SmugBlog: Release Notes

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 If you are too out-of-date, you’ll see a friendly prompt when you try to play a video.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.

We’ve done a good bit of tweaking this round, but on the excitement scale, none of it compares with our introduction into production. This week we roll out the first of our SmugMug How-To videos: The SmugMug Quick Start Guide. Designed to provide further insight into usage, navigation and customization, the SmugMug How-To videos will offer the next best thing to having a Hero at your shoulder.

Improvements and Updates:

* Updated the Picasa Uploader to include Category/Sub-Category information.
* Added AlbumKey support to gallery and GeoAlbum feeds for increased security.
* Updated several pages to reflect the increased video limits for Pros.
* Updated the Mousepad blurbs with new pixel reqs: 1100×926.
* Updated to YUI v2.5 and, to quote BigWebGuy, “A zillion other small things.”*

*SmugMug Sorcerer BigWebGuy says:
* Some security changes may impact customizers who have scripts running in their header box. If you are affected, please post in the Dgrin Customizing Forum and we’ll make sure we get you fixed up fast!

Andrew Carnegie used to tell his children, “Take care of the pennies, and the pounds will take care of themselves.” As exciting as it is to release amazing new technology and features, the genius is in the details.

* Added a vital ‘Gotcha’ to the Galleries: Creating Help page .
* Added estimated processing times to the shipping information page.
* Added a page to help Flickr Refugees begin their migration.
* Due to overwhelming demand, we have added Romania to the list of countries we ship to. Minunat!*

Bugs squashed:

* Fixed a bug that brought you to the first image in a gallery instead of the chosen image when ‘clicking’ on a Popular Photo in a community.
* Fixed a bug that prevented ’share links’ in Slideshow and Filmstrip for anything other than the first image on the page.
* Fixed a bug that prevented cropping from a Pro proof delay from passing the ImageKey.
* Fixed a bug that initiated a JS error when following a link to an image that was no longer available.
* Fixed a bug that would have forced our New Zealand customers to move if they wished to order prints. Whew.
* Fixed a bug that caused video play icons to line up incorrectly in IE6.
* Fixed a bug that caused errors when saving a choice while changing themes using Themepicker if ‘hide owner’ was enabled.
* Fixed a cookie bug that prevented Pro Smuggers from logging into custom domains using Firefox.
* Fixed a pretty bold typo on the Professional Users: Custom Hostnam page… oops, ‘Hostname!’ (Big thanks to the attentive Smugger who pointed that out!)
* Fixed a mismatched image on the Printing: Auto or true color page. (Another Genuine ‘No Prize’ to the sleuthing Smugger who caught that detail!)

*Wonderful! (Any Romanian would know that!)

Avast! SmuggLr will now grab yer photo booty from Picasa Web and haul it back to SmugMug to stash in our fine holds.

Join us on the good ship SmugMug and get 50% off your first year. Just be usin’ the coupon code: picasaweb when you sign up for SmugMug!

We’ve implemented some important changes to the site to make our privacy options more powerful and easier to understand.

SmugMug gallery, image and video URLs are now appended with keys: an underscore and five alpha-numeric characters. So URLs now look like this: http://cmac.smugmug.com/gallery/2504559_f3ta9 (gallery url) and this http://cmac.smugmug.com/photos/131481399_ZnZmK-L.jpg (image url).

Where we used to call galleries ‘private,’ we now call them ‘unlisted’ to make this feature more clear.

When you create a gallery, we now offer a checkbox called ‘Lock it Down.’ This option automatically makes the gallery unlisted, turns off SmugIslands and external linking, turns on right-click protection (for pros), and protects the gallery with a password of your choosing. All of these settings can be fine-tuned later on the gallery customization page, but this checkbox gives you a quick way to make brand-new galleries private and secure.

For more details about the ‘whats, ‘hows’ and ‘whys’, check out Don’s Blog, Baldy’s post and this discussion on DGrin. We’ve also updated all relevant help pages with the new terminology. Good examples are creating galleries and sharing photos pages.

This was a big release, and while we tested hard, there might be bugs - if you find any we’ll squash ‘em. Please forward any problems to our Support Heroes , thanks!