Smart Galleries. January 27th, 2010.
A Collect Photo icon has been added to the Photobar:
Until today, your galleries could only contain actual photos and videos that you uploaded. Now they can also display virtual copies so that one photo can be displayed in many locations.
Collecting Photos
Simply navigate to interesting photos and click the new Collect Photo icon on the photobar to collect them. You’ll be prompted to choose a destination gallery. Collected photos are attributed to the owner with a link back to the original photo.
You’ll also find a Collect Photos option in the tools menu that lets you collect in bulk. And on the header in Lightbox view.
It even has an option to collect all current and future photos for a gallery. More about collecting.
Smart Settings
You can automagically display virtual copies in your galleries by choosing from a powerful set of rules. Did you and a SmugMug friend go to Disneyland? You can quickly set a rule to display virtual copies of her photos in a date range with the keyword Audrey, for example, in a gallery on your SmugMug site. Here’s how.
Wait. Who can collect MY photos?
You may be honored when a woman of obvious taste displays your shot in her “Exceptional Photos” gallery. But you may not want your daughter’s photos collected. Here’s how you set permissions:
- You can always collect your own photos, regardless of gallery settings.
Your adoring fans can collect your photos in their SmugMug galleries when all of these conditions are true:
- Your site has no site-wide password.
- Your gallery is public and not passworded.
- Your gallery has external linking enabled.
- You have not disabled Allow Collecting in your control panel Settings Tab.
External Linking and Allow Collecting are very closely related. External linking is a gallery setting that has always enabled a form of collecting: displaying your photos in blogs and forums. When someone embeds your photo in a forum, they may not give you attribution or a link back to your site. Collections do both automatically.
Allow Collecting is a site-wide setting that has no effect if external links are off. It’s one click to rule them all if you want absolutely no collecting (but you can still collect your own).
All virtual copies honor the settings of the original. If you apply watermarks, set prices, limit the largest size, etc., the virtual copies will inherit those settings.
If you collect a photo from your unlisted gallery, it can be displayed in your public galleries. But we won’t display a link to its origin. And visitors will not be able to collect it.
This is version 1.0
We watch comments in this blog and the discussion on Dgrin like hawks because we know you’ll find annoyances we need to correct. And feature additions. We know you’ll want to know where virtual copies of your photos appear. And we know you’ll want to arrange virtual copies in galleries like you can uploaded photos (we hate to ask for patience with this feature, but it will take some doing).
We hope you’ll share your experiences, good and bad as we tackle improvements.
All the best,
The SmugMug Family
(Which is busy collecting each other’s photos.)
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If a collected, right-click protected, photo is placed in a gallery that is not right-click protected it is possible to save a copy to the hard drive.
This would be a nice trick to collect photos also for other use…
I hope this will be fixed because I like the idea but until then I will disable collecting.
I mast see this active and enable
@Robert – please write our heroes http://smugmug.com/help/emailreal with a link to the gallery – collected photos obey the original gallery settings – including right-click protection. Thanks!
This is great news! Thanks for adding this. I’ve always made use of cross-promoting my best photos in different galleries, but I like how you can collect other people’s photos too. This should make smugmug a much busier community, with people linking up to each other’s photos.
This is something that I’ve been looking forward to for a long time! It’s going to be nice to not have duplicate images running around in various galleries – I also like how smart galleries can also have non dynamic content as well so we don’t have to rebuild galleries to take advantage of this.
I’m sure it’s going to save you guys a load of space as well.
Alleluia. Thanks. Will improve work flow. Sounds like collection behaves as an alias in the mac. Is it?
Will spend time review and test drive after project deadline. Can hardly wait. Many thanks.
Amy
Yay! This should propel @smugmug to the front of the line for being THE place to upload photos to!
HOOORAAAY!
This is great news … virtual or smart folders was the only reason I still had photos on Flickr. Now I can finally focus solely on SmugMug
BTW, is the API set up to handle the new smart folders???
Thanks…
First off…..thank you, thank you.
I would love to be able to arrange the virtual copies in the galleries. If there’s a way to do that, it would be fantastic. I like to be able to pick a few choice photos from my sessions to feature in a “portfolio slideshow” I’d like to shuffle the photos in that gallery so that it’s not all the shots from one session, then all the shots from the next session.
If this is not possible with smart galleries, then the copy and move multiple photos feature request will remain towards the top of my wish list.
Thanks!
Heather
Virtual Galleries are a great feature that is a long time coming but it is lacking one option that needs to be added to make it truly useful. It needs to have the option to set different pricing from the original gallery. That is the main reason why people have been wanting these virtual galleries is so we don’t have to copy the photos to different galleries to offer special prices to clients. Yes, I know about coupons but there are cases where coupons don’t work and specially prices galleries do work. I hope you can add that option to the virtual galleries
One other thing I just noticed is that you can’t really collect ALL photos to a smart/virtual gallery. You can only collect all photos from one gallery at a time. What if you want to collect all photos from all your galleries into one gallery?
Congratulations! This is a long-awaited feature and I’m very happy to see it fulfilled. Great job!
