The SmugMug Blog

Parv is a prolific photographer with a pretty impressive portfolio. Perhaps my favorite gallery of his is this one of lava flows in Hawaii. That gallery has external linking turned off though, so I am going to give you a sample of some of his other work. I highly recommend visiting the lava gallery though!

Keeping with yesterday’s theme of age and weathered beauty, I dug up these photos in 2 different galleries on Parv’s site. Click on any of the images to see the parent gallery.

Enjoy!

As promised, we’ve added RSS, Atom, and Google Earth feeds for pages affected by our new PhotoRank feature. This includes:

• Your personal homepage, where there’s now a feed for “your popular photos”
• SmugMug’s popular photos today.
• SmugMug’s all-time most popular photos.
• Most popular photos by category (see the browse page and pick your favorite Category).

Still to come: differentiated most recent / most popular feeds for keywords.

In addition, we overhauled the way we draw the footer so we could include more than one set of feeds per page. In particular, we revived the “most recent photos” feed (in addition to the “most recent galleries” feed you know and love) that we replaced after considerable customer feedback. The good news? You can now have both.

Finally, we switched to the now standard feed icons. Hopefully if everyone starts using them (kudos to the Internet Explorer team for jumping on board), people will understand the feed thing even better.

In other news, SmugMug’s first large Partner Community has now gone live. Military.com is an enormous online community, with millions of users around the world. They just “soft launched” the Military.com PhotoCenter, powered by yours truly. It’s in “beta” right now, but you can see the link on their homepage.

What’s more, every Military.com customer gets a limited Free account at SmugMug when they sign up for the PhotoCenter. Pretty dang cool, if you ask me.

The Military.com Photo Center, just like all photo communities at SmugMug, gets their own destination page and access to lots of key SmugMug features, including PhotoRank and keyword tagging, exclusively within their photo community.

We have big plans for the great things we can do with Military.com, and other communities, so stay tuned.

According to his bio, Marc Weinberg began shooting in 1959 on a Kodak Brownie. His recent work is done in digital though, with this particular gallery of gorgeous rusted cars being shot on a Canon Rebel XT.

Enjoy!

Rob O’Dea brings us great photos of this last weekend’s Sea Otter Classic with this gallery.

Here are a few samples:

Enjoy!

Did you know that crocodiles can jump? Neither did I. But apparently they know down in Darwin, Australia.

Here is the gallery.

Here are some examples:

Enjoy!

First of all, we have two new Themes: “Big Chill” and “smugmug gradient”. Kudos to BigWebGuy for the “Big Chill”.

We’re currently planning on making “smugmug gradient” the new default Theme for all smugmug users. But we wanted to A) gather feedback first (got some?) and B) make sure it doesn’t break current customized sites. So let us know ASAP.

We also have some tweaks to PhotoRank, which is already more successful than I had any right to expect. Everyone’s really digging up some great photos.

Finally, more features and fixes:

• fixed some AJAX breakage on comments with odd characters
• added new ‘crop’ indicators in the shopping cart to make it more obvious
• fixed the shopping cart ‘crop’ overlay on IE. oops.
• fixed some gallery ordering problems when you add new galleries to categories. we’re still correcting some older categories, so be patient if this isn’t fixed for you quite yet.
• Filmstrip Style no longer is capped at 255 images. Also the arrows aren’t shown if you have less than 6 thumbnails.
• changing the Slideshow duration should be much less error-prone and easier to use.
• streamlined the initial gallery creation process. If you don’t have any SubCategories created, we no longer show the SubCategories dropdown. Duh.
• Forced Category selection now, rather than defaulting to ‘Other’
• Fixed a problem with the “other sizes: ” links on Keywords pages. They were broken – now they’re not.
• Communities can now have custom categories.

Enjoy!

Saul Raisin is a young American pro cyclist, who won the best young rider jersey at the Tour of Georgia last year and a stage at the Tour of Langkawi this year. On Tuesday in the opening stage of the Circuit de la Sarthe, Saul crashed and broke his clavicle and a rib. Early Thursday morning, he went into emergency surgery to ease pressure on his brain from a hemorrhage.

He is currently in a coma, and his condition is still listed as “serious”. We all wish him the best, and hope he makes a speedy recovery and continues on with his promising cycling career.

I found these photos of Saul on smugmug:
(click through on any of them to see them in the gallery)

And another that has external linking off.

Get well soon Saul!

The weather here in California is finally starting to warm up and look sunny, which must mean ski season is will be wrapping up in the weeks to come. With this in mind, I started searching for ski photos and found these. They come from three different accounts/galleries, so click through to see more of the same.

Eric Schmitt brings us some Half Pipe skiing:

David Belden’s ski photos:

And lastly, Kevin Winzeler brings us this shot:

Enjoy!

I was browsing the Flowers community, and I found quite a few amazing shots in the “most popular” section.

Some of them I have already blogged about actually, but I hadn’t yet seen the photos of Daniela Caneschi.

Here are two samples:

Enjoy!

Our new PhotoRank system allows visitors to “thumb up” or “thumb down” photos they like or dislike. It is already causing some truly amazing shots to float to the top, which is how I found Miguel Lasa’s site.

I highly recommend just taking the time to browse through his galleries and check out all of his images. You won’t regret it. But if you don’t want to take my word for it, here is a taste:

Enjoy!

(and make sure to give his photos thumbs up when you visit!)