A note of dissatisfaction

winnjewett · June 23, 2005

I would like to start by saying that I am a very satisfied smugmug customer. That said, there is one issue that I don't think that the powers-that-be are taking seriously. In order to accomodate a recent event, I needed to add an additional level of categorization. The purpose is to make my customers' lives simple and easy. This, however is not possible, and it sounds as though everyone at smugmug is perfectly content to leave it this way. This seems like poor foresight, and a lack of understanding on their part.

Here's why another level of categories is important:
If a photographer shoots both events and another type of photography, then he must make his top layer reflect this. Example:

Events
Portraits
Landscape

This leaves sub-categories and galleries available to each category. At the Baja 500, which I just attended, there were about 400 riders/drivers divided among different vehicle types. Since I have shot more than one event, the Baja 500 must be placed in a sub-category. This leaves me with no choice but to group all 400 riders into one huge list, making it difficult for my customers to find the photos they are looking for. This is unacceptable.

As a temporary solution, I purchased an additional professional account, which gave me that greatly needed additional category level, but this is certainly not ideal. I'm sure that it was not Don and Baldy's wish to squeeze an additional 100 dollars out of me, but as a result of their policies, that's what I was forced to do.

-winn

Ann McRae · June 23, 2005

Hi

I just shot a soccer tournament and grouped each game time seperately. I set up the following hierarchy:
sports at the category
tournament as the subcategory
game time as the gallery

This way my customers can fairly simply find the photos they are interested in without placing all 700 in one gallery. However, I did have to make them all private, which required me giving 24 different links to the tournament organizer for display n their web page. It works. Not ideal, but it does work.

Could you not then split your subcategory into a variety of galleries for each driver?

ann

rutt · June 23, 2005

The answer always seems to be that "not enough people ask for this given how hard it would be." It must be really really hard, because it seems that a lot of people have asked for it.

gooseattack · June 23, 2005

There are certainly a lot of changes I would like smugmug to have...enhancments would take a great deal of time, but as a customer, it's an incentive to want to continue to sign up with Smugmug instead of something else like Printroom.

All in all, I am pretty happy about Smugmug, but I have been struggling with categories also. Having the option of:
Homepage - Category - Subcategory - Sub-Subcategory - Gallery
is nice, but I agree that most people don't like to click 4 or 5 times to see a picture. Customers may get lost within the categories.

Another request (this is actually the biggest change I would like to see), is Organization. As of now, the easiest way to organize pictures is the Organize by Position link on the homepage. However, I think think feature is limited. Let's say If I am a compulsive picture taker and take 100 pictures a day. In 5 years, I would have 100 x 365 x 5 = 182,500 pictures!

So, if you have 182,500 pictures and divide them up to 50 pictures per gallery, that would still be 3,650 galleries! It would be pain to organize the galleries by position every time you create a new gallery -- and you have to see all 3,650 thumbnails and wait for them to load.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a feature to maybe sort by categories or subcategories?

That would make my life much simpler...

colourbox · June 23, 2005

I hope I'm not off base in this thread, but in the larger world, hard categories/folders are giving way to keyword metadata. Instead of having many small categories, you can have fewer larger categories with subgroups organized by metadata. For this to work at smugmug, smugmug would need to upgrade the keyword function.

I tried to use keywords but they don't work in private client galleries, I wish keyword searching could operate within the scope of individual galleries or categories so that private searching could work without locating photos of other jobs, clients, or users.

So ultimately my request would be for smugmug to allow metadata-driven categorization and search that can be limited to within particular galleries. The model I am talking would be similar to the Collections feature as implemented in Adobe Bridge. For this to be easy for visitors and clients, I would like to be able to send them a search URL with keywords in it and a password if necessary. When they click the URL, smugmug would display the photos (which can be from different galleries) in one "virtual gallery" and ask for the password if necessary.