Questions:
(1) How do collected images affect statistics? I would really like to know how many times an image has been viewed regardless of its apparent location. It’s still the same picture, after all. Since you say collecting makes a “virtual copy” (an alias or symbolic link, I assume), will views of collected copies be counted as views of the image in its original gallery?
(2) If the original picture is deleted or replaced, will collected copies also be deleted or replaced? If they are really just aliases, I would think so.
(3) Is there any way to find out where an image has been collected? You say that the collected copies will credit the original, but it would be interesting for the image in the original gallery to have a notation referencing the various places it is collected.
(4) Are size restrictions, information restrictions (such as whether the “info” button is available) and watermarks from the original gallery retained in collected copies?
Awesome!!!! Great job! Now it’s tablet time.
Another question:
(5) Can comments be made on collected copies? If so, will they really be stored with the original image, and viewable in its original gallery?
I guess my age is showing again, as I do not see a use for this feature. If others are happy about it then so am I, I guess.
@Mark Coons – try making a selects gallery of your best marching band photos from 100 different events.
@ craig: yes and yes on comments
@craig, working on stats, stay tuned. Deleting a photo deletes collected copies too (we warn). We’ll be showing you we hope, where images are collected to. All original gallery restrictions are respected.
@paul – thanks for the feature request!
That is pretty awesome. What an easy way to throw together a slideshow of fun moments.
Thanks for the reply, Andy. I think this is a good feature. For a while now I have been thinking that SmugMug could benefit from some new features to enhance the social aspect of things. The communities are good but not enough. Collections are a step in the right direction.
I’d also like to have the ability to keep a list of “friends” and a page that shows the most recent new photos/galleries of your friends (a la Facebook’s news feed).
@Daniel Schless methods for rule creation or collecting images are coming soon, but retrieval of images with type and origin is already supported
I’ve been hoping for a feature like this for quite some time now. Thank you very much SmugMug!
I just created a new sub-category and I wish I could keep the photos within their own galleries instead of having all photos from multiple galleries in a single virtual gallery.
I know that currently I will have to create as many virtual gallery as original gallery for each year. Is there a way to create a virtual sub-category and select galleries to it?
Thanks,
Poggi
Very nice feature! Virtual galleries are finally a reality!
“Virtuality” becomes “Reality”….this is great news! Can hardly wait to explore the new goodness.
DONT LIKE IT! I will be disabling this feature. As a pro trying to sell prints… why bother if someone can take a copy? ALSO… as a child photographer… how do i know some pervert can’t get my clients photos? Please rethink this…..BAD IDEA!
Thank you! I’ve been wanting a feature like this for a long time. There is only one more thing I would like to be able to do with it, and that is to be able to set captions for originals and virtual copies independently. The reason I would like this feature is that I sometimes like to share photos from private galleries on public websites. For this purpose, I create a separate gallery for online sharing only. I like to remove names and other identifying details from the captions when I do this.
And yes, sorting, please.
For those who don’t understand this feature, here are a couple of examples of its value from my personal experience: (1) When I got married, I uploaded photos by photographer. I had a gallery of wedding photos from our hired photographer, another gallery of photos from my father-in-law, etc. But I didn’t want everyone who wanted to see photos to have to go through all of these galleries. So I created a master gallery with *all* the photos, but this required copying every single photo and moving it to the master gallery. I also wanted to create a “highlights” type of gallery that only had a small subset of the wedding photos for those who didn’t want to see every detail. Again, I had to create and move copies. This new feature would have made my task so much easier! (2) I like to keep galleries of events (like Christmas, birthdays, etc.) I also have galleries in which I put pictures of my new baby girl on a monthly basis. But what about the pictures of the baby which we took at Christmas? It would be nice to have her picture in both the Christmas gallery as well as her “Month 5″ gallery. This feature makes that easy, without either the hassle or potential confusion of making copies and moving them around.
I would suggest to Smugmug, however, that the feature be disabled by default for those who are security-conscious. Not everyone keeps up with the release notes and knows to jump in and disable it right away! Better to err on the side of caution when it comes to defaults, IMO.
Thanks, Smugmug!
First: thank you!
Second: awesome. I like Smugmug
Jill,
First off, if you read the other comments and have been around the forums, you will see that other photographers have been BEGGING for this feature. So just because you don’t understand it, doesn’t automatically make this a “BAD IDEA”.
Next, Virtual Galleries can be just as secure as normal galleries if you bothered to read the instructions in the post. Also, after spending 2 minutes on your site, I see that none of your galleries are password protected, you display 3X sizes, and you use a minimal watermark. I think virtual galleries are the least of your concerns.
Why don’t you step back from the ledge and start to learn a little about this new fangled thing called technology. Welcome to the 21st century.
hello
great I was waiting this to have my smugmug pages in spanich and Ingilsh … thank you for to keep developing our smumug site !!!
really a great thank to all your team … !!!
michel gabriel duffour
Lots of ideas here and in the dgrin forums for “Phase 2″ of this terrific function. Here’s one for more flexibility in the smart gallery settings rules — take a look (and comment/vote):
http://smugmug.uservoice.com/forums/17723-smugmug/suggestions/461483-smart-galleries-enhancement-add-more-selection-cr
Great! I had asked if this was possible some 2 years ago. I am glad this is finally available. Thank you.
