries in a given category. I've probably missed something fundamental.
Let me ask another question: we're working on a tools upgrade at the moment and a reasonably easy addition would be to copy photos into other galleries. Actual, physical copies, not links.
I can see that for many people this would be useful but one downside would be that adding comments to one does not propagate it to the other copies, for example.
It sounds like for the problem you want to solve, John, there'd be a whole lot of copying.
The majority of my Smugmug photos (by quanitity and by time) come from events (things like school talent shows, kid's sports seasons, track meets, etc...). For a typical event, I'll have in the range of 200-1000 photos. I have a general rule of thumb that I really don't want a viewer to have to look through more than 30-40 photos in a gallery in order to find the ones they are looking for (usually the ones of their kid or their friends).
To make this happen, I've got to take 200-1000 photos and classify them into easy to navigate and find buckets. For example, in the school talent show, a friend of mine and I ended up with 1210 photos for display. Since there were 42 different scenes in the talent show, I classified all the photos by scene number and name (using Lightroom keywords). We then also picked the best 1-3 photos from each scene into a couple highlights galleries. Now, in Lightroom, I can see 44 views of those 1210 photos (42 scenes and two highlights collections). If we had real collections in Smugmug, I'd probably add a few more views to this display also like one by grade level so peope can browse their friends and maybe by performance type (piano, singing, large group number, etc...).
So, now I have all these images in Lightroom, all classified with useful keywords. It's now a lot of work to get these images properly into Smugmug.
Here's what I do today and then I'll describe what I wish I could do. First, I export all the images as JPEGs from Lightroom into a single directory on my hard drive. Then, I use Adobe Bridge on that directory to be able to manipulate them by keyword. I could have reimported them into Lightroom and used Lightroom again, but I don't want the JPEGs permanently in my Lightroom catalog so it's easier to just use Bridge. While Bridge is loading it's cache, I open up Star Explorer, create the sub-category I want to be the top level for this event and then mass create the galleries. Star Explorer is beautiful for this as it lets me just select all the gallery settings in one list of checkboxes and then type all the gallery names, one name per line in an edit box. I can literally create all my galleries in Star Explorer 50 times faster than I can in Smugmug. After typing all the names, I just tell Star Explorer to "go" and it creates all of them at once.
Now, I go to Bridge, select the first keyword query that matches up with what goes in a specific gallery, select that gallery in Star Explorer, drag/drop those images from Bridge into Star Explorer and then repeat that process for every single gallery / keyword query (44 times in the example above). When done with that, I tell Star Explorer to "go" and start uploading - typically overnight for a good-sized event. When that's done, I then often have to manually add a gallery name description to each of these 44 galleries. This is painfully done one at a time in the Smugmug web UI, but cries out for some sort of bulk tool where I could again just type, hit tab, type, hit tab, etc...
There are lots of things I dislike about this process, either because they take way more time than they should or they are very inflexible:
Exporting from Lightroom and then reindexing them again so I can manipulate the JPEGs by keyword is a pain.
Manually constructing every view by keyword (repeating the exact same thing 44 times) and then copying.
Every time an image is in more than one view, I have to upload it multiple times (this discourages me from doing much with extra views beyond a highlights view).
The whole system is ridiculously inflexible. If I realize I want to add new views or change existing views, I basically have to start over to create new views or manually move pictures around to change an existing view. I'd rather just add/change a few keywords on the existing uploaded images and have them just show up in new galleries.
I have to use Star Explorer for any sort of efficient multi-gallery upload and for gallery creation rather than stuff you offer to everyone.
I have no way to "upload as I finish processing", but rather I have to wait until I'm through processing all the images for an event before I can start any uploads. Since uploads is one of my bottlenecks, this definitely delays the time to final presentation.
Here's what I wish I could do:
Process photos in Lightroom
Keyword them according to how I want them to display
Export to one big directory
Upload that one big directory to one "master", but not publicly visible gallery for the event. In my case all photos usually have to be password protected so that needs to be supported here too.
Go into some sort of UI in Smugmug and define various sub-views of that one large gallery. In the case of the talent show, I'd define a view for each scene, a view for each highlights gallery, a view for each grade level and a view for each performance type.
I'd then provide friendly display names and optionally descriptions for each of these views.
I'd then define the presentation hierarchy (how I want all these virtual galleries to be organized). For example, I'd offer "View by Scene", "View by Grade Level", "View by Performance Type" or "Highlights".
