Pros will find a time-saving new Replace Multiple Photos button for their Proof & Retouch orders.  It automagically replaces photos from sales with your retouched photos having the same file names.

Badges can now draw from most recent or most popular photos.   They can have captions.  They’re faster-loading.  And they give you a choice of how images initially slide into place.

In your control panel settings tab, you’ll find a new field to enter meta description.  Google will use the words you enter there for their description of your SmugMug site in search results.

Also in the settings tab, you’ll find checkboxes to disable feeds and the iPhone interface.

SmugMug account owners can now see the email addresses of people who leave comments on their SmugMug sites so they can reply.

Comments are now included in the text of comment notification emails.

A dozen bugs were fixed, including:

• Watermarks no longer are imported to Animoto when you make an Animoto video.
• File size reported incorrectly in critique view.
• You sometimes got logged out if you closed your browser.
• Batch add to cart was misbehaving in certain gallery types like popular.
• Bad preview URL in customize gallery under some circumstances.

Last night we rolled out a partnership with Animoto that we’ve been excited about for years. You’ll find “Create an Animoto Video” in the Owner Only section of the Buy button when you’re logged in. Discover why we love Animoto on our CEO’s blog and on our help page.

Gallery viewing styles

We overhauled another viewing style, incorporating the best of All Thumbs and Traditional and adding magic to make it fill your page with photos. It goes by the name of “Thumbnails” and you’ll see it in the style menu on gallery pages. (You’ll see we kept All Thumbs and Traditional alive, but demoted them to the list in your Gallery Settings page.)

All viewing styles in the style menu now launch our Lightbox for single image viewing, and we tucked in some additional features: Owner Save for when you’re logged in, Save Photo for your visitors if you haven’t disabled original viewing, and Show Details. Click Show Details to get a neat side-by-side with the image on one side and any comments, camera info, and keywords on the other side.

Homepage boxes

All account levels now sport three new homepage boxes. It’s easy to drop a beautiful slideshow onto your page, pick a video or your favorite image to greet visitors, or display your most-recently uploaded photos. Our help page has a quick course on how to customize your homepage.

Big change for Pros

SmugMug is ready to move towards direct deposit for U.S. photographers. To that end, we’ve put the required W9 tax form online for you to fill out as well as information about which bank account we should put your money in when we make the change.

Even if you’ve previously filled out a paper W9 form for our accounting department, you’ll need to fill out the new online form prior to December 15th of this year so we’ll be able to continue paying your profit when we make the change in 2010.

All the details are on our help page.

NiceName Photo URLs

Direct links for photos that look like this will still work just fine:

http://smugmug.com/photos/imageID_imageKey-Size.jpg

But now in the Get a Link feature, you’ll see that we serve up direct links that contain the photo’s filename as well as the NiceName for the category, subcategory, and gallery that photo lives in. Reason? Descriptive words directly associated with your photo = more relevant search engine results.
As always, SmugMug makes it easy to stay out of search engines if you’d prefer.

Fixes

• Our Get a Link feature from the Share button will now properly update the embed code when the preview image is changed.
• Our Search Engine Optimization help page was overhauled by our in-house expert and has sage advice for those seeking love from Google.
• We fixed the “share photos” link in the single image view (found in older viewing styles)
• Files in your SmugVault that have a space in the filename can now be downloaded without a hitch.
• If you login while browsing a gallery, we’ll direct you right to the photo you were viewing.

For Pros who use our proof-delay feature, there’s now a real-time countdown to lab submission on the page. You can now adjust cropping for large orders much more quickly because the crop page allows paging to the next image after saving a crop.

All SmugMuggers can crop photos and thumbnails from the gallery more quickly as well. Simply adjust a crop, save it, and arrow forward or backward to the next photo you’d like to crop without leaving the tool.

The Get a Link page found in the Share menu is now much more useful for heavy posters. You can page through photos right there on the page, quickly gathering links for a forum or blog post. We’ve also added a Feed Wizard so you can create a specific feed to fit your need.

