any way to generate a random photo from a gallery?

denisegoldbergdenisegoldberg Administrators Posts: 14,220 moderator
edited January 3, 2017 in SmugMug Support

It was (is) possible to generate a random photo from a gallery in both legacy and new smug using a URL like this:
http://www.denisegoldberg.com/photos/random.mg?AlbumID=54260778&AlbumKey=fLcR9X&Size=250x250

The URL pasted above generates a random image from the gallery http://www.denisegoldberg.com/Fragments/Top-photos-2015/. I use the random image in the sidebar of my blog and I was hoping to change it to point to my new top photos gallery for 2016.

This still works today if you know both the AlbumID and AlbumKey. Unfortunately I can no longer find these elements for a gallery. Do they still exist? If so, can you tell me where to find them?

Is there another method to generate a random image from a gallery?

Comments

  • AllenAllen Registered Users Posts: 10,008 Major grins
    edited January 3, 2017

    Go into the gallery page source and search for "rss". On that line will be the album ID and Key. Example:
    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Allen Smith &gt; 2016-01-29 Riverlands Migratory Bird Sanctuary Gallery RSS Feed" href="/hack/feed.mg?Type=**gallery&Data=54949987_fmJjxQ**&format=rss200">

    I use this on many galleries to generate a map like on this page.
    http://www.photosbyat.com/Birds/2016-Birding/Birding-2016-January/2016-01-29-RMBS-Rock-Wren
    Click "Click to See Map" button.
    Map that's generated using the album ID and Key.
    http://maps.smugmug.com/?feedType=geoAlbum&Data=54949987_fmJjxQ

    From your gallery source. 54260778_fLcR9X
    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Denise Goldberg &gt; top photos :: 2015 Gallery RSS Feed" href="/hack/feed.mg?Type=gallery&Data=54260778_fLcR9X&format=rss200"

    Al - Just a volunteer here having fun
    My Website index | My Blog
  • denisegoldbergdenisegoldberg Administrators Posts: 14,220 moderator

    @Allen said:
    Go into the gallery page source and search for "rss". On that line will be the album ID and Key. Example:
    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Allen Smith &gt; 2016-01-29 Riverlands Migratory Bird Sanctuary Gallery RSS Feed" href="/hack/feed.mg?Type=**gallery&Data=54949987_fmJjxQ**&format=rss200">

    Thanks Allen! I was hoping there was still a way to get the id & key - that did the trick.

  • leftquarkleftquark Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 3,784 Many Grins

    Most of those old tools are in the process of getting retired. I'll double check on what we want to do with the random photo generator. My vote would be for keeping it, since there's a large # of votes for anything random photo related, and to just update it to only require AlbumKey.

    You can still get AlbumID from the "Replace" tool, for now.

    dGrin Afficionado
    Former SmugMug Product Team
    aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
    Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
    My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
  • denisegoldbergdenisegoldberg Administrators Posts: 14,220 moderator

    @leftquark said:
    Most of those old tools are in the process of getting retired. I'll double check on what we want to do with the random photo generator. My vote would be for keeping it, since there's a large # of votes for anything random photo related, and to just update it to only require AlbumKey.

    You can still get AlbumID from the "Replace" tool, for now.

    Ah, I forgot about the replace tool! Thanks for the reminder.

    I definitely vote for keeping the random photo generator in some form. Sometimes I want to show a teaser photo from a gallery, and I prefer a single photo rather than using a slideshow.

  • AllenAllen Registered Users Posts: 10,008 Major grins

    @leftquark said:
    Most of those old tools are in the process of getting retired. I'll double check on what we want to do with the random photo generator. My vote would be for keeping it, since there's a large # of votes for anything random photo related, and to just update it to only require AlbumKey.

    You can still get AlbumID from the "Replace" tool, for now.

    You state that most of the old tools are being retired, does that include the map? I use 100's
    of these going back many years and it works perfectly. It does not interfere with the gallery photos.