I would like to be able to have "virtual categories" on the home page that are not hard categories but are really links to specific keyword combinations so I don't have to organize galleries into every last sub-classification. That way, if they don't have a URL they can go to my home page and click a "virtual gallery" name that brings up photos for that keyword combination. It would save novices from having to run a search themselves.

The reason I am more into metadata than hard categories is that I often want a photo to exist in more than one gallery. A photo can only exist in one category (unless you duplicate it), but a photo can easily exist under multiple keywords.

I sure hope my boring rant makes sense and somehow helps...

mercphoto · June 23, 2005

Winnjewett, there are ways around this problem. Some of them have support already built into Smugmug. Others would require some work by them. At least one of the ideas below I have proposed to them before.

Look at mercphoto.smugmug.com, then go under "Karts", and see that I have multiple events as well. Karts is the category. An event is the Sub-category. Then galleries are divided up usually by group or kart type, or possibly by day as well.

Is this ideal? Not quite. But its not quite the "This leaves me with no choice but to group all 400 riders into one huge list" that you make it out to be. You do have choices to make this easier. Its just not the choice you want it to be.

winnjewett wrote:

I would like to start by saying that I am a very satisfied smugmug customer. That said, there is one issue that I don't think that the powers-that-be are taking seriously.

To me, you don't sound "very" satisified at all. And I do believe they have taken the issue seriously. They have their reasons for not adding another layer of category and have stated those reasons often. The fact that their opinion does not mesh with your opinion does not mean they are taking the situation lightly.

Now, what do I want added to make life easier? It involves changes to searching:

1) Allow partial word searching. They recently brought this in with wildcard characters (for example, "k89*"). I do not know if "*89*" would also work or not, but I sure hope it does.

2) Allow a user to restrict searches to lower levels. They recently allowed a pro user to restrict searches to only his galleries (though I can't figure out how to do this yet), BUT what I want is the ability to restrict searches to either my entire collection, to a particular category, a particular sub-category, or a particular gallery.

If Smugmug can implement both the above, and I have good ideas on the user interface to make this easy on the user, then searching for photos becomes much simpler.

From an astethic viewpoint I agree with Smugmug: too many levels of categorization just adds to confusion.

Am I a very satisfied customer? Mostly so. My big gripe is searching (see above) and their lack of interest of selling digital downloads.

onethumb · June 23, 2005

rutt wrote:

The answer always seems to be that "not enough people ask for this given how hard it would be." It must be really really hard, because it seems that a lot of people have asked for it.

It's not really really hard, and I don't think that's been our response.

The real problem is that it's very confusing for our (and your!) customers. We already get complaints that our navigation is too difficult, that there are too many bread-crumb levels (home -> Cat -> SubCat -> Gallery is too many). People get lost with 3 levels. Adding another would make it dramatically harder. Making it n-deep would make it impossible.

Remember, the average computer user isn't like you and I. They don't understand what folders are and how they nest (which is why MS had to make 'My Documents' because people "lost" their work all the time). They don't visualize and understand tree structures.

If you want your customers to find and buy or view your photos, burying them many levels deep is the kiss of death. As our help section on the subject explains, we think we've found the perfect balance. But we're always open to doing something even better.

If we could come up with something both more flexible AND as easy/easier to use, we'd do it in a heartbeat. I've asked for help from dgrinners many times, and so far, everyone has come up empty.

Here's the Nth call for help.

Don

onethumb · June 23, 2005

mercphoto wrote:

1) Allow partial word searching. They recently brought this in with wildcard characters (for example, "k89*"). I do not know if "*89*" would also work or not, but I sure hope it does.

Sorry, it doesn't, and as far as I know, no search engines do (or, at least, not very fast). This is an incredibly difficult computer science problem. Wildcard searching is usually based on prefix-branching using a tree. So a search term uses the first letter to quickly narrow the search, then the second letter, and so on.

