SmugBlog: Release Notes

This is a major release that vastly improves buying prints and gifts.

• It’s faster.  And it should stay fast after adding many hundreds of items
• It’s much easier to use.
• It’s prettier.
• It’s the key to adding features like coupons in the not-too-distant future.

We dedicate this feature to our customers in Iowa who lost everything from tornadoes and floods.

See 30Bone’s photos.

Here’s the overview and help page about SmugVault, and our Chief Geek’s blog.

We’ll try to answer some questions here that those pages don’t:

What is Amazon’s role, and what is yours?

• Amazon provides the physical storage, reporting, and billing.
• SmugMug provides the user interface for adding, retrieving, displaying, arranging, navigating, etc.
• SmugMug creates display copies from as many graphic and video files as we can, so you can see pictures as you browse, not just unintelligible file names.

How do I add and retrieve?

• We do everything in our power to enable you to add and retrieve your photos in as many ways as possible, including enabling developers to write applications with our api.
• You can use almost all existing SmugMug uploaders except for the Drag & Drop, which is being retired.
• Backup DVDs and SmugDav will also support SmugVault in the future.

How does bundling files work?

• For any gallery, when we see files with the same name but different extensions, we automatically link them into a bundle. For example, we would bundle Sunset.psd, Sunset.jpg, and Sunset.tif if they were uploaded to the same gallery.
• When we bundle, we add an icon to the display image to show it as a bundle.
• This way you only have to see one file but can tell it’s several file types of the same photo.
• You can use a new photo tool to bundle them manually, regardless of filename. For example, maybe you have 5 RAW files that you used to make a panoramic. You can bundle them together, along with the JPEG.

• We refer to files stored in your SmugVault as archives.
• When you hover over the large display size of your bundle, a save icon will appear. When you click it, you’ll see options to save any of the files in the bundle independently.

How do you navigate SmugVault?

• There are two ways: The same way you navigate any gallery with photos in it, and a SmugVault browser.
• You’re aided by a SmugVault graphic for non-displayable file types, like Word documents (see example, right).
• And you’re aided by an icon that indicates a bundle.
• If you click on the icon, you’ll be taken to a SmugVault browser.
• Note that there is navigation above the SmugVault browser that lets you see different levels.

How does displaying files work?

• A powerful feature of SmugVault is that we can convert many graphic file types so you can see what the photo is, not just guess from its filename.
• We can convert most RAW files and many other formats, but sometimes we’re foiled, so no guarantees.
• You have to enable this option in your control panel, on the settings tab.
• It doesn’t cost you extra because we don’t charge beyond your base subscription for storing JPEG files, and all this feature does is generate JPEGs for display.
• Note that when we convert from RAW, for example, we are only doing it for display purposes. So we make our normal display sizes, which is up to 1600×1200 if you enable X3Large.
• Some people could print from that and get good small to medium-sized prints, so use the image protection you normally do.
• Yes, if you have a pro account with watermarks turned on, the display copies will be shown with your watermark.
• No one can see or save your archives, only you. If you want to use SmugVault to transfer a RAW file to a friend, you’d need to give them a guest password if you’re a pro subscriber.

Size limits?

• Currently, each file can be up to 512 MB.
• We’re working on bringing that to 5 GB per file but have no estimated completion date.

Display priority?

• If you’ve uploaded a JPEG that becomes part of a bundle, it is the one used for display, not any preview files we would make from RAW files, for example.

Video archives?

• Video is a special case, because SmugMug does not currently save the unaltered original video you upload.
• Instead we convert it from whatever format you upload to h.264.
• And we may have to compress it more than you did in order for it to play smoothly across the Internet.
• There is an option in your control panel settings tab, to allow the file you uploaded to be stored as an archive in SmugVault.
• If you upload the video clips you used to make your final video, the same holds true. We wouldn’t know it’s a SmugVault item unless you check the option to archive videos. In any case, we will also make display copies so that you get more than just a filename.

As always, we love to hear your rants and raves so we can improve. You can post them to our happenin’ photography forum at www.dgrin.com, or send email (that we really will read and respond to): help at smugmug dot com.

All the best,

The SmugMug family

By popular demand:  The save photo icon is now visible when you are logged in even if you have originals turned off.  No worries, your visitors won’t see it.  To check that, you can log out — or click the visitor view button on your home page.

Sorry for the panic this caused for many people the first time they saw it!