    The only "new map" widget has to be added one at a time to each gallery which means all these
    galleries have to be made. "Just This Gallery". Then the problem is where do you put it on
    the gallery? At the top? Not a good idea having to scroll below it to find photos. Below the
    photos? Imagine scrolling down miles below college photos to find it.

    This "old" map tool now works great so why destroy the use of it? It make absolute no sense to me.

    BTW, no one at Smug will listen about the fact that there is no way to even know if any photo in a gallery has
    GEO info. You now have to go through every single photo to find one. Visitors have no clue to pop up the info box.
    And then you changed the map to only show the single photo. Use to be able to see all GEO tagged photos in the
    gallery in that one photo info/map. So it's now back to looking at every single photo for GEO info.

    Al - Just a volunteer here having fun
    My Website index | My Blog
  • leftquarkleftquark Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 3,784 Many Grins
    edited January 4, 2017

    @Allen said:
    You state that most of the old tools are being retired, does that include the map? I use 100's
    of these going back many years and it works perfectly. It does not interfere with the gallery photos.
    This "old" map tool now works great so why destroy the use of it? It make absolute no sense to me.

    Refresh my memory on what the "old map" tool is?
    [Update:] I believe you're talking about the maps.smugmug.com links you include on all of your galleries? Based on the usage data this would be a good candidate for retirement, though we'll dig more into the data before making any decisions

    @Allen said:
    BTW, no one at Smug will listen about the fact that there is no way to even know if any photo in a gallery has
    GEO info. You now have to go through every single photo to find one. Visitors have no clue to pop up the info box.
    And then you changed the map to only show the single photo. Use to be able to see all GEO tagged photos in the
    gallery in that one photo info/map. So it's now back to looking at every single photo for GEO info.

    We listen every time - that's why I have a team of amazing Product Managers and Support Heroes. Just because we don't agree doesn't mean we aren't listening! We always value your feedback!
    When you're viewing a single photo's INFO, we're only going to show you that single photo on a map, not the entire gallery of photos (it's called "Photo Info" not "Gallery Info"). We'll continue to stick with only showing the location of the single photo. If you'd like to show a map with all of the photos in a gallery, you can use the Map Content Block. There's definitely plenty of room to improve the Map Content Block, as you point out, but that's the tool for displaying an entire galleries' worth of photos on a map.

    dGrin Afficionado
    Former SmugMug Product Team
    aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
    Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
    My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
  • pilotdavepilotdave Registered Users Posts: 785 Major grins

    I think his point about showing multiple photos is that old smug had the "map this" button that applied to the whole gallery. A map content block could replace that, but there's no way to make a link to a map on a separate page or a map that pops up over the gallery. There's just no good way to incorporate a map content block into a gallery.

    I don't think it's possible to add a generic map in all galleries that shows the photos from that gallery. You'd need to make every gallery custom which makes it really hard to deal with future customizations. And for many of us, most galleries won't need a map so we wouldn't want blank maps all over our sites.

    A button that brings up a map of all geotagged photos in a gallery would be a huge improvement. Not sure why it was ever removed.

    Dave

  • AllenAllen Registered Users Posts: 10,008 Major grins

    I been playing with a test gallery combing two galleries together. In the past the limit for the map
    was 200 photos. That is why I had two galleries, A-G and H-Z, so all the photos would appear on
    a map. I've now found adding the ImageCount to the end expands that.
    http://maps.smugmug.com/?feedType=geoAlbum&Data=22109045_dCqvms&ImageCount=1000
    One of current split galleries. See map buttons.
    http://www.photosbyat.com/Birds/Missouri-Bird-Photos-A-G

    BTW, the one problem I've always had is when using HTML in captions it adds extra line breaks to caption on the map.