Now, if I need to correct any images after the fact, I just modify their keywords and they automatically show up in the right place. If I want to add a new view, I just add some more keywords and define a new virtual gallery.
When viewers come to see, they provide a password to "get in" and then can see everything for this event without entering the password again.
Just to provide you a few different examples, I use a similar process for soccer seasons. I end up with galleries for each player (about 30 photos of each player), a couple highlights galleries and then sometimes by position (best shots, goalies) and then some misc (group shots, coaches, goofing around, etc...). A soccer season might end up being 25 galleries of 20-30 shots each.
I just shot part of our junior olympics. I ended up with one gallery for each track and field event per grade level (e.g. 4th grade hurdles, 5th grade hurdles, etc...).
I went back a read all of your posts about virtual galleries that I could find and as always they were compelling. One thing I don't understand is, wouldn't the creation of virtual galleries increase the need for hierarchies?
It does create the need to be able to organize and control the way the virtual galleries are displayed which will be hierarchical. I wasn't thinking that was the same thing as categories and sub-categories, but maybe. Again, I don't like to go deep for displaying hieararchy. I would probably only add one level to what I do today to School/Talent Show 2008/View by Scene/Virtual galleries by Scene where all navigation would really just be between the bottom couple levels once you were in.
It seems to me you want to create extra galleries of say, a school play. One for a certain act, one for a child, etc., resulting in more galleries in a given category. I've probably missed something fundamental.
Let me ask another question: we're working on a tools upgrade at the moment and a reasonably easy addition would be to copy photos into other galleries. Actual, physical copies, not links.
I can see that for many people this would be useful but one downside would be that adding comments to one does not propagate it to the other copies, for example.
My gut tells me that there are all sorts of downstream disadvantages to using physical copies rather than real virtual galleries. For example, it sounds like a nightmare if I want to modify things after the fact by changing a few keywords. It also sounds like a lot of extra work for me to specify all the things I want copied around when the keywords already contain all the info. Unified comments for one image are good, but not that important to me personally - though this sounds like something that others would have very differnet opinions on.[/quote]
It sounds like for the problem you want to solve, John, there'd be a whole lot of copying.
Yes, and a lot of time and a pain to modify after the fact. I might try to use more efficient copying to trim out some of the double uploading I do now just to save myself some upload time, but it wouldn't otherwise enhance my process much the way virtual galleries could.
My $0.02 FWIW. If you're going to the trouble to add "a" level, then go all the way and make it a permanent fix by engineering "N" levels. If you go to 4 levels, in a few months (if you're lucky) people will start asking for 5 levels, and so on. I know I prefer to take a bit more time and figure out a more flexible, permanent fix when I have to go back and revise my code.
I like the idea of virtual galleries too. But that's a differnet topic.
Yeah, I posted about it way back when it had the potential to break us because storage was so expensive.
My question was directed at John, because I've seen him request virtual galleries often but didn't seem to be able to find posts from him on copying photos and the tradeoffs with virtual galleries.
At the risk of setting off another dgrin fight, there seems to be (at least) two different, competing definitions of 'virtual galleries':
1. A 'gallery' which doesn't actually contain photos/links, but instead contains instructions to dynamically pull in photos from the rest of your account. Example: "Photos keyworded with 'baseball' taken between Jan 1, 2007 and Jan 15, 2007 in the Silicon Valley" would on-the-fly pull in all of those photos. If you add a 'baseball' keyword to a photo that met the other criteria, it'd show up automagically.
2. A 'gallery' which doesn't contain photos, but does contain links to photos, such that you can group them together in interesting ways, but the photos themselves retain all the properties of their parents: caption, keywords, ratings, etc. If you cropped one, it would crop all links of that photo and so forth.
If you care about this topic, would you mind letting me know which 'virtual galleries' definition you mean? And if you had to choose one, which you'd choose?
Bear in mind that in either case, we'd likely have to honor passwords at the very least, so you couldn't have passworded images show up in non-passworded 'virtual galleries' of either definition... We'll think about that one, but I just don't see how we can do it and preserve our strong security claims and ideals.
- A 'gallery' which doesn't actually contain photos/links, but instead contains instructions to dynamically pull in photos from the rest of your account. Example: "Photos keyworded with 'baseball' taken between Jan 1, 2007 and Jan 15, 2007 in the Silicon Valley" would on-the-fly pull in all of those photos. If you add a 'baseball' keyword to a photo that met the other criteria, it'd show up automagically.