The comments page accessible from the Stats tab in your Control Panel is now prettier and more useful, allowing you to page through recent and pending comments.

We’ve created a new Quickstart video that narrates some of the great, core features we offer to new subscribers.

Fixes in this release:

• For Video: Mac users can now pause and unpause videos without causing trouble in the playback. We also fixed a bug where some videos were not being pulled properly from custom domains.
• For Slideshow: Fixed captions in small slideshows, improved slideshow randomness, cleaned up portrait image requests for full screen slideshows on large monitors, fixed an issue with irregular NiceName characters in Safari, added option to customize default speed for embedded slideshows.
• For our Be Social page: Fixed escape issue with quotation marks, fixed up lingering Facebook permission problems and custom domain snags with Twitter and Facebook, and added the ability to flip through images.
• Fixed an annoying loop with trying to login from the page where you requested a new password.
• Fixed a bug where deleting a category or subcategory would sometimes create an orphaned subcategory or gallery.
• Fixed a custom domain issue with Internet Explorer 8, so you should be able to stay logged in without having to jump out to nickname.smugmug.com.

Behold the power of a NiceName:

Old URL:

http://cmac.smugmug.com/gallery/8611000_VW7PY

New URL:
http://cmac.smugmug.com/Family/June-2009

NiceNames can skyrocket your findability (SEO)

Choose your NiceNames well, and your galleries will have much more relevance in searches.

Old URL:
http://www.moonriverphotography.com/gallery/3571799_T29nu

New URL:
http://www.moonriverphotography.com/Landscapes/Glacier-National-Park/3571799_T29nu

How it Works

Every gallery, category, and subcategory on SmugMug now has a NiceName (NN). We pick them for you, based on your gallery titles or category/subcategory names, but you can tweak them. With the exception of galleries set to hide owner, every gallery URL now looks like this:

http://example.com/CategoryNN/SubcategoryNN/GalleryNN/albumID_Key

No worries, the old URLs you’ve given out over the years will continue to work.

NiceName notes:

• A subcategory NiceName will only be in the URL if your gallery is actually in a subcategory
• If Hide Owner is set to “yes”, we’ll default to the soulless SmugMug URL you’re used to:

  http://smugmug.com/gallery/albumID_Key

• If the gallery is Unlisted, it requires the albumID_Key to be included in the URL. That prevents someone from “guessing” the URL and finding an Unlisted gallery.
• A NiceName must be unique within the subcategory or category it lives in, be a max of 30 characters and contain alphanumeric characters and dashes. No spaces, though most foreign language characters are ok.
• You can tweak gallery NiceNames in your customize gallery settings. Category and subcategory NiceNames can be tweaked via the Control Panel > Customize tab > Categories/Subcategories pages.
• An added bonus: category names are now less restrictive in terms of characters they can contain, because the Category NiceName (and not the category name itself) is shown in the URL. You can now have categories called “Jenny’s Favorites” or “Bridal Portraits” without worrying about ugly spaces in the URL or having to leave out the apostrophe.

Critical NiceName gotcha

The albumID_Key part of the URL is optional for public galleries, but we show it by default because without it, the URL is not a true permanent link. If you were to tweak a NiceName, or move the gallery to a different category or subcategory, the original URL will no longer find the gallery unless you included the galleryID_Key as part of it.

Example: If you give your fans this URL to find your pictures:
http://www.moonriverphotography.com/landscapes/glacier-national-park

.. and you later change the category NiceName to “stunning-landscapes”, the above link will not work. However, if you give your friends this link:
http://www.moonriverphotography.com/landscapes/glacier-national-park/3571799_T29nu

… you can reorganize your site all you’d like and the link will still take them to your gallery because they have the link with the albumId_Key in it.

More NiceName info is on our help pages. And, we added a page on helping search engines find your site. (Keep in mind, if you do NOT want search engines to find your photos, it’s as simple as toggling SmugIslands to “No”.)

More in this release

Our SmugMug User Group meetings have been well-attended (thanks for your enthusiasm!) and we’ve added a calendar to our SMUGs pages so you can easily find speakers and dates and times for upcoming meetings.