How about virtual galleries? My partner and I both have smugmug accounts and our vacation photos are stored in a gallery in his account. I would like to have the gallery show up on my homepage page as well, but don’t want to load them twice.
I would like a thumbnail on my homepage to link to the gallery on his homepage.
That would be helpful!!
I’m glad that other people like it. I may want to use it at some point in the future. But…big BUT…a feature that allows people to collect someone else’s image should never be turned ON by default, especially BEFORE the owner is informed.
I think this is a nice idea, but the execution doesn’t work for anyone working as a professional. There are two big problems. First, it appears that you need to a have SM account to use collections. My clients may or may not have a SM account. Also, I prefer to keep unprocessed images private. I don’t want the world to see less than finished products. This is why I password galleries of unfinished work. In a perfect world, I would send anyone to my site, give them the password to their photos, and they could create a virtual gallery of their favorite images. With that information, I would go back to Lightroom and Photoshop, process the images they have selected, and put them up for purchase on SM. Based on what I am reading, this new feature doesn’t allow that. If I am wrong, please enlighten me.
Hi Don,
I don’t think you’re wrong but I do think what you’re asking is something we see as a different feature. We executed Smart Galleries and Collections as a way to show virtual copies of your own photos in various locations, which has been the #1 feature request among pros for awhile.
What you’re asking for we refer to as favorites, where anyone can come along and pick their favs to buy. We see the mechanism for Smart Galleries as the first thing to get done to execute the feature you want.
I hope this helps.
All the best,
Chris
Hi LilleG,
No worries, it isn’t on if you have external links off. If external links are on then people have been able to collect your photos anyway, but place them anywhere like on other websites, so if collections are not interesting then external links should be off.
I hope this helps.
All the best,
Chris
I’m interested in trying this new feature out to see if there would be any practical use.
Thanks for improving the site once again!
If only I didn’t have to un-check that “Remember Me” box hundreds of times every week. Now fixing THAT bug would be a huge improvement!
Mark – I have a gallery of landscapes and a gallery of storm pictures… sometimes a storm picture is a landscape also… this saves me from uploading it twice.
Thanks guys! I asked Don about this @ the 1st SMUG in Orange County. It’s really nice that these things are taken serious and get done. Once again, SmugMug FTW!!
Yayyyy! This is a great new feature and I’m sure you folks can tweak any issues that crop up as it moves along. I will find it very useful.
Wow – I can already see ways in which I can use this feature. Thanks!
I’ve been hoping for sometime that you would enable access to meta-data such as Lightroom star ratings. I would love to create several virtual “Highlight” galleries of my sports/event photos rated 4+ in LR. Right now, I have to search in LR and upload into a new gallery – takes up my time, and your space.
I wouldn’t think this should be very difficult to implement since you can access other meta data such as keywords, photo dates, etc.
Thanks for everything! You guys are doing a great job in my book!
Peter
Awesome! This is a wonderful feature – it will save my family an awful lot of duplicate uploading
[We share different subsets of same photos with difft people].
A couple of ideas for next steps:
1. Integration with Picasa, where virtual Albums and Folder structures could be uploaded without duplication.
2. An autosync/upload feature, similar to what Google has just done with PicasaWeb.
I know these are not simple to implement… but I figure “Never ask, never get”. Again – Many Thanks for the current Smart Galleries feature!
Always willing to try new technology to enhance the experience – several ways this will benefit us as a couple of non-pros who just like to share photos around. Appreciate the constructive comments from experienced users to understand the possibilities. Thank you!
For Jill and others who are worried about security:
One can argue that this should be off by default. But it is quite easy to turn this feature off for all galleries. Go to Control Panel – Site Wide Features and disable Allow Collecting. Done.
If you are worried about privacy and abuse, you can also set all your galleries to Private by default. And you can use SmugIslands (see http://smugmug.com/help/private-search-island ).
Hope this helps
Thank You! I have been wanting something like this.
Awesome feature – and hip hip hooray, no more fighting to upload replicates!! It feels well implemented too…and the “preview” is a great (and speedy) way to make sure the selection is the right one…
A few asks for the next revision:
[1] TWO level “rules” — I need to be able to specify multiple albums AND only 4/5 star pics from each. This doesn’t look possible at present…
[2] I’ll be looking forward to SORTING support, since the first collection I created features snow pictures from the last four years, but there’s no apparent way to display them all in reverse chron order…
And just ignore any of the folks who don’t get all the problems you are solving with this, all while letting the photo owners maintain control if need be…
Thanks again!
~Douglas
Great Feature. My suggestion/request would be to add to this as you did to the upload pics where the user is reminded that they are adding a duplicate.
I am very excited about this new very useful feature and I can’t wait to use it. You guys are awesome.
Thanks!
-Emilio
My hats off to you. You always seem to be one, but only one, step ahead of me. I was just thinking what a great feature this would be.
Great news, a very useful feature, thanks!
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Very useful and great!
Disapprove. Why should smugmug be helping anybody to “collect” my photographs? Enjoy them on my own pages, the ones I paid for.
