New Improved Navigation and Photo Viewing Experience

Allen · August 11, 2020

I find it a pita now browsing my site when logged in. Every new gallery and other pages/folder I go to I have to scroll down to see the page. Need a toggle button to hide/show that now huge area at the top of the page.

leftquark · August 11, 2020

But now you can easily get between multiple different sections without having to click a bazillion times. And I love that all the settings aren't hidden or change on me. The drop-down menus that changed depending on where I was, drove me NUTS.

sarasphotos · August 11, 2020

Although I sort of get why the new black bar is there, I'm with @Allen - we desperately need a toggle button to turn it all off when it's not needed. While I do want to be logged in when I visit my site (mostly in order to share pictures), I only use the Organize/Customize tools about 10%-15% of the time so they take up an irritatingly huge amount of screen real estate in comparison to their usefulness. I've never been a fan of the big black bar across the top and now it's doubly so ugly and intrusive!

pegelli · August 11, 2020

I agree with Allan and Sara, I don't see the point of the change, in the old set-up if you go via "organise" very few clicks were needed to get from one place to another.
I think being able to toggle it off is a good suggestion, other compromise could be to do it all on one line (and a bit smaller/less intrusive would be good as well).

Allen · August 11, 2020

Some of your reasons make no sense. Anyone finding how to navigate should remember how to do it.
This is probably ONLY good for a first time user. The rest will suffer.

David_S85 · August 12, 2020

+1 and agree with Allen and Sara. Too much screen real estate is wasted with the new line of buttons. Please, make a toggle so we can turn it all off.

Shinrya · August 12, 2020

I'll chime in and say that I like the changes to the navigation/customize bars. It will undoubtably make it easier for new users to find all the features for editing their website.

But the increased size of the nav bar is a bit much. Especially for those using laptop screens or tablets with smaller real estate. Maybe could thin out those bars a bit, or add a toggle as others have suggested.

leftquark · August 12, 2020

While I know SmugMug has many ideas (that are probably different from the ones suggested here), the concern is valid. I'm sure we'll see something that ensures you have a beautiful browsing experience as well. Hang on!

jerryr · August 13, 2020

In the spirit of enhancements and improvements, I would like to see more flexibility in creative page designs and additional features to page design content blocks.
- jerryr

AceCo55 · August 13, 2020

Yeah - not a fan of this. Now we have double the vertical space taken up with this new toolbar.
I would LOVE to be rid of it ... just annoying the hell out me.
I'm also NOT interested in my recent uploads being the "landing" page when I log in. I don't see how I will EVER use this page.
Does anyone know of a way to have it default to "Photo Site" or "Organise"???

Allen · August 13, 2020

I go to "Selling Tools" and there is no way back to the gallery/folder where I came from that I can find?
Organize takes me to my Homepage.
"Photo Site" should always return from where you came. Homepage is useless.

Allen · August 13, 2020

I kinda find "Photos" useless. Is it just a new fancy "Search"?

I type a term in and the magnifying glass doesn't work? BTW, nothing is worst then looking at a collage.
Going through hundreds of page scrolls trying to re-find a photo is a big waste of time. Would rather look
at pages of thumbnails. After all, it's not for enjoying photos, it's for searching for something.

Hikin' Mike · August 13, 2020

I don't like the fact that when I log in, I have to click to my home page. I don't want to see my recent uploads.

Allen · August 13, 2020

When I log in I'm still on the page, folder/gallery?

Hikin' Mike · August 13, 2020

@Allen said:
When I log in I'm still on the page, folder/gallery?

I type in 'login' after my website then I get https://www.smugmug.com/app/photos. I want it back to the way it used to be.

Allen · August 13, 2020

You're right! Wow, whoever thought of that? Pretty bad.

I have a live Bookmark in my browser toolbar that I can click any recent visited galley to go to and log in there.
Never visit my homepage.

Djm3006 · August 13, 2020

What @jerryr said above, When I log in to my account its to work on it and/or buy a photo for a customer. Lightroom tells me what I have uploaded don't need it. time better spent on more important stuff

leftquark · August 13, 2020

@Djm3006 said:
When I log in to my account its to work on it and/or buy a photo for a customer.

This! One thing that's evolved over the years is that I no longer view SmugMug as a my "photo site" service. It's the entire home for all my photos, where my site is just one piece of it. I often come to "my site" to look at my own photos, whether it's to show someone, or just because I want to relive them. Often I don't need the website features, I just want to quickly find a photo and enjoy it. It's one of the ways in which I constantly use the SmugMug iPad and iPhone app on a daily basis. When I do it on the desktop side, I often don't need all the extra administration / organization stuff. I just want a place that's amazing to view my photos. I only need the extra stuff if I want to do some "administration" things like create new galleries, upload more photos, check my sales, etc.