We also have a new contest for Landscapes lovers, sponsored by the Ansel Adams Gallery. Enter your best images.

Finally, no release is complete without a few updates and fixes:

• Backprinting now includes the filename of the source image by default. Pros with custom backprinting won’t see any change.
• Your Control Panel comments pages are now paginated and the numbers should properly increment.
• Fixed a bug where the slideshow viewing style hid the fullscreen slideshow button if printing was disabled in the gallery settings.
• Fixed a bug with both the fullscreen slideshow and gallery slideshow that was causing it to hang.
• Updated our video player so when it’s embedded it’s no longer darkened before playing. Now you can see the video preview image more clearly on the page.
• Updated the video player in the gallery to show the share link at the end only if you have easy sharing enabled. If you want to hide that link in an embedded video, you can modify the url to add ’se=0′.
• Fixed the error that was being thrown occasionally about return type in our slideshow and video player.
• Improved the way our favorite in-browser uploader handles filenames with spaces in them.

• Fixed a bug where share links were getting exta // slashes and making the copied links inoperable.
• Fixed a bug where if you had certain privacy settings set, like a site password, we’d still show an inoperable Map This! button – even though we shouldn’t have.  Map This! now obeys the privacy settings in site password, SmugIslands.
• We didn’t allow certain tools for ‘this photo’ when you were in Slideshow viewing style.  Now we allow access to all the tools from this style.
• There was a display bug on the share email recipients page in your control panels, for emails with apostrophes.  We fixed it.
• The Add Photos button on the SmugVault page was displaying incorrectly, fixed!
• Fixed a bug where if you deleted a gallery that was in a sharegroup, the gallery thumb would still be in your share group listing.
• Removed “Attach Related Files” from the tools menu, unless you have a SmugVault.
• Fixed a bug when you create a gallery from a Category or Subcategoy page, we weren’t defaulting you to the Category or Subcategory you’re already in. Dumb, sorry – fixed!
• Significantly sped up the process of cropping a single thumbnail.

Boo!

Buttons

• Brand-new Tools button.
  • On gallery pages it has gallery tools, site links, and photo tools (as appropriate, depending on your viewing style.)
  • On pages like /date /keyword and /popular , it has photo tools as appropriate (yay!), and site links.
  • On homepage, category, and subcategory pages for Professional subscribers, it has site links. (Power and Standard subscribers will still see just a Control Panel button.)
• New Buy button goodness:
  • We added Collage Posters and Give the Gift of SmugMug to the gallery Buy button, as well as new items under Photo Books and Mounting & Framing.
  • We also added Create a Card to /popular , /date, and /keyword pages.
  • Buy buttons now live on your homepage, category and subcategory pages so you can easily order a backup disc for the level you’d like
• We updated the other buttons to match.

New Products

• Our Mounted Canvas prints are now wrapping on thicker, better stretcher bars.
• We added a new tab to our catalog page, chock full of goodies from our partners.
• The Goodies: Photo Books and Collage Posters through MyCanvas, and framed prints through Imagekind. Don’t miss the limited-time deals they’re offering to SmugMuggers! These same options are also loaded in the “Buy” button on your gallery pages when you’re logged in.