Not out of context in somebody else’s. Smugmug is sailing too close to the wind – professionals won’t stand for it – and we should not have to insert all sorts of extra protections in our control panels to protect ourselves from copyright violations that smugmug is now facilitating.
My account will be closed immediately.
It’s apparent that some of these so-called professional can’t read.
Please read this condition again:
“Your gallery has external linking enabled.”
or inverted
“If you don’t have external linking turned on, no one can collect your pictures.”
So, if you’re a “professional” which doesn’t like the collection idea, I put $10 on you not having external linking enabled either. Thus, problem solved, and move along..
At first i wasn’t sure about this feature but i’m quickly starting to like it. Very useful feature if your two individuals that shoot events (i.e. weddings, etc) together and put your own fav shot selections on your smugmug gallery. With this you can now add virtual copy of the other person’s fav shots to your gallery.
What i would say, is that there should be a bit more control (yes, i’m a control freak
) in regards to who can collect photos, rather than it being a site-wide setting only. Control options for this feature i’d like to see:
- site-wide setting options to be: ‘Disabled’ (default), ‘Enabled’, ‘Smugmug Friends Only’;
- regardless of whether your gallery is public and not passworded, ‘Allow Collecting’ should be settable per gallery. The options would be: ‘Disabled’ (default, unless side-wide setting is set to ‘Enabled’ or ‘Smugmug Friends Only’), ‘Public’ (anyone can collect), ‘Smugmug Friends Only’. Whichever option you select it should of course override site-wide setting.
Hope the above made sense,
cheers.
@Okwaeze: What you mean is the following, right?
Site: Disabled (default), Enabled or Smugmug Friends
Gallery: Site Default (default), Enabled, Disabled, Smugmug Friends
@Baffled: yes
Brilliant. I’ve been wanting this for ages!
Using this new feature I can quickly add pictures to my “favourites” gallery and show it as slideshow on my frontpage.
Great !
This is definitely a nice feature! Thanks a lot!
In the meantime I keep waiting for multilanguage (italian, please!).
Sorry for insisting but this missing feature will make my renewal difficult since I can hardly use smugmug for my work, so I guess my comment could be in your interest… not that my subscription should be so important, but I guess that other people from non-english speaking countries could be in my situation.
AHA..just last night I lay awake thinking of multi language sites..and now find that I have found similar minds…bliss.
The idea of a virtual gallery is great, because I have pictures that could be themed under several subjects and now I will be able to place in a number of subjects.
Re links Ive enabled mine because I think of my smugmug space as a virtual Art Gallery, and one day someone will walk in, undestand my work and..commision some work.
Thanks Smugmug..goodness knows..I did winge when I started..and your patience has enabled me to go further than I ever imagined..
Awww…a very nice addition! thanks smugly people.
Terrific – I was waiting for this feature !
While sounding good to many wanting retail features of social networking, I hope a priority for thorough protection of Professional photographers workproduct and copyright comes before all else. The great folks at SmugMug are responsible for fully debugging all aspects that could negatively effect Professionals IMHO. We Professionals need that assurance from SmugMug employees please; it should not be up to us to debug this level of SumgMug account.
Also perhaps anyone having a Professional account would automatically have these new features locked out by default and the only way to enable them ad hoc requires a deliberate two step process.
Jim
Ok Im new to the smugmug world and learning…Im not completely understanding this feature of Smart Galleries yet and the ability to “collect” others photos. Can someone please shed some light on this for me. I see everyone loves it and want to be a part of the “in crowd” as well. Thank You!!!
gfritzee
I guess this is a good idea, it wasn’t a big deal for me to just upload the same image more than once if I wanted it in separate galleries. This is probably better for SM so they are using less storage space.
The problem I see is as a sports shooter, if you allow “others” to capture your images, I get the feeling that your clients will now just open their own SM account to collect your images and no longer purchase them. More and more people are printing less and just want the digital copies for web showing….this has now made it easy for them to just collect images of themselfs for free (other than paying for their own SM account).
Personally I’m keeping mine turned off.
Thanks for the update! This (plus collecting) is one of the biggest things I’ve found lacking in SmugMug — this should be a huge improvement to the site. Thanks for keeping the features coming.
Thanks for the update. I was feeling guilty uploading pics twice sometimes and wasting all that disk space you have. This makes a lot of sense. Don’t let the downers get to you; people have a hard time with change, even when it is good.
Love the upgrade…but…I want it all.
I would love even more the ability to have a site-wide password (for most of my galleries/photos) and also have galleries that are available to be collected, mapped, linked, and viewed, by the public without a password. The best of both worlds.
OK. I just don’t get it.
LOVELY!!! This is a great added feature. Keep up the great work!
love it!!!!
Maybe I’m not understanding this new feature, but here’s my two cents: Regarding the new “collectable” feature, I really wish you had left the default to “OFF”. I have had several photos of mine stolen and used on internet ads without my permission (not from SM), so I am very careful about allowing links. I have been testing this new feature and find these problems:
1. I have turned off “collectable”. Then in individual galleries, I turned off “external links.”
2. When I go to “visitors’ view”, I can still click on share, and send an e-mail with the photo! So even though someone cannot “collect” my photo or copy a link, they can still steal it by simply e-mailing it to themselves.
