The SmugMug Blog

This week is another potpourri of fixes to keep your sharing, browsing and storing options as smooth as possible.

First up: Our discussion forums, Digital Grin, got a big software update tonight. We hope it’s a totally painless experience for all of you, but if you see something that looks funky flag us down here in this thread.

Fixes and Repairs

• We’re sorry to all of you who were receiving errant comment notifications for photos that weren’t yours. With a little detective work, we pinned the problem down and are glad to say that it’s been fixed. If you still happen to get the odd email please ping our heroes, but we hope that we’ve quieted the disquiet.

• Socialites using the Get a Link and Be Social features can more easily cycle through the image picker. It’s better. Faster. And now you don’t have to laboriously click backwards if you’ve reached the end to go back to the beginning of the gallery. Enjoy the endless loop!

• The Popular Photos box was throwing in extra images from other users when you tried to buy multiple photos or view a slideshow of all the images. We’ve removed the extras and, hopefully, the confusion.

• We fixed the flipped ascending/descending Auto Sort feature that a few Smuggers were seeing in their gallery settings. Please check to be sure it works as expected.

• If you have large number of photos in a galleries and are using the Thumbnails viewing style, the single image picker works on all the thumbs, whether or not you’re scrolling down the page.

• Checking Hide Owner in your gallery settings should properly update the URL preview at the top, under “Essentials.”

We hope you have a great weekend!

Cheers,
The SmugMug Family

The thing is we have giant walls and we’re kinda bored by static scenes.

What if we want a giant print of fireworks over San Francisco, like this shot we love from Chris Michel, printed BIG!

Creative high-schooler and SmugMug intern Kevin, who dreams of Stanford, did what he does best:  mooch cameras from his friends.  Fire nine of them at the same instant and voila!  Pixels enough for 12-foot prints.

Here ’tis with two cameras firing simultaneously:

So who wants to be part of shooting an epic 12-foot print of Fireworks over San Francisco?  ‘Cus Kevin and I  would like to meet you there so we can mooch your 5D MKII, if you have one.

Got other ideas for an epic big action shot we can take as a group of 5D donors?

Packages v2.0

Pros can now toggle color correction on or off for each and every package that they create.

We’ve added a switch so that you can decide if you need or want this additional service. Remember that Bay Photo does charge for color adjustments, so keep an eye on the Base Cost of your package. You may choose to adjust your price tag because of this. Packages printing through EZ Prints need not worry about color correction costs, since it’s free.

When we debuted this feature in March, we automatically set color correction to “on” regardless of your gallery or portfolio settings. Because it wasn’t adjustable, we never charged you for this. Thanks for bearing with us!

This means that your existing packages will be grandfathered in to these previous settings until you edit them.

Find this new switch in your Control Panel > Pros tab, and click the Packages line. Finally, keep in mind that your package color corrections override whatever you’ve chosen in your portfolio or gallery settings. Packages help.

Refinements

• Our mobile site now honors your gallery’s right-click protection settings, so viewers will receive a warning message when they try to view the large single image. Try it out by adding a /m/ to the end of your site’s URL.

• Pros: We’ve added Google juice to your Events. Now you’ll see your display name in the page title instead of our default SmugMug description. Also, if  you’ve filled out that homepage meta description in your Control Panel > Settings tab,  you and your clients should see that info when you view the page source. And if you don’t, we’ll use the text you entered in your Bio box.

Bug Fix

• We fixed a glitch in the upload log, which is found in your Control Panel > Stats tab. When you view “all uploads,” it displays an error message when necessary and not an erroneous thumbnail.

All the best,

The SmugMug Family

Don’t sweat the small stuff, because we do it for you. Even with a few fixes in our pipes, we still get ‘em to you as quickly as we can.

• We fixed some crossed wires on our SMUGs page. If you’re interested in getting updates about your local user group meetings check it out here! You’ll always find a link to those info pages in our footer.

• Sharing a gallery link on Facebook will now enable you to flip through and choose a thumbnail image for all your friends to see.

• Some users may have noticed that the total views tallied in their Control Panel > Stats tab didn’t quite match up with the number shown in the stats themselves. We fixed that.

‘Til next time,

The SmugMug Family

Ship, ship, hooray!

Pros get a happy new addition to the coupon family: Free shipping! Nothing better to sweeten your deal than to let them get the goods without any additional costs. With this coupon, you cover your customer’s shipping fees. Note that these are valid for standard shipping methods only, which means Economy or 3-5 Business Day options for domestic US orders, and Airmail for international orders. (The full list.)

Your customer can still choose a faster method at checkout. We’ll just deduct the cost of ground shipping from that total so they only pay the difference.  Our coupon help pages reflect all this new info.

As an additional benefit, you can now optionally allow Amount Off, Percent Off, and Print Credit coupons to apply to shipping charges, too. Translation: Phat print credit means no credit card at checkout.

Blurb loves you.

Our partner, Blurb.com, is offering Smuggers 20% off  orders until May 31st. Gather your best pics show them off in any one of their beautiful, custom-printed photo books. To start, log in and hit the Buy > Create a Book option in any of your galleries. Design away and enter the code SMUGMUG10 at checkout. And while you’re creating your literary masterpiece, why not enter it into Photography Book Now? With a lineup of impressive prizes, it’s worth checking out.