Shine-ups

• New PhotoRank page.
• New, more smug messages when you add or remove watermarks using the photo tool.
• New, more smug message when you’re logged in as an Assistant and try to view tabs in the Control Panel that are off-limits to Assistants.
• We supercharged the “make a copy” photo tool. No more twiddling your thumbs.
• We made watermark images always available for watermarking, even when hidden. Previously we’d use SmugMug’s default watermark if you had (likely inadvertently) hidden your custom watermark image.
• We sped up video processing significantly.
• Added “Replace Video Preview Image” tool so you can now tell us what your videos should look like before your fans click Play. Upload a jpeg that matches the resolution of your video (e.g. 1280×720).
• The “Buy: Photos in this Gallery” page now preserves the order of your images when you add them to your cart in bulk.
• We now put newest site messages at the top of the list, rather than the bottom.
• We renamed the “Guest Password” feature to be “Assistant Password”. It’s more clear as to the purpose and powers of an Assistant, we hope!
• We now prevent Professional subscribers from creating an Assistant password that is identical to their account password.
• Fixed a formatting issue in FF2 that caused our bullets to be displayed as ugly boxes.
• Changed Newfoundland (NF) to Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) in our country list. Apologies to all our Canuck friends to the north for the lag on that one!
• For customizers, there’s now a class=”notLoggedIn” on the body tag when you or your viewer are not logged in. This makes it much easier to hide things when you are not logged in. For example, you can now hide the share button for your visitors (such that it only shows when you are logged in) with this CSS: .notLoggedIn #shareButton {display:none;}
• Also for customizers, all breadcrumb information is now enclosed in <div id=”breadCrumbTrail”> so any modifications to the bread crumb (even in categories and sub-categories which wasn’t the case before today) can now use breadCrumbTrail instead of breadCrumb. This is important because modifying the HTML in the breadCrumb DIV will disable the other buttons (slideshow, tools, share, etc…) in that div. Those operations can now operate safely on the breadCrumbTrail div without harming the buttons. Questions? Ask on our Customizing Forum, we’ll be happy to help!

Bug Fixes

• We no longer accept nicknames that begin with a dash. (They break, so we’d prefer to head them off at the pass.)
• Fixed a bug where filenames with multiple periods could cause problems when adding them to your SmugVault.
• Fixed a bug with the wrapping preview for mounted canvas prints in the shopping cart.
• Fixed a bug where we’d lose site-wide customization and theme if a visitor entered an incorrect gallery viewing password. We now keep your look and feel and prompt the visitor to try again.
• Fixed a bug with commas in your address book for share emails. You can now add “Kent, Clark” without a hitch.
• Fixed a long-standing, very obscure, but surprisingly common bug that prevented a Quick Setting on the Customize Gallery page from saving properly if you had an apostrophe in your password, password hint, or backprinting.

• Metallic prints, in 11 sizes.
• 10 new canvas sizes, each available as rolled or mounted.
• Photo puzzle with a slick black box, keepsake box, mahogany desktop organizer, photo panels in three sizes, Post-it poster print, and photo stickers.

Also in this release:

• Fixed a bug involving the “no crop” option in the shopping cart giving four white borders instead of two.
• Fixed a bug with help page headlines.
• Fixed a bug with the full screen slideshow that was preventing exiting and returning to the slideshow in the same gallery seamlessly.
• Updated help pages to match the look and verbiage of the recently redone site-wide customization page.

Bugs zapped:

• Fixed missing Smuggy icon when you add your SmugMug page to the iPhone Home Screen.
• Fixed broken SmugShot link on the “choose an uploader” page.
• Fixed bug with saving photos in Firefox, where you’d end up with a file without an extension. This was occurring if your filename had a space in it, but it behaves for all filenames now.
• Fixed bug with the timeline section of your SmugMug homepage, where it would get “stuck” when you changed from date uploaded to date taken, or vice versa
• Fixed a bug on SmugMug’s browse page that prevented it from properly loading the map.
• Fixed rare bug in the shopping cart that allowed saving of an invalid crop.

Our sharegroups feature got some love:

• Fixed a sharegroups bug that was causing galleries to show up multiple times on your SmugMug homepage after viewing a sharegroup.
• Added “hide owner” functionality to sharegroups. If every gallery in sharegroup has the hide owner option turned on (in Customize Gallery settings), the sharegroup page will not have a link back to your SmugMug homepage.
• Added breadcrumbs back to your sharegroup. Now, when you click on a gallery from within a sharegroup, there’s an easy way to jump back to the sharegroup to check out the other galleries

More improvements:

