A note of dissatisfaction [Sitemap] - Digital Grin Photography Forum

winnjewett

Jun-22-2005, 11:25 PM

I would like to start by saying that I am a very satisfied smugmug customer. That said, there is one issue that I don't think that the powers-that-be are taking seriously. In order to accomodate a recent event, I needed to add an additional level of categorization. The purpose is to make my customers' lives simple and easy. This, however is not possible, and it sounds as though everyone at smugmug is perfectly content to leave it this way. This seems like poor foresight, and a lack of understanding on their part.

Here's why another level of categories is important:
If a photographer shoots both events and another type of photography, then he must make his top layer reflect this. Example:

Events
Portraits
Landscape

This leaves sub-categories and galleries available to each category. At the Baja 500, which I just attended, there were about 400 riders/drivers divided among different vehicle types. Since I have shot more than one event, the Baja 500 must be placed in a sub-category. This leaves me with no choice but to group all 400 riders into one huge list, making it difficult for my customers to find the photos they are looking for. This is unacceptable.

As a temporary solution, I purchased an additional professional account, which gave me that greatly needed additional category level, but this is certainly not ideal. I'm sure that it was not Don and Baldy's wish to squeeze an additional 100 dollars out of me, but as a result of their policies, that's what I was forced to do.

-winn

Ann McRae

Jun-23-2005, 06:24 AM

Hi

I just shot a soccer tournament and grouped each game time seperately. I set up the following hierarchy:
sports at the category
tournament as the subcategory
game time as the gallery

This way my customers can fairly simply find the photos they are interested in without placing all 700 in one gallery. However, I did have to make them all private, which required me giving 24 different links to the tournament organizer for display n their web page. It works. Not ideal, but it does work.

Could you not then split your subcategory into a variety of galleries for each driver?

ann

rutt

Jun-23-2005, 10:19 AM

The answer always seems to be that "not enough people ask for this given how hard it would be." It must be really really hard, because it seems that a lot of people have asked for it.

gooseattack

Jun-23-2005, 10:55 AM

There are certainly a lot of changes I would like smugmug to have...enhancments would take a great deal of time, but as a customer, it's an incentive to want to continue to sign up with Smugmug instead of something else like Printroom.

All in all, I am pretty happy about Smugmug, but I have been struggling with categories also. Having the option of:
Homepage - Category - Subcategory - Sub-Subcategory - Gallery
is nice, but I agree that most people don't like to click 4 or 5 times to see a picture. Customers may get lost within the categories.

Another request (this is actually the biggest change I would like to see), is Organization. As of now, the easiest way to organize pictures is the Organize by Position link on the homepage. However, I think think feature is limited. Let's say If I am a compulsive picture taker and take 100 pictures a day. In 5 years, I would have 100 x 365 x 5 = 182,500 pictures!

So, if you have 182,500 pictures and divide them up to 50 pictures per gallery, that would still be 3,650 galleries! It would be pain to organize the galleries by position every time you create a new gallery -- and you have to see all 3,650 thumbnails and wait for them to load.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a feature to maybe sort by categories or subcategories? :clap That would make my life much simpler...

colourbox

Jun-23-2005, 11:31 AM

I hope I'm not off base in this thread, but in the larger world, hard categories/folders are giving way to keyword metadata. Instead of having many small categories, you can have fewer larger categories with subgroups organized by metadata. For this to work at smugmug, smugmug would need to upgrade the keyword function.

I tried to use keywords but they don't work in private client galleries, I wish keyword searching could operate within the scope of individual galleries or categories so that private searching could work without locating photos of other jobs, clients, or users.

So ultimately my request would be for smugmug to allow metadata-driven categorization and search that can be limited to within particular galleries. The model I am talking would be similar to the Collections feature as implemented in Adobe Bridge. For this to be easy for visitors and clients, I would like to be able to send them a search URL with keywords in it and a password if necessary. When they click the URL, smugmug would display the photos (which can be from different galleries) in one "virtual gallery" and ask for the password if necessary.

I would like to be able to have "virtual categories" on the home page that are not hard categories but are really links to specific keyword combinations so I don't have to organize galleries into every last sub-classification. That way, if they don't have a URL they can go to my home page and click a "virtual gallery" name that brings up photos for that keyword combination. It would save novices from having to run a search themselves.

The reason I am more into metadata than hard categories is that I often want a photo to exist in more than one gallery. A photo can only exist in one category (unless you duplicate it), but a photo can easily exist under multiple keywords.

I sure hope my boring rant makes sense and somehow helps...

mercphoto

Jun-23-2005, 12:00 PM

Winnjewett, there are ways around this problem. Some of them have support already built into Smugmug. Others would require some work by them. At least one of the ideas below I have proposed to them before.

Look at mercphoto.smugmug.com, then go under "Karts", and see that I have multiple events as well. Karts is the category. An event is the Sub-category. Then galleries are divided up usually by group or kart type, or possibly by day as well.

Is this ideal? Not quite. But its not quite the "This leaves me with no choice but to group all 400 riders into one huge list" that you make it out to be. You do have choices to make this easier. Its just not the choice you want it to be.

I would like to start by saying that I am a very satisfied smugmug customer. That said, there is one issue that I don't think that the powers-that-be are taking seriously.

To me, you don't sound "very" satisified at all. And I do believe they have taken the issue seriously. They have their reasons for not adding another layer of category and have stated those reasons often. The fact that their opinion does not mesh with your opinion does not mean they are taking the situation lightly.

Now, what do I want added to make life easier? It involves changes to searching:

1) Allow partial word searching. They recently brought this in with wildcard characters (for example, "k89*"). I do not know if "*89*" would also work or not, but I sure hope it does.

2) Allow a user to restrict searches to lower levels. They recently allowed a pro user to restrict searches to only his galleries (though I can't figure out how to do this yet), BUT what I want is the ability to restrict searches to either my entire collection, to a particular category, a particular sub-category, or a particular gallery.

If Smugmug can implement both the above, and I have good ideas on the user interface to make this easy on the user, then searching for photos becomes much simpler.

From an astethic viewpoint I agree with Smugmug: too many levels of categorization just adds to confusion.

Am I a very satisfied customer? Mostly so. My big gripe is searching (see above) and their lack of interest of selling digital downloads.

onethumb

Jun-23-2005, 12:13 PM

The answer always seems to be that "not enough people ask for this given how hard it would be." It must be really really hard, because it seems that a lot of people have asked for it.

It's not really really hard, and I don't think that's been our response.

The real problem is that it's very confusing for our (and your!) customers. We already get complaints that our navigation is too difficult, that there are too many bread-crumb levels (home -> Cat -> SubCat -> Gallery is too many). People get lost with 3 levels. Adding another would make it dramatically harder. Making it n-deep would make it impossible.

Remember, the average computer user isn't like you and I. They don't understand what folders are and how they nest (which is why MS had to make 'My Documents' because people "lost" their work all the time). They don't visualize and understand tree structures.

If you want your customers to find and buy or view your photos, burying them many levels deep is the kiss of death. As our help section on the subject explains, we think we've found the perfect balance. But we're always open to doing something even better.

If we could come up with something both more flexible AND as easy/easier to use, we'd do it in a heartbeat. I've asked for help from dgrinners many times, and so far, everyone has come up empty.

Here's the Nth call for help. :)

Don

onethumb

Jun-23-2005, 12:19 PM

1) Allow partial word searching. They recently brought this in with wildcard characters (for example, "k89*"). I do not know if "*89*" would also work or not, but I sure hope it does.

Sorry, it doesn't, and as far as I know, no search engines do (or, at least, not very fast). This is an incredibly difficult computer science problem. Wildcard searching is usually based on prefix-branching using a tree. So a search term uses the first letter to quickly narrow the search, then the second letter, and so on.

We're not planning on implementing this until someone far more brilliant than I dreams it up at Stanford's CS department or something.