- A 'gallery' which doesn't contain photos, but does contain links to photos, such that you can group them together in interesting ways, but the photos themselves retain all the properties of their parents: caption, keywords, ratings, etc. If you cropped one, it would crop all and so forth.
I have to say this again.. I think the Flickr way is the nicest IMHO. Upload a photo. It's "Uncategorized" and not really in any gallery. Then, assign it to galleries/groups/shares/etc.. Do it based on whatever criteria you want. It's no longer about the physical location of the photo, but the links each photo has to galleries/groups/shares. Then, allow security based on location. So, if you link to the image that also includes the gallery key, and that gallery is open, allow the image to show. If you link to the image that is in a passworded gallery, but it contains the gallery key, then prompt for the password.
So, you'd have to have both the gallery key and the image key to determine if the image is available to view or not.
I've read this thread mostly out of curiosity because so far, I haven't run into any limitations around the lack of deeper categories - but I'm also just an amateur using Smugmug to share pictures with friends and family. So for me, everything about categories and sub-galleries is just fine.
But...
It's impossible not to see the numerous and never-ending requests from a wide variety of users who want to be able to have more sub-levels. And for every one person that takes the time to register in these forums and post, there's probably another 100 people who want the same feature but don't voice their opinions because they don't know how or don't feel it would be worth it.
I think this quote sums up the root of the problem from Smugmug's point of view:
If we build deeper levels, there will be many people who use it when they shouldn't simply because they don't understand click fatigue. But there will also be people who desperately need it and improve the overall browsing experience of their visitors.
I think it's really great that Smugmug thinks about this problem: protecting people from themselves in order to ensure the best possible experience for site visitors. But I think at some point that has to give way to the users that have legitimate reasons for wanting certain features to be in place - surely there's a middle ground where Joe Average user won't abuse the feature (perhaps there's a layer of forced complexity) but more advanced users can do whatever they want?
I should also add that the issue of click fatigue wouldn't be so tiring if the gallery pages had bigger images. Right now the home page and the category pages have thumbnail images so small it feels like you're browsing through your hard drive using Windows Explorer...bigger images = more beauty = less fatigue because it's more like exploring someone's photo album (which is the entire point, right?).
I think Smugmug needs something like Dell's IdeaStorm to get more direct feedback from users. Maybe something like UserVoice? I'll suggest that in a new thread because I think it's worthy of discussion...
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The reason I fear it is we get some smiles and kudos here when we add more features, which we love, but then have to deal with the consequences of complexity. One is we have to handle the people who say I love SmugMug but do you really have to give me so many options? My eyes!
I believe the most important answer is to take our UI design to the next level, because some of the confusion we create with new features is our own fault for not nailing the UI. This has become our biggest priority and when the UI design is really superb, my bet is we'll be able to offer more advanced features without confusing people.
Case in point is the way the UI currently works for categories and subcategories. We re-did it and it will go live soon, and what a difference.
That being said.... after trying Sheaf's recommendations on page 1 of the thread, I'm still not satisfied. It looks messy and it's not easy for me to see what belongs where after many galleries are uploaded. I don't know html or other programming so I don't know how to do the work-arounds some people suggested. I tried Zenfolio and after using it with "Photo Guru Backup", this tandem works flawlessly for me. I'll likely end up buying an account there.
I hear what you've said about Flickr and MySpace and I agree 100%. It's also true that you generally don't want people with 8 galleries having them in 6 different places. But while I don't know the stats and you do, I'd have to assume that the average SM user has lots of galleries, not just 8. Also, speaking for myself, many people are not sellers. I just want to use this as a backup option and to share folder links to other people. More subfolders is the only way to do this, IMHO.
It does pain me a bit since I love the community here. I'll keep a close eye on the forum and check out the new features that come out. As soon as more hierarchy becomes supported, you guys get my $. Cheers.
I was just reading over this thread because I'm also interested in another level of hierarchy, but for a different reason to what's been mentioned. Some of us would LOVE to sort our images by Year, as in year>category>sub-category>gallery>sub-gallery. For example 2008>Families>Bob's family>birthdays>Sue's birthday. I migrated from Phanfare, which essentially allows you to start your breadcrumb with your category already in a year. It's a given basically, so the year is basically a preset category, and you add a sub-category, a gallery, and sub galleries. I find this system of categorization to be very very helpful, as do most of my friends and family.
