SmugBlog: Release Notes

Love is in the air! We just added an elegant new theme for Valentine’s Day.  Showcase your lovebirds (or your own sweetheart) in style:

Find it in your themes picker under ‘Holidays & Seasons’. Remember, Power and Pro users can customize this theme and many others to create their own look.

Questions? Comments? Talk about it here.

Yours,
The SmugMug Family

Simple Sales Tax

Some states require Pros to collect sales tax. If you fit that bill you can now specify a tax rate and we’ll automatically apply it in the shopping cart for orders shipping to your selected state. Find the Sales Tax Tool right in your Control Panel, under the Pros tab.

You’ll also see that your Sales History records will reflect the amount of tax you collect. Read all about this feature here.

Please note that SmugMug does not assume responsibility for the management of sales tax you collect and we recommend you consult with your tax advisor if you have any questions.

Profit Handling

If you are a saver or a spender, we now offer a little something extra in our new Profit Handling feature. We give you the option to request payment or hold payment in the Pros tab of your Control Panel.

1. We’ll pay all pros that have at least $500 in profits once a month. If you make no changes in your Control Panel, your Payment Handling will be set to this option.

2. Previously, if your unpaid profit was less than $500 but you wanted to be included in our next payment cycle, you had to contact us via email. You can now trigger a one-time payout of all your profits yourself by clicking the top option. You will be included in our next payment cycle, then the normal schedule will resume.

3. If you prefer to bankroll, you can put all your future payments on hold until you change your mind. Choose the third option and savor your new holiday savings fund.

Need a refresher on reporting? Look here.

Fixes and improvements

Our Smart Galleries just got smarter:

• Smart Galleries no longer fall into an infinite loop if two galleries pull photos from each other.
• Switching rules from ‘Any’ to ‘All’ will properly return valid results.
• Smuggers using IE7 can now join the fun and add/remove rules.
• You can set a Smart rule to apply to a single day.

There were other important bug fixes, too:

• The W9 form accepts routing numbers that begin with 08 and 09. We also added a “Government” option to the filing status list.
• Be Social Tweeters were sometimes presented with an erroneous confirmation message if their post failed. This now works perfectly.
• Arranging photo by number saves the order you set.
• Keyword searchers are rewarded with a nicer message if there are no search results.

And last but not least, we heard your reviews about our beta Stats and made a few refinements:

• Click a calendar date twice to view data for a single day.
• The gallery choice sticks when you click through the other tabs. Get all the details.
• We added filenames to image pickers and gallery details.
• Gallery names now accept non-English characters.
• The graph should load properly each time you change tabs or adjust settings.

Thanks to everyone who offered their generous feedback. If you have a gripe or a comment, please make sure to tell us about it.

All the best,
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!

A Collect Photo icon has been added to the Photobar:

Until today, your galleries could only contain actual photos and videos that you uploaded.  Now they can also display virtual copies so that one photo can be displayed in many locations.

Collecting Photos

Simply navigate to interesting photos and click the new Collect Photo icon on the photobar to collect them.  You’ll be prompted to choose a destination gallery.  Collected photos are attributed to the owner with a link back to the original photo.

You’ll also find a Collect Photos option in the tools menu that lets you collect in bulk.  And on the header in Lightbox view.

It even has an option to collect all current and future photos for a gallery.  More about collecting.

Smart Settings

You can automagically display virtual copies in your galleries by choosing from a powerful set of rules.  Did you and a SmugMug friend go to Disneyland?  You can quickly set a rule to display virtual copies of her photos in a date range with the keyword Audrey, for example, in a gallery on your SmugMug site.   Here’s how.

Wait. Who can collect MY photos?

You may be honored when a woman of obvious taste displays your shot in her “Exceptional Photos” gallery. But you may not want your daughter’s photos collected. Here’s how you set permissions:

• You can always collect your own photos, regardless of gallery settings.

Your adoring fans can collect your photos in their SmugMug galleries when all of these conditions are true:

• Your site has no site-wide password.
• Your gallery is public and not passworded.
• Your gallery has external linking enabled.
• You have not disabled Allow Collecting in your control panel Settings Tab.

