SmugBlog: Release Notes

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

Announcing Metal Prints and Thin Wraps from Bay Photo, Framed and Mounted prints from EZ Prints:

Metal Print

Thin Wrap

Framed Print

Mounted Print

The two EZ Prints products are available to all subscribers, the two Bay Photo products are available to pro subscribers and their customers.

Pros: we zeroed your pricing for these products so your customers won’t see them in the shopping cart until you set prices.

Here are various versions of the catalog with these products added.  Note how the URLs end (P means prices are showing):

http://www.smugmug.com/prints/catalog/
http://www.smugmug.com/prints/catalog/B
http://www.smugmug.com/prints/catalog/AB
http://www.smugmug.com/prints/catalog/P
http://www.smugmug.com/prints/catalog/BP
http://www.smugmug.com/prints/catalog/ABP

These are products the SmugMug team buys for work and home and we hope you enjoy them like we do.

All the best,

The SmugMug family

By popular demand from exotic lands like Iceland with exotic alphabets, we bring you UTF-8 (international character) keyword support.

We’ve been getting great scans of old film from ScanDigital, so we added them to the buy menu.  They can upload your scans to SmugMug.  Example: a very precocious-looking future SmugFounder.

Love shooting but hate correcting?   You’ll find relief in the buy menu from ShootDotEdit.

If you force Thumbnails Style for a gallery, you can now choose to display all thumbs on a single page.  Or you can enable pagination for larger galleries.

And may 8 bugs rest in peace, including a foul one that placed the big image in SmugMug style bottom left instead of upper right where it belonged.  This bug surfaced on some browsers when the zoom was above 100%.

We welcomed several new card designers this year and expanded our selection of 5×7 folded and 4×8 cards to over 200!  You can see them at http://cards.smugmug.com.

You can of course order a card with just a photo on the front and no design.  Ordering help.  Or you can design your own cards from scratch on your computer.  Here are the guidelines.

With this release, pros can price and sell cards for a profit.  If you’re a pro, you’ll need to choose EZ Prints as the lab for the gallery where you’ll sell finished cards for your clients.  Then you’ll see the fields in the pricing tool to enter prices:

Three important new features:

• Last year you had to choose a photo first, and browse the designs by the small thumbnails in the card creator. Now, if you prefer, you can browse the large previews on cards.smugmug.com, choose your favorite, and make a card straight from there.
• Anyone can now order one of your finished card designs, whether they have a SmugMug account or not.  However, only SmugMug subscribers can create their own cards, and they can only use their own images.
• The following HTML tags in photo captions will now be preserved in lightbox view when someone clicks on an image in your gallery to see it bigger:
  <a><b><i><u><br><ol><strong><font><h1><h2><h3><h4><h5><ul><li><em><div><span><center>

We hope this release makes for happy holidays!

All the best,

The SmugMug Family

EDIT 11/20: We’re hearing lots about wanting customers to be able to pick their own card designs and make them from your photos.  We’re working hard on that but unfortunately don’t have a day to give you for when the feature will go live.

You’ll find a magical new button in gallery settings called Multiple Galleries.  Choose it to apply any number of gallery settings to as many galleries as you please.  More.

Pros will find a time-saving new Replace Multiple Photos button for their Proof & Retouch orders.  It automagically replaces photos from sales with your retouched photos having the same file names.

Badges can now draw from most recent or most popular photos.   They can have captions.  They’re faster-loading.  And they give you a choice of how images initially slide into place.

In your control panel settings tab, you’ll find a new field to enter meta description.  Google will use the words you enter there for their description of your SmugMug site in search results.

Also in the settings tab, you’ll find checkboxes to disable feeds and the iPhone interface.

SmugMug account owners can now see the email addresses of people who leave comments on their SmugMug sites so they can reply.

Comments are now included in the text of comment notification emails.

A dozen bugs were fixed, including:

• Watermarks no longer are imported to Animoto when you make an Animoto video.
• File size reported incorrectly in critique view.
• You sometimes got logged out if you closed your browser.
• Batch add to cart was misbehaving in certain gallery types like popular.
• Bad preview URL in customize gallery under some circumstances.

As a first step towards deeper pro branding through the order process, we added the ability for pro account holders to add their own identity to every page of the shopping cart.  Here’s how.

Example:

You’ll find the beginnings of a pro branding center in your control panel, Pro tab.

The much-loved Old Journal style received some love, so that clicking on a photo displays it in the much-improved new lightbox, with comments.  Example.

Bug fixes:

• The Recent Photos home page box now includes photos uploaded via Olde Faithful and the API.
• The show comments link in lightbox that was visible when comments were off is now…OFF!
• The bug that displayed filenames instead of captions got the cruel death it deserved.
• Custom themes can now enjoy stretchy thumbnail-style goodness.
• Fixed a homepage box placement bug.