2) Allow a user to restrict searches to lower levels. They recently allowed a pro user to restrict searches to only his galleries (though I can't figure out how to do this yet), BUT what I want is the ability to restrict searches to either my entire collection, to a particular category, a particular sub-category, or a particular gallery.

This is an interesting idea. I'll have to give it some thought, but it might be doable for images. First I've heard of it.

Am I a very satisfied customer? Mostly so. My big gripe is searching (see above) and their lack of interest of selling digital downloads.
This isn't very fair. We're very interested in selling digital downloads, as the numerous threads on the subject show. We've been busy, also as numerous threads have shown, but it doesn't have anything to do with a lack of interest.

Don

mercphoto

Jun-23-2005, 12:26 PM

Remember, the average computer user isn't like you and I.
Exactly.

If we could come up with something both more flexible AND as easy/easier to use, we'd do it in a heartbeat. I've asked for help from dgrinners many times, and so far, everyone has come up empty.

Here's the Nth call for help. :)

Don
Ok, here are the details on my searching idea. What I like to do is put a caption on each kart racing photo that has the kart number. I ususally do "k32" for kart 32, for example. The user can then search for k32 and get his photos. The problem is, he gets ALL the photos.

In other words, he just wants to search for photos from the last race, not from every race I photographed. He's already seen those. He might want to search only one particular gallery or one particular sub-category.

So, in addition to a search string, we could use a search scope. The possible values for scope are: Smugmug (i.e. the entire smugmug universe), User (i.e. all of Mercury Photography's images), Category, Sub-Category, and finally Gallery.

The default could happen one of two ways:

1) Default to the User
2) Or Default to where ever you happen to be now. If I am at the user's top page, default to User. If I am currently in a gallery, default to gallery. Etc.

Not sure how clear that was.

Another possibility to help searching is to change how search results are reported to the user. Show a listing of all galleries that search results were found in and let the user click to see "all photos that matched my search for the Group 2 gallery of the May 28 race of Kart racing".

Goto my page and search for "kart99". You get 75 hits in various places and its a bit clumsy to actually use the search results.

Lastly, back to organizing photos, if we could choose to have galleries displayed in the sub-category page without thumbnails, then if a sub-category had dozens of galleries in it, the overall page would be smaller to scroll through.

DavidTO

Jun-23-2005, 12:28 PM

How about smart galleries? This would be a gallery that would have all instances of a keyword and would automatically update as you uploaded images. A la smart playlists, smart folders, etc.

mercphoto

Jun-23-2005, 12:54 PM

jfriend

Jun-23-2005, 12:59 PM

How about smart galleries? This would be a gallery that would have all instances of a keyword and would automatically update as you uploaded images. A la smart playlists, smart folders, etc.
This is something I'd really like. I have been doing a lot of "event" photography lately, often 600-1000 images per event (school talent shows, kid's sports, summer camps, etc...). When presenting this many images to hundreds of parents, how to organize them has been a real challenge. I find that I often want to offer several different views of the images. For example, for the talent show images, I want to offer a view by Act and Scene, but I also want to offer a view by person. That way, a viewer could either find all the images for a particular scene or they could find all the images that their son/daughter is in. I have the same issue for kid's sports photos and other kid's events I've been shooting. I want to present more than one view of the same set of images. When I use to use Photoshop Album on my own hard disk, I'd use queried views of tags and/or Photoshop Album's "collections" to create these views.

In Smugmug, I have to "hard code the organization" one particular way and the only way to offer any other way of viewing the images is to upload a duplicate set of images organized a different way. When you start having images with multiple people in them, this can get really time consuming and would obviously be really wasteful of storage.

I've been wondering if Smugmug could be the first to offer "logical views" of galleries based on IPTC tags. That way I could tag images with people's names, act/scene, etc... and then set up pre-canned "logical views" of these images that it would be really easy for a viewer to use. For example, in the talent show, my dream would be for me to upload all the images into one physical gallery, but have them tagged with act/scene, grade level and people in the shot. Then, the viewer would be offered pre-canned choices for viewing the photos organized by act/scene, grade level or person's name.

To be clear, I'm not asking for a search. Many of my viewers are not saavy enough to use a search effectively. When they select view by act/scene, they'd be presented with virtual-galleries for each act/scene that there was a tag for and they could choose the one they were interested in. When they select view by grade-level, they'd be presented with virtual-galleries for each grade level. Same for person's name.

Anyone else be interested in this type of functionality?

mercphoto

Jun-23-2005, 01:11 PM

Anyone else be interested in this type of functionality?
Now that's pretty cool.

colourbox

Jun-23-2005, 01:21 PM

How about smart galleries? This would be a gallery that would have all instances of a keyword and would automatically update as you uploaded images. A la smart playlists, smart folders, etc.

Definitely, that's part of what I meant in my earlier post. Anything that uses the image metadata to organize itself, rather than us having to create all the structures. Trying out metadata-driven "Smart _____s" definitely gives you that "Wow, this is the way it should be!" feeling.

onethumb

Jun-23-2005, 01:52 PM

How about smart galleries? This would be a gallery that would have all instances of a keyword and would automatically update as you uploaded images. A la smart playlists, smart folders, etc.

We already have this. It's the beauty of keywords. Just tag something and there's a "dynamic gallery" of everything with those tags. :)

For example, every time I post a photo from or about Hawaii, it automagically shows up here: Hawaii! (http://onethumb.smugmug.com/keyword/hawaii)

Don

onethumb

Jun-23-2005, 01:56 PM

Exactly.

Ok, here are the details on my searching idea. What I like to do is put a caption on each kart racing photo that has the kart number. I ususally do "k32" for kart 32, for example. The user can then search for k32 and get his photos. The problem is, he gets ALL the photos.

In other words, he just wants to search for photos from the last race, not from every race I photographed. He's already seen those. He might want to search only one particular gallery or one particular sub-category.

So, in addition to a search string, we could use a search scope. The possible values for scope are: Smugmug (i.e. the entire smugmug universe), User (i.e. all of Mercury Photography's images), Category, Sub-Category, and finally Gallery.

The default could happen one of two ways:

1) Default to the User
2) Or Default to where ever you happen to be now. If I am at the user's top page, default to User. If I am currently in a gallery, default to gallery. Etc.

Not sure how clear that was.

Another possibility to help searching is to change how search results are reported to the user. Show a listing of all galleries that search results were found in and let the user click to see "all photos that matched my search for the Group 2 gallery of the May 28 race of Kart racing".

Goto my page and search for "kart99". You get 75 hits in various places and its a bit clumsy to actually use the search results.

Lastly, back to organizing photos, if we could choose to have galleries displayed in the sub-category page without thumbnails, then if a sub-category had dozens of galleries in it, the overall page would be smaller to scroll through.

I'm not entirely clear why you wouldn't use the keyword feature of smugmug to get exactly what you want?

For example, tag something as "kart99" and as "raceJun17". Then point them to the combined page of kart99-raceJun17.

Here's a keyword "gallery" that has all my photos tagged with "Hawaii" and "atvs": ATVing in Hawaii! (http://onethumb.smugmug.com/keyword/hawaii-atvs)

Keyword tag sorting is faster than searching, more static, and has an easier URL to pass along. I'm probably missing something, though... ?

Don

onethumb

Jun-23-2005, 01:58 PM

This is something I'd really like. I have been doing a lot of "event" photography lately, often 600-1000 images per event (school talent shows, kid's sports, summer camps, etc...). When presenting this many images to hundreds of parents, how to organize them has been a real challenge. I find that I often want to offer several different views of the images. For example, for the talent show images, I want to offer a view by Act and Scene, but I also want to offer a view by person. That way, a viewer could either find all the images for a particular scene or they could find all the images that their son/daughter is in. I have the same issue for kid's sports photos and other kid's events I've been shooting. I want to present more than one view of the same set of images. When I use to use Photoshop Album on my own hard disk, I'd use queried views of tags and/or Photoshop Album's "collections" to create these views.

