SmugBlog: Release Notes

We hope this release was worth the wait! We’re thrilled to announce lots of the social features requested by our customers.

If you have the “Easy Sharing” option enabled in your gallery settings, you’ll see the following new options in your Share menu when you’re logged in:

1. Social Bookmarking – quickly share galleries with lots of popular networks such as Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon.
2. Be Social – share your photos with friends on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, and Tumblr.
3. Show Off (for logged-in gallery owner only) – create a custom flash slideshow or animated image badge. Get the code with a single click and flaunt it on your blog, forum, or website.

We’re proud to announce a new, faster uploader that replaces the old Simple uploader. We built this one in-house and it offers better real-time reporting of errors in addition to more robust error retrying and duplicate handling (see the drop-down menu at the bottom). When loading it for the first time, be sure to click “Trust” when the prompt from Sun Java comes up!

We welcomed a new (and incredibly talented) Artist In Residence: B. D. Colen. Photographers with a photojournalistic and documentary flair will want to check out his site and join in the lively discussions and exercises on Digital Grin.

Our first Wiley photo contest was so popular, we’ve added more. Go win some prizes!

Also in this release, we added two more great ClubSmug deals for Smuggers: a discount on stunning flash slideshows with Showit and a free(!) ecopy of the popular book FastTrack Photographer.

More improvements:

• We added an “Unlisted gallery” indication to the breadcrumbs for unlisted galleries when you’re logged in.
• The Customization FAQ is now restored and updated for your customizing pleasure.
• We brushed up and improved the news, referrals, upload log, backprinting, and watermarking pages accessible from the Control Panel.

Bug fixes:

• We fixed the annoying loop started from logging in to your account from the logout page. You should now properly arrive at your homepage.
• Special characters in the Amazon Payments billing/address field no longer cause hiccups for new subscribers.
• New users should now be able to upgrade their accounts on signup when paying via Amazon Payments.
• Assistants now see “Unlisted gallery” indication on homepages and category pages.

Update on stats, for those of you anxiously awaiting: Stats are currently showing up-to-date information. We are still actively working on overhauling this feature and we think you’ll be thrilled when it’s ready. Sorry we don’t have an ETA yet!

We had a great release last night, but the part we’re most excited about has actually been going on behind the scenes for several weeks now.

SmugMug User Groups (SMUGs) kicked off with a great turnout at SmugMug HQ in April. SmugMug sorcerers were on hand to divulge some of the magic they’re working on and to gather feedback on what our working Pros want to see happen at SmugMug. Lots of passionate photographers showed up to swap tips and ogle the floor-to-ceiling prints we have on the walls of the office.

In this release, we’re announcing nearly a dozen SMUGs in major cities across the US. You can visit the SMUG page for all the details and to sign up for email notifications of new SMUGs as we add ‘em.

Also in this release, we made some good improvements on the Easy Customizer based on your feedback, as follows:

• The parts of advanced customization that directly overlap with the Easy Customizer (Page Title, SmugMug header and footer, and Basic Appearance) are now shown when you use the Easy Customizer, to prevent inadvertent overwriting.
• We added a button to the advanced customization page so you can easily email yourself a copy of your advanced customization code.
• Pros who choose to completely turn of SmugMug’s footer can now optionally add the feeds links back in using the Easy Customizer.
• Pros now have a toggle in their advanced customization page to remove SmugMug’s footer completely. Previously they had to use the Easy Customizer.
• We added a “Help” link to SmugMug’s mini footer. For visitors, it goes straight to our visitor help sections.
• If you’re a Pro and specify a Page Title, we’ll leave out the “- Powered by SmugMug” , so your brand stands alone at the top of the browser.

We also improved the embeddable flash slideshow:

• New configurable settings: autoStart and showSpeed. You can change whether the slideshow starts automatically whether the slow/med/fast controls.
• FIxed it so you can set pageStyle white/black so that the slideshow uses the white OR black SmugMug logo and sets the text to white OR black.
• Fixed a bug where if you set the background color on an embed greater then 1280×720 it wouldn’t honor your color settings.
• Fixed a bug where captions were being truncated in some cases.

We updated the Lensbabies deal in ClubSmug.

More bug fixes:

• Fixed a bug on the pro sales page where clicking through on the image would incorrectly redirect in Internet Explorer.
• Also fixed a bug where the shipping information from an order would be absent in some cases from order emails generated at order time.
• Added shipping method to pro sales information pages so you can see how the order will be shipped to your customer.
• Fixed a bug that caused Internet Explorer to jump to another photo when clicking on Arrange in the tools menu.
• Clarified the wording of pro notification emails for orders that include images purchased from multiple Pros.
• Added shipping for Serbia and Montenegro.
• Fixed the ‘Read more…’ hyperlinks in RSS feeds in Safari to properly point back to the gallery.