Animoto

Last night we rolled out a partnership with Animoto that we’ve been excited about for years. You’ll find “Create an Animoto Video” in the Owner Only section of the Buy button when you’re logged in. Discover why we love Animoto on our CEO’s blog and on our help page.

Gallery viewing styles

We overhauled another viewing style, incorporating the best of All Thumbs and Traditional and adding magic to make it fill your page with photos. It goes by the name of “Thumbnails” and you’ll see it in the style menu on gallery pages. (You’ll see we kept All Thumbs and Traditional alive, but demoted them to the list in your Gallery Settings page.)

All viewing styles in the style menu now launch our Lightbox for single image viewing, and we tucked in some additional features: Owner Save for when you’re logged in, Save Photo for your visitors if you haven’t disabled original viewing, and Show Details. Click Show Details to get a neat side-by-side with the image on one side and any comments, camera info, and keywords on the other side.

Homepage boxes

All account levels now sport three new homepage boxes. It’s easy to drop a beautiful slideshow onto your page, pick a video or your favorite image to greet visitors, or display your most-recently uploaded photos. Our help page has a quick course on how to customize your homepage.

Big change for Pros

SmugMug is ready to move towards direct deposit for U.S. photographers. To that end, we’ve put the required W9 tax form online for you to fill out as well as information about which bank account we should put your money in when we make the change.

Even if you’ve previously filled out a paper W9 form for our accounting department, you’ll need to fill out the new online form prior to December 15th of this year so we’ll be able to continue paying your profit when we make the change in 2010.

All the details are on our help page.

NiceName Photo URLs

Direct links for photos that look like this will still work just fine:

http://smugmug.com/photos/imageID_imageKey-Size.jpg

But now in the Get a Link feature, you’ll see that we serve up direct links that contain the photo’s filename as well as the NiceName for the category, subcategory, and gallery that photo lives in. Reason? Descriptive words directly associated with your photo = more relevant search engine results.
As always, SmugMug makes it easy to stay out of search engines if you’d prefer.

Fixes

• Our Get a Link feature from the Share button will now properly update the embed code when the preview image is changed.
• Our Search Engine Optimization help page was overhauled by our in-house expert and has sage advice for those seeking love from Google.
• We fixed the “share photos” link in the single image view (found in older viewing styles)
• Files in your SmugVault that have a space in the filename can now be downloaded without a hitch.
• If you login while browsing a gallery, we’ll direct you right to the photo you were viewing.

We’ve been working for many months on a change that has involved every engineer at SmugMug and has kept the testers working evenings and weekends.

This release touched almost every feature and page and we’re still standing by to monitor the changes closely, because simulating the live site with its millions of varied users on test servers is a very big challenge.

It’s not a flashy release, in fact if we did our job perfectly, nothing will appear differently to our customers. But we’re very excited about it because it lays the foundation for bigger things to come.

Find a problem? Want to discuss this release? Head to Digital Grin.

With this release, pros who sell prints through SmugMug will see a dramatically improved Sales History, accessible from the Pro tab of their Control Panel. Among other things, we added imageID, albumID, gallery title, and category title to the downloadable CSV. We also added more specific shipping information where possible, including tracking numbers and ship dates. Your entire sales history is now sortable with helpful data at the bottom of the page. You’ll also find a date listed for when we’ve mailed a profit check.

For Pros who use our proof-delay feature, there’s now a real-time countdown to lab submission on the page. You can now adjust cropping for large orders much more quickly because the crop page allows paging to the next image after saving a crop.

All SmugMuggers can crop photos and thumbnails from the gallery more quickly as well. Simply adjust a crop, save it, and arrow forward or backward to the next photo you’d like to crop without leaving the tool.

The Get a Link page found in the Share menu is now much more useful for heavy posters. You can page through photos right there on the page, quickly gathering links for a forum or blog post. We’ve also added a Feed Wizard so you can create a specific feed to fit your need.

The comments page accessible from the Stats tab in your Control Panel is now prettier and more useful, allowing you to page through recent and pending comments.

We’ve created a new Quickstart video that narrates some of the great, core features we offer to new subscribers.