In Smugmug, I have to "hard code the organization" one particular way and the only way to offer any other way of viewing the images is to upload a duplicate set of images organized a different way. When you start having images with multiple people in them, this can get really time consuming and would obviously be really wasteful of storage.

I've been wondering if Smugmug could be the first to offer "logical views" of galleries based on IPTC tags. That way I could tag images with people's names, act/scene, etc... and then set up pre-canned "logical views" of these images that it would be really easy for a viewer to use. For example, in the talent show, my dream would be for me to upload all the images into one physical gallery, but have them tagged with act/scene, grade level and people in the shot. Then, the viewer would be offered pre-canned choices for viewing the photos organized by act/scene, grade level or person's name.

To be clear, I'm not asking for a search. Many of my viewers are not saavy enough to use a search effectively. When they select view by act/scene, they'd be presented with virtual-galleries for each act/scene that there was a tag for and they could choose the one they were interested in. When they select view by grade-level, they'd be presented with virtual-galleries for each grade level. Same for person's name.

Anyone else be interested in this type of functionality?

Man, we must really suck.

I just posted about this, so I'm not going to rehash it, but I could swear we've had this for 6 months or so. Lots of people are using it for doing exactly what you're suggesting... ?

What can we do to improve it?

Don

mercphoto

Jun-23-2005, 02:02 PM

We already have this. It's the beauty of keywords. Just tag something and there's a "dynamic gallery" of everything with those tags. :)

For example, every time I post a photo from or about Hawaii, it automagically shows up here: Hawaii! (http://onethumb.smugmug.com/keyword/hawaii)
Good way to use keywords. Haven't thought of them that way before. :)

Ok, lets run with this. Lets say I do 12 kart club races per year, plus 4 regionals. That is 16 races. I already have all those images with keyword "Iron Rock Raceway", which honestly isn't doing me any good. Already over 3900 images on that keyword. So I'm not helping myself or my customers in this route. I'm not making good use of keywords.

Lets say I break it down to keywords such as "kart32", "kart8", etc. Then the user can get only his/her kart numbers. I could also use keywords for event name, and even for racing group name. But even that can get cumbersome. Kart 8 exists in the kid karts class, the juniors, and the senior shifters. Plus from this race, the prior race, the two before that, etc.

What is a good way to use existing tools, and to create as few new tools as possible, to help users find their photos? Is there a way to get an intersection of two keywords perhaps? "All images of kart8 from kidkarts from May28?

Yeah, I know... its getting complicated. I don't like that either.

mercphoto

Jun-23-2005, 02:03 PM

onethumb

Jun-23-2005, 02:03 PM

Good way to use keywords. Haven't thought of them that way before. :)

Ok, lets run with this. Lets say I do 12 kart club races per year, plus 4 regionals. That is 16 races. I already have all those images with keyword "Iron Rock Raceway", which honestly isn't doing me any good. Already over 3900 images on that keyword. So I'm not helping myself or my customers in this route. I'm not making good use of keywords.

Lets say I break it down to keywords such as "kart32", "kart8", etc. Then the user can get only his/her kart numbers. I could also use keywords for event name, and even for racing group name. But even that can get cumbersome. Kart 8 exists in the kid karts class, the juniors, and the senior shifters. Plus from this race, the prior race, the two before that, etc.

What is a good way to use existing tools, and to create as few new tools as possible, to help users find their photos? Is there a way to get an intersection of two keywords perhaps? "All images of kart8 from kidkarts from May28?

Yeah, I know... its getting complicated. I don't like that either.

Yep, just add a hyphen between the keywords.

You can string an unlimited # of keywords together: kart8-kart32-kidkarts-kartrace27 would chain together "kart8" + "kart32" + "kidkarts" + "kartrace27" photos, so you really get to drill down fast.

There are then some pretty quick-click tools to rapidly drill up or down even more.

Don

onethumb

Jun-23-2005, 02:07 PM

Coulda swore I've brought this idea up before, but I could be mistaken about that.

I'm notorious around the smugmug offices for saying "first I've heard about this" when, in reality, I've heard about it only once or twice, so it didn't "stick". The other team members gleefully pull out emails where they told me about it quite plainly... :)

So "first I've heard about it" may or may not mean "i've forgotten" in addition to the literal meaning. ;)

Don

Andy

Jun-23-2005, 02:08 PM

mercphoto

Jun-23-2005, 02:11 PM

Yes, proper use of keywords, and the combining of keywords into one search, will do what I need to do. I think I could even write up a small web page to explain to my riders how to find the images themselves.

I feel so dumb.... :sniff

jfriend

Jun-23-2005, 02:43 PM

I'm not entirely clear why you wouldn't use the keyword feature of smugmug to get exactly what you want?

For example, tag something as "kart99" and as "raceJun17". Then point them to the combined page of kart99-raceJun17.

Here's a keyword "gallery" that has all my photos tagged with "Hawaii" and "atvs": ATVing in Hawaii! (http://onethumb.smugmug.com/keyword/hawaii-atvs)

Keyword tag sorting is faster than searching, more static, and has an easier URL to pass along. I'm probably missing something, though... ?

Don Maybe keywords will do what I want. I'm not that saavy on how to best use them so let me ask some questions. They definitely sound interesting for my family photos, but I'm not sure they can do what I need for my event photography. Here are some questions:

1) Can keywords automatically come from metadata fields upon upload? For several reasons, I need to use PC-based tools for assigning them and have them stored in the image metadata (I use Adobe Bridge for assigning metadata and plan to use other PC-based tools that also use the metadata for managing the images locally).

2) Can keyword views be scoped to within a single gallery or category? In the talent show example or for any of my event photography, I don't want collisions with keywords from other events? The viewers are only trying to look at photos for that event and I don't want to have to make sure keywords are globally unique. For example, if Bob Smith is a child at our school, I should be able to tag photos with his name and not have them collide with other Bob Smith photos from Little League or a different Bob Smith in a different event.

3) Will keyword views work with password protected galleries? For parental concern reasons, I password protect almost every gallery that I post that has photos of kids (school events, sports teams, summer camps, etc...). This is another reason I need a solution that scopes to a particular gallery or category (since a set of galleries for an event will share a common password).

4) Can I easily present a UI for keywords that scope only to a set of password protected galleries? For example, could I have a Smugmug generated page that showed the different keyword viewing options for a particular event (by act/scene, by person, by grade level)?

--John

gooseattack

Jun-23-2005, 02:55 PM

Yep, just add a hyphen between the keywords.

You can string an unlimited # of keywords together: kart8-kart32-kidkarts-kartrace27 would chain together "kart8" + "kart32" + "kidkarts" + "kartrace27" photos, so you really get to drill down fast.

There are then some pretty quick-click tools to rapidly drill up or down even more.

DonMaybe I'm just retarded or something :scratch , but can someone please explain it again?

I usually do keywords by the bulk, and they looks something like this:

"Christmas" "Party" "Christmas Party" "2004" "Trail of Lights" "winter"

What you need to type out in this section to make it Related Keywords, Combined With, or Remove Keywords?

If you want to do related keywords do you do something like this? (entered word-for-word in the textbox):

"Christmas+Party+Lights+winter"

If you want to add combined with, do you enter something like this? (entered word-for-word in the keyword textbox)

"Christmas" + "2004" + "Trail of Lights"

Would this be correct?

Also, is there a limited list of keywords you can enter? I know in the Control Panel section -- there are 100 keywords listed, but I assume you can enter more than that.

One last thing (sorry for the hand-holding to walk me through this),
Is it possible to insert links on your homepage? -- links that will take you to the keyword galleries. I understand that you can insert links, but can you insert them in the "100 Keyword section" as a list? (for example, using <LI> , tables, or some kind of css box).