We're not planning on implementing this until someone far more brilliant than I dreams it up at Stanford's CS department or something.

mercphoto wrote:

2) Allow a user to restrict searches to lower levels. They recently allowed a pro user to restrict searches to only his galleries (though I can't figure out how to do this yet), BUT what I want is the ability to restrict searches to either my entire collection, to a particular category, a particular sub-category, or a particular gallery.

This is an interesting idea. I'll have to give it some thought, but it might be doable for images. First I've heard of it.

mercphoto wrote:

Am I a very satisfied customer? Mostly so. My big gripe is searching (see above) and their lack of interest of selling digital downloads.

This isn't very fair. We're very interested in selling digital downloads, as the numerous threads on the subject show. We've been busy, also as numerous threads have shown, but it doesn't have anything to do with a lack of interest.

Don

mercphoto · June 23, 2005

onethumb wrote:

Remember, the average computer user isn't like you and I.

Exactly.

If we could come up with something both more flexible AND as easy/easier to use, we'd do it in a heartbeat. I've asked for help from dgrinners many times, and so far, everyone has come up empty.

Here's the Nth call for help.

Don

Ok, here are the details on my searching idea. What I like to do is put a caption on each kart racing photo that has the kart number. I ususally do "k32" for kart 32, for example. The user can then search for k32 and get his photos. The problem is, he gets ALL the photos.

In other words, he just wants to search for photos from the last race, not from every race I photographed. He's already seen those. He might want to search only one particular gallery or one particular sub-category.

So, in addition to a search string, we could use a search scope. The possible values for scope are: Smugmug (i.e. the entire smugmug universe), User (i.e. all of Mercury Photography's images), Category, Sub-Category, and finally Gallery.

The default could happen one of two ways:

1) Default to the User
2) Or Default to where ever you happen to be now. If I am at the user's top page, default to User. If I am currently in a gallery, default to gallery. Etc.

Not sure how clear that was.

Another possibility to help searching is to change how search results are reported to the user. Show a listing of all galleries that search results were found in and let the user click to see "all photos that matched my search for the Group 2 gallery of the May 28 race of Kart racing".

Goto my page and search for "kart99". You get 75 hits in various places and its a bit clumsy to actually use the search results.

Lastly, back to organizing photos, if we could choose to have galleries displayed in the sub-category page without thumbnails, then if a sub-category had dozens of galleries in it, the overall page would be smaller to scroll through.

DavidTO · June 23, 2005

How about smart galleries? This would be a gallery that would have all instances of a keyword and would automatically update as you uploaded images. A la smart playlists, smart folders, etc.

mercphoto · June 23, 2005

onethumb wrote:

Sorry, it doesn't, and as far as I know, no search engines do (or, at least, not very fast). This is an incredibly difficult computer science problem. Wildcard searching is usually based on prefix-branching using a tree. So a search term uses the first letter to quickly narrow the search, then the second letter, and so on.

Makes perfect sense.

This is an interesting idea. I'll have to give it some thought, but it might be doable for images. First I've heard of it.

Coulda swore I've brought this idea up before, but I could be mistaken about that.

This isn't very fair. We're very interested in selling digital downloads, as the numerous threads on the subject show. We've been busy, also as numerous threads have shown, but it doesn't have anything to do with a lack of interest.

I stand corrected and offer apologies.

jfriend · June 23, 2005

I second the vote for virtual galleries

DavidTO wrote:

How about smart galleries? This would be a gallery that would have all instances of a keyword and would automatically update as you uploaded images. A la smart playlists, smart folders, etc.

This is something I'd really like. I have been doing a lot of "event" photography lately, often 600-1000 images per event (school talent shows, kid's sports, summer camps, etc...). When presenting this many images to hundreds of parents, how to organize them has been a real challenge. I find that I often want to offer several different views of the images. For example, for the talent show images, I want to offer a view by Act and Scene, but I also want to offer a view by person. That way, a viewer could either find all the images for a particular scene or they could find all the images that their son/daughter is in. I have the same issue for kid's sports photos and other kid's events I've been shooting. I want to present more than one view of the same set of images. When I use to use Photoshop Album on my own hard disk, I'd use queried views of tags and/or Photoshop Album's "collections" to create these views.