    Al - Just a volunteer here having fun
    My Website index | My Blog
  • leftquarkleftquark Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 3,784 Many Grins
    edited January 11, 2017

    @Allen: I just wanted to give you a heads up that we've dug further into the usage of https://maps.smugmug.com and we've decided to add it to the list of items to retire. We won't retire it immediately but we wanted to give you a few weeks to make any adjustments to your site before it disappears. Please let me know if there's anything we can do, if you need help adapting your site to this decision. In the future I'd love to do a better job with displaying an entire gallery worth of photos on the maps but for most people, the Maps Content Block has done the trick (I realize it doesn't solve your use-case but we had to make the hard decision to retire it based on nearly non-existent usage of the feature).

    dGrin Afficionado
    Former SmugMug Product Team
    aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
    Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
    My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
  • AllenAllen Registered Users Posts: 10,008 Major grins

    This map worked on old Smug and continues to work on New Smug with no problems. Why in
    the world would you disable it? That makes absolute no sense at all. You have nothing to do as
    long as it continues to work. So how many hours and $$ are you spending to disable this?

    It would take me months just to find where they exist, let alone all the many hours of work removing
    them. That's assuming that I had the time which I don't.

    I hope you all realize how crappy your map widget is now. Adding to every gallery would really slow the
    page loading down plus I doubt anyone would ever find it after scrolling down miles on college gallery.
    There really is no where to put it in a gallery.

    Al - Just a volunteer here having fun
    My Website index | My Blog
  • AllenAllen Registered Users Posts: 10,008 Major grins
    edited January 11, 2017

    @leftquark said:
    ... (I realize it doesn't solve your use-case but we had to make the hard decision to retire it based on nearly non-existent usage of the feature).

    The ONLY "non-existent usage" reason is you do not cover it anywhere. If people knew what it was I think you'd get plenty of usage. After all,
    you have no decent map app. and this would be a huge improvement.

    Al - Just a volunteer here having fun
    My Website index | My Blog
  • leftquarkleftquark Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 3,784 Many Grins

    @Allen said:
    This map worked on old Smug and continues to work on New Smug with no problems. Why in the world would you disable it? That makes absolute no sense at all. You have nothing to do as long as it continues to work. So how many hours and $$ are you spending to disable this?

    Amongst many other reasons, supporting features that are no longer used, carries some amount of cost and retiring those features removes that. Maintaining a healthy SmugMug so that it can survive another 14 ... 24 ... 48+ years means that sometimes we have to prune features that are no longer used, as we continue to move SmugMug forward.

    @Allen said:

    @leftquark said:
    ... (I realize it doesn't solve your use-case but we had to make the hard decision to retire it based on nearly non-existent usage of the feature).

    The ONLY "non-existent usage" reason is you do not cover it anywhere. If people knew what it was I think you'd get plenty of usage. After all, you have no decent map app. and this would be a huge improvement.

    In this instance we looked at how visitors viewed the maps and found that, for those of you still referencing them (like yourself), your visitors were not viewing the maps. The "Map This" button on Old SmugMug had low usage, and we've received no feedback from customers who had previously used Legacy SmugMug that it was a feature they wanted back. It's always hard to make a decision when we have an extremely passionate customer using a feature but we have to be responsible and keep SmugMug alive by focusing our attention on features that the majority of our customers will use.

    The Maps Content Block works very well, and for the most part, does exactly what you're asking for: it displays multiple sets of photos on one map. A number of our customers use it successfully and love to include it on their pages. It's not going to solve your use case, but it's a stretch to say that there's no decent maps tool.

    dGrin Afficionado
    Former SmugMug Product Team
    aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
    Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
    My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
  • AllenAllen Registered Users Posts: 10,008 Major grins

    There is no text for each photo thumb as they pop up. Suggestion, add the photo Title or first line
    of caption to the popup thumb. Need to be able to zoom in/out on a spot with mouse wheel. Clicking +/-
    is old school. With each zoom you have to drag to recenter map on the spot which is very cumbersome.