Thank a bunch :):
Lucy

onethumb

Jun-23-2005, 03:56 PM

1) Can keywords automatically come from metadata fields upon upload? For several reasons, I need to use PC-based tools for assigning them and have them stored in the image metadata (I use Adobe Bridge for assigning metadata and plan to use other PC-based tools that also use the metadata for managing the images locally).

Yes. We automatically look for keywords in the industry-standard IPTC Keywords field as well as trying to intelligently mine your filename you upload.

Some apps don't use IPTC, like ACDSee. I have no idea why they don't want to play nice with the rest of the world, but you'd better try your apps and see.

2) Can keyword views be scoped to within a single gallery or category? In the talent show example or for any of my event photography, I don't want collisions with keywords from other events? The viewers are only trying to look at photos for that event and I don't want to have to make sure keywords are globally unique. For example, if Bob Smith is a child at our school, I should be able to tag photos with his name and not have them collide with other Bob Smith photos from Little League or a different Bob Smith in a different event.
Not automatically, no, but you can easily add a specific keyword that's unique to a given category, subcategory, or gallery and combine the two or more keywords to drill down.

3) Will keyword views work with password protected galleries? For parental concern reasons, I password protect almost every gallery that I post that has photos of kids (school events, sports teams, summer camps, etc...). This is another reason I need a solution that scopes to a particular gallery or category (since a set of galleries for an event will share a common password).

Nope, I'm afraid our policy at smugmug is that if you want to password something, it's removed from all search, keywords, and various other indexes. We take privacy and security very seriously, and would hate for a lapse to damage someone's business or image.

4) Can I easily present a UI for keywords that scope only to a set of password protected galleries? For example, could I have a Smugmug generated page that showed the different keyword viewing options for a particular event (by act/scene, by person, by grade level)?

Nope, but I'm not adverse to adding this kind of functionality. Did you have anything specific in mind for how this would work? Bear in mind, keeping it easy to use is more important to me than making it super powerful.

The other alternative is to add a page (either to smugmug using customization, or to your own external site) which links to specific keywords and/or keyword combinations.

Don

jfriend

Jun-23-2005, 03:58 PM

Man, we must really suck.

I just posted about this, so I'm not going to rehash it, but I could swear we've had this for 6 months or so. Lots of people are using it for doing exactly what you're suggesting... ?

What can we do to improve it?

Don
Since you asked what you can do to improve it...

So, it dawned on me that maybe I just need to RTFM on keywords. So, I tried to find what you say about keywords on smugmug. This is all I can find at http://www.smugmug.com/help/keywords-tags. It answers a few of my questions, but doesn't even remotely describe either what you are doing with keywords or most of the questions I've asked or most of the other questions asked aobut them in this thread.

To be perfectly honest, I read nearly every post here and have, at one time or another, read most of your site's help pages. I thought keywords were for searching, for Google indexing and for the keyword list that you can put on your homepage (which seems pretty dorky to me for the keywords and number of keywords I've tried). I'm not interested in any of those.

So, to answer your question, if you have already written a lot more about keywords than the above page, then it needs to be easier to find and I need to read and understand it. If you haven't written more than that, they you need to overhaul that page and really illustrate the power of keywords with a whole bunch of real examples of what you can do with them and how you go about doing it.

And, from what I've read so far, it appears that keywords will not solve my event photography problem becaues they don't work on password protected galleries, they can't be scoped to a gallery / category and I don't understand how I could set up the appropriate UI for the keywords related to a particular event.

--John

onethumb

Jun-23-2005, 04:01 PM

Maybe I'm just retarded or something :scratch , but can someone please explain it again?

I usually do keywords by the bulk, and they looks something like this:

"Christmas" "Party" "Christmas Party" "2004" "Trail of Lights" "winter"

What you need to type out in this section to make it Related Keywords, Combined With, or Remove Keywords?

If you want to do related keywords do you do something like this? (entered word-for-word in the textbox):

"Christmas+Party+Lights+winter"

If you want to add combined with, do you enter something like this? (entered word-for-word in the keyword textbox)

"Christmas" + "2004" + "Trail of Lights"

Would this be correct?

Also, is there a limited list of keywords you can enter? I know in the Control Panel section -- there are 100 keywords listed, but I assume you can enter more than that.

One last thing (sorry for the hand-holding to walk me through this),
Is it possible to insert links on your homepage? -- links that will take you to the keyword galleries. I understand that you can insert links, but can you insert them in the "100 Keyword section" as a list? (for example, using <LI> , tables, or some kind of css box).

Thank a bunch :):
Lucy

You enter keywords as follows:

Christmas "2004" "Trail of Lights"

That will tag a photo or photos with all three of those keywords. It uses a space as as the delimiter. Note that for numbers, a few stop words, and phrases with spaces, you need to wrap quotes around them. For single words, like Christmas, you don't.

Then, to see a 'gallery' with all your Christmas photos for 2004, your URL would look like:

http://yourname.smugmug.com/keyword/Christmas-2004

That's all there is to it!

There's more help in our help section on keywords (http://www.smugmug.com/help/keywords-tags) of course.

I'll add clarifying how keyword combinations work to our TODO list, clearly we're not doing a good job at describing them.

Don

jfriend

Jun-23-2005, 04:06 PM

Nope, but I'm not adverse to adding this kind of functionality. Did you have anything specific in mind for how this would work? Bear in mind, keeping it easy to use is more important to me than making it super powerful.

I do have some ideas for an easy way that this could work simply and powerfully. I'll put some thought into it and post in a little while when I get some time to write it down in a sensible way.

--John

DavidTO

Jun-23-2005, 04:38 PM

Mike Lane

Jun-23-2005, 04:46 PM

Geeze Onethumb, that keyword stuff is pretty cool, I'm not sure why you guys don't advertise that capability more. It is very much like del.icio.us isn't it?

I suppose I could even write a script that sent people to http://www.mikelanephotography.com/keyword/<whatever>

Now if I only knew how to write scripts!

rutt

Jun-23-2005, 07:02 PM

If we could come up with something both more flexible AND as easy/easier to use, we'd do it in a heartbeat. I've asked for help from dgrinners many times, and so far, everyone has come up empty.

Here's the Nth call for help. :)

Don

At some level this isn't your problem. For the pro users who keep telling you why they want more levels of hierarchy, it's their problem if they use the feature in some way that makes it hard for their customers to find what they want. They are telling you that they have ideas for using more levels of hierarchy that will make it easier for themselves and their customers. Why not make this a feature of pro accounts and then they will be paying you for the freedom to do it they way they want. If it's not hard for you, what do you care? Just make it an "advanced/pro" feature. It's advanced because it's on some obscure menu, maybe the "advanced" menu. And it's pro because only pro accounts get it.

If you do it that way, you won't be putting it into the hands of people who will use it in some way that just confuses themselves.

So, what's missing from this?

I do think virtual galleries, categories, and subcategories modeled on searching is a good idea, but it really doesn't let the pros organize their work the way they want. Suppose I want a journal view at the "category" level, for example?

In my experience, hierarchy, even very deep hierarchy works great as long as someone puts some thought into it and it isn't too arbitrary. That's the reason MS ended up with "My Documents"; the average user wasn't good at creating meaningful hierarchy. But we all use hierarchy all the time to simplify things. Libraries stacks have a lot of hierarchy, each book has a structure that might include "Books", chapters, sections, paragraphs, and sentences. We give date/time in year/month/date/hour/minute/second.