In Smugmug, I have to "hard code the organization" one particular way and the only way to offer any other way of viewing the images is to upload a duplicate set of images organized a different way. When you start having images with multiple people in them, this can get really time consuming and would obviously be really wasteful of storage.

I've been wondering if Smugmug could be the first to offer "logical views" of galleries based on IPTC tags. That way I could tag images with people's names, act/scene, etc... and then set up pre-canned "logical views" of these images that it would be really easy for a viewer to use. For example, in the talent show, my dream would be for me to upload all the images into one physical gallery, but have them tagged with act/scene, grade level and people in the shot. Then, the viewer would be offered pre-canned choices for viewing the photos organized by act/scene, grade level or person's name.

To be clear, I'm not asking for a search. Many of my viewers are not saavy enough to use a search effectively. When they select view by act/scene, they'd be presented with virtual-galleries for each act/scene that there was a tag for and they could choose the one they were interested in. When they select view by grade-level, they'd be presented with virtual-galleries for each grade level. Same for person's name.

Anyone else be interested in this type of functionality?

mercphoto · June 23, 2005

jfriend wrote:

Anyone else be interested in this type of functionality?

Now that's pretty cool.

colourbox · June 23, 2005

DavidTO wrote:

How about smart galleries? This would be a gallery that would have all instances of a keyword and would automatically update as you uploaded images. A la smart playlists, smart folders, etc.

Definitely, that's part of what I meant in my earlier post. Anything that uses the image metadata to organize itself, rather than us having to create all the structures. Trying out metadata-driven "Smart _____s" definitely gives you that "Wow, this is the way it should be!" feeling.

onethumb · June 23, 2005

DavidTO wrote:

How about smart galleries? This would be a gallery that would have all instances of a keyword and would automatically update as you uploaded images. A la smart playlists, smart folders, etc.

We already have this. It's the beauty of keywords. Just tag something and there's a "dynamic gallery" of everything with those tags.

For example, every time I post a photo from or about Hawaii, it automagically shows up here: Hawaii!

Don

onethumb · June 23, 2005

mercphoto wrote:

Exactly.

Ok, here are the details on my searching idea. What I like to do is put a caption on each kart racing photo that has the kart number. I ususally do "k32" for kart 32, for example. The user can then search for k32 and get his photos. The problem is, he gets ALL the photos.

In other words, he just wants to search for photos from the last race, not from every race I photographed. He's already seen those. He might want to search only one particular gallery or one particular sub-category.

So, in addition to a search string, we could use a search scope. The possible values for scope are: Smugmug (i.e. the entire smugmug universe), User (i.e. all of Mercury Photography's images), Category, Sub-Category, and finally Gallery.

The default could happen one of two ways:

1) Default to the User
2) Or Default to where ever you happen to be now. If I am at the user's top page, default to User. If I am currently in a gallery, default to gallery. Etc.

Not sure how clear that was.

Another possibility to help searching is to change how search results are reported to the user. Show a listing of all galleries that search results were found in and let the user click to see "all photos that matched my search for the Group 2 gallery of the May 28 race of Kart racing".

Goto my page and search for "kart99". You get 75 hits in various places and its a bit clumsy to actually use the search results.

Lastly, back to organizing photos, if we could choose to have galleries displayed in the sub-category page without thumbnails, then if a sub-category had dozens of galleries in it, the overall page would be smaller to scroll through.

I'm not entirely clear why you wouldn't use the keyword feature of smugmug to get exactly what you want?

For example, tag something as "kart99" and as "raceJun17". Then point them to the combined page of kart99-raceJun17.

Here's a keyword "gallery" that has all my photos tagged with "Hawaii" and "atvs": ATVing in Hawaii!

Keyword tag sorting is faster than searching, more static, and has an easier URL to pass along. I'm probably missing something, though... ?

