Keyword gallery limit changed?

pilotdavepilotdave Registered Users Posts: 785 Major grins

I see a keyword gallery can only display 1000 photos. Am I wrong that it used to be limited to 5000? When did that change?

We have unlimited storage... 1000 photos doesn't get some of us very far. I have keyword (and smart) galleries that only go as far back as last year because of the 1000 photo limit. This creates a pretty big limitation in allowing guests to find photos.

Dave

Comments

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

    The # was changed for performance reasons but this obviously isn’t thrilling so I’m working with the team to understand more and revisit the change. Stay tuned

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

    The majority of keyword galleries don't reach 1,000 photos and we were seeing some performance issues trying to let it populate up to 5,000 images. It's not in our nature to make decisions based on things being hard -- we have a great team that can and enjoys tackling hard problems. Slow performance for the majority of users was the primary motivation for the change since it's not a thrilling experience to have those keyword galleries load slowly. We're looking at what we can do to improve the performance and then increase the limit.

    I'm curious to know more about how you use the keyword galleries, especially as they grow to thousands of photos.

    For example, if any of my visitors land on a keyword gallery, I don't expect them to browse through 1,000+ photos to find one they want. Most likely they stop browsing if they even get to a couple hundred. If they're looking for a specific photo, I'd imagine they'd use search or try to browse gallery structure. But the one thing I've learned about photographers is that there are so many different workflows and usecases and what works for me, might not for someone else. What doesn't work for me, might be amazing for someone else. So I'm happy to hear about how you want to use this so we can create a thrilling experience.

    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: 10,007 Major grins

    I have, I think, only one public KW over 1000 and I split it into four keywords to stay under limit.
    warblers_2007_down, warblers_2008_09, warblers_2010_11, warblers_2012_up
    I have probably 80,000 birds photos and I try to tag every one with the bird name.

    I have some private family photos over 1000, my wife for one so I'll never see all her photos. I also created
    a smart gallery for everyone so I can control how it looks like all other galleries but still has the 1000 limit.

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

    @Allen said:
    I have, I think, only one public KW over 1000 and I split it into four keywords to stay under limit.
    warblers_2007_down, warblers_2008_09, warblers_2010_11, warblers_2012_up
    I have probably 80,000 birds photos and I try to tag every one with the bird name.

    I have some private family photos over 1000, my wife for one so I'll never see all her photos. I also created
    a smart gallery for everyone so I can control how it looks like all other galleries but still has the 1000 limit.

    Yep -- I'd imagine I have a bunch of keywords with >1000 photos too, but I'm not sure I'd use the keyword galleries to try to find the photos. So understanding how pilotdave and others want to use those >1000 photo keyword galleries would be super helpful to ensure we thrill him and others like him!

    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

    For me, its location tagging. Most of my photos come from the same location, so they add up fast. My site is sort of photo blog style, organized by date, often with 100-200 photos added weekly. 1000 photos goes fast.

    Way back (I'm in my 12th year with smugmug), I don't think there was any limit to the size of a keyword gallery. I set this up expecting it to stay that way.

    I even have combinations of keywords that now only reach as far back as last year when I'd like ALL the photos to show up. There isn't even any kind of notification that the keyword results are limited to the latest 1000.

    I understand the performance issues, but if it's only affecting page load time in huge galleries, I'd rather live with it than arbitrarily cut off the keyword search results. Older photos are no less valid than new ones.

    Some people use smugmug as a portfolio to display their best work and hardly use any storage. Others like me take advantage of the unlimited storage only to find ourselves limited by the software.

    Dave

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

    It makes sense that some keywords have >1000 photos. I’d love to understand how a keyword gallery with >1000 photos is useful to you or your visitors. How does our limitation inhibit what you’re trying to do?

    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: 10,007 Major grins

    It's very useful to my family finding old photos of a person.
    1. there's no way of knowing where a KW'ed photo will fall in a KW gallery. Depends when the KW was added to a photo. Which means old photos recently scanned in show early in a gallery.

