Archive
Say Hello to Your New Account Settings
If you felt the earth shaking the last time you logged in to SmugMug, don’t panic! It’s just the incredible new Control Panel that we installed, especially for you. It’s so stunning, we renamed it “Account Settings.”
Take a look and you’ll see we’ve moved things around, trimmed some bits and gave it a whole new (modern) look. Fewer clicks, intuitive navigation, easy on the eyes. You’ll love it.
Why fix what ain’t broke?
While it’s true that the old Control Panel was still functional and lots of you have gotten the hang of where things were, our amazingly patient Support Heroes were always getting asked how to do basic things like change passwords or email, or how to find Pro Sales info, etc. Important stuff like that.
So we took the hint and decided that we could do things better.
Our #1 priority is to bring you trouble-free navigation so you can find things fast. Pros, this means digging into your money-making tools so you can start selling ASAP.
Lastly, as we keep adding shiny new features to your SmugMug account, we’ll slot them into the Account Settings more easily. And that’s a plus for us.
Where can I find _______?
We hope you’ll never need to ask again. But you can swing by our updated help pages here to get a complete road map of the different areas and what they mean.
You’ll find everything you need filed under six different icons. Basic and Power Users will see the first five.
- Me: You and your subscription.
- Privacy: Who can see your site.
- Style: How your site looks.
- Discovery: Search engines, sharing stuff.
- Stats: Nitty-gritty numbers.
- Business: Everything e-commerce. (Pros only)
If you can’t find things at a glance, don’t hesitate to let us know what’s on your mind. We’re listening!
Hash Bang: How We Beef Up Your Google Juice
It may just sound like a breakfast item to you, but hash bang is something we did to your gallery URLs to improve your SEO. Sitemaps was one, but we’ve tinkered with your gallery links to make it even more powerful.
Confused? Let’s start from the beginning.
Why the change?
To help Google index your gallery pages and get you found. Our old URLs made it easy for search engines to list the gallery, but not the individual image links due to the way they were dynamically created.
Our newest update makes it easier for Googlebots who are trying to crawl your site to index your gallery images on search engines. (Better indexing for AJAX-based pages, for you tech-minded folks.)
If you’re feeling daring you can check out the Google specs here and see exactly how and why this works.
How do I make sense of the new URLs?
Pull up your favorite gallery and zoom in on the URL. You used to see something like this:
http://cmac.smugmug.com/SmugMug/Support-Heroes-painted-faces/2504559_TrBCmb#131487110_FdKeW
Now you’ll see this:
http://cmac.smugmug.com/SmugMug/Support-Heroes-painted-faces/2504559_TrBCmb#!i=131487110&k=FdKeW
Note the new “i” for image and the “k” for the image key. Those numbers and scrambled letters still mean the same things:
- Album ID: 2504559
- Album key: TrBCmb
- Image ID: 131487110
- Image key: FdKeW
Opening the lightbox looks just a little different, too, but see if you can spot the “lb”:
And if you click to another page in the gallery, you’ll see a couple of additional things in the URL:
http://cmac.smugmug.com/SmugMug/Support-Heroes-painted-faces/2504559_TrBCmb#!p=1&n=20
- P: Page number (page 1, here)
- N: Number of images per page (20 images, here)
If you get a direct image link, you’ll see that it looks pretty much the same as it did before:
http://cmac.smugmug.com/SmugMug/Support-Heroes-painted-faces/SuperheroGroup/131487110_FdKeW-L-5.jpg
Will my old page links break?
No way, José! We’ve made sure that your site, images and your business remain unchanged for smooth sailing through the week. If you do notice anything funny with your site, be sure to ping our Support Heroes and send us the deets.
What changes will I see in the coming weeks?
Better indexing, possibly more traffic and fanfare from new clients. 
Now that we’ve made all these changes, we can start cooking up even more exciting URL-based improvements to help folks who use SmugMug on Chrome, Firefox and Safari. All modern browsers that we love.
Don’t want your site to be found? Just like before, you can always enable SmugMug’s many privacy options and be left out of search results, search engines and Google Images.
And here’s further reading:
Release Notes and Bug Fixes
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.
Bug Fixes and Metadata Update. January 29th, 2010.
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!
Improved Viewing Styles and Bug Fixes – July 10, 2009
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.
What is SmugMug?
Gorgeous, unlimited photo sharing for everyone. Grab your own website on SmugMug and be ready to archive, share and print the photos you love. From unlimited photo and video uploads to e-commerce tools for Pros, we have it all. Learn more.
