The SmugMug Blog

We made Proof Delay a heck of a lot smarter.

In the old days, your clients would sometimes order prints cropped a certain way, and when you replaced it with an edited photo of a different shape it wouldn’t always work out so well. Heroes to the rescue and everything, but, yanno.

And if you replaced the image with something that was shaped the same, there wasn’t a way to remember exactly how they’d had it cropped in the first place.

We’ve fixed all that.

How it works.

Pros, the very next time you get a cropped order held for Proof Delay, don’t fret. We’ll now do the following:

1) Show you the exact same crop your client used if you replace the photo with an edited version of the same shape and size.

2) Show you a thumbnail of the original image with the crop when you replace the photo with one that’s a different shape and size.

3) Display the thumbnail with the original image and crop when you go in and try to adjust the crop on a replaced image of a different size.

We hope this makes your life a whole lot easier and that your customers don’t notice a thing. Except, of course, how much they love their prints and what a great photographer you are.

The Magic of Proof Delay

Remember that using this simple feature in all of your for-sale galleries can help you upload your proofs to your gallery ASAP, and let you only edit the photos that get bought. Plus, if there are any problems with the order, our Support Heroes have a gazillion times’ higher chance of being able to cancel, fix, or correct the problem before your customer even notices.

We can’t stress enough just how cool the Proof Delay feature really is. It saves you time AND helps you give your clients a better product. And it comes baked right in to each and every SmugMug Pro account.

Questions? Suggestions? Epic tales of how Proof Delay saved your bumme? We’d love to hear it all, so talk to us!

Bonus Pro tips for you:

• Use Two Bright Lights to get published fast
• How to make hands-free wedding albums in two weeks or less
• Customizing help with our in-house customization expert
• Know what your customers see before you make the sale

We let off a little pre-Labor Day steam in the form of these miscellaneous bug fixes:

• Photos weren’t always sticking when they were arranged using the Drag to Arrange or the Arrange photos checkbox. They do now.

• Pros working in IE9 should be able to change the color correction or print lab in their custom pricing screens… and have it stick.

• We tightened up the email address field on the signup page so peeps can’t enter spaces when they type their address.

• Moving multiple galleries into a Subcategory using the “Many Galleries” option should stick as expected.

• If you delete a gallery, we’ll redirect visitors who go to the old link to the closest Subcategory or Category.

• You can no longer accidentally rename a custom Category to one that already exists.

Here’s a few various things we’ve released this week:

• The link to the gallery in our Simple uploader was linking you to your SmugMug domain, not your custom domain if you had one. It should respect your custom domain now.

• The printmarking, watermarking and largest size settings weren’t always sticking when applied in your gallery settings so we fixed that.

• Our SmugShot app now reports the proper EXIF info (including geotag coordinates!) in the shots you upload through it.

• Now when you click the ‘Like’ Quick Share button under a video, we’ll post a small embedded version of it to your wall, not just a link.

This week we’ve released:

• Homepage goodness. If you’ve pointed your homepage slideshow box to an empty gallery, we won’t mysteriously log you out. (But you should still go fill it with photos so people can see what you’re up to!)

• Pricing safeguards. We installed a safety catch for Pros who have priced Printmarked digital downloads but haven’t set a Printmark in their gallery settings. In that case, we won’t show the Printmarked options when your customers open the shopping cart. More info about our newest digital download options.

• Editing ease. Firefox 5 Smuggers will see that Picnik loads cleanly from the photo tools menu. Don’t forget to check out this cool in-gallery feature any time you want to tweak or add text to your photos.

Several important bug fixes went out tonight on a wide variety of features:

• We fixed a bug in the card creator that prevented some zoomed or repositioned photos from staying where you dragged them. We were getting some complaints of cards with strange black gaps. Try it now!

• Power and Pro Smuggers with custom domains will notice that Gallery Downloads stay put in the customer’s shopping cart.

• Pros: We also properly hold back hidden images from the zip file when your fans buy All Digital Downloads.

• We strengthened the Facebook login so that it listens to your Facebook permissions and doesn’t try to automatically log you in to SmugMug when it shouldn’t.

• We display the number of times your Quick Share Tweet button was hit and your photo shared. You’ll see it under your photos in your galleries where Quick Sharing is enabled.

Enjoy!

NiceNames for Sharegroups

We made Sharegroups NiceName-friendly. This means that instead of random gibberish, you can pick the URL for any Sharegroup you share. Make sharing your favorite galleries so simple, you can do it over the phone!

Keep in mind that if you don’t want to reveal your SmugMug nickname this way, you should skip this option. Read more about Sharegroups.