Eye-Fi has just announced that video uploading is now available for SmugMug! Shoot the footage on your digital camera and skip the card reader for uploading the goods to your galleries. Using a Wi-Fi network, Eye-Fi’s cards eliminate the hassle and let you share your photos and videos faster.

You can get more details about how it works on Eye-Fi’s site, and find a great intro deal on hotspot access through ClubSmug.

We’re thrilled to announce the release of two of our most requested features: Easy customization SmugMug sites and SmugMug subscription without a credit card.

Our brand spankin’ new Easy Customizer empowers SmugMug’s Professional and Power subscribers to completely change the look and feel of their SmugMug site with a few clicks. No code wrangling required. Find it in your Control Panel on the Customize tab.

Our advanced customization options are still alive and well, for those who do want to dive into code or need to tweak specific galleries… but now the rest of us can still get the look we want without breaking a sweat.

Things to know:

• The Easy Customizer allows complete removal of SmugMug’s footer for Pro subscribers, even the “Powered by SmugMug” bit.
• You’ll see a real-time preview in the Easy Customizer, so you can see how it plays with any advanced code you had previously entered.
• The Start Over button gives you several options for dialing back changes.
• There’s an ongoing discussion over at Digital Grin.

New SmugMuggers can now pay for their SmugMug account by choosing Amazon Subscriptions on the signup page instead of entering a credit card. To go this route, you’ll need to set up an Amazon Payments account and provide either your credit card information or your bank account information to Amazon. If you sign up this way, all future upgrades and renewals will be handled through Amazon Subscriptions as well.

Our apologies, if you already have a paid SmugMug account, you cannot (yet) switch over to Amazon Subscriptions.

Also this week, we’re announcing our sponsorship of the Wiley Photo Contest. Those with a competitive edge may want to check it out for a chance to win sweet prizes.

In this release:

• We are soft launching an uploader we built in-house.   You can give it a whirl and give us your feedback: new uploader thread on dgrin.
• Fixed the “Apply” button in Internet Explorer 8 on the pro pricing page.
• Fixed an Internet Explorer 6&7 bug on the bulk pricing page so expanding sections no longer overlap.
• Fixed a bug with cropping square photos so you can now select a non-square ratio for your crop box.
• Fixed a bug with downloading your pro sales spreadsheet.
• On digital-download only orders, we telling pros proof-delay was in effect in some cases. Fixed.
• Fixed a logging-in bug with the iPhone interface.
• Sharegroups now inherit the site’s look & feel.
• We updated to YUI 2.7.

We’ve had several great releases in the last few weeks, including the following enhancements:

• Newly updated Terms of Service. We made the change, in part, to make it perfectly clear to our customers that YOU still own your photos. The Terms, though still long, are now more readable. Here’s an excerpt: “SmugMug neither has nor wants any ownership of your Content.”
• We added “last updated” to the login page so you can see if we’ve made a change to the Terms since the last time you logged in.
• Increased the time limit on Professional account video files to 10 minutes each, up to 1920×1080p!
• Added a wrap/trim preview to the cropper in the shopping cart and on the proof-delay page for some merchandise such as buttons and ceramic tiles.
• Simplified our International shipping options. There was some confusion as to how the options differed, and some overlap at the labs in terms of shipping methods. We now offer a single USPS option and either a single UPS (through BayPhoto) or FedEx (through EZ Prints) option.
• For the homepage and embedded slideshow, you can now specific round or square border in the code: borderCornerStyle=rounded|square
• Also on the slideshow, you can add clickToImage=true and visitors will click on an image and be taken straight to that image’s home in a gallery.
• Finally, randomize=true in the slideshow will randomize the order in which your images are displayed.
• Fine-tuned the contact form we fire from password prompts (on a passworded gallery or site-wide gallery page). Unless the gallery has Hide Owner enabled, we now show the site owner’s bio photo. In the case of Pro users, if a contact email is specified in their Control Panel, we’ll send the contents of the contact form straight to that email address.
• Added the filename to the “replace” feature from the proof-delay page.