Bug fixes:

• We had a short-lived bug that prevented you from manually arranging galleries at the subcategory level, but we fixed this. Sort away!

• You should be able to feature a gallery even if you’ve turned on Hide Owner.

• You’ll no longer have trouble getting the delete buttons to work when deleting photos from a Smart Gallery.

• Due to popular request, we’ve made the footer small if your gallery is protected, set to Hide Owner and you’ve already customized your site to use the mini footer.

• We also fixed a bug that threw a wrench into your photo ranking. Leaving a comment will tally your popularity as expected.

• If your gallery is hidden, passworded, or unlisted, we were hiding your related keywords even when you’re logged in as the site owner. Check again – They should work.

All the best,

The SmugMug Family

Kerry Ellis offered to ask the astronauts to take a high-res pic inside the International Space Station.  Ooooo!!  Kerry, it isn’t the winning idea for the staircase but I have a wall 140″ tall x 140″ high that I’ll mount that shot on if you can arrange it, and I’ll send you a very fine iPad.

Photo courtesy NASA:

A few days ago I was sure we would settle on award-winning underwater photographer (and editor of Wetpixel) Eric Cheng’s idea for an underwater pano.

Eric, I love the idea so much I may be willing to commission it, and we may not be able to pull off the iPad-winning idea, so stay tuned.

The idea that swept us away:

California Photographer Patrick Smith suggested getting to the top of the North Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge and shooting South, placing the south tower on the staircase far wall, and the spans on the two side walls, with views of SF through the spans.  Epic!  Chilling!  I’ll be sending your iPad right away.

The challenge:

How do you get permission?  Some have:

Golden Gate tower photoset on Flickr.

What’s in it for the people who manage the Golden Gate Bridge?  An epic public domain gigapixel image for historical purposes?  Make it available for public viewing somewhere important?

Anyone know how to get permission?

Thanks!

Chris MacAskill

It may be April 1st, but our efforts are no joke! We’re back this week bringing you a few new goodies amidst a garden of bug fixes.

SmugMug + iPad™

We’re huge Apple fans, and we hope that those of you who are also waiting for the iPad will be pleased to see a familiar face on their latest and greatest. Check out our brand-new iPad app, which will let you browse not only your own site, but any SmugMug site you please. Fire it up and be ready to show off gorgeous photos, videos and slideshows at any time.

You can download it for free from the App Store℠.

Collecting Photos

We made a small change to the collecting photos feature so that collecting (and Smart Gallery rules) follows our existing logic for linking and sharing photos. We’ve always allowed photos to be posted to external sites even if you had a site-wide or a gallery password, and if the gallery was unlisted. In the same way, a photo can now be collected from you if the galleries are protected. If you prefer to prevent this, you can:

1. Disable the ‘Allow Collection’ toggle in your Control Panel > Settings tab

2. Disable ‘External Linking’ in the gallery settings where the photo resides.

If you need to review the details of these features, check out the help pages: Collecting. Smart Galleries.

SEO: Use your Meta

We give you lots of great SEO tools so you can hike your Google juice. We made things a bit better by serving up your custom meta information into search results. This means that if you have a gallery description entered in your gallery settings, we’ll use that first. If not, then we use your site meta description, which you can set in your Control Panel’s Settings tab. If you have entered neither, then search results will display our default SmugMug phrase.

Stats ahoy!

We’ve flipped the switch on our new Stats and have bid a fond farewell to v1.0 . Visit your Control Panel and say hello to our formerly-beta stats because they’re here to stay. We really, really appreciate all the feedback you’ve sent us over the last few months. If you’re lost, we updated our help pages, so take a look. Growing never stops; Our ears are still perked if you have any suggestions or gripes.

Comments updated

Comments got a boost and some refinements, so we hope that you’ll notice the difference:

• Notification emails are back to containing the comment text you missed so much.
• If you have elected to receive notifications, you’ll see the messages now indicate if the comment was left on the collected version of the photo.
• The comment notifications will be emailed to the gallery’s owner, not the owner of the photo (if they are different.)
• Although we love to hear from you, we’ve removed our Heroes-in-the-Middle. If the commenter left their email address, hitting reply to the notification will now email the comment author, not our support team.

Bug fixes:

• When you share a collected photo to Facebook using Be Social, the gallery link will point to the display gallery, not the original location.
• We fixed a bug that was causing your Smart Galleries to break when you previewed your rules.
• Our Timeline got a smack. It now correctly toggles between “date taken” and “upload date.”
• Your Friends and Family box displays all of your additions without overflow or a scrollbar.
• Get a Link now gives the right link for blogs after you choose the thumbnail. It also allows you to grab a gallery link even if the gallery has external linking disabled.
• You can now customize away the “Stuck? Contact this photographer for help” link on the password prompt of a protected gallery.
• We fixed a customization bug that caused a few Buy buttons to hide. Your old customizations should work just fine once more.

All the best,

The SmugMug Family