3. If you click on “be social”, you can link it to a Twitter account. I don’t want ANY links.
4. If I go to “share”, even though “external links” is turned off, people can still click on “feed links” and copy them.
5. If I look at a photo, then click on the largest size, if I right-click it says it is copy-protected, as it should, but now after clicking “OK”, it immediately changes to the regular menu (copy link, save as, etc.) It never did that before. It just gave the copyright notice.
THIS IS ALL WHEN IN “VISITORS VIEW”.
I know lots of people are happy about this feature, but I am not one of them. If, at least, it was turned OFF by default, it wouldn’t be so bad, but now everyone has to go through all of their galleries and reconfigure everything.
Sorry to be negative, but it seems like you’re making things easier for visitors, but more difficult for the site owners. For example, it would be nice to be able to order prints for yourself without having to turn sharing back on in order to do it, and then having to turn it back off again. I would love to be able to go into my account and just order my own prints without having to reconfigure my settings every time. (I have printable turned off.)
Thanks.
I have to agree with Jill and Westinghouse. This feature makes our photos MORE susceptible to people stealing out photos.
Yes, we CAN set our galleries to not allow external links, BUT if you have been on SM very long you will notice certain features don’t stay coded or set the way you want. If you have a large amount of galleries, it just makes it more difficult to double check ALL the settings.
Perhaps I’m missing something in all the pro-collect propaganda, but all we had to do before is just make a copy from the original gallery, and move it to a target gallery. So, this feature seems redundant.
As a pro-photog, I’m not sure why we would want other photogs photos on our site. Sometimes I post some of my freelancers photos, but I have collected these images by permission, and uploaded with a photo credit. So, as mentioned…redundant.
Chris MacAskill
“We executed Smart Galleries and Collections as a way to show virtual copies of your own photos in various locations, which has been the #1 feature request among pros for awhile.”
With all due respect, I’m wondering why a true professional (100% of your income is from photography that care about their copyright) would allow others to control where their work is displayed. I find it hard to believe this is the #1 requested feature by professionals. I’m with Don, Chris Westinghouse, Jim, and Alan on this. I think a heads up to pro account users prior to enabling this feature would have been appropriate. How about improving SEO? On google, SM comes up at #11 for me and I caption and keyword all my photos since joining just over two years ago.
I see that the feedback is good for your new feature and people seem to enjoy it, but I’m not buying in that this was the #1 pro feature request. Maybe I’m missing something here.
Thanks for the feature! I was just about to reupload photos for a best-of gallery, but now I can just click and choose.
This is really nice, easy and fast, too. What would be really great would be to add capability to ‘collect gallery’. For example, I have some subcategories that are organized by year, containing miscellaneous galleries. I could then go into each year subcategory and collect all nature-related galleries into a nature-specific sub category.
This is going to completely revolutionize the way I organize my site!
THANK YOU!!!
Ira
Many thanks! This is really nice feature.
Although this is a nice feature, I agree that this should be an “opt in” not an “opt out” feature… at least at the pro level. Granted my watermark and right click settings would follow the photo as it is now, but you have made the decision for me that I would want to use the new feature. In the time that it takes for someone to get around to reading about this new feature, quite a few images could have been used by others for whatever purpose they wished. I would have had no control over the use. The shared photo would have my watermark which may be construed as my supporting the usage, whatever that may be, I would have no control over content on the page the images were used on.
A couple of points you should have considered prior to publishing this feature.
1. If someone wants to use my photos they must first get written permission. ALL works of intellectual property are copyrighted at inception by their creator and permission is required to use them unless they are released under the Creative Commons licensing, but SmugMug’s lawyers and principals should already know that. Allowing someone other than the owner, by default, to copy one’s creative works is violating the owners copyright.
2. If it has to do with security of a file it is BAD IT POLICY to turn the security feature off from the get go. Would you handle your financial information this way? Isn’t SmugMug legally responsible for the security of my images barring unauthorized access?
Prior to paying for my account I read the “terms of use” and anything I could find on your site about how to lock down the images so they couldn’t be downloaded or used elsewhere. I was satisfied at that point that SmugMug was concerned about my copyright. But by automatically turning on this feature you have shaken that faith.
I urge SmugMug to take our rights more seriously in the future and protect out property just as stringently as they protect their own. I am only glad that I decided to red the email today. Otherwise there is no telling how long the security issue would have been unnoticed, and I am only one of many.
Thank-you for reading this.
I am just absolutely loving this feature! It makes thing so much easier! Thanks so much for adding this! I LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE THIS!!!!
Absolutely this (and any other feature that fundamentally changes availablilty-to-others) should be an OPT-IN (not an opt-out) feature.
I am surprised (and appalled) that SM would implement a new feature like this with non-conservative settings.
BTW, there’s a lot of feedback from smugmuggers here: what about some feedback on these issues (in this blog) from SM staff??
Has the SmugMug API been updated to handle this case? I would love the ability to have my upload tool upload the image once and put it in multiple galleries.
I have often wished for this feature in Smugmug, et voila: now it’s there…
Thanks guys!
THANKS!!! You guys are the best. I love how you keep adding new features all of the time. Keep up the great work!