Don

onethumb · June 23, 2005

jfriend wrote:

This is something I'd really like. I have been doing a lot of "event" photography lately, often 600-1000 images per event (school talent shows, kid's sports, summer camps, etc...). When presenting this many images to hundreds of parents, how to organize them has been a real challenge. I find that I often want to offer several different views of the images. For example, for the talent show images, I want to offer a view by Act and Scene, but I also want to offer a view by person. That way, a viewer could either find all the images for a particular scene or they could find all the images that their son/daughter is in. I have the same issue for kid's sports photos and other kid's events I've been shooting. I want to present more than one view of the same set of images. When I use to use Photoshop Album on my own hard disk, I'd use queried views of tags and/or Photoshop Album's "collections" to create these views.

In Smugmug, I have to "hard code the organization" one particular way and the only way to offer any other way of viewing the images is to upload a duplicate set of images organized a different way. When you start having images with multiple people in them, this can get really time consuming and would obviously be really wasteful of storage.

I've been wondering if Smugmug could be the first to offer "logical views" of galleries based on IPTC tags. That way I could tag images with people's names, act/scene, etc... and then set up pre-canned "logical views" of these images that it would be really easy for a viewer to use. For example, in the talent show, my dream would be for me to upload all the images into one physical gallery, but have them tagged with act/scene, grade level and people in the shot. Then, the viewer would be offered pre-canned choices for viewing the photos organized by act/scene, grade level or person's name.

To be clear, I'm not asking for a search. Many of my viewers are not saavy enough to use a search effectively. When they select view by act/scene, they'd be presented with virtual-galleries for each act/scene that there was a tag for and they could choose the one they were interested in. When they select view by grade-level, they'd be presented with virtual-galleries for each grade level. Same for person's name.

Anyone else be interested in this type of functionality?

Man, we must really suck.

I just posted about this, so I'm not going to rehash it, but I could swear we've had this for 6 months or so. Lots of people are using it for doing exactly what you're suggesting... ?

What can we do to improve it?

Don

mercphoto · June 23, 2005

onethumb wrote:

We already have this. It's the beauty of keywords. Just tag something and there's a "dynamic gallery" of everything with those tags.

For example, every time I post a photo from or about Hawaii, it automagically shows up here: Hawaii!

Good way to use keywords. Haven't thought of them that way before.

Ok, lets run with this. Lets say I do 12 kart club races per year, plus 4 regionals. That is 16 races. I already have all those images with keyword "Iron Rock Raceway", which honestly isn't doing me any good. Already over 3900 images on that keyword. So I'm not helping myself or my customers in this route. I'm not making good use of keywords.

Lets say I break it down to keywords such as "kart32", "kart8", etc. Then the user can get only his/her kart numbers. I could also use keywords for event name, and even for racing group name. But even that can get cumbersome. Kart 8 exists in the kid karts class, the juniors, and the senior shifters. Plus from this race, the prior race, the two before that, etc.

What is a good way to use existing tools, and to create as few new tools as possible, to help users find their photos? Is there a way to get an intersection of two keywords perhaps? "All images of kart8 from kidkarts from May28?

Yeah, I know... its getting complicated. I don't like that either.

mercphoto · June 23, 2005

onethumb wrote:

I'm not entirely clear why you wouldn't use the keyword feature of smugmug to get exactly what you want?

For example, tag something as "kart99" and as "raceJun17". Then point them to the combined page of kart99-raceJun17.

Here's a keyword "gallery" that has all my photos tagged with "Hawaii" and "atvs": ATVing in Hawaii!

Man, I didn't even know you could combine tagging in that fashion. I need to look into this. I think you are right... it will do what I want.

onethumb · June 23, 2005

mercphoto wrote:

Good way to use keywords. Haven't thought of them that way before.

