Schools? Do other educational institutions use Smugmug?

vaio2006 · April 1, 2008

I was wondering if other Educational Institutions use smugmug?

If so, how do you guys use it? How do you guys integrate it to your current site?

vaio2006 · April 3, 2008

:poke

Ham1 · April 4, 2008

vaio2006 wrote:

I was wondering if other Educational Institutions use smugmug?

If so, how do you guys use it? How do you guys integrate it to your current site?

Since we donate free Pro accounts to all non-profit schools, we have a lot that use us

I am donating daily! http://www.smugmug.com/help/non-profit-free-accounts

Schools are using it all different ways. Some mark up their print prices and use the commissions for fund raising, others lock it down very tightly and allow only parents with passwords to enter.

We have Universities to Grade Schools using it for sports, plays, drama, marching band, you name it!

Markham

darryl · April 5, 2008

Blah blah blah

vaio2006 wrote:

I was wondering if other Educational Institutions use smugmug?

If so, how do you guys use it? How do you guys integrate it to your current site?

Hi vaio:

My son's co-op preschool has a free Pro account courtesy of SmugMug (thanks Markham).

Guest passwords
We wanted a site that would allow all of the parents to upload and share their photos with the other families. The "Guest" password for Pro accounts helps with this immensely, however it could be better:

Guest accounts allow lots of customization choices that can overwhelm some users, and also kind of mess up the presentation of the albums. At the same time, guest accounts cannot delete images (good) or rotate images (annoying).

Organization
Organizationally speaking, I've tried to keep things pretty simple.

I've created categories for each class (there's only three -- an AM class for 3-year olds, and two PM classes for 4-5-year olds.) Beneath each class category I've created subcategories for Field Trips and for high-volume events like Halloween.

There's also categories for Portraits (one of our parents serves as "official" photographer) and Events (where all of the classes are together).

Security
We've instituted a site-wide password for the site. And within the site, all albums are public.

I've really got to think about how we'll "migrate" stuff when the new school year rolls around. I was thinking I could replicate the current top-level categories as subcategories, and then stick them all under a new top-level category of 2007-2008. But that'll be confusing to uploaders (because they can choose category and subcategory when creating new galleries).

I'm now thinking about making the old schoolyear into private galleries, and maybe creating a Sharegroup (2007-2008) that contains all of them. This year's password would be applied to that Sharegroup, and we would pick a new password for the main site.

Unfortunately last time I looked at Sharegroups, they didn't contain categories or subcategories, so it's promises to be a mess. Ugh.

Gallery Customizations

Downloads are enabled. We want people to be able to get the full-sized originals and take them to CostCo to print, or print at home.
Photorank is turned off. We *don't* want people competing on whose child is cutest. Because of course mine is. :-}

Other Customizations
Because it annoyed me that you couldn't have categories *and* a section with "most recent galleries" on the home page, I hacked a bit of Javascript to replace "featured galleries" with "recent galleries".

Keywords
I always thought keywords for my personal photos were more trouble than they were worth. I mean, if I name the album "Hawaii trip", won't I be able to find all of the Hawaii photos pretty easily?

But in a school situation, keywords have the potential to be hugely helpful. If everyone who uploads adds tags with just the kids' names, parents will be able to take advantage of the search and "tag cloud" functionality of SmugMug to find all of the photos of their kid. Or of their kid with Nate. Or with Nate and Gwyn. It's very very cool. IF everyone tags.

Problem is -- even if you're just tagging names, it's time-consuming. At least with a co-op, you pretty much know every kid's name. But still, it's a pain.

If SmugMug allowed people who have logged in with a site-wide or album password to add keywords, then more "browsers" could help out with the tagging. It would kind of be like Flickr tags, but it's not just random people tagging, but rather only parents from the school that had the site password.

Alas, this hasn't really gotten out of the discussion phase. And I'm sure it's *way* down on the list of SmugMug priorities. :-{

Anyways, to try and address this shortcoming, I wrote a Perl script that periodically looks for new Comments (thanks to the RSS feed for this) for a photo, and if there are any that meet my "tag: noah gwyn nate" scheme, it uses the API to add those as keywords for the photo.

It's a complicated solution, and due to another bug where spam-prevention captchas ("Please type these funny looking letters") are required even for users who have entered a site-wide or album password, it's an annoying process for "browsers" who just want to help out with tagging.

Integration
Our co-op's website is primarily informational, so no photo integration there. For school business/communication, we use Yahoo Groups, so again, no integration there either, except for a link to the site and some documentation on how to upload, etc.

Anyways, I know I've gone on a lot. But I figured it was time I documented all of this anyways. If you want to take a peek at the site, please send me a PM and I can hook you up with the password to take a look.

vaio2006 · April 6, 2008

thanks a million!
(a more indepth post to come... after I finish my exams...)