• When Professional users add their custom domain in their SmugMug Control Panel, we now do more intelligent checking to make sure the domain is set up properly to point to domains.smugmug.com . More.
• Improved speed in the shopping cart, especially with large orders. You should see a noticeable improvement particularly when cropping photos.
• Changed the gear link in the footer to link to ClubSmug instead.
• Added Eye-Fi to ClubSmug.
• Gave the site-wide customization page (available for Power and Professional subscribers) a face lift. The wording is more clear and there are now useful links right on the page.
• Rewrote and reformatted many of our notification emails (renewal, photo comment, etc.) to be more clear and helpful.
• We had Atom 1.0 feeds for a long time, but were still feeding Atom 0.3 feeds as the default. Fixed.
• Added a feed for popular photos within a user’s category.
• Made it so expired free trialers without galleries can still view their SmugMug homepage and sign up.
• Made the “take me back to the page I was on” link smarter on the logout page. It now remembers if you were in your shopping cart when you clicked “logout”.
• Added a link from every Visitor help page back to our full help pages, so no one gets stranded.
• Our confirm message after using the “Adjust Thumbnails” photo tool was “pheh.” Fixed.

• Powerful new “buy multiples” interface so you (and your customers) can pack the new shopping cart to the brim. Print the whole gallery as 4×6 glossies, and add 10 photos as 5×7 lustre prints, 2 as mousepads, and a handful of 8×10s. All without leaving the page.
• Our homepage has a flash slideshow so you’ll get some variety when you visit.
• The “Arrange Photos” tool had an annoying formatting bug causing the toolbox to display at the top of the page. It’s now back on the left where it belongs.
• The “Save Photo” icon you get on your photobar when you’re logged in will now say “Owner Save” instead. As it turns out, everyone wanted that icon when they were logged in, but when we added it we caused some panic. Logout (or use Visitor View) and you’ll see a “Save Photo” icon, or no icon at all if you have your originals disabled.

Things you might not notice:

• Lots of changes to help pages, ClubSmug, and Give the Gift of SmugMug.
• Product changes on our 4×6 postcards and canvas prints.
• In the shopping cart, the catalog link in the footer now goes to our catalog page without prices.
• We added item numbers to the order confirmation screen, for easier reference.
• We fixed a bug that prevented the tracking number from being displayed.
• We now auto-generate passwords for logged-out orders, so your customers (or grandma) won’t have to hassle with creating and remembering an order password.
• Fixed a bug that was causing the order confirmation page for large orders to take an obscenely long time to load on FF2 on Macs.
• The “Items” total in the cart now reflects the total quantity, not just the number of different products. In other words, if you order 20 5×7 prints of the same photo, your item count is now 20.
• By popular demand, clicking on the thumbnail in the shopping cart now takes you to the Adjust Crop tool, instead of back to the gallery. You’ll see a “view in gallery” link added at the left.
• Fixed bug that was causing problems with shipping to a few countries. (Frustrating bug, but fun to see we had customers from Dubai!)
• Tweaked the in-cart Adjust Crop tool to be faster loading and more responsive.

Sorry for the panic this caused for many people the first time they saw it!

More convenience:  If you uploaded PNG, GIF, and JPEG files that were over 12 MB for standard and power users, over 24 MB for pros, or over 48 megapixels,  we used to reject them.  We’d write a Dear John note about them in your upload log, not exactly convenient or endearing.  

Now we re-size them to sneak under our limits so we don’t send you scrambling for Photoshop.

Filenames are back!  In the bulk photo tools, we had many requests to bring back filename display. 

Bug fixes:  

One bug prevented Filenames from being converted to Keywords on upload. Now you can upload files with dashes, spaces, etc… and the filenames are properly converted to Keywords.

Another made the Slideshow button disappear when you forced your gallery to be SmugMug Small.  

Retired:  The Drag & Drop uploader lacked the error detection and retry goodness of the other uploaders and, sadly, had to be retired.  But you can still find it listed in fine print at the bottom of the uploader tabs.  If it works for you, great.

PayPal:  Did you know they introduced a plug-in that lets you use your PayPal as if it were Mastercard on sites like SmugMug?  We acknowledged that on the site.

Pro FAQ:  Version 2.0.

As always:  Many enhancements to the help pages including vastly improved help search.

Oh, one more thing:  Got RAW?  (A separate release note is in the works for this.)