Keywords do not include foreign characters

Richard · June 15, 2006

There was a thread about this quite a few months ago, but I have not been able to find it, so here we go again:

Accented characters are still being dropped from keywords. So España, which displays correctly here, ends up as Espaa as a keyword. This makes it less likely that a Spaniard will find my stuff if he searches Google using España as a keyword. Google handles foreign characters just fine.

Last I recall, Smugmug was "aware of the problem." I was wondering if there is any plan to fix it. Is there a work-around that I missed? I'm sure many non-English speaking customers would be glad to see this resolved.

Thanks,

rainforest1155 · June 15, 2006

rsinmadrid wrote:

There was a thread about this quite a few months ago, but I have not been able to find it, so here we go again:

Accented characters are still being dropped from keywords. So España, which displays correctly here, ends up as Espaa as a keyword. This makes it less likely that a Spaniard will find my stuff if he searches Google using España as a keyword. Google handles foreign characters just fine.

It's not yet possible to use any foreign characters. Just use the standard 'n' as long they're working on it. I think Google doesn't care about it and should display your site too, even when people explicitly searched for España.

Sebastian

Edit: The 3rd result when searching for españa is the following site:
"CIA - The World Factbook -- Spain [SIZE=-1]local short form: Espana. Government type:. Definition · Field Listing parliamentary monarchy. Capital:. Definition · Field Listing ..."[/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]As you can see the CIA didn't care for the ñ and still gets that high in the ranking!

[/SIZE]

Richard · December 31, 2007

rainforest1155 wrote:

It's not yet possible to use any foreign characters. Just use the standard 'n' as long they're working on it. [SIZE=-1]
[/SIZE]

Well, here we are 18 months later, and Smugmug still doesn't support international characters in keyword searches. I just want to remind you that there are a lot of people in the world who use different keyboards and extended character sets. While Espana may look fine to most Americans, it looks illiterate to anyone who speaks Spanish. If I enter España as a keyword, it shows up as Espaa in my keyword list, which looks illiterate to Americans as well as Spaniards. I would like to put my keywords on my home page, but cannot do so while they look so ridiculous. I love Smugmug, but if you are really serious about being a world-class site, you had better address this problem.
:deadhorse ? I hope not.

Edit: Just to give you an example of the mischief that can ensue here, in Spanish, the greeting "Happy New Year" is translated "Feliz Año Nuevo." If I follow your advice and use n instead of ñ I get "Feliz Ano Nuevo," which in Spanish means, "Happy New Anus." Not good.

Happy New Year,

Andy · December 31, 2007

rsinmadrid wrote:

Well, here we are 18 months later, and Smugmug still doesn't support international characters in keyword searches.

Hi, it's not a trivial task for our engineers, and other things have been in the queue in front of it, and still are, I'm afraid. I wish I had a better and different answer for you, Richard

westis · January 25, 2008

Andy wrote:

Hi, it's not a trivial task for our engineers, and other things have been in the queue in front of it, and still are, I'm afraid. I wish I had a better and different answer for you, Richard

Why not just use UTF-8? I've written about this before, but really, it is an abstacle for using SmugMug, so continue using PicasaWeb as well for public galleries....

Thanks.

suisekiart · June 7, 2008

another request for the full set of unicode characters
Here's another voice asking (begging) for this! I would like to use Japanese terms in my keywords - both in Kanji and in "Romaji". In Romaji there are ways around having to use just the standard English characters, but without Unicode/UTF8 there's no way to do Kanji.

I can use anything I want in the caption it appears, but not in the keywords.

I guess no Chinese or Japanese people are using smugmug?

Thanks - Janet

Andy · June 7, 2008

it's not that at all, it's that they won't work when they are part of the keywords urls, I'm so sorry

suisekiart · June 8, 2008

Andy wrote:

it's not that at all, it's that they won't work when they are part of the keywords urls, I'm so sorry

Aaahhh, I see. yes, that is a harder problem isn't it. I will practice patience...:cry

JIRphoto · July 9, 2008

Just want to add another vote to have keywords support the so-called "foreign" characters.
I am currently in my 14-day trial period, and the inablility to support norwegian characters such as æ, ø and å, as well as some icelandic special characters in keywords has made it less likely that I will sign up.
I wish to add keywords for names of places/locations, and without these special characters that will not be possible.
From reading this thread I understand the technical challenges, but I still want to emphasize the importance of this if you want to compete in the international market and not just the US/UK, especially since some of your competitors does not have this disadvantage.

And by the way, there seems to a small glitch in the keyword editing interface if such characters are used. If a keyword with for example an "ø" is added, it will seemingly be stripped from the word. But if I come back to the same photo later to edit the keywords, the keywords edit dialog will loose the "ø" and anything that comes after, including all later keywords.

vahan1 · September 19, 2008

+ another vote

Queue · October 2, 2008

JIRphoto wrote:

Just want to add another vote to have keywords support the so-called "foreign" characters.
I am currently in my 14-day trial period, and the inablility to support norwegian characters such as æ, ø and å, as well as some icelandic special characters in keywords has made it less likely that I will sign up.
I wish to add keywords for names of places/locations, and without these special characters that will not be possible.
From reading this thread I understand the technical challenges, but I still want to emphasize the importance of this if you want to compete in the international market and not just the US/UK, especially since some of your competitors does not have this disadvantage.

And by the way, there seems to a small glitch in the keyword editing interface if such characters are used. If a keyword with for example an "ø" is added, it will seemingly be stripped from the word. But if I come back to the same photo later to edit the keywords, the keywords edit dialog will loose the "ø" and anything that comes after, including all later keywords.

This is really a major problem for me as well. I have used smugmug for a couple of years and I think it is really great. However, the lack of support for unicode characters makes me use it a lot less than I would have with this support included.

RhichMan · October 3, 2008

Andy wrote:

it's not that at all, it's that they won't work when they are part of the keywords urls, I'm so sorry

But a dash or an Umlaut doesn't even need unicode, and you could 'HTML encode' those for the URL? Like ä or what it is for ä etc.?

Keywords do not include foreign characters

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