Ok, lets run with this. Lets say I do 12 kart club races per year, plus 4 regionals. That is 16 races. I already have all those images with keyword "Iron Rock Raceway", which honestly isn't doing me any good. Already over 3900 images on that keyword. So I'm not helping myself or my customers in this route. I'm not making good use of keywords.

Lets say I break it down to keywords such as "kart32", "kart8", etc. Then the user can get only his/her kart numbers. I could also use keywords for event name, and even for racing group name. But even that can get cumbersome. Kart 8 exists in the kid karts class, the juniors, and the senior shifters. Plus from this race, the prior race, the two before that, etc.

What is a good way to use existing tools, and to create as few new tools as possible, to help users find their photos? Is there a way to get an intersection of two keywords perhaps? "All images of kart8 from kidkarts from May28?

Yeah, I know... its getting complicated. I don't like that either.

Yep, just add a hyphen between the keywords.

You can string an unlimited # of keywords together: kart8-kart32-kidkarts-kartrace27 would chain together "kart8" + "kart32" + "kidkarts" + "kartrace27" photos, so you really get to drill down fast.

There are then some pretty quick-click tools to rapidly drill up or down even more.

Don

onethumb · June 23, 2005

mercphoto wrote:

Coulda swore I've brought this idea up before, but I could be mistaken about that.

I'm notorious around the smugmug offices for saying "first I've heard about this" when, in reality, I've heard about it only once or twice, so it didn't "stick". The other team members gleefully pull out emails where they told me about it quite plainly...

So "first I've heard about it" may or may not mean "i've forgotten" in addition to the literal meaning.

Don

Andy · June 23, 2005

onethumb wrote:

We already have this. It's the beauty of keywords. Just tag something and there's a "dynamic gallery" of everything with those tags.

For example, every time I post a photo from or about Hawaii, it automagically shows up here: Hawaii!

Don

can we have a keyworded gallery for mrs. onethumb?

seriously don, cool pics in your hawaii gallery, and, the feature is awesome

mercphoto · June 23, 2005

Yes, proper use of keywords, and the combining of keywords into one search, will do what I need to do. I think I could even write up a small web page to explain to my riders how to find the images themselves.

I feel so dumb....

f

jfriend · June 23, 2005

Keywords a possibility - some questions...

onethumb wrote:

I'm not entirely clear why you wouldn't use the keyword feature of smugmug to get exactly what you want?

For example, tag something as "kart99" and as "raceJun17". Then point them to the combined page of kart99-raceJun17.

Here's a keyword "gallery" that has all my photos tagged with "Hawaii" and "atvs": ATVing in Hawaii!

Keyword tag sorting is faster than searching, more static, and has an easier URL to pass along. I'm probably missing something, though... ?

Don

Maybe keywords will do what I want. I'm not that saavy on how to best use them so let me ask some questions. They definitely sound interesting for my family photos, but I'm not sure they can do what I need for my event photography. Here are some questions:

1) Can keywords automatically come from metadata fields upon upload? For several reasons, I need to use PC-based tools for assigning them and have them stored in the image metadata (I use Adobe Bridge for assigning metadata and plan to use other PC-based tools that also use the metadata for managing the images locally).

2) Can keyword views be scoped to within a single gallery or category? In the talent show example or for any of my event photography, I don't want collisions with keywords from other events? The viewers are only trying to look at photos for that event and I don't want to have to make sure keywords are globally unique. For example, if Bob Smith is a child at our school, I should be able to tag photos with his name and not have them collide with other Bob Smith photos from Little League or a different Bob Smith in a different event.

3) Will keyword views work with password protected galleries? For parental concern reasons, I password protect almost every gallery that I post that has photos of kids (school events, sports teams, summer camps, etc...). This is another reason I need a solution that scopes to a particular gallery or category (since a set of galleries for an event will share a common password).

4) Can I easily present a UI for keywords that scope only to a set of password protected galleries? For example, could I have a Smugmug generated page that showed the different keyword viewing options for a particular event (by act/scene, by person, by grade level)?