External Linking and Allow Collecting are very closely related.  External linking is a gallery setting that has always enabled a form of collecting: displaying your photos in blogs and forums.  When someone embeds your photo in a forum, they may not give you attribution or a link back to your site.  Collections do both automatically.

Allow Collecting is a site-wide setting that has no effect if external links are off.  It’s one click to rule them all if you want absolutely no collecting (but you can still collect your own).

All virtual copies honor the settings of the original. If you apply watermarks, set prices, limit the largest size, etc., the virtual copies will inherit those settings.

If you collect a photo from your unlisted gallery, it can be displayed in your public galleries.  But we won’t display a link to its origin.  And visitors will not be able to collect it.

This is version 1.0

We watch comments in this blog and the discussion on Dgrin like hawks because we know you’ll find annoyances we need to correct.  And feature additions.  We know you’ll want to know where virtual copies of your photos appear.  And we know you’ll want to arrange virtual copies in galleries like you can uploaded photos (we hate to ask for patience with this feature, but it will take some doing).

We hope you’ll share your experiences, good and bad as we tackle improvements.

All the best,

The SmugMug Family

(Which is busy collecting each other’s photos.)

It wasn’t clear that the Control Panel is for site-wide stuff and tools are for galleries and photos.  New wording and layout should help:

Tweaks

• When the date taken field of a photo was blank, we used to show zeros in the more info display.  Now we leave it blank.
• Upload error messages are now red to make them more obnoxious visible (it pained us, but we understand why it was important).
• The simple uploader now counts up instead of down as images are added.
• Billing for coupons used by pros was implemented (okay, that was more than a tweak).
• We now confirm pros’ contact email in the Control Panel.

Bugz

• IE drop shadows were fixed on new themes.
• We removed slideshow embed code from search results.
• Fixed an unforgiveable bug that prevented a spectacular photo from appearing in our home page slideshow gallery.

All the best,

The SmugMug family

Want a peek at Stats Extreme Makeover Work in Progress edition?  Just point your browser to http://www.smugmug.com/homepage/newstats.mg.

Have feedback? We’re watching this thread closely.

Contact the Pro

When customers click the Contact link while admiring your photos, they usually have questions like, “Can you shoot our wedding in July?”

Entering your contact email will allow those questions to go straight to you.

No worries, support questions from help links will still come to us.

If you have at least one sale, you’ll be prompted to enter a contact email.  You can enter a new address in the pros tab of your control panel.

Video Player Love

If you use our video player on Windows, or embedded in a web page, you’ll see new options:

Here’s what’s changed:

1. You now have the ability to turn HD on when you go into full-screen mode from the embedded player.
2. You now have the ability to stretch the video to fit the player area (default: no stretch).
3. We added four owner-configurable parameters: autoplay, hide logo, hide home button, hide share button.  Details.
4. If the video is deleted so the embedded version can’t play, we now show a “We’re sorry” message.
5. When going full-screen, the video is not stretched by default (goodbye, jaggies).
6. If you hover the mouse pointer over the controls, they don’t slide away.
7. Non-standard video sizes are no longer stretched by default. We play them at their native resolution.

Bug fixes

There were roughly a dozen bug fixes, such as:

• Fixed a bug that prevented you from changing your cart co-brand photo if it had an apostrophe in the filename.
• The Old Faithful uploader popup status window didn’t close in all browsers when the upload completed.
• Cleaned up the Simple Uploader “skipping duplicates” message.
• Gallery comments should not appear in timeline, keyword, or popular photos anymore.
• Be Social failed to post Twitter messages if they contained 68 characters.
• Be Social failed to post on Facebook any letters to the right of an ampersand in the title of a gallery.
• “Your message here” stayed in the tweet if you sent the tweet without entering a message.
• Keywords now more precisely honor password-protected SmugMug sites.

Happy New Year!

The SmugMug family

Happy New Year!  At SmugMug, we celebrated the new decade with fireworks and themes.

Here are a few samples:

They’re available to everyone, and there are many more you can preview on your own sites with the themes chooser.  Or view examples at themes.smugmug.com.