… and the following bug fixes:

• Fixed a search problem on the iPhone portal page.
• Cleared up the remaining (reported) iPhone browsing bugs including: “more subcategories” loading improperly, showing the option to pull up more categories or galleries even when there were no more available, back arrow problems, and empty galleries showing up for non-owners.
• Fixed searching from /date/ pages. It previously would pop out into Global search results, rather than staying on site-specific results.
• Fixed the fotoflot links to properly pre-load the image and gallery information.

One enhancement is still in-the-works, but some consequences of it are already visible. We’re in the process of adding some neat improvements to Stats, and while we work on that you’ll only see your stats updating once every 24 hours. Also, we discontinued tracking of the Tiny and Thumbnail display sizes and as a result, your “Photos Viewed” will be more useful. Stay tuned for the goodies yet to come, though. We think they’ll be worth the wait.

Lots of good fixes and enhancements in this release:

• Added alpha-numeric UTF-8 support for custom categories, subcategories, and community names. International characters should work beautifully now.
• We cleaned up the “share” email so it’s more sleek for more mail clients.
• Goodness for the Flash slideshow:
  • We cleaned up the transition between differently-sized images, so we now handle all cases gracefully.
  • We gave it a substantial speed boost for galleries with lots of images. The slideshow should start now without any extra lag, even if you have thousands of images in the gallery.
  • If you’re viewing the gallery style “slideshow”, and you change sizes, the slideshow is now more responsive and will serve up the chosen size sooner, rather than relying on a cached size.
  • We now ignore incorrectly set splash images instead of showing a broken image.
  • We fixed a bug where a SmugVault file without an image preview would stall the slideshow.
  • We improved the way we handle storage of image bitmap data in memory, so you’ll see significantly less cpu and memory usage on long-running slideshows.
• Fixed a bug with digital download license display in the shopping cart.
• Fixed a bug with scrolling the “Contact a Support Hero” form in small browser windows.
• Made arranging galleries within a sharegroup faster. This was a special request from a customer who had hundreds of galleries in one sharegroup – something we hadn’t considered.
• Cleaned up the “Recent Photo” feed so it no longer shows stale content.
• Fixed an obscure bug with arranging galleries within a category whose name contained an ampersand.
• The bulk pricing tool is much faster now when pricing many galleries at once.
• Fixed a bug with iPhone browsing where if you had a category containing more galleries than would originally load on the first page, clicking on “more albums” caused galleries from other categories to be loaded.
• Fixed another iPhone browsing bug where if you had a category that had only subcategories in it, browsing to the subcategory would show “no public albums found” even if there were public albums there.
• Rotated in some fresh photos for SmugMug’s homepage slideshow.

• We added the much-loved 12×18 size to the Bay Photo catalog.
• We made some really nice changes to the pricing tool on the bulk gallery pricing page: Galleries are now displayed alphabetically by category and subcategory and there’s a visual indicator of which lab each gallery is set to.
• We added extra information to the Pro sales details for orders, including the Color Correction and print lab choice for each item on the order.
• Based on customer feedback, we made a change so that a keyframe image for a video will NOT be watermarked as it’s added, regardless of gallery settings.
• We made some changes so that going forward, new pro galleries will inherit portfolio settings even if they are using an old quicksettings template.
• The “Color Correction” option is now included in quicksettings for Power and Standard users.
• We added a new div to the date and keyword homepage breadcrumbs so they are more consistent with the other breadcrumb pages.
• We’ve fixed a footer bug on customized community pages where it was tucked under the Featured Galleries section. If this change causes any footer problems for your community, you can add #cobrand_footer {clear:none !important;} in your CSS.
• We added a “contact a Support Hero” form to order confirmation pages so our customers (and their customers) can get quick and relevant help.
• We added an “ask a real person” link on the prompt page for password-protected galleries and homepages. Now, stranded visitors can ask a Support Hero for help.
• We fixed some bugs with leaving comments through Facebook connect and made it a lot faster in the process.
• Fixed a bug where the “Buy: Many photos” page would sometimes default to a product that wasn’t available for purchase.