I'm curious, @Djm3006 , when you say "work on it", what are you referring to? Customizing your photo website? Checking out your print sales? Creating new galleries? Organizing photos?

Djm3006 · August 14, 2020

@leftquark said:

@Djm3006 said:
When I log in to my account its to work on it and/or buy a photo for a customer.

This! One thing that's evolved over the years is that I no longer view SmugMug as a my "photo site" service. It's the entire home for all my photos, where my site is just one piece of it. I often come to "my site" to look at my own photos, whether it's to show someone, or just because I want to relive them. Often I don't need the website features, I just want to quickly find a photo and enjoy it. It's one of the ways in which I constantly use the SmugMug iPad and iPhone app on a daily basis. When I do it on the desktop side, I often don't need all the extra administration / organization stuff. I just want a place that's amazing to view my photos. I only need the extra stuff if I want to do some "administration" things like create new galleries, upload more photos, check my sales, etc.

I'm curious, @Djm3006 , when you say "work on it", what are you referring to? Customizing your photo website? Checking out your print sales? Creating new galleries? Organizing photos?

Thats correct @leftquark, customizing etc and yes I do consider it a work "admin" zone when logged in
always using a iPad ,iphone, laptop and TV for groups, to show friends photos of trips etc, but I don't login to do that.

Jtring · August 14, 2020

Several comments on the new header, the new Photos page, and a few related items.

I agree with others about the two-line header taking up too much screen real estate, but I’ll admit I like the basic ideas behind it. So I’ve taken a cut at some user CSS to tighten things up: reducing size, paddings, and margins, as well as making buttons look like menu items (not all caps, no borders, same font size and weight, same kerning). It’s way too early to share code, but here’s a picture of what’s possible. I’ve obviously diddled colors too: I’m no fan of the original in-your-face black. The mouse doesn’t show but I was hovering over Settings when I did the screen capture. Both bars are 36px high, down from 60px. User CSS doesn’t make it to the Organizer and I’ve avoided doing anything to the Customizer, but this smaller, cleaner display looks good on the Photo Site display. I invite SM to do something similar.

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While the new Photos module provides an interesting and attractive photostream view – Flickr inside SmugMug? – I’m not impressed with it (yet) as a search tool. It does have potential. I like the idea and the ready filters up top. But the images are a little too small on my QHD (2560 x 1440) screen. Captions – useful for identification if you are looking for one particular picture – are reachable only after two clicks and screen refreshes. The old search page’s approach of an expanded pop-up with the source gallery name shown is a little better. A title and/or partial caption at the bottom of the image in the Photo page’s lightbox – I’m amazed SM wrote a second lightbox for this – would help too. The other thing that’s missing is the ability to search for galleries, pages, and folders, which I find I do more often than search for photos. It would be very nice if under “type” in the filter bar there were four more entries: “folders”, “galleries”, “pages”, and “all f/g/p nodes”. Obviously, the results display would need to be a little different – titles are critical here – but the same idea of searching on titles and meta-keywords would apply. Until those things are in place, I’ll be using the old search page. Make it accessible. For now, I’d much prefer that the search link in the account icon dropdown menu go to the old search page, not to this.

The words in the upper header bar menu -- Photos / Organizer / Photo Site -- need work. That sounds trivial, but for an update clearly aimed at making life easier for new and infrequent users, it would seem there ought to be a premium on avoiding ambiguity and confusion.

There are opportunities for both now. My first look at the Organizer left me confused at the difference between “Photo Site” and “View on Photo Site”. Since everything has to do with photos, how are “Photos” and “Photo Site” different things? When the display contracts, the Photos / Organizer / Photo Site menu reduces to a drop-down headed by the title Photo Site: the title of the menu is the same as one of the entries! One can obviously work through all this, but a few tweaks could, I think, make this nicer to the new and infrequent user.

Let me suggest the following:

Photos --> Photostream
Organize --> Organizer
Photos Site --> Photo Site (Home)
Contracted Menu Header “Photo Site” --> Photo Views

"Photos", "Organize", and "Photo Site" flag different modules – different views – of the information on the site: the photostream/search module, the database organizer, and the website display and management module. The green highlighting indicates which module the user is in. Clicking gets to the top level entry point for each. The new names emphasize that just a little bit more and avoid some of the unclear meanings I mentioned above. I’ve suggested changing "Organize" to "Organizer" so all the entries are nouns, not a mix of nouns and verbs, not a mix of names and functions.

