SmugMungous – October 15th, 2007
During the wee hours of this morning, we launched a release that’s been many months in the making. With the average screen resolution of SmugMuggers and their visitors continually on the rise, we decided it was high-time we stepped up our game.
Please welcome to the family… SmugMungous! Three new viewing sizes: XLarge, X2Large, and X3Large. You can view them in lightbox and with our new “auto” feature, we’ll automatically choose the best size for your browser window. Open wide. 
All new photos added to SmugMug will get these extra three viewing sizes, and olde photos will get them too if you rotate, watermark, crop, or use color effects on them (thus telling us you need new display sizes generated). You can see all 8 display sizes outlined on this freshly updated help page.
But wait, there’s more.
- Also on that page, you’ll see the nitty gritty on a cool feature we added to power and pro accounts: the ability to adjust SmugMug’s recipe for photo sharpening on display sizes. Play with the numbers on your customize gallery page, and we’ll use them when new display sizes are generated (again, through upload, or rotating, cropping, etc. existing photos).
- We increased the quality of newly-generated thumbnails. Because your photos should look good, 150 pixels or 1600 pixels.
- We now use PNG and GIF files natively, instead of converting the display sizes to jpeg.
- We increased the jpeg quality if your photo has been cropped and cannot be rotated losslessly.
- The customize gallery page now has a drop-down so you can select the largest size you’d like to be viewable. Standard users can still block originals, by selecting X3L as their largest size. Pros can still select a size as small as medium for their largest size.
- Updated API and help pages for SmugMungous options.
- Added new help page outlining SmugMug’s accepted forms of payment.
- Updated the news page to include Apple and Entrepreneur Magazine featuring SmugMug.
- Quick update to our photoshop elements help page to mention that you can add photos to SmugMug straight from the brand-new Photoshop Elements 6.0.
- New “copy link” button on the share page to save our customers some time.
Whew! It feels good to have this baby out the door, but stay tuned because the party ain’t over yet.
October 17th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
I really love the XL, XL2 (a good match for one of my computers), XL3 (a good match for another of my computers)!
May we expect a SmugMug Large and SmugMug XLarge layout in the near future?
But is there not *any* way to trigger the calculation of these new sizes which is not wasteful and annoying?
Re-Upload causes lots of unnecessary network traffic, destroys comments and thumbs-ups.
Rotate/rotate back and watermark/unwatermark forces you to re-generate all sizes twice. And what of the customers viewing them while being done halfway?
Crop is destructive. So are Colour effects.
On top of that, you get to deal with all the pictures treated that way _right_now_.
I’d _really_ love a button, switch, etc. to say “Please, could you re-calculate the smaller sizes as an idle task (and maybe give me a feedback when it’s done)? I agree it may take days or even weeks to finish it all, as you run the conversions as an idle task, when your computers have nothing more important or time critical to do.” (Creating them on the fly, as they are asked for, would be a very interesting alternative, but is likely not be viable due to limited computing power.)
That would be a) less wasteful (only one re-calculation instead of two), b) less intrusive for customers viewing the photos, c) needing much less care than doing it manually. I understand there probably has to be some limit per day/week.
October 18th, 2007 at 12:50 am
Why did you make the other size limits more open to Pro and not Standard? I happen to be a budding photographer, and I can’t very well call my picture mine if someone takes the original or 3xLarge, edits the watermark out, and posts it on their website.
SmugMug was the one site I called a safe home, but now, I don’t know.
Excellent edition in the aspect where you honestly didn’t give a rat’s a** on whether or not someone claimed your art.
October 18th, 2007 at 7:39 am
@Wolfgang: Yes, you may expect SmugMug Large and SmugMug XLarge layouts coming soon.
You make an excellent point about a “Smugmungify me” button, and we’re currently chewing on possibilities.
@slink: There’s a great discussion going on here:
http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=73761 .
In particular, you may be interested in this post from SmugMug’s CEO:
http://dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=658254&postcount=45 .
And this post, where SmugMug’s President announces an upcoming change based on our customers’ feedback:
http://dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=659689&postcount=95 .
October 19th, 2007 at 7:26 am
First of all, these improvements are fantastic and I am very impressed by the changes I have seen since I signed up in March.
However, one suggestion…Could you please allow “Power Users” to use a custom domain. I paid for my own domain and have yet to use it. Since I am not a Pro Photographer, it is hard to justify the upgrade to Pro just for this feature.
Thanks for listening!
October 23rd, 2007 at 7:52 pm
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