    This widget needs a popup/overlay application. There's no where to put a map on a gallery other
    then below the gallery photos. It's not an option for collage galleries as you'd have to scroll very
    far to see it. Then there's the problem I can imagine that no one would even know it's down there.

    I repeat, this map has NEVER been publicized/promoted that it could be manually generated this way.
    There was some discussion in this forum but that's a very small percentage of users. The old Smug
    had a "map button", it was automatically there and how it worked was publicized. I see a
    lot in the forums of no happyness about losing that button ever since new Smug was created. And
    Smug has done nothing to come up with a realistic solution.

    Al - Just a volunteer here having fun
    My Website index | My Blog
  • AllenAllen Registered Users Posts: 10,008 Major grins
    edited January 17, 2017

    I'm trying to work with the new map widget. I've added the map widget to a page and call it up from a gallery.
    In each of the galleries with photo GEO info I use a "map button" to call up a page. There is no where on a gallery page that a map widget would go that would be visible to visitors.
    So far I've added 84 pages with a map widget with many many more to go.

    Before I get too far and you/Smug does something that would negate what I'm doing, here is an example of what I've come up with.
    Click map button.
    http://www.photosbyat.com/Birds/2017-Birding/Birding-2017-January/2017-01-01-Kirksville-Area

    Please let me know if you have any comments or suggestion.
    Thanks

    By far the most needed is text on each map thumb. The photo title, or if blank, the caption would do.
    Example of old map page. Notice the text on each thumb, the full photo caption. Plus the nice index in right column.
    Click map button.
    http://www.photosbyat.com/Birds/2010-Birding/Birding-2010-January/2010-01-31-Road-to-Aransas-NWR/
    Map page from above.
    http://maps.smugmug.com/?feedType=geoAlbum&Data=11107743_CCPrsj

    Al - Just a volunteer here having fun
    My Website index | My Blog
  • leftquarkleftquark Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 3,784 Many Grins

    Lookin' good. I'll take the map content block feature request back to the team. I don't see you doing anything that would be risky there!

    dGrin Afficionado
    Former SmugMug Product Team
    aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
    Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
    My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
  • AllenAllen Registered Users Posts: 10,008 Major grins
    edited January 17, 2017

    @leftquark said:
    Lookin' good. I'll take the map content block feature request back to the team. I don't see you doing anything that would be risky there!

    Thanks.

    BTW, it would be a HUGE improvement if the mouse wheel would zoom the view.
    I do like the numbers on map instead of the icons.

    Al - Just a volunteer here having fun
    My Website index | My Blog
  • pilotdavepilotdave Registered Users Posts: 785 Major grins

    Allen, I don't know if it would work for you, but have you considered a single map instead of a separate map for each gallery? While at times I'd like to map out a single gallery, your method wouldn't even come close to being worth the effort to me. Instead, I created a single map page. To me it's a lot more interesting than a single-gallery map because there's a lot more to see. It WAS easy to maintain until recently because it was set up to include all geotagged photos using a smart gallery. I recently changed to using a gallery of collected photos so I can more easily pick and choose what photos show up, avoiding the 1000 photo limit.

    Smugmug has a couple bugs to fix related to geography smart rules to do it the easy way (including all geotagged photos). But to me, a single map is the only way to go until smugmug comes up with an automated way to do what you're doing. And your visitors might enjoy being able to scroll around and see all your locations, not just one at a time.

    Dave

  • AllenAllen Registered Users Posts: 10,008 Major grins
    edited January 18, 2017

    I use that on my yearly pages for every gallery of the year, thank goodness "current location" flows down.
    Scroll to the bottom to see map.
    http://www.photosbyat.com/Birds/2010-Birding

    The only problem is the page is very slowly loading.

    I'm using the site like a journal documenting my trips. Some very bad photos with a few good one mixed in. The map is defining where a particular gallery location was especially when something rare or interesting is there.

    Al - Just a volunteer here having fun
    My Website index | My Blog
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