Perfecting Package Permissions

Pros have been telling us that they weren’t thrilled with a recent change to how Packages play along with gallery privacy settings. So, we listened! You’ll now see a third button whenever you create or edit a package, under the “Limit the galleries” section:

In the past, packages set for All Galleries were really only visible to your clients if they were browsing and picking a package from a public gallery. So if they were viewing photos in a passworded gallery, they would have only seen packages that you created specifically for that gallery. Now we’ve clarified this with the new All Public Galleries button.

In short, you can choose individual galleries for a package, All Public Galleries (public and non-passworded) and All Galleries on your site (which include unlisted and passworded galleries).

As always, you can just pick specific galleries for your package, but we hope the additional button and the clearer wording will help you sell more Packages to more happy customers.

Coda of Bug Fixes

• While we were mucking with the wires, we also fixed a bug that prevented Packages from loading when they were picked from video galleries. Start selling bunches now.

• We added an additional quick link that lets you quickly view your site’s stats for the past month. Find it on the main Stats page, at the top. See all about Stats here.

More Magic to Backprinting

We added three more options to your custom Pro backprinting: Year taken (SMUGYEARTAKEN), month taken (SMUGMONTHTAKEN) and day taken (SMUGDAYTAKEN).

To use them, just open up your Control Panel and look for the Backprinting link under the Pros tab. Add the code words there  to apply them to all prints ordered from your site. Or, apply them to specific galleries in the “Backprinting” option in your Gallery Settings.

Examples

Write this: SMUGYEARTAKEN SMUGMONTHTAKEN SMUGDAYTAKEN

• Get this with EZ Prints: 2011_08_07
• And this with Bay Photo: 2011 08 07

Remember that Pros have tons of choices for what gets printed on the back of their prints. See all the tasty options here, or you can specify your own custom text.

Bug Fixes

• Your slideshows won’t trip over images with unusual characters in their filenames.

• We fixed a Pro bug that was preventing Sole Proprietors and LLC-Disregarded Entities from successfully filing their W-9 form with an EIN. (Confused about reporting?)

• Your suitably big, clean, unwatermarked original photos will get sent to Animoto and ProShow Web so they can build your sumptuous slideshows. Give them a try and spice up your presentations!

• When you delete a photo, we’ll drop you back at the photo that comes right after it and not at the beginning of the gallery.

A few notable bug fixes just went out:

• Pros can now disable Printmarks for orders held in Proof Delay. Doing so applies to just that image in that order and won’t affect the gallery settings, or for any other order that includes that photo.

• Cropping thumbnails will advance you to the next image in the gallery, rather than just staying on the same photo.

• We fixed a video processing bug so that movies with high detail and motion will remain as crystal-clear as they were before.

• Folks editing their photos in Picnik will see the saved files keep the original filenames, instead of getting renamed.

• A few people noticed that Album Download orders placed from galleries made up of Collected photos were acting funny. They will now display the correct pricing in the shopping cart and the zip file should download without a hitch.

We made a few important fixes to our videos:

• Portrait-oriented videos stay upright and don’t get squashed.

• Full HD videos show the “Save Movie” option in the flyout bar (just like all the other available sizes).

• Anamorphic videos wont be squished out of their original shape when played.

• Metadata like camera type is now reported correctly, along with video length and dimensions.

Two improvements in video sharing:

• Our Get a Link feature for video embeds will use our updated API to deliver smooth, buttery videos on iDevices.

• You can just copy the URL of your video from the gallery and drop it into your blog. We’ll automatically embed the best-sized video for a proper fit.

And a few other fixes:

• Smart Galleries will better update content when you upload new photos that match your Rules.

• Some homepage slideshows were presenting thumbnails of images, but they’ll display the normal-sized pics now.

• You can get short smu.gs link for your gallery right from your Share or Owner Share button. If you use our dedicated link shortener, we now give smu.gs links for SmugMug and Dgrin domains and bit.ly links for everything else.

• If you don’t have any Printmarks set up and toggle it to ‘Yes’ at the gallery level, we’ll now prompt you to create one instead of displaying an empty space.

• You may also notice that when you change a gallery’s name or NiceName in the gallery settings, you’ll see the URL preview update more quickly than before.

A few little things were just released:

• The Buy > All Digital Downloads box won’t act funny if you’d selected a Collected photo.

• Our Simple (Java) uploader reports the real number of files that you actually uploaded.

• The SmugVault JPG previews show the correct orientation of your RAW files.

• Customers using IE9 to buy a Package won’t see the thumbnails vanish when they go to pick images.

Cheers!

The SmugMug Family