In addition, a fair number of people seem to be using smugmug for both pro and personal photos, and if you want to "hide" your personal photos by creating a category that is hidden (but with an address known to friends and family) then it becomes impossible to sort your photos properly. For example, if you have www.blahphotos com/ personal, where Personal is already a category. You can't sort past Personal/Travel/UK, when what you need is Personal/Travel/UK/Scotland and Personal/Travel/UK/Wales to prevent there being all 500 travel photos from your 4 weeks in the UK all in one gallery.
I know that feature bloat is always an issue with a site like Smugmug, and I thought the 3 diagrams that someone posted were hilarious.
Admittedly I almost did not join Smugmug because of this issue of not enough levels for sorting- all of the other sites that I looked into had more sorting levels, but when it came right down to it the sites were simply not as good. So I was forced to sacrifice my sorting levels. And truthfully my Personal galleries are all a mess still, a month after migrating, because I still can't figure out a work around for the lack of sub-galleries.
Can I just say though that Smugmug has the absolute best service, and dGrinners you are all amazing- your dedication to helping all of us poor newbies, even when asked the same questions day after day, has made me thankful that I joined Smugmug and determined to stay despite the sorting issues. I love the community here, and I'm glad I joined it. I do still hope that you'll allow sub-galleries, but if not at least my professional site will look awesome, even if my personal photos are a mess.
Kristi
year. Each thumb links to an html gallery with all that year family name
categories. You got your levels. Codes already created here, just need to
add in your data.
2008 (1st html gallery)
.... Bob's 2008 family (category) (2nd html gallery)
....... birthdays (sub-cat)
............ Sue's birthday (gallery)
.... Joe's family 2008 (category) (2nd html gallery)
.... Liz's family 2008 (category) (2nd html gallery)
2007 (1st html gallery)
.... Bob's 2007 family (category) (3rd html gallery)
....... birthdays (sub-cat)
............ Sue's birthday (gallery)
.... Joe's family 2007 (category) (3rd html gallery)
.... Liz's family 2007 (category) (3nd html gallery)
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Kristi, I don't want to turn this into a thread on alternatives (I read the long SM vs. Zenfolio thread) to SM but since we have the same subfolder desires, I'm curious about what you didn't like about Zenfolio.
I would add my vote for one more level of hierarchy.
The magic point to hit is where simple things are simple to find, learn and use yet more powerful things are there to discover and use efficiently - all without reading help files, dgrin or wikis. I've never believed that the only way to make things simple is to limit features. Great UI design doesn't have to limit features to keep things simple. Unplanned addition of new features by just tacking them on without fully thinking their UI through does make a mess. But, as I'm sure you know, there are better ways.
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The reason I chose Smugmug was because of it's Pro level capabilities, including customization. I wanted my site to be highly customizable, and I found that most of the Zenfolio sites looked just a little too similiar to each other for my taste. In fact, they all look exactly the same to me. That said, I didn't have a clear idea just how difficult customizing would turn out to be, and I wouldn't have been able to do it if it wasn't for the very helpful dgrinners who must spend most of their days helping poor newbies like myself.
I also looked at some interesting reviews, namely:
http://gophoto.tribe.net/thread/facc2f02-4ede-43bc-bcd7-d11e93c90a41
And I looked at this thread on Digital Photography Review, which had a number of people with sites on both Zenfolio and Smugmug whose sites I could compare (it's a few months old now so some people have ended either one or the other service and the links might be dead now):
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1014&message=26179467
I'm glad I chose Smugmug, because I love the customization, and I love the community of photographers here. My site is coming along, albeit slowly, and I'm learning to code in the process- I'm even thinking of taking a web design class now.
Why did you choose Smugmug? Or do you have both and are considering which one to go with?
Al, I just followed your link and I had no idea that you had put html tutors for various things on your site! Thank you!!
Kristi
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Can others confirm that one more level of hierarchy is sufficient? Or do we need to go N levels deep?
Most of the requests that I've seen have been for one extra level. But perhaps you should go overboard, and allow unlimited extensions.
In terms of how to write the URLs, I like the idea of having
username.smugmug.com/name1/name2/name3/
etc
However, I appreciate that this would be difficult if there were any special characters in the category / sub-category names.
How about using the current sub-category URL style, and make it equally applicable for sub-sub-categories etc?