Link the SmugMug logo button to the Smugmug site. That’s what it does on the logged-out header bar. There’s no need for it to replicate the function of the Photostream button when logged in. To me, at least, the SmugMug logo button suggests a link SmugMug, not to the user photostream. And getting to https://www.smugmug.com/ can sometimes be handy. Once upon a time, there was a Photo Sharing link up there to the SmugMug site, wasn’t there? Linking the logo to the new Photostream page is, I suspect, there to highlight this most recent addition. That fine for the rollout but not for the long term.

I too think the Photo Site home page is the right place to land on log-in.

Consider allowing user CSS to reach the Settings dialog box. This isn't a big deal, but I did have some code that made thumbnails on image picker a little larger. That died. On a QHD monitor, one gets mighty small thumbnails when selecting a feature image for a folder, page, or gallery and when selecting a cover image for a gallery.

Jtring · August 15, 2020

After posting the above, I took some additional time to play with the new Photos / Photostream view. I have a sense I could find this page very useful -- or will end up ignoring it -- depending on where it goes in the future. Some comments, suggestions, and bug finds that might nudge it toward the first
. . .

The Display. I noted above that on my QHD screen those images seem small. I suggested popping-up a larger image on hover, much as on the current search page. Another option (perhaps in addition) would be some sort control to select general image size. Perhaps a hamburger icon next to the filter icon holding a choice of small, medium, large, or extra-large images (and perhaps some other set-up choices). Also why limit the main photostream collage to 1440px width when the associated lightbox goes the full display width?

The Search Logic. Introducing a new search page is the time to revisit how searches are done. The new page searches the same way the old search page did: it searches titles, captions, and keywords SEPARATELY and returns all the hits on the three individual lists. That's just fine when the search is on a single word, which I suspect is what the original designer had in mind. But if the search has two or more terms, that approach limits things. It will not return an image where one term shows up in the title and the other in the caption, or one in a caption and the other as a keyword. Try it. Combining searches would be nice. In addition, there is an implicit AND between multiple entries. That’s the right default, but sometimes using ORs might be useful.

Now a stretch, if you want to take it on. Working the multiple word issue could also be the means to fix some of the limits of the old keyword page. If there was a flag to limit searches to keywords, some sort of keyword entry like you have for smart gallery set-up would both provide guidance on finding keywords to select and a way to have ORs between the entries. I believe folks on Dgrin has asked for both. Is possible to (almost) lift something directly from smart-gallery set-up? Having a more complex mix of ANDs and ORs would, of course, be nice and has been requested too, but I recognize that’s an additional step.
.

The Filter Bar. Let’s take each item in sequence.

Filter Bar: Capture Date Range. The range entry process is clunky, even more so than the one on the old (and itself clunky) date page. The old date page let you enter and edit the start and end dates independently. Here you have to go through the entire sequence of both just to change one of the six elements. The date page year drop down showed all years available and did not include years with no photos. The new Photostream view filter dropdown has all the years from the first on, guaranteeing I’ll almost always have to scroll. (I have dated some of the scans I’ve made old film photos with my earliest listed capture being April 21, 1993. The dropdown shows 1993 through 1999 without scrolling. But most of my site pictures date from the 21st century digital era.) And how about letting me select any date back to January 1 of that first year, rather than graying out all the days before April 21? That would make it easier just look for all my photos in, say, from 1993 to 1999. A couple of special selections might be nice too. “This year” and “The last two years” belong on such a list. An easy way to get back to “Any Date” without resetting the other three fields would be good. A special selection to enter any whole year (as the old date page allows) would be helpful.
Filter Bar: Sort By. Given the date filter is by capture date, it would make more sense to me to have sort by capture date be the default. Perhaps that hamburger menu I suggested above could have an option to reset the default either way. I’m sure there will be a range of desires among the user community.
Filter Bar: Order By. Fine for now.
Filter Bar: Type. As I mentioned in the previous post, adding entries for galleries, folders, pages, and all nodes is critical to make this display useful as a full search engine. I acknowledge that doing so is not exactly in line with the idea of a photostream, so it depends on where you want to go. But the gallery, folder, and page search function has to exist somewhere.
Filter Bar suggested new entry: Search Fields. Maybe add a selector for title/caption only, keyword only, and all three. Keyword only can then have the guided search I discussed above, pulling in the approach from the smart gallery set-up.
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Oddities and Bugs.

