New features – June 2006
Ok, I blew it. I forgot to submit the release notes for the two other releases we did in June. My bad! you’ve been using new software, with new features, and didn’t even know it. 
Here’s what changed:
- New Mac uploader!
- Supercharged everyone’s homepages with SpeedDemon v2. It’s now always on and always fast.
- We now convert from Adobe98 and ProPhoto colorspaces to sRGB, the standard on the web, upon upload. Your Adobe98/ProPhoto photos will no longer look washed out and print poorly.
- Enhanced uploading speed for all uploaders.
- Added HTTP RAW POST interface for uploading via API. For API users, I’ll post more about this soon, but essentially you can get a 25% speed boost with little to no effort.
- Sped up SmugMug and SmugMug Small styles to fetch the larger image first, then the thumbnails. We should have done this years ago. Dumb us.
- Serve static images from Amazon’s S3 instead of SmugMug, enhancing browser throughput.
- Added ‘random image picker’ for galleries. Also great for embedding in your blogs, forums, etc. Right-click on a thumbnail on your homepage and look at the image URL for a clue on how it works.
- Fixed arranging categories and subcategories breaking gallery order in other categories. Finally!
- Fixed gallery settings not showing properly for certain acount levels.
- Fixed upgrade button in account settings
- Fixed customization on user keywords homepage
- Fixed buttons not working in Camino or Opera (Camino and Opera still not supported, but we do what we can)
- Fixed link to the upload log not having your nickname in it
- Fixed SubCategories showing even when there weren’t any galleries in that SubCategory.
- More consistent shopping cart icons on the site
- Fixed typos on the customization page
- Fixed double-text on ‘add photos’ buttons for Safari
- Fixed hovering over cart buttons with themes
- New ‘Bio Photo Not Found’ image
- Show featured photo on sharegroup pages
- Fixed sharegroups showing up on Category and SubCategory pages
- Removed some extra HTML tags on the homepage and various sales pages.
- Creating a new gallery now puts it “first in line” for your galleries if you’re sorting by gallery position.
- Fixed wrapping problems on ’share with friends, family’ page
- Updated almost all help sections to be clearer. Also made a much nicer menu for help.
- Updated out-of-date news page.
- Added new menu goodness from help to hacks.
- Fixed buttons having double-text and overlay problems.
- Fixed problems with certain characters and slideshow.
November 29th, 2006 at 4:23 pm
Hi, I’ve started playing with sharegroups, and I’m wondering if you can shed any light on their future direction… they clearly work well as an artificial “view” to other galleries, but they only exist as a URL. Any plans to make them optionally show up as an actual pseudo-gallery? I.e. I’d like to organize my galleries as a chronological log, and then “gather” related galleries together… “Travel”, or “Work Friends”. Thoughts? I’m thinking about wrapping it all up myself using the API, but that seems like a pain. Thanks, –rg
January 25th, 2007 at 10:49 am
I agree with the entry above. that would be a really cool feature – sorting by category is intelligent, but most friends dropping in want to answer the question “what has he been up to lately”. The feature gallery has only space for 4 items.
perhaps a workaround would be to allow galleries to appear in multiple categories. I.e. I travel to Zurich for a party. the photo gallery would appear under Travel category as well as Party category… and then I would obviously create a category “All” and sort in that by chrnological order (I name my photo galleries “2007.01.06 Zurich” and then sort by name which gives the illusion of being chrnologically in order)
just a suggestion…