Is there something I'm just not getting?

rutt

Jun-23-2005, 08:00 PM

Charge $X/year for each additional level allowed. That will keep it under control, I think, but not limit pros who actually know what they want to do with it. Any you'll get paid.

onethumb

Jun-23-2005, 09:05 PM

At some level this isn't your problem. For the pro users who keep telling you why they want more levels of hierarchy, it's their problem if they use the feature in some way that makes it hard for their customers to find what they want. They are telling you that they have ideas for using more levels of hierarchy that will make it easier for themselves and their customers. Why not make this a feature of pro accounts and then they will be paying you for the freedom to do it they way they want. If it's not hard for you, what do you care? Just make it an "advanced/pro" feature. It's advanced because it's on some obscure menu, maybe the "advanced" menu. And it's pro because only pro accounts get it.

If you do it that way, you won't be putting it into the hands of people who will use it in some way that just confuses themselves.

So, what's missing from this?

On the surface, this sounds very logical and makes a lot of sense.

Once you mix a healthy dose of reality from the "How to be a great smugmug customer service rep", though, it falls apart.

Most of the time, when a browsing person ('browser') gets confused, they just give up. On the rare occasion that they make a stink, they make a stink to us because they find the help links and email links and whatnot.

As a result, not only does it take up our precious customer support time, but it also makes both us and our pro look bad. Yet the Pro never hears about it, they just complain about no sales.

I know it's a bit arrogant of us to insist that we know best, but it IS our job to do photo sharing, we serve more than 1,000,000 unique visitors per day, and we interface directly with tens of thousands of customers, so we get a very tight feedback loop of what does and doesn't work.

We're often wrong, as we've seen over and over, but on this particular point I think we're correct. However, I think that's only because we haven't come up with something brilliant that's better... and I think it's waiting for us. We just need to get that lightbulb moment.

Don

digismile

Jun-23-2005, 09:52 PM

The Keyword search works perfectly for a multi-category seach. I tried it on a group of photos from a sports related activity with some folks at work. What onethumb didn't add to his description of keywords is that the screen offers the viewer additional sort words specific to the current selection. This means the user can continue to filter by clicking additional keywords (i.e. "combine with"), so you don't necessarily need a keyword search script.

I simply gave the entire group a common keyword, a subset of this an additional keyword, and a further subset of the subset another keyword.

To see what I mean, look at:

http://digismile.smugmug.com/keyword/corporate%20challenge%202005

This will show 27 photos. Then click on "combine with" Lana. This will reduce the selection to 8 photos. Then combine with team, and the selection narrows to one.

This should work fairly well for several of the event type scenarios discussed in this thread.

The only thing I noticed is that my sort order changed. The original gallery is sorted by filename. I don't know how it ordered this keyword selection.

Brad

Mike Lane

Jun-23-2005, 10:34 PM

digismile

Jun-24-2005, 02:21 AM

Yes, the examples that onethumb gave made that perfectly clear.:D My point is that a user essentially has a ready made, context sensitive pick list right today, no scripting required, no new programming by smugmug. The examples given earlier by others seemed to require the intended viewer to have previous knowledge of the keywords to put yourname.smugmug.com/keyword/keyword1-keyword2 together. Some people had suggested they would put some instructions on a webpage etc. When I tried this for the first time, I was pleasently surprised to see that there is already an automated process.

Any event photographer could now simply send a link like:
yourname.smugmug.com/keyword/event. The person viewing that link would then see all photos for that day and would be presented with a list of additional key words to refine their search at the top right of the page. They might then click on the race number and/or kart number (something like the example given earlier in this thread).

This whole thread started because a number of people spoke of their strong desire to have more levels of sub-categories. The keyword approach could be used to take this to as many levels as required. The stated downside (with sub-categories) was the increased number of clicks to get where the viewer wants to go. Obviously with keywords, it is possible to go much more directly to the final "sub-category" (keyword selection) instead of having to travel through many levels of a nested hierarchy.

The reason I was surprised with this solution is because I turned off displaying keywords long ago on my page. When trying this out, I quickly tagged a few photos then tried the yourname.smugmug.com/keyword/keyword1-keyword2 approach and thought, that's cool! It was only when I looked on the top right corner of the screen that I saw that I could add/subtract other keywords ( and it only showed keywords associated with this set, not the million other keywords that smugmug generated for other galleries).

Onethumb answered one person's response with something like "I think we already have that". I guess what everyone is stumbling around with is that many of us really had no idea how keywords actually worked without seeing a real life example.

So to repeat someone else's point, maybe the power of keywords needs to be advertised a bit more and not be smugmug's best kept secret.

You can also just type in something like:

yourname.smugmug.com/keyword/keyword1-keyword2

rutt

Jun-24-2005, 05:01 AM

Most of the time, when a browsing person ('browser') gets confused, they just give up. On the rare occasion that they make a stink, they make a stink to us because they find the help links and email links and whatnot.

Fix this. For pros who insist on more levels than you are comfortable with, point the appropriate help sections at something that the pro writes and gives his contact for tech support.

We're often wrong, as we've seen over and over, but on this particular point I think we're correct. However, I think that's only because we haven't come up with something brilliant that's better... and I think it's waiting for us. We just need to get that lightbulb moment.

Don

The problem is that this is so ill defined a problem that it's impossible to work on. I don't really understand what makes you so uncomfortable with filesystem style hierarchy and so comfortable with the arbitrary category/subcategory/gallery style you do support. I know that you think hierarchy is confusing, but, then so are a lot of worthwhile things. We have to choose between confusing grandma and having email, for example. Personally, I find it confusing that you treat different levels of the hierarchy so differently.

Can you give an outline of a possible solution? What tests would it have to pass? Is there someway to make this more concrete?

Mike Lane

Jun-24-2005, 07:12 AM

This whole thread started because a number of people spoke of their strong desire to have more levels of sub-categories. The keyword approach could be used to take this to as many levels as required. The stated downside (with sub-categories) was the increased number of clicks to get where the viewer wants to go. Obviously with keywords, it is possible to go much more directly to the final "sub-category" (keyword selection) instead of having to travel through many levels of a nested hierarchy.

The reason I was surprised with this solution is because I turned off displaying keywords long ago on my page. When trying this out, I quickly tagged a few photos then tried the yourname.smugmug.com/keyword/keyword1-keyword2 approach and thought, that's cool! It was only when I looked on the top right corner of the screen that I saw that I could add/subtract other keywords ( and it only showed keywords associated with this set, not the million other keywords that smugmug generated for other galleries).
Agreed and same here. My only gripe about this feature is that it is not easy or intuitive to access via a search and it is basically hidden if you don't have the (awful looking) keyword "cloud" sitting on your page.

My point is that I'd like easier access to the keyword search for my site. I'm still not sure how to get to it without doing the whole www.mikelanephotography.com/keyword/ (http://www.mikelanephotography.com/keyword/) thing.

Just to reiterate what you were saying, in my opinion the keyword system can be used in effect to create an nth level layers. There are other sites which use a very similar system as the method by which they allow users to categorize their entries -- del.icio.us is the site that I'm thinking of.

digismile

Jun-24-2005, 08:27 AM

My only gripe about this feature is that it is not easy or intuitive to access via a search and it is basically hidden if you don't have the (awful looking) keyword "cloud" sitting on your page.

I was thinking about what this would look like. In my example, I only had a few key words for these specific photos, and therefore I only see a manageable amount at the top of the screen.

If some like Ann used it for soccer and used the jersey number as one of the keyword criteria, it might look ugly. I guess you could use a "range" keywords like 1-20, 21-40, etc.

I agree with your point that an clean looking input box where the user simply typed the keywords and it went out and did the www.yourname\smugmug.com\keyword\word1-word2 (http://www.yournamesmugmug.comkeywordword1-word2/) automatically would be very useful.

mercphoto

Jun-24-2005, 08:51 AM

I was thinking about what this would look like. In my example, I only had a few key words for these specific photos, and therefore I only see a manageable amount at the top of the screen.

If some like Ann used it for soccer and used the jersey number as one of the keyword criteria, it might look ugly. I guess you could use a "range" keywords like 1-20, 21-40, etc.