First off, serious kudos for responding to this problem. Speaking for myself, adding one level would help but would not help enough for me to buy an account. The majority of my collection could be categorized properly but there still would be folders that wouldn't. SM is great, so why should Zenfolio be able to go deeper without a problem but SMers should be limited?
http://forums.zenfolio.com/forums/p/442/2409.aspx
But I certainly hear you. I haven't heard Don say he's sweating over scalability problems with a deeper hierarchy like we had to battle with SmugIslands, so maybe it's just me sweating over UI and support (like we get killed with over SmugIslands).
BTW, way to take the reigns & come through for the users here with more levels in the breadcrumb.
I can have a photo of my cat; that photo can equally be put into my Family gallery, my pet gallery, cat gallery, mammal gallery, etc.. Basically, it lets my visitors find that photo from multiple places.
Now, is that the best UI I can provide my users? Probably not.... But, it does allow me the flexibility to do it (which is nice). Eventually, people realize that they're doing dumb things and fix it. But, there's no need to limit it artificially.
David
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If you sit someone down in front of Phanfare or Flickr's Flash slideshows, they will say they're smooth and fast, but they will say Zenfolio's is slow and choppy. I've never been able to understand why what we had read in forums and what we experienced watching users was 180 degrees out in this case, but we wasted a lot of time getting that one wrong.
If you watch users struggle with breadcrumbs, it puts the fear of God in your heart. Once you get them, it seems impossible that anyone wouldn't. But I really sympathize with the need and we're gonna do something about it, I just hope we're not gonna strand grandmas who don't know for breadcrumbs 5 levels deep.
Could I suggest a AJAX based organization system for galleries/cat/sub-cat, etc..? So I can drag and drop, right click and add, etc galleries, categories, sub-categories, etc... It should work like one big directory tree IMHO. That would be a KILLER UI!
David
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I have an assumption that you are going to do some form of virtual galleries at some point where the categorization and display of the photos can be truly independent of any sort of container that a photo is put in. I can't use any of the keyword hacks for this today beacause I need it to work with password protected galleries.
If that assumption is right, then I'd suggest that you do that first before working on more levels of container hierarchy because that's an even more powerful organizational tool and only then will you have a good picture of what else in gallery organization really needs to be done. I'm not arguing against more levels (I myself can see how I'd want one more level than we have now).
But, I would rather totally rethink how I organize and display my event photography with real virtual galleries and it might even render additional levels of container hierarchy irrelevant for me.
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I, personally, see how one more level would be beneficial. But, I don't see how I would ever use more than one more.
Unfortunately, all you're going to do by adding just one more level is reduce the number of people asking for more. But, I'm sure you know that already.
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Putting the same photo in many galleries is a good idea that we're working on but it's different than having N levels of hierarchy, no? Flickr enables you to nest collections 5 deep. I dunno why the restriction but my guess is it's both for usability and scalability.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't go deeper than them, I'm just wondering if some fixed integer is more reasonable than N. For example, we allow N galleries and have users with more than 300,000 of them.
When I hear that Flickr can go 5 deep, my response is respect. They have been able to scale to very high levels of traffic and users. When I hear that Zenfolio is N, I think hmmm, maybe we should check back and see how that scales.
Each photo has an ID number. Make categories/subs, etc.. completely seperate from the images. Image #'s are related to galleries which would be related to a "category". Categories are related to each other (parent/child) or to the home. So, basically everything is related to everything else. The end result is that you can scale to N categories because it's all just related to each other and you itterate through it, only looking one up or one down the tree at any one time. Photos are related to the galler(y|ies), and indexed on that. So, you do something like a select images where images exist in gallery # x (yeah, that's some fantastic SQL there..
Sure, it's complicated to create the query, and to create the tables to make it work, but, once it's done, the scalability would be amazing.
So, no.. We're not talking about two things really. If you make photos related to galleries only because a lookup table says they are, then, the number of categories doesn't matter any longer. AND, you can have one photo in multiple galleries, without worrying about how to store the images, etc.. You ARE storing the photos in the database itself and not in a filesystem... Right???
Check out how vbulletin does categories/subcategories, etc.. (Look at the newest release for it.. I don't know how this version does it, I only know the 3.6.x tree). They do a good job, and it is FAST--even with tens of thousands of people using it at a time.