--John

gooseattack · June 23, 2005

onethumb wrote:

Yep, just add a hyphen between the keywords.

You can string an unlimited # of keywords together: kart8-kart32-kidkarts-kartrace27 would chain together "kart8" + "kart32" + "kidkarts" + "kartrace27" photos, so you really get to drill down fast.

There are then some pretty quick-click tools to rapidly drill up or down even more.

Don

Maybe I'm just retarded or something <img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/headscratch.gif" border="0" alt="" > , but can someone please explain it again?

I usually do keywords by the bulk, and they looks something like this:

"Christmas" "Party" "Christmas Party" "2004" "Trail of Lights" "winter"

What you need to type out in this section to make it Related Keywords, Combined With, or Remove Keywords?

If you want to do related keywords do you do something like this? (entered word-for-word in the textbox):

"Christmas+Party+Lights+winter"

If you want to add combined with, do you enter something like this? (entered word-for-word in the keyword textbox)

"Christmas" + "2004" + "Trail of Lights"

Would this be correct?

Also, is there a limited list of keywords you can enter? I know in the Control Panel section -- there are 100 keywords listed, but I assume you can enter more than that.

One last thing (sorry for the hand-holding to walk me through this),
Is it possible to insert links on your homepage? -- links that will take you to the keyword galleries. I understand that you can insert links, but can you insert them in the "100 Keyword section" as a list? (for example, using <LI> , tables, or some kind of css box).

Thank a bunch

:
Lucy

onethumb · June 23, 2005

jfriend wrote:

1) Can keywords automatically come from metadata fields upon upload? For several reasons, I need to use PC-based tools for assigning them and have them stored in the image metadata (I use Adobe Bridge for assigning metadata and plan to use other PC-based tools that also use the metadata for managing the images locally).

Yes. We automatically look for keywords in the industry-standard IPTC Keywords field as well as trying to intelligently mine your filename you upload.

Some apps don't use IPTC, like ACDSee. I have no idea why they don't want to play nice with the rest of the world, but you'd better try your apps and see.

jfriend wrote:

2) Can keyword views be scoped to within a single gallery or category? In the talent show example or for any of my event photography, I don't want collisions with keywords from other events? The viewers are only trying to look at photos for that event and I don't want to have to make sure keywords are globally unique. For example, if Bob Smith is a child at our school, I should be able to tag photos with his name and not have them collide with other Bob Smith photos from Little League or a different Bob Smith in a different event.

Not automatically, no, but you can easily add a specific keyword that's unique to a given category, subcategory, or gallery and combine the two or more keywords to drill down.

jfriend wrote:

3) Will keyword views work with password protected galleries? For parental concern reasons, I password protect almost every gallery that I post that has photos of kids (school events, sports teams, summer camps, etc...). This is another reason I need a solution that scopes to a particular gallery or category (since a set of galleries for an event will share a common password).

Nope, I'm afraid our policy at smugmug is that if you want to password something, it's removed from all search, keywords, and various other indexes. We take privacy and security very seriously, and would hate for a lapse to damage someone's business or image.

jfriend wrote:

4) Can I easily present a UI for keywords that scope only to a set of password protected galleries? For example, could I have a Smugmug generated page that showed the different keyword viewing options for a particular event (by act/scene, by person, by grade level)?

Nope, but I'm not adverse to adding this kind of functionality. Did you have anything specific in mind for how this would work? Bear in mind, keeping it easy to use is more important to me than making it super powerful.

The other alternative is to add a page (either to smugmug using customization, or to your own external site) which links to specific keywords and/or keyword combinations.

Don

jfriend · June 23, 2005

What you can do to improve keywords

onethumb wrote:

Man, we must really suck.

I just posted about this, so I'm not going to rehash it, but I could swear we've had this for 6 months or so. Lots of people are using it for doing exactly what you're suggesting... ?

What can we do to improve it?

Don

Since you asked what you can do to improve it...