Notable Changes:

• We added a contact form on help pages, so our Support Heroes will be armed with more information (such as your browser version) when you email in a question.
• We are excited to announce a new SmugMug Artist-in-Residence team: Celebrity photographer Robert Evans and award-winning videographer Curt Apanovich.
• We took advantage of Facebook Connect so you can now login to your Facebook account when leaving a comment at SmugMug. No more captcha!
• We now filter out some profane words from comments.
• We added a timeline feed, accessible from the bottom of the /date page.
• We added the news of our new pro lab, Bay Photo, to our homepage. The soft launch is going beautifully, so we’re ramping things up.
• We updated to YUI 2.6
• By popular demand, we added a few options to the “Apply This Pricing” list in the pro pricing tool. You can now quickly apply prices “from other galleries” to a certain image. Also, you can quickly fill in your portfolio prices at the gallery or image level.
• We tweaked some things on the backend of the stats pages, so they should be faster.
• The custom hostname field in the Control Panel (for Power and Pros) is smarter, and it now tries to clean up improperly entered URLs.
• The catalog links are now cleaner:
  Unpriced EZ Prints catalog – http://smugmug.com/prints/catalog
  Priced EZ Prints catalog – http://smugmug.com/prints/catalog/P
  Unpriced Bay Photo catalog – http://smugmug.com/prints/catalog/B
  Priced Bay Photo catalog – http://smugmug.com/prints/catalog/BP
  Priced two lab catalog – http://smugmug.com/prints/catalog/ABP

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a feeds bug where it broke for Recent Videos if you previously had a viewing password set.
• Fixed feeds so they should properly show up in iTunes once again.
• Fixed the pro sales downloadable spreadsheet so it will contain data in all applicable fields going forward.
• Fixed a bug with the price tool that caused problems in the “Apply This Pricing” menu if you had a subcategory with the same name as the category that contained it.

We are thrilled to announce that SmugMug Professional subscribers can now choose to print through Bay Photo, a lab trusted by truly great photographers for over 30 years.

Why Bay Photo? We spent many months poring over prints from labs across the country and here’s what we found.

Here’s what this means for our subscribers:

• Power and Standard subscribers will still go through EZ Prints, the lab we’ve used and loved for years.
• Professional subscribers can choose between Bay Photo and EZ Prints for prints. On the pro pricing page, Pros select a lab for their portfolio and override that choice on the gallery level, where needed.
• All merchandise, such as mugs and magnets, will continue to go through EZ Prints.

Which lab should you choose? Here’s some help deciding.  Want to discuss this?  Right here.

As we worked on integrating Bay Photo, we improved lots more on the site as well:

• Every SmugMug subscriber now decides whether photos printed through their site will be color corrected at the lab or not. The end customer no longer sees “auto or true” in the shopping cart. Power and Standard users will see the Color Correction option in their Customize Gallery settings and in the Settings tab of their Control Panel. Pro users will see this option in their pro pricing. Color correction is automated through EZ Prints and done by hand at Bay Photo. More about color correction.
• The Pro pricing page was re-done from scratch. The basic structure is the same as before, but it should be easier to understand and faster to price. On the portfolio level and gallery level, there are two new options: Print lab (EZ Prints/Bay Photo) and Color Correction (yes/no). Note that changing your Color Correction preference will change the base price of Bay Photo prints.
• We fixed the bug that required “penny-over” pricing on the gallery level in order to override portfolio pricing and allow at-cost sales. Now, you can simply price a gallery at SmugMug’s default prices and it will be at-cost. Please note those sales will not be tracked in your Pro Sales report, because they won’t be profitable.
• The backprinting tool has been updated so we now correct backprinting on our end before sending orders to Bay Photo or EZ Prints. You’ll see a more accurate preview, and greater consistency within each lab.
• We updated our minimum print resolution requirements and added the sizes available through Bay Photo.
• Added new catalogs for Bay Photo prints: Bay Photo with pricing, Bay Photo without pricing (client-facing), both labs with pricing (for your reference) .
• Updated our shipping page with Bay Photo info.

More good news:

• We’ve added a new Artist-in-Residence, renowned wedding photographer David Jay.
• We loaded our homepage slideshow up with more jaw-dropping images.

Bug fixes:

• We fixed up the shopping cart icons on many themes so they now look like shopping carts, instead of easily-missed graphics.
• Fixed the Edit with Picnik.com tool so that when you save an image as a new copy, captions, keywords and geocoding are now transferred from the original image.
• Fixed a rare bug that caused images not to be displayed in a gallery using Firefox at a specific browser height.
• Fixed an even rarer bug that allowed the creation of an invalid sharegroup URL.
• Fixed a bug that prevented designated friends and family from editing captions and keywords.
• Fixed a bug with the copy box for the exif link.
• Fixed a bug with iPhone browsing where if you had added a site-wide password and later removed it, you couldn’t browse photos.
• Fixed a bug where searching from a subcategory would take you to a search results page without your site customization.
• Added a login page redirect that allows for clicking through in case the automatic redirect fails for some reason.
• Fixed lightbox viewing in the Sunshine theme.
• Removed the searchbar in the header of help pages, to draw attention to the special “search for help” bar on the page.