    Perhaps adding a toggle in each "Smart" gallery to manually remove limit. Then the photag can decide what's important, speed or seeing all. Actually, no one would even notice unless they happen hit a >1000 gallery.
    Internet speeds are much faster now.

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

    @leftquark said:
    It makes sense that some keywords have >1000 photos. I’d love to understand how a keyword gallery with >1000 photos is useful to you or your visitors. How does our limitation inhibit what you’re trying to do?

    I don't think I'm suggesting anything complicated. If my friend wants to find all the photos of him on my site, he'll go to his keyword. I just identified 3 friends that reach the 1000 photo limit going back only two years. There's no reason I should have to give my friends some convoluted, multi-step process to find pictures of themselves from before 2016.

    It's just a database. I can't think of any other database that arbitrarily limits search results. Visitors can't even change the sort order of the results, another feature of basically any database search. Improved filtering tools (like boolean searches beyond combining two keywords) would help.

    My problem is only going to get worse over time as my photo collection grows. I might be in the minority of users, having over 74,000 photos on my site, but I just think the tools should accommodate all users and all photos.

    If you want to see how I end up with so many photos, you can look at my site: https://pilotdave.smugmug.com

    Dave

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

    I'm also a photographer that takes a ton of photos and keywords them all, so I understand how you can get to having so many. I'm just trying to understand the ways in which all of you then browse/view those photos and how you use keyword galleries to do that. For example, some people have their photos organized really well and visitors can navigate to a year and a gallery pretty quickly. Others will use search to get there, which can narrow in quicker (for example search on "Aaron Yosemite birthday" if they were looking for photos from a birthday trip to yosemite, instead of just searching on "Aaron").

    It sounds like the use case revolves around trying to find older photos of a specific keyword, and clicking on that keyword instead of using search. Your visitor is already on the gallery, they see a photo that interests them, and they want to see more photos, potentially older photos, and they have no idea where it is? How often is it that they don't have any information that might help them get to where you organized the photo?

    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
  • pat.kanepat.kane Registered Users Posts: 332 Major grins

    Any update on this? I'd really like to get back to the earlier functionality or to eliminate the limitation completely.

    Because I photograph sports for multiple schools, the easiest way for them to find photos if they're not sure what I covered is to use the search feature and to look at the most recent photos I've taken. I've simplified this process with a pick list on my blog at http://blog.dmvpix.com/

    I had no idea this feature had changed until I decided to test a link before sending it to a potential client.

    It only takes seconds to scroll through thousands of thumbnails to get an idea what is available.

    The alternative for me is to provide a link that searches galleries instead; however, that doesn't work when I have multiple schools tagged in a gallery titled for the event. Providing this link would mean lost sales. As just one example, I got a yearbook cover one year through the photo search and that would not have happened if it had been a gallery search.

  • AllenAllen Registered Users Posts: 10,007 Major grins
    edited September 23, 2018

    I had one keyword that I split up in years because way more then1000.
    warblers_2007_down
    warblers_2008_09
    warblers_2010_11
    warblers_2012_up

    Couple family members have reached the limit.

    Al - Just a volunteer here having fun
    My Website index | My Blog
  • ancarancar Registered Users Posts: 10 Big grins
    I'm really missing this feature as well.
    As @pat.kane I'm creating galleries of sport events, and use the keywords to tag players. Since 2011 I've got several players in my galleries with a lot more than 1000 tags.

    When using the search tool in Smugmug it certainly shows more than 1000 pictures.
    The problem with the search tool is that if I search a player with full name (first name + surname) I end up having hits where different players tagged in the same picture when their name combined matches the search (Alex Bolt and Usain Baldwin generates a hit if searching Usain Bolt...)

    The keyword list generates only 1000 pictures though, and this "keyword gallery" cannot be sorted by newest/oldest etc.
    But the keyword list does not include these fault search results so I usually use this anyway to share someone all my pictures of a certain player.

    It would be great to have the search tool to be able to produce results from complete string, like "Usain Bolt" (google uses the "exact match" feature when using quotes).
    OR have the 1000 picture limit gone in keyword listing and have the "keyword gallery" sorting ability in newest/oldest/photorank.
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