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Removal of the 'Thumbs-Up/Down' feature
SeattleVet
Registered Users Posts: 5 Beginner grinner
This was one of the things that made SmugMug so useful for me, and without it I must seriously consider leaving (after many years) and finding another photo hosting service. Taking away this feature has severely restricted the usefulness of SmugMug for us.
I am the head photographer for the Pacific Northwest Region for a large national organization with 34 different regions. Each region selects one image in each of the 18 categories from the previous year, to be forwarded for national selection at a meeting this fall for an annual award in each of the categories.
I just spent 17 hours or so arranging 18 galleries with all of this region's images from 2013, and found that the 'Like' feature is no longer usable. In previous years I was able to have our local regional group of 45 or so people go in to a password-restricted set of galleries, and by using the Thumbs-up and Thumbs-down help to pre-select images for nomination and voting for our region's selections. Without this winnowing we must go through up to 100 images in each of the 18 categories, which takes a HUGE amount of time during our annual business meeting next month. By doing the online pre-selection we could narrow the categories down to the top 5 to 7 images in each section, and be able to go through the annual awards selection at our annual business meeting in a short time. This year I will have to have the people send me an email with their selections after viewing the galleries, then narrow the categories manually.
Removing the rating feature is making this preselection and winnowing process almost as bad as it had been in the past, when we had to manually move slides among the trays to make our way through the selection process.
These images are not in any publicly-accessible gallery, and we have made excellent use of this feature for the past few years.
SmugMug has taken a feature that was almost perfectly suited and implemented for our use and made it completely unusable. When I announced the 'new' procedure this afternoon at our monthly meeting everyone hated having to go back to what we thought we had avoided by going to a fully digital, online process. It creates a lot of extra work for all those involved in the pre-selection process, and also for me as I now have to wade through a big batch of emails rather than just seeing what the 5 to 7 most-liked images were by checking the gallery stats.
We are now actively searching for a service that has similar functionality, as the removal of the feature has made SmugMug mostly unusable for what we had been doing the the past several years.
I am the head photographer for the Pacific Northwest Region for a large national organization with 34 different regions. Each region selects one image in each of the 18 categories from the previous year, to be forwarded for national selection at a meeting this fall for an annual award in each of the categories.
I just spent 17 hours or so arranging 18 galleries with all of this region's images from 2013, and found that the 'Like' feature is no longer usable. In previous years I was able to have our local regional group of 45 or so people go in to a password-restricted set of galleries, and by using the Thumbs-up and Thumbs-down help to pre-select images for nomination and voting for our region's selections. Without this winnowing we must go through up to 100 images in each of the 18 categories, which takes a HUGE amount of time during our annual business meeting next month. By doing the online pre-selection we could narrow the categories down to the top 5 to 7 images in each section, and be able to go through the annual awards selection at our annual business meeting in a short time. This year I will have to have the people send me an email with their selections after viewing the galleries, then narrow the categories manually.
Removing the rating feature is making this preselection and winnowing process almost as bad as it had been in the past, when we had to manually move slides among the trays to make our way through the selection process.
These images are not in any publicly-accessible gallery, and we have made excellent use of this feature for the past few years.
SmugMug has taken a feature that was almost perfectly suited and implemented for our use and made it completely unusable. When I announced the 'new' procedure this afternoon at our monthly meeting everyone hated having to go back to what we thought we had avoided by going to a fully digital, online process. It creates a lot of extra work for all those involved in the pre-selection process, and also for me as I now have to wade through a big batch of emails rather than just seeing what the 5 to 7 most-liked images were by checking the gallery stats.
We are now actively searching for a service that has similar functionality, as the removal of the feature has made SmugMug mostly unusable for what we had been doing the the past several years.
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Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!
I still have a Legacy SmugMug site and testing the thumbs up / down feature on a password protected and unlisted gallery, while the thumbs do show, clicking on the thumbs up doesn't seem to have any effect on the popular photos on the account. I also waited give indexing some time to no avail, even for me as the logged in account owner.