More convenience:  If you uploaded PNG, GIF, and JPEG files that were over 12 MB for standard and power users, over 24 MB for pros, or over 48 megapixels,  we used to reject them.  We’d write a Dear John note about them in your upload log, not exactly convenient or endearing.  

Now we re-size them to sneak under our limits so we don’t send you scrambling for Photoshop.

Filenames are back!  In the bulk photo tools, we had many requests to bring back filename display. 

Bug fixes:  

One bug prevented Filenames from being converted to Keywords on upload. Now you can upload files with dashes, spaces, etc… and the filenames are properly converted to Keywords.

Another made the Slideshow button disappear when you forced your gallery to be SmugMug Small.  

Retired:  The Drag & Drop uploader lacked the error detection and retry goodness of the other uploaders and, sadly, had to be retired.  But you can still find it listed in fine print at the bottom of the uploader tabs.  If it works for you, great.

PayPal:  Did you know they introduced a plug-in that lets you use your PayPal as if it were Mastercard on sites like SmugMug?  We acknowledged that on the site.

Pro FAQ:  Version 2.0.

As always:  Many enhancements to the help pages including vastly improved help search.

Oh, one more thing:  Got RAW?  (A separate release note is in the works for this.)

After gathering feedback, we cleaned out some seldom-used and redundant photo tools, organized and shined up the rest, and fixed bugs along the way.

Every single tool was fussed over to make it more intuitive and faster. Keep an eye out for round 2 (and 3, and 4, and …) but round 1 brought major improvements with subtle changes such as button placement and the addition of breadcrumbs.

Extra goodies we added to several of our bulk tools:

• You can now select multiple thumbnails just like you would in your regular OS, by shift-clicking or clicking and dragging your mouse.
• We added additional photo info for each thumbnail, available on hover-over: A larger version of the image, the caption, and filename.
• Open your browser window wider and we’ll fill it with thumbnails. Less wasted space = less scrolling.

(More on this help page.)

The customize gallery page was also cleaned up. It’s shorter now, with less scrolling, and is better thought-out in terms of wording and organization.

Note that the option to dynamically arrange photos in the gallery is now called “Auto Sort” and if you’d rather arrange photos manually, you’d now select “Auto Sort: None” whereas previously you would have selected “Sort by: Position”.

Also in this release:

- The password change field in the Control Panel used to be case-sensitive when you typed in your email address. Annoying no longer.

- Shined up the “Forgot Password” routine on SmugMug’s login pages. It’s a bit friendlier and easier to follow.

- Updated the Simple uploader.

-Added Hackersafe logo to marketing and signup pages, since we are indeed safe from hackers.

- Added a call to theme designers on our jobs page.

- Updated lots of help pages so that the images match the current appearance of the site.

You may have noticed some subtle changes to SmugMug’s look and feel, especially if your galleries use SmugMug’s default theme like this one does.

Specifically, you’ll see less green, a more readable font, an off-black (rather than stark-black) background, new share button, capitalization where appropriate (also to improve readability), and an overall cleaner look.

Love it? Hate it? Can’t tell the difference? We gave our customers a heads up about the coming change last month on our forum, and that’s the best place to gush or gripe.

You can always change the theme for any or all of your SmugMug pages. Here’s how.

Video

When we released SmugMungous video several months ago, our customers were ecstatic. Finally, their photos AND videos looked better on SmugMug.

As the dust settled, however, we saw there was still room for improvement. For starters, videos can really light up a forum post or blog and our Quicktime video solution didn’t allow embedding. So, we decided to go with something a bit… flashier…

The move to Flash-based video is a win on many levels:

• We built our video player with an interface that’s easier to use and easier on the eyes.
• You’ll find a jaw-dropping full screen option. Keep in mind, the laws of the universe still apply: the higher the quality of your video is, the better it’ll look filling your whole screen.
• Your videos are now embeddable outside of SmugMug, in forums, blogs, or any web page you’d like. Choose either the 425 (web/small) version or 640 (DVD/large) version.

We had to make some tough decisions along the way, though:

• You need the latest flash player version to watch videos. Updating is easy and free, though, and you can do it here. If you are too out-of-date, you’ll see a friendly prompt when you try to play a video.
• Flash has significant performance issues on Mac-based browsers when playing high definition h.264 video. We love Macs, and wish it wasn’t so. If you’re on a Mac, you’ll see the flash player for the smaller video sizes when they are embedded on other web pages. However, to keep the herky jerky at bay and to maintain a consistent viewing experience, Mac users will see Quicktime for all video sizes played in your SmugMug galleries.