Source gallery links. I was surprised the source gallery link in the Photostream page lightbox goes to the Organizer view of that gallery. I would have expected, and would appreciate, the link going to the Photo Site view.
Videos upscaling in the Photostream Lightbox. A 1080p video (or worse a 720p video) will show at the full display height on my 2560 x1440 screen (minus controls) which means it’s been upscaled. That doesn't look wonderful. For an example -- one which presumably the SM folks can replicate -- on my site, if I keep the search field empty, set the capture date range to Any, Order by to Earliest first, Sort by to Upload date, and Type to Videos only, and then take a look at the first entry from December 2, 2012, I find a 720p video that behaves as described. It's not a great video -- it's the first I ever posted, after all -- but it shows the issue.
Video capture time disconnects between the filter and the Photostream Lightbox. When I do a video search sorted by capture time, many videos show as having no capture time ... but at least some of those do show the date taken field filled when I pull up the info panel. In form, they look just like videos that show a capture date on the results list. So why do they show on the results list without that date? The SM folks can see an example of this on my site. Search as above but by sort by Capture Date (again Earliest First). Toward the bottom many are listed under “Missing Capture Date”. And indeed, many of those have the date taken field empty when you hit the info button. But scroll down to, say, the 17th entry, the one with of two swans swimming – yes, I know, there ought to be seven – and open it up in the Lightbox. It has a date taken, just like the ones that the search results list by date. Previous Dgrin discussion have noted that metadata for videos has been an on-going problem, but this seems like something different than has been discussed before. Here there's a filled-in entry that, it would appear, is not being used.

Allen · August 16, 2020

Looks like this destroyed the search in the profile dropdown. I used to be able to search down a selected folder/tree like a month or year. Or in single gallery.
I have 298 photos presently in a gallery and need to search terms there. Old search found 12 photos, new search found the 12 + 45 unrelated photos.
Now that you changed that search to the new site wide search. Completely useless.

Add a selection to search at a starting point anywhere in the site tree. Like folder or specific gallery.

Jtring · August 16, 2020

@Jtring said:

Consider allowing user CSS to reach the Settings dialog box. This isn't a big deal, but I did have some code that made thumbnails on image picker a little larger. That died. On a QHD monitor, one gets mighty small thumbnails when selecting a feature image for a folder, page, or gallery and when selecting a cover image for a gallery.

I observe it now does for the Setting dialog box reached by the lower section bar (but not via the Organizer). I don't know if that's a change or if I just missed something earlier. If it's a change, my thanks.

MidlandDeltic · August 16, 2020

Sorry, a little late to the party. Not a fan of the new "Photos" page - a direct lift of the Flickr photostream, which I equally ignored and was one of (several) reasons I ceased using the platform. As mentioned above, two clicks and screen refreshes to get the caption up is a complete pain. Defaulting to it when clicking on the SmugMug logo from elsewhere within the site is also a complete PITA. I had hoped the joint ownership of the platforms would lead to improvements, but in this case it seems a poor feature has been replicated rather than banished!

Edited to add - the change to the "Share" button is also a pain in the neck. Previously, it offered an option on which size to share, so it could be targetted (eg to Facebook). Now there is no option - a single link is presented. This means a full res is shared, which I do not want to do.

Allen · August 16, 2020

@MidlandDeltic said:

...!

Edited to add - the change to the "Share" button is also a pain in the neck. Previously, it offered an option on which size to share, so it could be targetted (eg to Facebook). Now there is no option - a single link is presented. This means a full res is shared, which I do not want to do.

Click the Embed tab select a size for photo.

grahamphoto · August 16, 2020

Not improved! Please go back to the way it was. Too many clicks now to accomplish what we could do in just 1 click before.

gtmalone · August 17, 2020

Would prefer the "photo site" be the home page instead of "recent uploads". Seeing recent uploads is no value to me. Thanks for listening.

Allen · August 17, 2020

"photo site" ? Whose photo site? Kinda ridiculous it does not say Homepage.

AceCo55 · August 19, 2020

Can anyone tell how they might find "recent uploads" useful?
For the life of me, I can't think of any situation where I might be even remotely interested in this page.
Smugmug obviously thinks there is otherwise they wouldn't have created it. Can anyone see a use for this page (because I can't)
I hate the fact that I am brought to this page when I login.
I login to create more content (galleries, folders) or to do maintenaince - not to look at the photos I KNOW I have already uploaded.

Agree with Allen 're "Homepage"

Jtring · August 20, 2020

@Jtring said:
While the new Photos module provides an interesting and attractive photostream view – Flickr inside SmugMug? – I’m not impressed with it (yet) as a search tool. ... Until those things are in place, I’ll be using the old search page. Make it accessible. For now, I’d much prefer that the search link in the account icon dropdown menu go to the old search page, not to this.

I observe the account icon dropdown search link has returned to the old search page, not to Photos. Thank you.

Allen · August 20, 2020

On my site the "now current" search in profile/account drop is searching whole site not just the gallery/page.

I've added a "Search Box" widget via customize to the gallery page and it only searches that gallery not the whole site.

One thing I've noticed is in the Search Box settings there are Photos, Videos, Galleries, Folders and Pages choices in "Default Results" drop.
Please a Photos/Videos as a selection in the drop.

New Improved Navigation and Photo Viewing Experience

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