Last night I did about half my kart racing photos. A bunch of editing of keywords, for sure, but you can see the results of what you are talking about by looking at my page: mercphoto.smugmug.com

I have decided to tag each racing image with at least three keywords: track name, event date, and rider number. Eventually I might add kart type (i.e. kid kart, shifter, clutch, etc.) but that is not always easy to identify from the picture.

Cluttered or not? Easy searching or not? I think I can explain the three-step process to find photos easy enough to customers. Choose the keyword for your track. Next the keyword for the event date. Finally your rider number keyword.

rutt

Jun-24-2005, 09:00 AM

jfriend

Jun-24-2005, 09:04 AM

Last night I did about half my kart racing photos. A bunch of editing of keywords, for sure, but you can see the results of what you are talking about by looking at my page: mercphoto.smugmug.com (http://mercphoto.smugmug.com)

I have decided to tag each racing image with at least three keywords: track name, event date, and rider number. Eventually I might add kart type (i.e. kid kart, shifter, clutch, etc.) but that is not always easy to identify from the picture.

Cluttered or not? Easy searching or not? I think I can explain the three-step process to find photos easy enough to customers. Choose the keyword for your track. Next the keyword for the event date. Finally your rider number keyword.
I see the potential power of this feature, but boy this is not easy to use without each viewer reading and understanding a multi-sentence description of how to use it first. Further, the big block on the homepage that lists every single keyword you have in your galleries is just plain ugly and hard to understand. And, after you select your first keyword, the "combine with" text/presentation is very small text and not that simple to understand (e.g. it's pretty techy).

This doesn't seem to line up with the Smugmug "easy to use" mantra. So as not be to just a complainer and offer some constructive feedback, I'm working on some ideas for how this could work a lot better. More when I get them written down.

--John

mercphoto

Jun-24-2005, 09:23 AM

I see the potential power of this feature, but boy this is not easy to use without each viewer reading and understanding a multi-sentence description of how to use it first.
My fear as well. Powerful, and awful fast too. Heck, since some photos have more than one kart in them, you can actually search for every photo from a particular event with two particular karts in them! Pretty neat.

But... unsure how quick I can get users to "learn" this process.

Further, the big block on the homepage that lists every single keyword you have in your galleries is just plain ugly and hard to understand.
Would be nice to pick and choose which keywords show up there, but I have no idea how Smugmug would implement that or allow me to choose.

onethumb

Jun-24-2005, 09:27 AM

The only thing I noticed is that my sort order changed. The original gallery is sorted by filename. I don't know how it ordered this keyword selection.

FYI, keyword views are always shown with the most recent first.

Don

mercphoto

Jun-24-2005, 09:33 AM

FYI, keyword views are always shown with the most recent first.

I'm really digging this keyword thing.

Question: Should I make it a habit to make keywords all one word? For example, instead of "Iron Rock Raceway", make it "IronRockRaceway"? Any underlying reason one way or the other, and if I do one word will it keep the mixed-case of the lettering?

Second Q: If it is advised to make keywords with no spaces, is there any easy way to bulk convert keywords? Some of my keywords link to nearly 4000 photos.

Thanks!

onethumb

Jun-24-2005, 09:35 AM

Fix this. For pros who insist on more levels than you are comfortable with, point the appropriate help sections at something that the pro writes and gives his contact for tech support.

You're not getting it. Education is dang near impossible, and very expensive. We cannot afford to educate our customers, because they *do not* want to be educated.

Everything must be intuitive. Which is why all features at smugmug get worked over, then worked over again when we get feedback, then worked over again.... It's probably a neverending battle, but if we have to somehow educate the majority of people about a feature, we've lost and need to hit the drawing board again.

The problem is that this is so ill defined a problem that it's impossible to work on. I don't really understand what makes you so uncomfortable with filesystem style hierarchy and so comfortable with the arbitrary category/subcategory/gallery style you do support. I know that you think hierarchy is confusing, but, then so are a lot of worthwhile things. We have to choose between confusing grandma and having email, for example. Personally, I find it confusing that you treat different levels of the hierarchy so differently.

Can you give an outline of a possible solution? What tests would it have to pass? Is there someway to make this more concrete?

People have already been educated, over 10 years on the breadcrumbs-on-the-web layout. Yahoo! did it first, and spent the time to educate people, and now thousands of sites now employ it. People "get" it. They're allergic to too many layers deep (which is why the Yahoo! directory started dying a slow death to search), but they do get the idea.

They don't get folder-like heirarchy. We hear over and over how people can't even find the photos on their PCs to upload ... and that's heirarchy they built themselves! How on earth can they navigate someone else's photos?

The test a new solution would have to pass is, on the surface, a simple one: If I go and take 100 random people off the street, sit them in a focus group room, and tell them nothing ... can most of them navigate someone's galleries without frustration or education? If yes, we've won. If no, we've lost.

Don

onethumb

Jun-24-2005, 09:37 AM

Agreed and same here. My only gripe about this feature is that it is not easy or intuitive to access via a search and it is basically hidden if you don't have the (awful looking) keyword "cloud" sitting on your page.

My point is that I'd like easier access to the keyword search for my site. I'm still not sure how to get to it without doing the whole www.mikelanephotography.com/keyword/ (http://www.mikelanephotography.com/keyword/) thing.

Just to reiterate what you were saying, in my opinion the keyword system can be used in effect to create an nth level layers. There are other sites which use a very similar system as the method by which they allow users to categorize their entries -- del.icio.us is the site that I'm thinking of.

Keyword searching is available from the main search bar all across the site... Is it not working for you?

del.icio.us invented the tagging scheme, I spent a weekend hanging out with them and then shamelessly built smugmug's. :)

Plenty of other sites, whether they're blogs, photo sharing, bookmarks, or whatever now use tags almost exactly like we do, which makes aggregating them easier.

Don

onethumb

Jun-24-2005, 09:43 AM

OK, I'll try something that seems like a constructive suggestion to me. What about supporting a "simplified" and "expert" (or something) view? This would be similar to gallery style. The viewer can set his preferences and the smugmug customer can have some control over deraults and/or whether they can be overridden. In simplified mode, viewers see what they see now. In "expert" mode, full arbitrary hierarchy is revealed. This works because galleries still have category/subcategory, allowing a simplified view. But the smugmug customer is free to work with a nested folder model where galleries can have subgalleries.

Lightbulb?

No lightbulb. You're thinking like someone who actively thinks about using a computer and has a wealth of information about how computers work. You're thinking like less than 1% of the population.

Go read one of Jeremy Zawodny's latest blog entries about user expectation (http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/004853.html) , especially the part about Mac Word 6.

If the customer has to think or learn something new, we've lost our battle, and will lose some money. Education is expensive.

Don

onethumb

Jun-24-2005, 09:47 AM

I'm really digging this keyword thing.

Question: Should I make it a habit to make keywords all one word? For example, instead of "Iron Rock Raceway", make it "IronRockRaceway"? Any underlying reason one way or the other, and if I do one word will it keep the mixed-case of the lettering?

The typical way to tag on the web is to use CamelCase, and it does make URLs prettier & easier to pass along. But it's your call. Non-geeks often don't "get" CamelCase, and would never think to look for New York as NewYork, for example. Which is why smugmug is farily unique on the net and allows spaces.

Second Q: If it is advised to make keywords with no spaces, is there any easy way to bulk convert keywords? Some of my keywords link to nearly 4000 photos.

Thanks!

Yep, go into the keyword for the one you want to change. Select the Bulk Caption/Keyword tool. Then there's an option to change X into Y. That's all there is to it!

Don

onethumb

Jun-24-2005, 09:48 AM

I see the potential power of this feature, but boy this is not easy to use without each viewer reading and understanding a multi-sentence description of how to use it first. Further, the big block on the homepage that lists every single keyword you have in your galleries is just plain ugly and hard to understand. And, after you select your first keyword, the "combine with" text/presentation is very small text and not that simple to understand (e.g. it's pretty techy).