You can read our CEO’s thoughts on SmugMug’s video offering on his blog.

Sharing

We want to keep our customers happy AND their fans happy. So, we fixed up our share page. Now just two clicks stand between you and getting a meaningful link to thrill your fans.

1. Click the Share button on your gallery pages. Or click the Share button you see at the end of a video played using Flash.
2. Click a link. It’ll be copied automagically and ready to paste into an email, forum post, blog, or instant message.

New Goodies for Power and Standard Accounts

• Our custom hostname and right-click protection features are now built into Power accounts as well as Professional accounts.
• All SmugMuggers (Professional, Power, and Standard) can now force a viewing style for each gallery in their Customize Gallery settings.

Custom Categories and Subcategories

• The custom category and custom subcategory pages (accessible from the Customize tab of the Control Panel) were cluttered and none-too-attractive. We shined them up.
• The gallery creation page was confusing with regard to creating your own categories and subcategories. We tweaked it a bit to make this feature easier to understand.
• We also updated the help pages accordingly

Help Page Overhaul

Have you noticed both our full help pages and visitor help pages look much improved?

Some customers thought our help pages were hard to read. They were black, with small font (kinda like this blog, eh?), and we’re sorry we left them that way for so long. The good news is, you let us know and we stepped up and made some changes. They are now white and wider, with larger font to boot. Lots of pages were also rewritten for clarity and updated for new features.

Bug Squashing

• Fixed a bug where if you switched viewing styles from SmugMug to Critique, you weren’t being directed to the correct image.
• Fixed a bug with slideshow and stats reporting.
• Fixed an IE7 error in SmugMug style, at certain resolutions and with certain image sizes, the browser was hanging.
• Fixed a pagination error in Journal style.

Sometimes we do the right thing in the wrong way. Many of you requested a square thumbs tool over the years. Unfortunately, we launched when it was a good bit less than perfect, and you were quick to call us on it. We should never have released ’square thumbs’ without providing an easy way to undo them. We apologize. No excuses, we should have done it better.

Thank you for your patience and invaluable feedback while we’ve worked to produce a better version.

• You’ll find a new feature in the Photo Tools menu that will change your thumbnails to or from square as you like.
• Checking thumbnails square/original under ‘look & feel’ in the Customize Gallery settings will change all thumbnails in that gallery.
• When creating a gallery, customers not using quick settings are offered a choice of ’square’ or ‘original.’ The effect is shown in the Theme preview.
• Creating new galleries using quick quick settings will default to squared thumbs unless you choose otherwise. Theme preview will reflect your setting.

We’ve posted more details at the Dgrin Square Thumbs Thread.

Watermarks: We’ve updated Watermarks to work similarly to the new Thumbnails tool. If you change your watermark settings in the Customize Gallery section, you’ll see a new check box: ‘Apply to existing photos in gallery.’ Checking this will add or remove a watermark from all photos in the gallery when you save the settings. Unchecked, the change will be applied to all photos uploaded from then on. The checkbox will only appear if you make a change to your current saved settings.

Slideshow: We’ve made some adjustments to our new slideshow to accommodate Adobe’s latest version of Flash Player. If you experience any difficulties, the Support Heroes are standing by to assist.

It is your passion that fuels ours.

Slideshow: Captions are back! Many of you wrote in to let us know they were missed. We’re really sorry for any inconvenience, it was always our intention to include them with the new show, but we needed to release and debug v1.0 first. We heard your comments on slideshow thumbnails as well, you like them, but don’t want to see them during the show. By your command, thumbnails will now automagically disappear when you release your mouse. We also made a few tweaks that should improve slideshow’s overall performance and speed. Please keep that feedback coming.

Printing: After months of testing with our printing partner, ezprints, we’ve switched from Fuji to Kodak paper as of April 1st. Judging by your feedback to date, this April Fools Day was all treat and no trick. Check out the community’s thoughts on Dgrin.

iPhone: Browsing SmugMug on your iPhone just got a whole lot easier. With the addition of a Categories option, you no longer need to scroll through countless galleries to find the one you’re looking for. Site owners receive even more goodness with the ability to login and view unlisted and passworded galleries.

