New features - April 27, 2006
Got some new stuff for everyone today:
- Pros now have UNLIMITED traffic limits. Yes, you read that right.
- Much better redundant storage of your precious photos. We now store at least 4 copies of every new photo in 3 different datacenters in 3 states, using both internal SmugMug storage and the storage infrastructure of a partner who’s in the business of data availability. We’re currently in the process of copying 100TB (!) of old photos to our new storage partner in addition to our local copies. More details on this will be forthcoming.
- A new “Large” size for photos. We made a very bad decision in the early days of SmugMug when we chose 800×800 for our “Large” size. Monitors are wider than they are tall, and that’s only increasing with widescreen monitors. This made it very difficult for people to see the “Large” photos which were portrait oriented - they’d be partially off the page and need to be scrolled. Ugh. 800×600 is now the max size for newly uploaded “Large” photos and any photo you edit (crop/rotate/color correct). We’re not doing anything to old photos at this time, but are gathing feedback from our customers about what to do. If you care about this topic, do participate in the ongoing discussion.
- Fixed the watermarking quality to match our new JPEG quality levels.
- The search page has been overhauled to the new look & feel, including much better customization for Power and Pro users.
- New tour of SmugMug.
- New signup page.
- New more info page
- Better signup process - better looking, easier to use, more streamlined, and lands you on a much friendlier “newbie” page that’s less intimidating.
- Added a JavaScript variable to allow Pros to better track their sales by filename.
- Fixed a bug with image protection and filmstrip.
- Microsoft lost a lawsuit that means their latest Internet Explorer patch breaks tons of existing ActiveX controls on the net, including SmugMug uploaders. We just updated ours to work with this new patch.
- Fixed a bug with “Hide Owner” and image href titles and alt tags
Enjoy!