Fixes in this release:

• For Video: Mac users can now pause and unpause videos without causing trouble in the playback. We also fixed a bug where some videos were not being pulled properly from custom domains.
• For Slideshow: Fixed captions in small slideshows, improved slideshow randomness, cleaned up portrait image requests for full screen slideshows on large monitors, fixed an issue with irregular NiceName characters in Safari, added option to customize default speed for embedded slideshows.
• For our Be Social page: Fixed escape issue with quotation marks, fixed up lingering Facebook permission problems and custom domain snags with Twitter and Facebook, and added the ability to flip through images.
• Fixed an annoying loop with trying to login from the page where you requested a new password.
• Fixed a bug where deleting a category or subcategory would sometimes create an orphaned subcategory or gallery.
• Fixed a custom domain issue with Internet Explorer 8, so you should be able to stay logged in without having to jump out to nickname.smugmug.com.

Thanks to the persuasive case many of you made, we’re introducing URLs that can hugely boost your search engine relevance. Plus, they’re so simple you can describe them over the phone.

Behold the power of a NiceName:

Old URL:

http://cmac.smugmug.com/gallery/8611000_VW7PY

New URL:
http://cmac.smugmug.com/Family/June-2009

NiceNames can skyrocket your findability (SEO)

Choose your NiceNames well, and your galleries will have much more relevance in searches.

Old URL:
http://www.moonriverphotography.com/gallery/3571799_T29nu

New URL:
http://www.moonriverphotography.com/Landscapes/Glacier-National-Park/3571799_T29nu

How it Works

Every gallery, category, and subcategory on SmugMug now has a NiceName (NN). We pick them for you, based on your gallery titles or category/subcategory names, but you can tweak them. With the exception of galleries set to hide owner, every gallery URL now looks like this:

http://example.com/CategoryNN/SubcategoryNN/GalleryNN/albumID_Key

No worries, the old URLs you’ve given out over the years will continue to work.

NiceName notes:

• A subcategory NiceName will only be in the URL if your gallery is actually in a subcategory
• If Hide Owner is set to “yes”, we’ll default to the soulless SmugMug URL you’re used to:

  http://smugmug.com/gallery/albumID_Key

• If the gallery is Unlisted, it requires the albumID_Key to be included in the URL. That prevents someone from “guessing” the URL and finding an Unlisted gallery.
• A NiceName must be unique within the subcategory or category it lives in, be a max of 30 characters and contain alphanumeric characters and dashes. No spaces, though most foreign language characters are ok.
• You can tweak gallery NiceNames in your customize gallery settings. Category and subcategory NiceNames can be tweaked via the Control Panel > Customize tab > Categories/Subcategories pages.
• An added bonus: category names are now less restrictive in terms of characters they can contain, because the Category NiceName (and not the category name itself) is shown in the URL. You can now have categories called “Jenny’s Favorites” or “Bridal Portraits” without worrying about ugly spaces in the URL or having to leave out the apostrophe.

Critical NiceName gotcha

The albumID_Key part of the URL is optional for public galleries, but we show it by default because without it, the URL is not a true permanent link. If you were to tweak a NiceName, or move the gallery to a different category or subcategory, the original URL will no longer find the gallery unless you included the galleryID_Key as part of it.

Example: If you give your fans this URL to find your pictures:
http://www.moonriverphotography.com/landscapes/glacier-national-park

.. and you later change the category NiceName to “stunning-landscapes”, the above link will not work. However, if you give your friends this link:
http://www.moonriverphotography.com/landscapes/glacier-national-park/3571799_T29nu

… you can reorganize your site all you’d like and the link will still take them to your gallery because they have the link with the albumId_Key in it.

More NiceName info is on our help pages. And, we added a page on helping search engines find your site. (Keep in mind, if you do NOT want search engines to find your photos, it’s as simple as toggling SmugIslands to “No”.)

More in this release

Our SmugMug User Group meetings have been well-attended (thanks for your enthusiasm!) and we’ve added a calendar to our SMUGs pages so you can easily find speakers and dates and times for upcoming meetings.

We also have a new contest for Landscapes lovers, sponsored by the Ansel Adams Gallery. Enter your best images.

Finally, no release is complete without a few updates and fixes:

• Backprinting now includes the filename of the source image by default. Pros with custom backprinting won’t see any change.
• Your Control Panel comments pages are now paginated and the numbers should properly increment.
• Fixed a bug where the slideshow viewing style hid the fullscreen slideshow button if printing was disabled in the gallery settings.
• Fixed a bug with both the fullscreen slideshow and gallery slideshow that was causing it to hang.
• Updated our video player so when it’s embedded it’s no longer darkened before playing. Now you can see the video preview image more clearly on the page.
• Updated the video player in the gallery to show the share link at the end only if you have easy sharing enabled. If you want to hide that link in an embedded video, you can modify the url to add ’se=0′.
• Fixed the error that was being thrown occasionally about return type in our slideshow and video player.
• Improved the way our favorite in-browser uploader handles filenames with spaces in them.