This is the one feature I’ve actually emailed about over the years I’ve had my smugmug account. So very glad to finally see it.
I’d love to see the “favorites” set up (as described above), ’cause it would allow visitors at my site to put together their own galleries. I take lots of pictures of friends/family, and that feature would allow them to create custom galleries at my site that they could use with password protected galleries, and then also password protect that gallery (though I, as owner should access to everything).
I’m pretty perplexed by how pro photographers think that this feature will be abused. Right now, anyone who views your pictures can link to them (if you have external links turned on), and that’s true for password protected albums. In addition, they can just download the picture, and then upload it again.
Collections can only be made by smugmug users, so compared to either of those options, you actually have more protection (at the least, only a subset of viewers can abuse the system).
agree with Guy Manning. This feature should be off by default.
re the impolite comment above, just because You don’t understand the dangers doesn’t make it a good idea, and just because it’s oh goody a new feature doesn’t necessarily make it more than creeping featurism. you get with the 21st century and start exercising some discretion beyond gee whiz, I can do this, therefore I should.
In general, I like the “idea” of the feature, but I think the implementation still has some weaknesses. I saw above that someone said they were able to get to the full menu for saving the photo while in Visitor view. This problem does not present itself if you logout and then view the gallery, which is good.
However, if the original gallery was password protected and did allow those with the password to “save” the photo, this permission is passed along to that photo in the new gallery. I would argue that this is not necessarily the behavior I would want to see. I should be able to allow users with the password to the original gallery to continue to be able to save the photo (if that’s what I want) and block those viewers from saving the photo if they are seeing it in a gallery displaying the collected photo.
So, for me, any time those circumstances arise, I have to make a copy of the photo the old way.
Also, I do see the weakness of allowing anyone to start collecting photos of others without that being obvious to the gallery owner that this is occurring.
Pro: Great Feature…! I really do like the idea. Love new toys!
Con: Sorry guys but I have to agree that “off by default” would have been the wiser approach. This would provide ALL SmugMug Clients with the opportunity to experiment and allow for some damage control while digesting the new option and looking for possible shortfalls… which we all know exists in technology. Should be a feature that we “select”, if desired and should not have been thrown out there and say “OK, Here… we made it.. now see if you can break it.” I dealt with those issues for well over a decade when digital imaging was introduced in a large agency I worked for. It just made our work that much more difficult and resultingly, made electronic storage a very “hard sell” throughout the agency for years to come.
Only saying “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” and ensures your clients confidence in your decision making policies. Take it from an old lady with 30 years of business office experience. ; ]
I created a new gallery for images I specifically wanted to make available for sale. It turns out I needed to make those images available for sale in my “regular” gallery as well. That’s unfortunate.
Nicely Done!
At first I thought that having my images collectable and viewable on other’s SM sites was not ideal, but have kind of rethought that now. Even if the collecter is a ‘client’ that wants to just have the electronic copies for free instead of paying for them, the will only have (hopefully) watermarked images visible on their site, which will be atributed to you there too, remember. Name recognition is paramount to success, and this could be looked at as a great way to get your name out there too.
SmugMug team: What would be a nice addition to this would be to make it possible for a pro to allow collecting of images even from a non-public gallery that the photographer has shared with a client or clients (disabled by default in that context of course), but in that instance, include the attribution and a link back to the photographer’s home page instead of the protected gallery. That way, people that like what they see anywhere they find it can still get to the photographer’s public galleries with a single click — even the cheapest of cheapskates may share their SM site URL with many friends that are willing to pay for the images!
This feature is something I have been looking for a long time, BUT.
I always arrange my photos by date, and any attempt at arranging a gallery with collected virtual copies gives (and actual photos mixed in) gives me messages like this:
“This gallery contains virtual copies that cannot be arranged.”
I won’t go into the details but as much as I want to, I can’t use the virtual copies until they can be treated just like a regular photo file.
Thanks.
This is nice …
BUT…
where is the BIGGER BUY BUTTON?
I thought that the BUY BUTTON was going to be a priority to help us SELL MORE and make more money for Smugmug too!
Thank you for your attention,
Sincerely,
John Michael
I am so excited about this! Every week I do a family journal and I use a picture from that months gallery. It was always a pain to pick a pictures, copy it, then export it to the journal gallery. This is simply perfect. You guys just keep getting better and better! Luv you guys!
Wow, the comments are amazing, keep them coming – pro and con we love it all. Thanks everyone. If you have a specific question and we didn’t answer it here in the comments, please do write our help desk http://smugmug.com/help/emailreal and our heroes are standing by.
All the best,
Andy
@Roland – we had to make the smart galleries obey their original galleries settings – otherwise confusion would reign!
@Bitzy – if you have ext links off then you’re off by default. Or you an use the control panel button for ‘don’t allow collecting’ Thanks!
@Justin – yes, working on the API now, stay tuned on the API forum on Dgrin
@Philip and others that wanted this off by default – thanks for your passionate feedback. We felt it would be not found if off by default. And since external links control this feature, if you are security conscious you probably have those off. But even still, there’s a one button control panel shutoff so that you can then decide later if you want to try it. Thanks!
