SmugBlog: Release Notes

Got a big release out the door a few hours ago. We’re especially excited about the addional exposure many of our Pros will be able to get out of these new features, but everyone should enjoy them:

- PhotoRank! We think this is huge. SmugMug gets millions of visitors each day who browse & search for photos. They don’t have paying accounts, so until now, their activity has been mostly passive. Today, though, we’ve enabled them to vote on their favorite photos with a single click - thumbs up or thumbs down. No login or account required - it’s completely democratic and should bring order out of the chaos of our 60,000,000+ photos. Already we’re seeing some gorgeous photos float to the top.

There are some truly great things about the way PhotoRank works. It’s everywhere! You can now browse your favorite keywords by “most popular” in addition to “most recent”. What’s more, you can browse photos in your favorite categories by “most popular” as well. Further, your SmugMug homepage has an optional box for YOUR photos which people have voted for. SmugMug photo communities can also enable “most popular” so you can see the most exciting photos in those communities. Finally, and perhaps this is the most immediate fun, the new SmugMug browse page has a “today’s top photos” section which will reset on a daily basis, showing you the very latest and greatest popular photos.

The formula is fairly complex, and has lots of knobs that we can fiddle with to make sure we get a good feedback loop established. Hopefully it’ll work pretty well right out of the gate, but bear with us if it doesn’t - this is exciting and scary, to put so much power over our site and our business into your hands.

NOTE: All Power & Pro users who have customized their sites have the ‘most popular photos’ box DISABLED on their homepage, just in case it messes up their customization and/or they don’t want their customers seeing it. There are plenty of other settings, including javascript variables, homepage settings, and gallery settings, that let everyone customize and disable the feature to their heart’s content. Go enable it in your control panel if you fall into that category - it’s a lot of fun.

- Keywords by time. Starting today, you can now view keywords for just today or all-time, based on activity. If there’s a big event in the world, you’ll see keywords about it quickly rise to the top - and we’ll archive it that way for future use. As we gather more data, you’ll see more functionality exposed, but it’s already quite neat to see what people are doing early this morning. Our new browse page is a perfect place to start.

- Browse ‘Critique’ photos. We released the ‘Critique’ gallery style a few weeks ago with this in mind, and we’re happy to say it’s out in the wild. If you set your public, non-passworded gallery to ‘Critique’ style in your gallery settings (Power & Pro users), other SmugMug customers and visitors alike can find your photos from the browse page and comment on and critique them to their heart’s content. This is a great way to get feedback on your shooting - whether it’s lighting, composition, or setting - not to mention sales.

- Communites got an overhaul and a facelift. They support “most popular photos”, a new search box, a two-column layout similar to the new browse, and more. We actually have a few more important features coming for communities in the next day or two, so stay tuned.

There are a raft of smaller fixes that made it out with this update, too, but it’s nearly 5am and I’m tired. I’ll see if I can post a follow-up tomorrow when I’m not so brain-fried.

You can expect two new Themes this week, too, one of which will likely become the new SmugMug default after we collect feedback from everyone. If you want to comment and help us refine it, please do so over at Digital Grin.

Finally, you can expect at least two, and likely three, more releases this week. Nothing major, unless you run a Community, but we have quite a few fixes that we didn’t want to tangle up with PhotoRank and the rest.

Oh, and yes, we’ll have RSS & Atom feeds for all the new features within days. You can subscribe to the daily “most popular photos” feed, for example, and get a steady stream of great pics headed your way. Stay tuned!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 4th, 2006 at 5:07 am and is filed under SmugMug, bug fixes, new features, release notes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.