Maps!

shogun · August 17, 2005

The new maps feature is great! However there are a couple of extra features that would be nice to go with it:

#1 The ability to set a default 'home' location so I dont have to scroll all the way from somewhere in California to find the locations I usually am.

#2 The ability to easily set the same location for all images in a gallery.

shogun · August 17, 2005

shogun wrote:

The new maps feature is great! However there are a couple of extra features that would be nice to go with it:

#1 The ability to set a default 'home' location so I dont have to scroll all the way from somewhere in California to find the locations I usually am.

#2 The ability to easily set the same location for all images in a gallery.

Ok now that i've played with it a little more it seems #2 might not really be neccesary but #1 would definantly be very helpful...

Andy · August 17, 2005

shogun wrote:

Ok now that i've played with it a little more it seems #2 might not really be neccesary but #1 would definantly be very helpful...

thanks for your feedback, shogun

pumpkin · August 17, 2005

andy wrote:

thanks for your feedback, shogun

how about being able to input the direction we were facing too? :P that way someone could really copy our photos

dem · August 18, 2005

shogun wrote:

The new maps feature is great!

It sure is. Thanks, guys.

shogun · August 18, 2005

Another quick issue, why is it that from http://maps.smugmug.com/ any search you do will return the same 150 results based around San Francisco?

Baldy · August 19, 2005

As you've probably noticed, maps.smugmug.com is a little bit slow. They are fairly large images and we have to wait for Google's servers. So we're showing the latest 150 uploaded so it doesn't get intolerable wrt speed.

We've received about 2,000 geomapped photos now and apparently the last bunch have all been from the San Francisco Bay Area.

xian · August 19, 2005

A couple more suggestions
I like the map feature, but living in a part of the world that is not covered very well, it would be even nicer if

1) As stated before, a home location for user or gallery is certainly my number one missing feature.
2) It would be nice to use longitute/latitude to jump in the map. Then use clicking to the exact location. Sometimes one knows a position in the neighborhood, but not the exact one. (Address cannot be used for the place I live in).
3) If a certain "scale" is not available, automatically show one that is available. Now one has to move the scale slider manually.
4) When a visitor clicks the 'map this' button, she gets a list of all pictures, but have to navigate again to find the "original" picture. This is rather annoying, especially since the order in the map screen is not the same as in the gallery.

But overall maps is a very good 1.0 !

Maki · August 25, 2005

Baldy wrote:

As you've probably noticed, maps.smugmug.com is a little bit slow. They are fairly large images and we have to wait for Google's servers. So we're showing the latest 150 uploaded so it doesn't get intolerable wrt speed.

We've received about 2,000 geomapped photos now and apparently the last bunch have all been from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Cool.. It was driving me up the wall to see inconsistancies of what pictures were mapped! Is there any way of posting some text on the maps indicating the current limitation so that the viewers would know what's going on?

limbik · August 26, 2005

I added geography info to a photo as a test, and made sure it was enabled in the gallery, but when I browse the gallery there is no geography info.

Also, searching by address rarely finds anything. But other than that, the maps are great, a bit slow at the moment, but great.

dem · August 26, 2005

limbik wrote:

I added geography info to a photo as a test, and made sure it was enabled in the gallery, but when I browse the gallery there is no geography info.

It won't show if the gallery is private.

More specifically, it appears that it won't show if you add the information while the gallery is private, even if you subsequently make the gallery public. You need to re-add the geography data (at least to one photo; I've only been tagging one photo per gallery with geo data). A minor inconvenience.

Richard · August 26, 2005

dem wrote:

It won't show if the gallery is private.

More specifically, it appears that it won't show if you add the information while the gallery is private, even if you subsequently make the gallery public. You need to re-add the geography data (at least to one photo; I've only been tagging one photo per gallery with geo data). A minor inconvenience.

Are you sure of that? I was trying it out for the first time yesterday and didn't know about the private gallery gotcha till I searched the support forum. I could be wrong, but I think I entered the data when the gallery was private and it still worked when I switched it to public.

scratch

dem · August 26, 2005

rsinmadrid wrote:

Are you sure of that? I was trying it out for the first time yesterday and didn't know about the private gallery gotcha till I searched the support forum. I could be wrong, but I think I entered the data when the gallery was private and it still worked when I switched it to public. scratch

I'm sure I saw the behavior I described, but perhaps if I'd waited longer after making the gallery public I wouldn't have needed to re-add the data.

limbik · August 26, 2005

It has been public the whole time.

Richard · August 26, 2005

limbik wrote:

It has been public the whole time.

Maybe all the photos in a gallery need the geo-info for the feature to kick in?

limbik · August 26, 2005

rsinmadrid wrote:

Maybe all the photos in a gallery need the geo-info for the feature to kick in?

This is really a stumper... There is only one photo in this gallery, and it has the geo info.

DoctorIt · August 26, 2005

shogun wrote:

Ok now that i've played with it a little more it seems #2 might not really be neccesary but #1 would definantly be very helpful...

Another vote for having a home location. I've been slowly adding geo info to my best travel photos, and its a real PITA to start from San Fran everytime... well, except for that one travel photo I had in CA

Also, whats up with Google having such poor worldwide support? I don't even mean for satellite, I mean for regular old maps. It doesn't even show cities like Frankfurt and Innsbruck in Germany! Not very world considerate of us, eh?

Richard · August 26, 2005

DoctorIt wrote:

Also, whats up with Google having such poor worldwide support? I don't even mean for satellite, I mean for regular old maps. It doesn't even show cities like Frankfurt and Innsbruck in Germany! Not very world considerate of us, eh?

Amen! Curiously, they have pretty good resolution satellite photos of Madrid but no map of Spain at all.

I guess when you release a new product every week, you have to cut some corners.

Matthew Saville · August 26, 2005

limbik wrote:

This is really a stumper... There is only one photo in this gallery, and it has the geo info.

Yes, the gallery must be public and if you mapped it while it was private, you must delete the coordinates, click update, and then go back in and re-enter them. The same applies to if you had "google earth" disabled in the gallery customization, you can't map a pic with it off and then turn it on... But it seems that this isn't your problem? Have you tried going to "map this!" from your main page? That seems to work the best for me...

And YES PLEASE, I don't need to see smugmug HQ every time I go to map a photo. Can we at least zoom out to the whole US? That would be awesome... And I know that the zoom is "averaged" for when people click "map this!" from our sites, but I have a lot of photos that fall outside this average, it seems. It'd be great to be able to force the tool to take people to a map that shows ALL my photos...

Thanks, and WOW this is a mind-bogglingly cool tool!

-Matt-

DoctorIt · August 29, 2005

rsinmadrid wrote:

I guess when you release a new product every week, you have to cut some corners.

Let's hope they come back to make a few upgrades at some point.

Andy · August 29, 2005

Matthew Saville wrote:

And YES PLEASE, I don't need to see smugmug HQ every time I go to map a photo. Can we at least zoom out to the whole US? That would be awesome... And I know that the zoom is "averaged" for when people click "map this!" from our sites, but I have a lot of photos that fall outside this average, it seems. It'd be great to be able to force the tool to take people to a map that shows ALL my photos...

Thanks, and WOW this is a mind-bogglingly cool tool!

-Matt-

matthew, please put this in the feature requests thread, and also email to help@smugmug.com with the subject: feature request/change

Maps!

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