Bug Safari:
(Not to be confused with a Safari bug)

• As unbelievable as it may seem [wink], we did find a few bugs in the new slideshow. They are now stuffed and mounted on our fotoflot trophy wall.
• We spotted a bug on homepages with the Shizam Slideshow. It prevented the show from going on if you had thumbs enabled. We took him down with a single click.
• We found a very rare species of IE bug deep in the Lightbox jungle. We didn’t have the heart to do the little critter in, so we trapped him and named him Bill. We keep him in a terrarium in the kitchen where he can’t cause anymore trouble.
• One ingenious bug actually sabotaged our SmugMaps, making it very hard to track. We caught the clever girl anyway. Now the default zoom on the Around the World map works so much better.
• A particularly crafty bug was causing homepage slideshows to call up a thumbnail for the first image if the site owner was using force size in their homepage slideshow settings. Another fine trophy.
• Tracked a Firefox bug that occasionally caused stretchy galleries to wrap if a sidebar was open in SmugMug style. We caught it and fed it to Bill.
• We found a youthful bug that was causing some videos to act like good children (but bad videos): they were seen, but not heard. We’ve sent it off to boarding school for a proper education.

Huge thanks to our passionate customers who poured out their hearts about their dream slideshow: silky-smooth cross-dissolves, full screen, thumbnails, beautiful aesthetics and…speed, baby.

We thought we’d have to choose between speed, size and smoothness but after months of sweat we’re ready to call it awesome if you are. Click the slideshow button and let us know what you think.

The slideshow gallery style, which you get to by choosing from the pull-down menu in the upper right of gallery pages, inherited the new goodness. Turn captions on or off, choose photo sizes, and make thumbnails visible or not. Then admire silky transitions.

Square thumbnails: By popular demand we added a square thumbs option to the customize gallery tools. Turn this feature on to give your gallery a clean, symmetrical look.

The square thumbs option won’t take effect until you do something that generates new display copies, such as rotating, watermarking, or adding new photos. To apply square thumbs to an existing gallery, use a bulk tool like rotate photos after you select the square thumbs option.

Preview: To see your site as your adoring fans will, just click the new visitor view button at the top of your home page or a category page. Pros: it lets you see your pricing as your customers will.

Custom domain sweetness: You don’t have to be an uber-geek to configure custom domains anymore. SmugMug Pros who want their own domains can do it the easy way. Check the link for our new domain partnership with Godaddy.

Video: There are new video help sections for adding and editing. We usually don’t talk much of future features but this time we will: the Flash goodness in our new slideshow is coming soon to video.

We fixed a video bug that made some videos larger (more bytes) than what you uploaded.

Help pages: They now cover Visitor View and Square Thumbs.

Mac lovers: There is an improved version of our beloved MacDaddy uploader. And we fixed a bug relating to the Drag & Drop arrange feature in SmugMug and Traditional styles when using Safari.

Bugs: Our popular photos galleries now stretches to fill your screen. This bug also affected customizers who had styled their own popular pages. Another bug prevented some user customization and themes from working when using a site-wide password. Fixed. Several SmugMaps bugs were squashed. Polaroid JPEGs that wouldn’t upload before do now. Custom-sized images now use the photo sharpening settings available to power and pro subscribers.

Keepsake box and puzzle: They’ve been removed from the gifts catalog pending a bug fix and better puzzles. They’ll be baaaaaack, and better than ever.

We’ve made an important change to the way Customizer’s JavaScript is loaded and handled: we put it back the way it was. We further tweaked it with the addition of a JavaScript ‘footer box.’ Nothing ventured nothing gained, we simply figured out a better way to increase performance. Moving JavaScript down to the footer box on your site should improve page loading. Want an example? Have a look here. Power and Pro customization shouldn’t be affected.

Bigwebguy explains why we two-stepped. Questions? Head over to our Customization Forum and ask away.

Bug fixes:

* Fixed a bug that caused double-headers and missing CSS. And we ain’t talkin’ Baseball, Sonny.
* Fixed a bug that caused community popular galleries to display all photos instead of just the community photos in SmugMug style.
* Fixed a bug that could allow a feeds to function on a protected gallery.
* Fixed a bug that totally messed with the Drag & Drop tool for arranging photos. Righteous.
* Fixed a bug that was causing site-passworded galleries to redirect to the SmugMug homepage.