This doesn't seem to line up with the Smugmug "easy to use" mantra. So as not be to just a complainer and offer some constructive feedback, I'm working on some ideas for how this could work a lot better. More when I get them written down.

--John

I wonder if maybe on the http://yourname.smugmug.com/keyword/ page, we should let you specify a few different "root blocks" and display keyword clouds based on each of those which you can use as a base to drill down with.

Does that sound interesting to anyone?

Don

Mike Lane

Jun-24-2005, 09:50 AM

Keyword searching is available from the main search bar all across the site... Is it not working for you?

del.icio.us invented the tagging scheme, I spent a weekend hanging out with them and then shamelessly built smugmug's. :)

Plenty of other sites, whether they're blogs, photo sharing, bookmarks, or whatever now use tags almost exactly like we do, which makes aggregating them easier.

Don
It isn't working well Don. When I do a search for say keyword1 keyword2 I get the three tiered search results the first is the keywords, the second is the gallery, the third is the pictures. The pictures that I get are rarely ever the same as if I went to www.mikelanephotography.com/keyword/keyword1-keyword2.

For instance if you go to my page and search for seattle space needle (for no other reason than I know what I should get) you'll see that the keyword results say "seattle(57)" and that's it. There are no galleries found (interesting since I have a gallery named seattle) and there are 2 pictures found but they are not displayed so I don't know what they are.

If you to go www.mikelanephotography.com/keyword/seattle-space%20needle you get an entirely different result. There are 3 images (and for some odd reason they showed up as a slideshow this time with no option to change that...freaky) which is exactly what there should be.

Is it possible to be able to integrate what you'd find at www.mikelanephotography.com/keyword/keyword1-keyword2-...-keywordn into the search results that you get from a standard search? Because it obviously isn't doing it that way right now.

Mike Lane

Jun-24-2005, 09:51 AM

I wonder if maybe on the http://yourname.smugmug.com/keyword/ page, we should let you specify a few different "root blocks" and display keyword clouds based on each of those which you can use as a base to drill down with.

Does that sound interesting to anyone?

Don
Gah! I HATE the keword cloud! That's why I don't have the keywords on my main page in the first place. If you can do it another way it may be of interest, but not if it is that awful cloud.

muddyknees

Jun-24-2005, 11:19 AM

Gah! I HATE the keword cloud! That's why I don't have the keywords on my main page in the first place. If you can do it another way it may be of interest, but not if it is that awful cloud.
A pull-down List instead, maybe?

mercphoto

Jun-24-2005, 11:37 AM

I wonder if maybe on the http://yourname.smugmug.com/keyword/ page, we should let you specify a few different "root blocks" and display keyword clouds based on each of those which you can use as a base to drill down with.

Does that sound interesting to anyone?

Yes.

One other thing. I can't seem to get CamelCase to work on my keywords. Everything turns out lowercase. For example, I entered KidKarts and got kidkarts.

onethumb

Jun-24-2005, 11:52 AM

Yes.

One other thing. I can't seem to get CamelCase to work on my keywords. Everything turns out lowercase. For example, I entered KidKarts and got kidkarts.

You're right, sorry. I mis-remembered. CamelCase used to work, but then we got different keywords for Newyork, NewYork, newyork. Like all the other tagging sites, we now lowercase everything.

Sorry!

Don

mercphoto

Jun-24-2005, 12:23 PM

jfriend

Jun-24-2005, 01:19 PM

You're right, sorry. I mis-remembered. CamelCase used to work, but then we got different keywords for Newyork, NewYork, newyork. Like all the other tagging sites, we now lowercase everything.

Sorry!

Don
If people like the camel case for visual reasons, you could make the searching/indexing be case insensitive, but still preserve the camel case visually if that's what is entered. Thus "NewYork" would display that way if that's how it was entered, but "NewYork", "newyork", "Newyork" would all be the same keyword.

I personally would like to see case preserved for names and proper nouns, but am fine with a case insensitive search/index.

--John

muddyknees

Jun-24-2005, 02:57 PM

Sorry, it doesn't, and as far as I know, no search engines do (or, at least, not very fast). This is an incredibly difficult computer science problem. Wildcard searching is usually based on prefix-branching using a tree. So a search term uses the first letter to quickly narrow the search, then the second letter, and so on.

We're not planning on implementing this until someone far more brilliant than I dreams it up at Stanford's CS department or something.
Maybe not out of Stanford, but out of Wisconsin around 1950, Stephen Kleene dreamt up regular sets, implemented in Unix as Grep etc.

OK, it's not super-efficient, but maybe there would be a reason to offload it to the client - for example, send a string of keywords and use the Javascript regular expression parser to pick out the matching words that the user can then re-submit in place of the original wildcard expression.
But there might be more of a use for this in file renaming than keyword searching.

Might as well chime in here with a few more reactions to other posts on this thread.

I am one of those who promptly removed the keywords from my main page, but I'll be trying out the keyword-URL feature as soon as I get a chance to retrofit some meaningful sets of keywords into my Galleries. I think I'll like it.

I'll be curious whether I can use the same bulk tools on keyword-defined galleries to add captions and copy or move images into different "real" galleries.

As for the existing "confusing" four-level category-subcategory-gallery-image hierarchy, I think part of the confusion is that these three levels behave so inconsistently. Personally, my ideal hieracrchy would blur the distinctions between all four levels as much as possible - even allowing individual photo's at the top level! You might have two additional "styles" - one "Mac-Finder-like, the other PC-exlorer-like. (You could even snif the client platform and provide the "right" view for that user.) You might need an additional option for your slide show - whether to go "deep" or stay shallow. For the "elegant" style, if you click on a thumbnail that happens to represent a "folder", you'd find yourself viewing a new set of thumbnails, that's all. The "feature photo" for a gallery could be used whenever you need to treat a galler as a photo (e.g., sort-order by exif creation date).

I imagine your support staff must get more calls from us account holders than from browsers confused over the category-subcategory-gallery scheme.

If the user is sitting at a PC, its likely (s)he's got some familiarity with the hierachy of the file system. Sure out of 100 random people off the sidewalk if you place them in front of a computer you'll first have to train some of them to use a mouse, Just as if you send invitations to all your relatives for a party at your house, some will get lost trying to find it, there might be one gets into an accident, some can't drive. No reason to cancel the party.

Gary

rutt

Jun-24-2005, 05:31 PM

Mike Lane

Jun-24-2005, 05:42 PM

OK, here is another idea. Why not allow a gallery to have more than one category/subcategory? This gives more than one way to find it, if that makes sense. So then I might have:

2005->portraits->Jones Family
portraits->2005->Jones Family
Jones Family->2005
:scratch

If the Jones family can find all their pictures, or just the ones with Mamma Jones and Sis Jones, or Daddy Jones and brother jones, or Just Mom and Dad, or just Bro and Sis (etc etc etc the combinations are limited only by the number of keywords you use) in a given year, simply and easily without having to know anything about how your site is set up then why push for a different category set up?

Now, I should say that I can't get the search to work for keywords like Don says they should, but assuming that can get fixed, why not just save the Joneses a bunch of time and make it easy for them to find exactly what they want in a hurry with keywords.

I could definitely be missing the point here but it just seems like this doesn't need to be that complicated. The way they have implemented the keywords amounts to categorization that is much more powerful and flexible than any hierarchical method could match.

I just don't think they implement the UI very well.

BenV

Jun-27-2005, 12:49 PM

:scratch
I could definitely be missing the point here but it just seems like this doesn't need to be that complicated. The way they have implemented the keywords amounts to categorization that is much more powerful and flexible than any hierarchical method could match.

I just don't think they implement the UI very well.I 100% agree.

That's one of my biggest annoyances with pbase, or Gallery (the php software) or many others -- when people bury the actual gallery photos 10 levels deep and you are clicking and clicking and wondering if you are every going to see the pictures.