David
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I went back a read all of your posts about virtual galleries that I could find and as always they were compelling. One thing I don't understand is, wouldn't the creation of virtual galleries increase the need for hierarchies?
It seems to me you want to create extra galleries of say, a school play. One for a certain act, one for a child, etc., resulting in more galleries in a given category. I've probably missed something fundamental.
Let me ask another question: we're working on a tools upgrade at the moment and a reasonably easy addition would be to copy photos into other galleries. Actual, physical copies, not links.
I can see that for many people this would be useful but one downside would be that adding comments to one does not propagate it to the other copies, for example.
It sounds like for the problem you want to solve, John, there'd be a whole lot of copying.
<Head explodes!>
This has been asked for for years! :bash
I Reject Your Reality And Substitute My Own - Adam Savage
My question was directed at John, because I've seen him request virtual galleries often but didn't seem to be able to find posts from him on copying photos and the tradeoffs with virtual galleries.
To make this happen, I've got to take 200-1000 photos and classify them into easy to navigate and find buckets. For example, in the school talent show, a friend of mine and I ended up with 1210 photos for display. Since there were 42 different scenes in the talent show, I classified all the photos by scene number and name (using Lightroom keywords). We then also picked the best 1-3 photos from each scene into a couple highlights galleries. Now, in Lightroom, I can see 44 views of those 1210 photos (42 scenes and two highlights collections). If we had real collections in Smugmug, I'd probably add a few more views to this display also like one by grade level so peope can browse their friends and maybe by performance type (piano, singing, large group number, etc...).
So, now I have all these images in Lightroom, all classified with useful keywords. It's now a lot of work to get these images properly into Smugmug.
Here's what I do today and then I'll describe what I wish I could do. First, I export all the images as JPEGs from Lightroom into a single directory on my hard drive. Then, I use Adobe Bridge on that directory to be able to manipulate them by keyword. I could have reimported them into Lightroom and used Lightroom again, but I don't want the JPEGs permanently in my Lightroom catalog so it's easier to just use Bridge. While Bridge is loading it's cache, I open up Star Explorer, create the sub-category I want to be the top level for this event and then mass create the galleries. Star Explorer is beautiful for this as it lets me just select all the gallery settings in one list of checkboxes and then type all the gallery names, one name per line in an edit box. I can literally create all my galleries in Star Explorer 50 times faster than I can in Smugmug. After typing all the names, I just tell Star Explorer to "go" and it creates all of them at once.
Now, I go to Bridge, select the first keyword query that matches up with what goes in a specific gallery, select that gallery in Star Explorer, drag/drop those images from Bridge into Star Explorer and then repeat that process for every single gallery / keyword query (44 times in the example above). When done with that, I tell Star Explorer to "go" and start uploading - typically overnight for a good-sized event. When that's done, I then often have to manually add a gallery name description to each of these 44 galleries. This is painfully done one at a time in the Smugmug web UI, but cries out for some sort of bulk tool where I could again just type, hit tab, type, hit tab, etc...
There are lots of things I dislike about this process, either because they take way more time than they should or they are very inflexible:
- Exporting from Lightroom and then reindexing them again so I can manipulate the JPEGs by keyword is a pain.
- Manually constructing every view by keyword (repeating the exact same thing 44 times) and then copying.
- Every time an image is in more than one view, I have to upload it multiple times (this discourages me from doing much with extra views beyond a highlights view).
- The whole system is ridiculously inflexible. If I realize I want to add new views or change existing views, I basically have to start over to create new views or manually move pictures around to change an existing view. I'd rather just add/change a few keywords on the existing uploaded images and have them just show up in new galleries.
- I have to use Star Explorer for any sort of efficient multi-gallery upload and for gallery creation rather than stuff you offer to everyone.
- I have no way to "upload as I finish processing", but rather I have to wait until I'm through processing all the images for an event before I can start any uploads. Since uploads is one of my bottlenecks, this definitely delays the time to final presentation.
Here's what I wish I could do:- Process photos in Lightroom
- Keyword them according to how I want them to display
- Export to one big directory
- Upload that one big directory to one "master", but not publicly visible gallery for the event. In my case all photos usually have to be password protected so that needs to be supported here too.
- Go into some sort of UI in Smugmug and define various sub-views of that one large gallery. In the case of the talent show, I'd define a view for each scene, a view for each highlights gallery, a view for each grade level and a view for each performance type.
- I'd then provide friendly display names and optionally descriptions for each of these views.