@Guy Manning – I expect you have external links off, password galleries and more, if you are as security minded as you say – but please do remember the CP ‘off’ button for this feature, thanks.
@Douglas – we’ve massively improved SEO in the past months. Write me, attn: Andy at our help desk about it and I’ll help. http://smugmug.com/help/emailreal
@Glenn – still stumped? Write our heroes http://smugmug.com/help/emailreal thanks!
@Chris Westinghouse – we’re so sorry! It’s a 2-second button click to turn off the feature sitewide on your account. I hope you’ll stay.
@PeterK and others with feature requests – thanks – we’re reading them all and taking note!
just finished collecting pictures from several galleries to another gallery. which i thought was so great just to find out you can’t sort them once they are in a different gallery. collecting does me no good if i can’t put them in the order i want. maybe i missed something?
Nice feature. Just one thing I noted.
I made a new gallery and collected some photos from other galleries. I then used the ‘Share’ function to publish the gallery to facebook but unfortunately it published the wrong gallery. It seems to be the gallery of one of the photos contained in the collected gallery.
Thank you so much! I have two adopted babies and the birthmothers want pictures! Having to sort out the pictures between the two kids and save multiple copies for the times the kids are together was becoming painful.
to tell the truth my question may be redundant; I did not read all your 100 replies, however:
Let’s say I clicked the collect button, what I would like to happen is that when prompted for “which gallery would you like to save this picture to?” that Smugmug will give opportunities to CREATE empty galleriesand subs right then and there.
Is that possible?
How do I monitor your answer? Do I receive email, as well as finding the info in this massive set of replies?
I love what you’re doing with Smugmug, have used it for years.
Thanks
Gerhard
I LOVE that you guys implemented this! I just can’t use it because I can’t arrange collected photos, nor can I arrange photos that appear in smart galleries via rules. My galleries aren’t auto sorted and when a collected photo goes into a gallery it will appear in very odd and random places…like page 4 of 12 pages. Worse case they should go at the end of a gallery but ideally we should be able to arrange these photos ourselves.
Works well but not with my chosen browser, Opera, refuses to show Gallrys to copy to.
I beseech thee, oh great conjurers, allow us the honour of arranging photos in Virtual Galleries. Subject us no more to your magical arrangements. Dazzle us instead with your brilliance. And allow us the pleasure of seeing all the places on smugmug where an original photo is collected. A neat trick would also be to allow us to make a real copy of a “collected” (i.e. virtual) photo.
On the forum there are three feature requests for sorting (i.e. these things should have been part of the original Smart Gallery delivery!) . Vote at the one with the highest votes yet:
VOTE HERE:
http://smugmug.uservoice.com/forums/17723-smugmug/suggestions/482620-allow-sorting-of-collect-photos-pictures?ref=title
Sorry, I correct myself: This arrange Feature Request has the highest votes yet:
http://smugmug.uservoice.com/forums/17723-smugmug/suggestions/471379-let-us-arrange-images-in-virtual-galleries?ref=title
Smug looks really cool. I will have to give it a try and load some of my Disney World photos.
“I beseech thee, oh great conjurers, allow us the honour of arranging photos in Virtual Galleries. Subject us no more to your magical arrangements. Dazzle us instead with your brilliance.”
If I cannot arrange the Virtual Photos, Please tell me how I can un-do the collection of virtual photos – As the system seem to work at this moment – I find it useless.
Thanks…jbb
I happened to know Smugmug through my coworkers. The site looks very cool, that’s why I really want to try it and load some of my photos
I attended the Downey Wedding March 6th, and I received this web address with the password cm to view the pictures. It tells me the password is not right. I would love to view the pictures of the Downey Wedding. Thank you, AD
hi It’s first time to share this!
I’m girl and I’d like to know more so if you could learn me
or at least just tell me how to know others….
So…if I have an old picasa gallery that I would like to display in smugmug so that all of my albums are in the same place, how do I do that?
and I am a man 52 years old if you want please write me some thing please
SMUGMUG ROCKS!! Love this new collections metaphor!! Keep up the good work!!
So…if I have an old picasa gallery that I would like to display in smugmug so that all of my albums are in the same place, how do I do that?
I like smugmug.com very mach
So…if I have an old picasa gallery that I would like to display in smugmug so that all of my albums are in the same place, how do I do that?
I hired Paige to take pictures at my fathers 60th Birthday Party, and she was wonderful. I have to say her and her husband were so helpful. I spoke to about 4 different people and when I spoke to Paige I knew she was the one I wanted. Thank you for everything Paige.
very nice ,Ihad mor photos with SmugMug but I cant find it
great effort on smugmugs part. Thanks!
However the default option should be off. It’s just too much effort and time to go back in and redo the default for those who have so many galleries.
And Anyone who thinks their photo won’t be stolen will have a big surprise some day.
Over years of experience I have found that new isn’t always better. Flickr is such a jumbled mess because of this feature, I find that place to be out of control with phony comments, too much garbage on each page, and not professional at all. I stop by there once a year to check my old photos, which I left long ago. Just too much networking overkill if you ask me, and too many opportunist clubs that flatter routinely for their own promotion, eventually a stroking production that gets old.
