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

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.

Tonight we’ve got a few fixes for our IE9-using Smuggers:

• Prices in the shopping cart are again showing the proper numerical values without funny brackets.

• The crop tool lets you drag and adjust the borders.

• Printmarks and Watermarks let you drag the transparency sliders when you’re creating or editing them.

… and some miscellaneous improvements for the rest of us:

• Hidden photos appear normally to you, the logged-in owner.

• The  Simple (Java) uploader’s “Select Files & Folders” button no longer hides from Smuggers using Mac OS X 10.5.8 .

• Lens and focal length info is accurately displayed for photos shot with Canon 1Ds and 500Ds.

• We also fixed an Arrange bug that was preventing images uploaded to unsorted galleries from showing up at the front, where you’d expect.

As always, let us know what you think.

A variety of bug fixes went out tonight:

• Geotaggers rejoice! You no longer need to enter captions for pins to show on your map.

• We kicked a bug that caused some non-Pro-priced galleries to print from a different lab than expected.

• Crop bars should no longer appear for cards purchased through Pro packages.

• Our signup page is SMRTer so that you won’t be double-billed even if you double-click on the signup button or use the back button in your browser.

Stay tuned for more great updates,

The SmugMug Family

Since the smoke has begun to clear from our release of Smart Galleries, we wouldn’t want to leave you high and dry for the weekend. Here’s a few bonus bug fixes to tide you over:

• Double quotes in the caption won’t disturb other tags in our Journal viewing style.
• You’ll see several more options for configuring embedded videos via the Get a Link feature.
• Photos in Thumbnails viewing styles should now properly save after you’ve arranged them.
• Pros: Old orders now display proper product info on the downloadable Sales History spreadsheets.

Metadata Updates

• We’ve always tried to automatically extract captions and keywords from your IPTC data. To make things even easier we now also read keyword information from .xmp files, in addition to IPTC and Exif, in the following order of precedence:
  Xmp.dc.description >> Xmp.dc.UserComment >> Iptc.Application2.Caption >> Exif.Image.ImageDescription
• Our keywords are also now imported from xmp and IPTC – in the following order of precedence…Xmp.dc.subject >> Iptc.Application2.Keywords
• Globetrotters rejoice: Both our captions and keywords fields now accept non-English characters. Check those out in your bulk captions/keywords tool and tag away, though the UTF-8 keywords will only show up in the keyword string (in the keyword edit box) not the individual keywords at the moment.
• We smarted up our metadata filters so that only relevant EXIF data gets transmitted on upload. No more default “Olympus Digital Camera” captions! (Unless you want those, of course.)
• All focal lengths shown in your Camera Info box should reflect the actual information contained in the file. Bogus? Begone!

We’re really pleased to unveil stunning updates to how you view your galleries. Now the Slideshow and Journal viewing styles will keep up with your bigger and better browsers. Under the new Style button at the top of your gallery, you can try them out for yourself. Let your jaw drop, view the new Journal Style here and the Slideshow here. Both styles not only look great but they stretch for complete wall-to-wall visual goodness. Best of all, the new Slideshow style reflects our ever-popular full-screen slideshow that you already know and love.

Old Journal die hards, never fear. You can still keep your galleries in that format by selecting it in your Customize Gallery settings. Similarly, if you loved Filmstrip and Critique, you’ll also see those there. These three styles will stick around as long as we can keep them, but they will no longer be updated or chooseable by your viewers.

Of course, we also have some fixes and improvements in the mix:

• The Easy Customizer now has an options for adjusting a background image to your site. You’ll notice the code generated by this tool will also be a bit easier to read.
• For those of you who have used our new Share features, we now have official help pages to answer any lingering questions: Be Social, Social Bookmarking, and Show Off.
• Our new Simple Uploader has been further improved with a few tweaks, including the ability to accept files with non-alphanumeric names and an error message if you didn’t properly install it in your browser.
• Our card creator no longer objects when you’re working from a site with a custom domain.