Apart from the favorite feature from the Business account level, you could only consider the comment feature. As the logged in account owner, you would be able to review the comments within the last 24 hours or all comments on your site via the account settings > stats > comments > manage screen. For more details on comments, you can take a look here.
SmugMug Support Hero
Yup, just ask that "large national organization with 34 different regions" to quit blocking facebook on their computers so that the "local regional group of 45 or so people" can each sign up for facebook accounts so they can leave comments on his site.
Dave
Until I switched to the 'new' SmugMug I was able to get a set of stats from the images in each gallery, and I could quickly and easily see a relative ranking within the gallery based on the Thumbs Up/Down clicks. That was how we were able to narrow down a 90+ image gallery to a 5-image selection for the past couple of years - by using the 'Like' counts to narrow down the potential pool of images to be viewed and voted on at the business meeting.
Regardless of whether it was the way that Photorank was 'supposed' to work, it did work that way and it did provide us with the functionality that we needed, used, and have now had removed.
Neither of the solutions presented (pay for a business account or use the comments feature) is feasible in our situation. For this year's selections we'll have to use the 'select a few images to vote on and email the names to me' method; by this time next year we will probably wind up having these hosted on another service that does provide the functionality that we used to have here at SmugMug.
Here's a help page about them.
I believe that feature requires a Business account.
http://www.smugmug.com/features
In all my years of using Legacy SmugMug, I've never encountered this feature you speak of. Can you provide me details on how / where I can access that so I can take a look at it on my Legacy account? What steps do I have to take?
SmugMug Support Hero
I know, I know, smug has said that some people received objectionable comments. That's what comment moderation is for - so they can be deleted and not shown.
Bring back anonymous commenting!
I know that in the past when someone had thumbed up photos in a recently published gallery that I could see those photos on the /popular page. It's harder to see that now but I suspect it is because of the number of photos seen on that page and because there is no way to see /popular by gallery.
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
SmugMug Support Hero
recommend not use FB log in at any site but theirs.
My Website index | My Blog
Still, if comments were allowed with no login to a foreign site (or to smug) that would solve his problem.
And given that his viewers are essentially logged on to a password-protected gallery the current smugmug position on comments is unacceptable - why on earth should the viewers need to log in twice?
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
When the image was open in the gallery, the user could hover over it and get the floating pane with the Thumbs-Up. When I would go in later, I believe that there was a section somewhere in the gallery's statistics page that gave the counts. It was while looking for this stats section this time that I discovered that it was no longer available anywhere.
Sorry if I'm being a little vague; it was something that got used once a year for a specific purpose.
"Chance favors the prepared mind." ~ Ansel Adams
"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." ~ Terry Pratchett
Unfortunately that has never existed on smugmug. It's been a requested feature since I joined in 2006. The only way to use thumbs up ratings was using the /popular gallery. It doesn't keep any stats, but generally gives you an idea of what images have been rated.
I'm still using legacy, but doesn't new smug still have thumbs up? They removed the thumbs down button to avoid abuse, and they changed the algorithm that drives popularity. But you may still be able to use smugmug likes and a smart gallery that pulls in popular photos from the galleries of your choice.
Dave
For the past 2 years I was definitely able to see the 'Thumbs-up' counts for all of the images within a specific gallery. I seem to recall that it was buried somewhere in the gallery statistics pages, but it definitely was there. I *know* it was there, as it was what I used to narrow down a few of the larger galleries into a manageable number of images to go through the final selection process. That's why I was so surprised that this feature had been removed (whether or not it was actually supposed to be a 'feature').
The new Smug still has 'Thumbs-up', but it does no good in this situation as it isn't gallery-specific. It will give me an overall view of the 'most popular' images for the entire site, but that includes all of the images in all of the galleries, including the ones that were the most-viewed, and not necessarily voted on.
Too late to do anything for this year; I have to get the galleries narrowed down in the next week or two, and an email has gone out with the instructions on selection/noting/emailing back to me.
There really should be an easy way to do this again!
Support Hero