Power and Pro subscribers can customize the themes and use them as the basis for their own custom sites.  It’s simple with the easy customizer.  You’ll find more help in our customization forum.

Happy New Decade!

The SmugMug family

Pros: Let your customers design cards.

The #1 request from pros was, let my customers design cards.   They can now, with some caveats:

1. If you set prices for cards at the Portfolio or Gallery levels, your visitors will see the Create a Card option in the Buy Menu.
2. When they click the Photos Tab in the card creator, they will only see photos from the gallery they were viewing when they chose Create a Card.
3. When they click the Create Tab, they’ll see your pro prices and be prompted to choose quantities.   Then they can add to cart.
4. The card will be saved to a Guest Card private gallery in the category My SmugMug Creations on your site.
5. Your guests won’t see a link to that gallery.

Reminder: Cards are fulfilled by EZ Prints, so they only show up in your pricing tool if you have EZ Prints selected.  Once prices are set for cards, you can revert back to Bay Photo if you want the other products from the gallery to be printed there.

All subscribers: Keyword upgrades.

• A new option has been added to the Bulk Caption/Keyword tool.  It lets you remove all numeric keywords from a gallery.
• You’ll find a setting in your Control Panel to enable or disable automatic keyword generation from filenames (default: enabled).
• There is a Design Rule for Camera File Systems (DCF) that lets us ignore filenames generated by your camera.  We do not create keywords from filenames like IMG_001.JPG.
• Multi-word keywords no longer need to be quoted as long as they are followed by a comma or semi-colon.  For example, we used to require you to put quotes around “New York” to make one keyword phrase.  Now you can enter New York, or New York;
• 1 and 2-character keywords used to require quotes, but no more.  For example, 12, 5, would be added as keywords.

U.S. Pros:  Direct Deposit.

Get paid the fast, secure, convenient, environmentally-friendly way: direct to your bank.

If you haven’t already, please fill out our online “Tax & Payment Info.”  We’re sorry to say that even if you’ve sent us a W-9 by another method, we’ll need the online form to enable direct deposit.

You’ll find the online form in your SmugMug Control Panel, in the Pros tab. Click the edit link next to Tax & payment info.

Payment schedules will remain unchanged, but electrons should reach you faster than postmen.  Payments begin in January.

Bug fixes and enhancements.

• iPhone feeds and settings are handled correctly in IE8 now.
• Search results now correctly take you to the image selected instead of the first page of a gallery.
• The lightbox link in comment emails now takes you to the correct lightbox view.
• Name is now required on the billing page of the cart.
• Full screen images now appear faster in the full screen slideshow.
• The Bulk Caption/Keyword tool acted erratically in some instances.  Fixed.
• Add to cart in lightbox view now only requires one click.
• No more problems creating a gallery when a category name is in quotes.
• The slideshow pop-up on password-protected galleries is fixed.
• Better read-only message for SmugMug’s maintenance windows.
• You can now go to Batch Add via a direct URL even if there is a site-wide or gallery password, if you know the password.

Merry Christmas!

The SmugMug Family

The #1 most requested feature for our pros is here!

Many thanks to our pros who kept the faith during the long development process.  We sincerely appreciate it and hope to reward you with many other great features in the not-too-distant future.

Here’s the scoop on coupons.

Also in this release, holiday cut-off dates have been added to the shopping cart.  And a minor uploading bug was fixed.

All the best,

The SmugMug Family

Our popular white, 15-ounce ceramic photo mugs come printed with your favorite photo, then filled with a variety of rich, luxurious gourmet hot chocolate  or melt-in-your-mouth candy cane caramels.

Candy mugs come filled with buttery caramel balls dressed in a festive, candy-sprinkled peppermint cover. Exclusively ours from Marich Confectionery.

Cocoa mugs come filled with four single-serve packs of Stephen’s Gourmet Hot Cocoa in a special two-flavor collection: milk chocolate and candycane. The smoothest and creamiest cocoa in the world!

They are $19.95.

Pros can price and sell these at a profit.  In your pricing tool, you’ll see them listed on top after you click on the merchandise tab.  Pricing help.

All the best,

The SmugMug family