So, it dawned on me that maybe I just need to RTFM on keywords. So, I tried to find what you say about keywords on smugmug. This is all I can find at http://www.smugmug.com/help/keywords-tags. It answers a few of my questions, but doesn't even remotely describe either what you are doing with keywords or most of the questions I've asked or most of the other questions asked aobut them in this thread.

To be perfectly honest, I read nearly every post here and have, at one time or another, read most of your site's help pages. I thought keywords were for searching, for Google indexing and for the keyword list that you can put on your homepage (which seems pretty dorky to me for the keywords and number of keywords I've tried). I'm not interested in any of those.

So, to answer your question, if you have already written a lot more about keywords than the above page, then it needs to be easier to find and I need to read and understand it. If you haven't written more than that, they you need to overhaul that page and really illustrate the power of keywords with a whole bunch of real examples of what you can do with them and how you go about doing it.

And, from what I've read so far, it appears that keywords will not solve my event photography problem becaues they don't work on password protected galleries, they can't be scoped to a gallery / category and I don't understand how I could set up the appropriate UI for the keywords related to a particular event.

--John

onethumb · June 23, 2005

gooseattack wrote:

Maybe I'm just retarded or something <img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/headscratch.gif" border="0" alt="" > , but can someone please explain it again?

I usually do keywords by the bulk, and they looks something like this:

"Christmas" "Party" "Christmas Party" "2004" "Trail of Lights" "winter"

What you need to type out in this section to make it Related Keywords, Combined With, or Remove Keywords?

If you want to do related keywords do you do something like this? (entered word-for-word in the textbox):

"Christmas+Party+Lights+winter"

If you want to add combined with, do you enter something like this? (entered word-for-word in the keyword textbox)

"Christmas" + "2004" + "Trail of Lights"

Would this be correct?

Also, is there a limited list of keywords you can enter? I know in the Control Panel section -- there are 100 keywords listed, but I assume you can enter more than that.

One last thing (sorry for the hand-holding to walk me through this),
Is it possible to insert links on your homepage? -- links that will take you to the keyword galleries. I understand that you can insert links, but can you insert them in the "100 Keyword section" as a list? (for example, using <LI> , tables, or some kind of css box).

Thank a bunch :
Lucy

You enter keywords as follows:

Christmas "2004" "Trail of Lights"

That will tag a photo or photos with all three of those keywords. It uses a space as as the delimiter. Note that for numbers, a few stop words, and phrases with spaces, you need to wrap quotes around them. For single words, like Christmas, you don't.

Then, to see a 'gallery' with all your Christmas photos for 2004, your URL would look like:

http://yourname.smugmug.com/keyword/Christmas-2004

That's all there is to it!

There's more help in our help section on keywords of course.

I'll add clarifying how keyword combinations work to our TODO list, clearly we're not doing a good job at describing them.

Don

jfriend · June 23, 2005

I'll post some ideas on this in a little while

onethumb wrote:

Nope, but I'm not adverse to adding this kind of functionality. Did you have anything specific in mind for how this would work? Bear in mind, keeping it easy to use is more important to me than making it super powerful.

I do have some ideas for an easy way that this could work simply and powerfully. I'll put some thought into it and post in a little while when I get some time to write it down in a sensible way.

--John

DavidTO · June 23, 2005

onethumb wrote:

We already have this. It's the beauty of keywords. Just tag something and there's a "dynamic gallery" of everything with those tags.

For example, every time I post a photo from or about Hawaii, it automagically shows up here: Hawaii!

Don

Dang it. Another feature I can't use because I want to keep the pictures of my kids private.

Mike Lane · June 23, 2005

Geeze Onethumb, that keyword stuff is pretty cool, I'm not sure why you guys don't advertise that capability more. It is very much like del.icio.us isn't it?

I suppose I could even write a script that sent people to http://www.mikelanephotography.com/keyword/

Now if I only knew how to write scripts!

A note of dissatisfaction

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