- I'd then define the presentation hierarchy (how I want all these virtual galleries to be organized). For example, I'd offer "View by Scene", "View by Grade Level", "View by Performance Type" or "Highlights".
- Now, if I need to correct any images after the fact, I just modify their keywords and they automatically show up in the right place. If I want to add a new view, I just add some more keywords and define a new virtual gallery.
- When viewers come to see, they provide a password to "get in" and then can see everything for this event without entering the password again.
Just to provide you a few different examples, I use a similar process for soccer seasons. I end up with galleries for each player (about 30 photos of each player), a couple highlights galleries and then sometimes by position (best shots, goalies) and then some misc (group shots, coaches, goofing around, etc...). A soccer season might end up being 25 galleries of 20-30 shots each.I just shot part of our junior olympics. I ended up with one gallery for each track and field event per grade level (e.g. 4th grade hurdles, 5th grade hurdles, etc...).
Now to address your questions: It does create the need to be able to organize and control the way the virtual galleries are displayed which will be hierarchical. I wasn't thinking that was the same thing as categories and sub-categories, but maybe. Again, I don't like to go deep for displaying hieararchy. I would probably only add one level to what I do today to School/Talent Show 2008/View by Scene/Virtual galleries by Scene where all navigation would really just be between the bottom couple levels once you were in.
Yes.
My gut tells me that there are all sorts of downstream disadvantages to using physical copies rather than real virtual galleries. For example, it sounds like a nightmare if I want to modify things after the fact by changing a few keywords. It also sounds like a lot of extra work for me to specify all the things I want copied around when the keywords already contain all the info. Unified comments for one image are good, but not that important to me personally - though this sounds like something that others would have very differnet opinions on.[/quote]
Yes, and a lot of time and a pain to modify after the fact. I might try to use more efficient copying to trim out some of the double uploading I do now just to save myself some upload time, but it wouldn't otherwise enhance my process much the way virtual galleries could.
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I like the idea of virtual galleries too. But that's a differnet topic.
http://www.chrislaudermilkphoto.com/
At the risk of setting off another dgrin fight, there seems to be (at least) two different, competing definitions of 'virtual galleries':
1. A 'gallery' which doesn't actually contain photos/links, but instead contains instructions to dynamically pull in photos from the rest of your account. Example: "Photos keyworded with 'baseball' taken between Jan 1, 2007 and Jan 15, 2007 in the Silicon Valley" would on-the-fly pull in all of those photos. If you add a 'baseball' keyword to a photo that met the other criteria, it'd show up automagically.
2. A 'gallery' which doesn't contain photos, but does contain links to photos, such that you can group them together in interesting ways, but the photos themselves retain all the properties of their parents: caption, keywords, ratings, etc. If you cropped one, it would crop all links of that photo and so forth.
If you care about this topic, would you mind letting me know which 'virtual galleries' definition you mean? And if you had to choose one, which you'd choose?
Bear in mind that in either case, we'd likely have to honor passwords at the very least, so you couldn't have passworded images show up in non-passworded 'virtual galleries' of either definition... We'll think about that one, but I just don't see how we can do it and preserve our strong security claims and ideals.
So, you'd have to have both the gallery key and the image key to determine if the image is available to view or not.
David
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But...
It's impossible not to see the numerous and never-ending requests from a wide variety of users who want to be able to have more sub-levels. And for every one person that takes the time to register in these forums and post, there's probably another 100 people who want the same feature but don't voice their opinions because they don't know how or don't feel it would be worth it.
I think this quote sums up the root of the problem from Smugmug's point of view:
I think it's really great that Smugmug thinks about this problem: protecting people from themselves in order to ensure the best possible experience for site visitors. But I think at some point that has to give way to the users that have legitimate reasons for wanting certain features to be in place - surely there's a middle ground where Joe Average user won't abuse the feature (perhaps there's a layer of forced complexity) but more advanced users can do whatever they want?
I should also add that the issue of click fatigue wouldn't be so tiring if the gallery pages had bigger images. Right now the home page and the category pages have thumbnail images so small it feels like you're browsing through your hard drive using Windows Explorer...bigger images = more beauty = less fatigue because it's more like exploring someone's photo album (which is the entire point, right?).
I think Smugmug needs something like Dell's IdeaStorm to get more direct feedback from users. Maybe something like UserVoice? I'll suggest that in a new thread because I think it's worthy of discussion...
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