My Smugmug workflow -- missing features adds painful steps

rynoshark

I thought I'd share this since I might be missing some obvious improvements in my process fir managing our families photos. I have some painful steps that seems like Smugmug could (and maybe does) make significantly easier...

My current workflow:

* Create quarterly folders (e.g. 2008-Q2) on my NAS device that contains all photos for the quarter; copy new photos into this folder.

* Use EasyGPS or GoogleEarth + Picasa to geotag a bulk set of photos.

* Use Picasa & PixVue to add tags, comments, etc.

* Finally upload to Smugmug.

I would love to skip at least the external tagging step and just manage all the tags, comments, etc on Smugmug; however this process takes way longer via the web interface (would be easier if more support for bulk operations).

My beefs w/ Smugmug:

* No good way to upload all my photos to Smugmug, make them private, and create "virtual" galleries of just those photos I really want to share. I do not like to duplicate photos since those quickly get out of sync (e.g. tags, comments, etc.) I used to use Picasa Albums which enabled uploading/syncing albums easily which were made up of links back to the actual photos (e.g. not copies). I am *REALLY* missing this with Smugmug.

* Bulk operations extremely limited, makes updating painful (unless I do all updates/edits prior to uploads). For instance, hard to quickly tag all the photos of my wife Mary with a "mary" tag.

* No easy way to quickly geotag many photos where I don't already have GPS data merged w/ EasyGPS. Many of my photos I'd be happy just bulk tagging to the town they were taken in. One day I'll forget where the heck all these photos were taken My only option seems to buffer up all my photos in a folder and edit/tag/geotag them locally prior to uploading to Smugmug. This adds a fairly large amount of delay before others can see them.

* Would like my family/friends to be able to add tags/comments easily. I haven't quite figured out how to do this, I tried playing around with ShareGroups but couldn't figure out how to enable specific users to be able to modify my photo metadata.

Otherwise I love Smugmug for keeping the original images, open APIs, ability to order backup DVDs, the fact it is stored on S3 which I trust, and the speed the site loads is excellent!

Ryno

Andy

I have found Picasa to be pretty easy to Geotag, no?

darryl

* No good way to upload all my photos to Smugmug, make them private, and create "virtual" galleries of just those photos I really want to share. I do not like to duplicate photos since those quickly get out of sync (e.g. tags, comments, etc.) I used to use Picasa Albums which enabled uploading/syncing albums easily which were made up of links back to the actual photos (e.g. not copies). I am *REALLY* missing this with Smugmug.

Hiya -- you do know about the Picasa uploader right? It doesn't do everything you say, but at least it lets you avoid using a separate app to upload. What I do is double-click on the first image, then use the arrow-keys to go through them, and when there's an image I want to upload, I hit the space bar to "star" the photo.

After getting a bunch that I want to put into a gallery, I go to Starred Photos, select all, and use the Picasa SmugMug uploader to send them, which then creates the gallery w/ those selected images.

* Bulk operations extremely limited, makes updating painful (unless I do all updates/edits prior to uploads). For instance, hard to quickly tag all the photos of my wife Mary with a "mary" tag.

Oh, there was a cool hack for this:

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=89237&highlight=firefox+bookmarklet+keywords

* Would like my family/friends to be able to add tags/comments easily. I haven't quite figured out how to do this, I tried playing around with ShareGroups but couldn't figure out how to enable specific users to be able to modify my photo metadata.

Your family/friends can't edit caption or keywords unless they join SmugMug too (and you allow it). You can allow anybody to add comments (again, if you allow it). But the twain shall not meet. Well, unless you use some hokey script:

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=74036

(Warning, it's a little kludgy.)

I wish I didn't need to do it at all:

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=73349

rynoshark

Thanks darryl, I'll check out that hack. Great idea using Bookmarklet!

I've recently tweaked my process:

* Create quarterly folders (e.g. 2008-Q2) containing all photos for the quarter; copy new photos into this folder. This is my archival copy.

* Extract .gpx tracks from Garmin GPS using EasyGPS, save into quarterly folder.

* Use GeoSetter (http://www.geosetter.de/en/) to automagically map GPS tracks to all my photos. Any that don't have GPS data quickly map.

* Use Picasa & PixVue to add tags, comments, etc.

* Use Picasa Uploader for Smugmug

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I have to say GeoSetter is *by far* the best photo geotagging tool I've ever used. This is *way* faster than using Picasa and Google Earth. My only complaint is that it seems a bit slow to write back the geotags after you've done a bunch of bulk updates.

rynoshark

Features I still would really love to see...

* Enable family/friends to update tags/comments; I have limited time to add meta-data, however my massive number of in laws would add comments all over the place!

* Some way to easily backup all photos to Smugmug and then hand select the ones I want to share publically into virtual galleries so any updates are applied to "both" galleries. However, I am going to think about this a bit; I suspect I can improve my process to get both backup as well as just highlighted albums. Given Smugmug storage is unlimited perhaps I can just be wasteful and duplicate...