Can't add a keyword

jfriend · August 29, 2009

I am so frustrated with keywords. There's all these silly little special Smugmug-only secret handshakes that you have to know to make them work. When you don't know one of these secret little rules, nothing works, absolutely nothing. There are no errors, no visual indication in the UI that anything is wrong. You just NEVER get a keyword match on anything you put in. There's basically zero error handling and zero feedback so consequently, if anything is wrong, it just leads to loads of user frustration.

I have a bunch of images spread across 20 galleries from a trip to Kenya. I uploaded them a year ago with a bunch of keywords already on them. I've never touched the keywords on them inside of Smugmug. They are as they were uploaded. Now, I'd like to identify a subset of them that I can target for my homepage slideshow with a keyword feed.

I open the bulk keyword page for a gallery and add the keyword ss_slideshow to every image in the gallery. After doing the appropriate preview, I hit Save and it literally takes 4 minutes for the page to complete. It shows in the bulk keyword box for every image, but it hasn't really been accepted as a keyword. It won't match any keyword feed. It doesn't show by the image in the gallery. So, what could possibly be wrong.

There are at least two bugs there. First, it shouldn't take 4 minutes for the Save to process. I literally got up to get a drink, flipped through a few channels on the TV, came back to the computer and it still wasn't done. Waited a few more minutes and it did finally complete.

Second, it has to either accept my keywords or give me a meaningful error. Taking minutes to process them, then not really accepting them is just wrong. That's a bug or at best a horrible UI experience.

So, next I bring up the bulk keyword page again. I notice that for some reason, the keyword box looks like this:

Hmm. All I did was bulk add bestkenya. Why isn't there a semicolon between the 4578 and the bestkenya. Hmmm. I don't know and I have no idea how to bulk fix that. I didn't do it. For some reason, when I bulk added bestkenya, it didn't put the right delimiter in there. So, I take one item and add the semicolon and hit save. This time it takes one minute thirty seconds before the Save button finishes. I check the feed. OK, that image now shows in the feed. Wow, so to fix these 89 images, I have to manually add a semicolon to 89 keyword boxes. Jeez, come on.

So, the third bug here is that the keyword screen failed to add a delimiter after my last keyword when I bulk added a new keyword. That means that every single image in this gallery is messed up.

And, if you look at that screen shot again, the folks at Smugmug know this is my favorite issue which I fisrt raised a long time ago and I thought was being worked on 6 months ago, but we still haven't heard anything about a fix for. I don't want that 4578 keyword. I didn't put it there. It isn't in the upload image. The filename is JF2_4578 and Smugmug decided on it's own to give me a junk keyword of 4578. Please stop with the junk keywords. There's also NO bulk way to get rid of these because they are different on every single image.

To recap, four issues here:

1) Taking forever to process the Save button when bulk adding to each iamge, with just 89 images in the gallery.

2) The save command reports no error, but it doesn't index the keywords I just added. It has to either report an error or do what I asked - one or the other.

3) Bulk adding a keyword didn't add a semi-colon delimiter between the last keyword and the new keyword.

4) Please stop adding junk keywords like 4578 from my filenames.

So, now I've got non-functional keywords on 89 images in a gallery and I can't figure out any way to fix it other than doing something individually on 89 images. I can bulk remove what I added, but that doesn't solve my issue. I need to bulk add a new keyword. That's a pain.

jfriend · August 29, 2009

It looks like bulk add and remove is just busted in regards to the delimiters. I see that a lot of my images have both jlf and 3456 as keywords because of their filenames JLF_3456. I figure I'll bulk remove the jlf. I do that and it leaves the extra semicolon in the keywords. So, this is bug #5.

Bulk remove doesn't remove delimiter with the keyword.

Andy · August 30, 2009

John, thanks for the bug report. I will review and we'll be back to you.

Andy · August 30, 2009

John, I looked here
http://jfriend.smugmug.com/Kenya/Sasaab/Samburu-Celebration/5576119_T93q6#342456039_4tBxj

then looked at the bulk took there. Did you delete 4578 from this photo because it is not there.

Andy · August 30, 2009

We're not indexing 4578 as far as I can tell. I may show in the UI (and I'd like it not to) but I think we're honoring what we say in the help pages.

just after uploading to my test site:

after indexing:

I added keywords via the bulk dialog just now and the page completed in about 2 seconds

So I'm sorry I can't replicate it. Can you email me right when this happens next time? If I can get some data, and replicate, Ops/Sorcery can better investigate.

It wouldbenice if we didn't have to show you at all, the #s that we're ignoring anyway.

Andy · August 30, 2009

jfriend wrote:

It looks like bulk add and remove is just busted in regards to the delimiters. I see that a lot of my images have both jlf and 3456 as keywords because of their filenames JLF_3456. I figure I'll bulk remove the jlf. I do that and it leaves the extra semicolon in the keywords. So, this is bug #5.

Bulk remove doesn't remove delimiter with the keyword.

Yeah I don't like this.. it's confusing in the UI - doesn't seem to affect the remaining keywords, which is a small consolation.

I've reported this bug in our system.

jfriend · August 30, 2009

Andy wrote:

John, I looked here
http://jfriend.smugmug.com/Kenya/Sasaab/Samburu-Celebration/5576119_T93q6#342456039_4tBxj

then looked at the bulk took there. Did you delete 4578 from this photo because it is not there.

Yes, I cleaned up that whole gallery manually. I deleted all the JLF and 4578 keywords and fixed all the extra semicolons. The main point of this bug is that once you have a couple keywords in place, bulk add and bulk remove seem busted because they weren't adding/removing semi-colon delimiters.

If you want a virgin gallery that I haven't cleaned up, try this one: http://jfriend.smugmug.com/Kenya/Shaba/Animals/5570155_3TdNQ

Try bulk adding the keyword "favoritekenya" to all photos. Then try bulk removing jlf. Neither works until you manually fix the delimiters after the bulk operation.

jfriend · September 2, 2009

Any update on this. If you have more than one keyword, then bulk add or bulk remove doesn't work properly. Simple to reproduce. And other issues noted in original report including no error reporting when the keywords are in a format that will not be indexed (thus leaving the customer either unaware or a problem or scratching their head as to why it doesn't work).

CosmicVoyager · October 14, 2009

Just wanted to add my vote to fixing this issue with the semicolons when bulk adding/deleting keywords. I tweak my keywords frequently, and it's a pain to still have to edit each keyword list manually afterwards. There is also the risk that I'll delete extra characters by mistake when trying to correct many photos quickly.

This issue has been around for months (that I'm aware of), and doesn't seem like it should be that hard to fix.

Can't add a keyword

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