Improved Viewing Styles and Bug Fixes – July 10, 2009
We’re really pleased to unveil stunning updates to how you view your galleries. Now the Slideshow and Journal viewing styles will keep up with your bigger and better browsers. Under the new Style button at the top of your gallery, you can try them out for yourself. Let your jaw drop, view the new Journal Style here and the Slideshow here. Both styles not only look great but they stretch for complete wall-to-wall visual goodness. Best of all, the new Slideshow style reflects our ever-popular full-screen slideshow that you already know and love.
Old Journal die hards, never fear. You can still keep your galleries in that format by selecting it in your Customize Gallery settings. Similarly, if you loved Filmstrip and Critique, you’ll also see those there. These three styles will stick around as long as we can keep them, but they will no longer be updated or chooseable by your viewers.
Of course, we also have some fixes and improvements in the mix:
- The Easy Customizer now has an options for adjusting a background image to your site. You’ll notice the code generated by this tool will also be a bit easier to read.
- For those of you who have used our new Share features, we now have official help pages to answer any lingering questions: Be Social, Social Bookmarking, and Show Off.
- Our new Simple Uploader has been further improved with a few tweaks, including the ability to accept files with non-alphanumeric names and an error message if you didn’t properly install it in your browser.
- Our card creator no longer objects when you’re working from a site with a custom domain.
July 13th, 2009 at 11:09 pm
I love the new journal style, but I’m missing being able to comment on individual pictures, or at least be able to click the picture for a picture-sentric page.
July 17th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
The new Journal and Slideshow formats are very nice and great additions to have. But the format of the “Old” Journal with captions in more readable form on the right side have great value for easy photoblog reading. Can SM team consider adding an option to the new Journal to allow captions on either the right side or the bottom? That would solve the readabillity problem.
I assume the caption background color is CSS editable. Thanks for great work.
July 27th, 2009 at 10:36 am
@truls &Al: Thanks for the comments. We hope to add a photo-focused view complete with comments and captions, but we’re not there yet.
August 11th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
With all the “issues” surrounding SmugMug (downtime, bugs, etc), I’ve been trying to find information and updates to the issues, but can’t find anything. What’s going on over there?
August 11th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Hi Robert, we post all site issues here:
http://smugmug.wordpress.com
and see our CEO’s recent post, here:
http://smugmug.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/scheduled-maintenance-tuesday-811-and-thursday-813/
Holler to us at our help desk if we can help further, thanks.
August 23rd, 2009 at 8:07 am
Your link at “And, we added a page on helping search engines find your site.” is wrong and doesn’t work… I figured it out though, just remove remove ‘blog’
October 24th, 2009 at 9:03 am
Curious
how do i get this new look, the big picture?
Jeffrey
October 24th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
@jeffrey, write our support heroes http://smugmug.com/help/emailreal and we’ll set you up – you’ve probably got some customizing in the way, we can take a look.