I hope we arent heading that direction. This is JMO, not meant to be rude, but I feel I am beyond all that, and do not want my photos taken without my permission, or at least give us a stat feature where we can see where they are linked to. Thnx for all your work smuggies, I love this place.
Question, if I
I had a nice galery in smugmug but I cant find it now it name may be ESMOIEL.MALEK Galery
Sorry forgot the question. If I disable public will I then not be able to post my link elsewhere or will it mess up the few smugmug communities i belong to?Thnx
Hello ,
How is your day?
Like you know,I am living in the refugee camp here in West Africa.In
this camp,its just like one staying in the prison and I hope by God’s
grace,I will come out here soon.I don’t have any relatives now whom I
can go to as all my relatives ran away in the middle of the war.The
only person I have now is Rev.Peter Vim who is the pastor of ( Our
Lords Chosen Church ) here in the camp,he has been very nice to me
since I came here but I am not living with him rather I live in the
female’s hostel because the camp has two hostels one for men the other
for women.
As a refugee here,I don’t have any right or privilege to anything be
it money or whatever because it is against the law of this country.I
want to go back to my studies because i only attended my first year
before the tragic incident that led to the death of my parents took
place.Please listen to this,I have my late father’s statement of
account and death certificate here with me which I will send to you
later,because when he was alive he deposited some amount of money in a
leading bank in Scotland, which he used my name as the next of kin,the
amount is $7.5M(Seven Million five Hundred Thousand Dollars).So I will
like you to help me transfer this money to your account and from it
you can send some money for me to get my traveling documents and air
ticket to come over to meet with you.
I kept this secret to people in the camp here the only person that
knows about it is the Reverend because he is like a father to me.So in
the light of above i will like you to keep it to yourself and don’t
tell it to anyone for i am afraid of loosing my life and the money if
people gets to know about it.Sir,I will like you to send me all the
under-mentioned particulars,for me to
know you more,and know whom I am dealing with.Below here is what I need from
you so that I can send to you the bank information:
(1) Full name
(2) country of residence & city
(3) Occupation & position in the company
(4) phone & Fax numbers
(5) House & Office addresses.
Remember,I am giving you all this information due to the trust I
reposed in you..I love you because you are an honest and understanding
person.You are truthful,full of vision and a hardworking person.Thanks
for your sweet regards for me.You are a nice person,I love to meet you
very soon.Have a nice day and think about me.
Awaiting to hear from you soonest.
Yours Forever in love.
Your sweetheart lisa Diop
SPAM SPAM SPAM
Hi,
I just finished creating my smart gallery of my best shots. I have two questions..
Is the sorting function available yet? if not when?
also, I’d like to know if there will be statistical data collected with these virtual photos.
Thank You
Damiano
I want to know very well up now
Not having read these forums for a while – or being on SmugMug at all, in fact – I was truly astounded to read here that ‘Allow Collecting’ was turned on by default when introduced.
No one from SmugMug wrote to me to mention this and I don’t drop by SmugMug for kicks when I have no other reading matter. I only come to the site to upload photos (which, until now, I had always felt were secure). I no longer have that feeling.
What were you people thinking?
If I wanted anyone to be able to collect my photos, I would not be on SmugMug in the first place.
The default for this option should definitely be OFF!
@Lucian ??? Collecting is just an easy form of linking. If you have external linking disabled then collecting is off by default. If you have external linking enabled then people could effectively collect your photos previously anyway. Having collecting follow external linking makes for consistency?
I use gallery templates for creating new galleries – I take a lot of sports photos for an all girls school and these galleries default to a template with lots of protection (no public, no linking, password protected) by default. Collecting will automatically follow these rules and will not be enabled for anyone who I have given access to these galleries. Using customized sets of gallery templates avoids the need to set all those parameters each time a new gallery is created.
Hi, Gary,
I must say it would have been nice if you’d provided a link to who you are rather than my having to google the information, but after googling I did find a link to your site. Frankly, I’d say it would have been just common courtesy to provide one.
Additionally, I’m curious about your multiple question marks after my name.
What are they about ?????
In any case, I stand by what I wrote above and, going through the comments, I see that many others agree:
The default setting for ‘collecting’ should be ‘off’ The external links setting should also be ‘off’. And SmugMug should have informed me by email they were planning to implement this unasked-for, unwanted ‘feature’.
I also use gallery templates for many of my galleries with the same protections you mention plus their being unlisted and still feel it’s outrageous for SmugMug to have set collecting ‘on’ as a default.
If I want someone else to be able to link to my photos, I’ll send him/her a link. If I want him/her to have the photos, I’ll send the photos.
Hi Rach,
My recollection is that I provided my hotmail address as typed above. I tried to get in by making it all caps except the password, but I didn’t get in.
Which galleries tab do I look for. I tried several….
Looking fwd to receiving your email. Grace & Peace, Bill
Excellent post!! Very informative… Looking for more posts like this!! Do you have twitter or an RSS feed?
Anyway thank you for this blog.
What a great photograph!
Is there a way to truly “export” from one SM account to another, like from ProShowWeb to SM? No attribution or linkback or deleting if collected.
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