The problem seems to have a common cause, namely, that the tree is implemented in a way that visually contradictory to what it represents -- it is implemented as thumbnails that LOOK like galleries and the user thinks they are clicking on a gallery. If you represent the categories and sub-categories visually in a manner consistant with their use there wouldn't be so much confusion. Keywords don't look like galleries and they don't confuse people -- that cloud thing looks like I don't know what, but that's a different story... -- IOW, if you implement it as a tree, not thumbnails that look like galleries.

For every category, have an option to show sub-categories in a simple box either horizontally or vertically under the breadcrumb trail. Even better, have the ability to apply styles to categories. I'd personally rather not even have thumbnails as the categories. Or maybe I'd like to choose a unique graphic (NOT from a gallery) to represent the category.

It'd almost be enough if you gave us the option to make the "Related words:" and "Combine with:" section a first class citizen, as opposed to being stuck up in the corner -- put it right under the breadcrumb trail.

Kinda like this (http://www.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Web_Applications/Photo_Sharing/)

Finally, what if, in our control panel we could list a defined set of keywords that would appear on the home page as if they were categories (and would show like the categories do now) to use as a "base" for keyword browsing. Just replace that whole cloud thing!

Master Keywords, if you like.

BenV

mercphoto

Jun-27-2005, 01:00 PM

I could definitely be missing the point here but it just seems like this doesn't need to be that complicated. The way they have implemented the keywords amounts to categorization that is much more powerful and flexible than any hierarchical method could match.

I just don't think they implement the UI very well.

I'm starting to like the keywords searching too, now that I understand how it works and how to exploit it. I also agree the UI might have a problem, which I put in a different thread. Mainly, not all keywords that can be combined with the current keyword(s) are always displayed.

I think keywords are the way to go to solve the dilema of levels of categories and sub-categories. Literally, my racing customers can find their photos with three mouse clicks (and no keyboard typing). Add a fourth click, and they can find photos of them that also have photos of their buddy in it. Pretty cool, and something that cannot be done with a hierarchy of galleries and categories.

Mike Lane

Jun-27-2005, 01:10 PM

Finally, what if, in our control panel we could list a defined set of keywords that would appear on the home page as if they were categories (and would show like the categories do now) to use as a "base" for keyword browsing. Just replace that whole cloud thing!

Master Keywords, if you like.

BenV
Interesting idea there. This assumes that you always put certain keywords in certain photos. SM has implemented something more automatic with their keyword cloud. It determines which keywords are used the most by you and then displays the x highest used keywords...the infamous cloud:huh. Looking on http://del.icio.us just the other day I found out exactly where they got that cloud idea. You can use either the standard keyword list or a keyword cloud that is suspiciously similar to SM's.

I don't know what the right answer is here. Maybe mercphoto would find it most useful to have a list of keywords that has the most recently added keywords at the top. I would rather have a keyword search (a feature that I have now implemented by the way so I'm all set) right on my front page. Maybe you would like the most popular keywords displayed in a style of your choosing (you can do that now with stylesheets btw). Maybe the right answer is that it needs to be flexible and changeable enough to fit more people's needs.

BenV

Jun-27-2005, 01:22 PM

Looking on http://del.icio.us just the other day I found out exactly where they got that cloud idea. You can use either the standard keyword list or a keyword cloud that is suspiciously similar to SM's.To those options I want to add, "Use these keywords:"

BenV

Mike Lane

Jun-27-2005, 01:28 PM

To those options I want to add, "Use these keywords:"

BenV
Now if we can get the SM guys to tell us what they think about this...

BenV

Jul-01-2005, 12:01 PM

Now if we can get the SM guys to tell us what they think about this...
Bueller... bueller...

---------
BenV
-- It worked last time.

mercphoto

Jul-01-2005, 12:11 PM

After using keywords for one race I'm not sure exactly how I'd want to see it changed. And I'm not sure how universal my needs are anyway.

The SM guys had it right when they said I needed to use keywords instead of captioning and galleries to sort race photos. This is working much better, and I was able to show some racers at the track (wireless internet).

The only problem is the sheer number of keywords I am creating as part of this process! There is one keyword per track (very manageable), one keyword per date (such as 2005jun25, again reasonably manageable), and one keyword per vehicle number. That is where things explode on me. Since motocross bikes commonly have numbers involving three digits, I think I'm somewhere around 130 keywords for numbers alone. The good thing is I can "share" keywords for numbers. In other words, kart #3 and motocross bike #3 using the very same "3" keyword.

I've outlined a process for riders to find their photos in the "bio" section of my Smugmug page, if anyone is interested. I tell them to start on the keywords page (which lists all keywords) and find their number. Next combine it with the event date keyword. This gets them a very narrow search result rather quickly and easily.

The problem is, the "combine with" list is not exhaustive. As the SM guys have said, the list for combine with can sometimes get rather large, making for a UI issue. And I'm not sure the solution to that problem either.

And that is my biggest usability issue, the combine-with list. I want it to be small, so that its not cluttered. However, there are times it needs to be big. Fore example, as the year progresses and I get more events, and thus more keywords for event dates, when the user has clicked his vehicle number and now wants to combine-with an event date, not all the possible event dates will show up. Some will be hidden because the list has become too large. Not sure how to deal with that.

mercphoto

Jul-01-2005, 12:22 PM

Another thing about the combine-with feature. Suppose I have a race image with two karts in it. Numbers 4 and 20. The user clicks to my main keywords page, then clicks on 4, then clicks on the race date. Now, suppose #20 is his friend. If he combines-with the 20 keyword, now he sees not only his images, but only those images that have his buddy in it as well.

This is really cool! The racers I showed this to really liked it. But, since the combine-with list is not exhaustive the racers cannot rely on it. Sometimes 20 won't even be in the combine-with list.

What about a pull-down list box for the "combine with" list, and making that list exhaustive? Might reduce the clutter?

jfriend

Jul-01-2005, 01:44 PM

And that is my biggest usability issue, the combine-with list. I want it to be small, so that its not cluttered. However, there are times it needs to be big. Fore example, as the year progresses and I get more events, and thus more keywords for event dates, when the user has clicked his vehicle number and now wants to combine-with an event date, not all the possible event dates will show up. Some will be hidden because the list has become too large. Not sure how to deal with that.
The system I tried to describe here (http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=13914) (but might not have done a good job describing) would solve your problem. In this system, you'd create a real gallery for each race day and upload all the photos from that race day. Then, you'd define virtual galleries for each racer's number that would automatically display just their pictures from that day. This would let your visitors pick a day/track gallery and then a virtual gallery for their race number. They'd see this as real galleries and wouldn't have to learn anything new. You wouldn't have to explain anything to them.

If they could find the gallery for their race day and pick the sub-gallery for their number, they'd have their list of pictures.

In a further enhancement which I tried to describe in my previous message, Smugmug could create the virtual galleries for you automatically instead of you having to do them by hand by just letting you say that you want a virtual gallery automatically displayed for each racer number that exists within your master gallery. This would essentially be "viewing by keyword", but scoped to a specific set of images that solves the keyword pollution (too many keywords in the "combine with" list) when the user has to pick from all keywords used in your whole site.

In this mechanism, they wouldn't have to learn a new keyword system because they'd just be picking galleries and sub-galleries like they already do. They wouldn't have the "combine with" problem of too many keywords. You wouldn't have to explain/teach them anything new.

--John

Baldy

Jul-02-2005, 09:10 AM

I expanded the help section to include related keywords but Onethumb asked me to hold it for awhile as he experiments with some ideas. Dunno if anything will come out of his experiments but he's thinking about the feedback from this thread.

Tag clouds, as they're usually called on the net, are very cool but I found myself moving some of my photos from my main site to another so they could get their own tag cloud.

For example, car shots from Concours d'Elegance went to concours.smugmug.com (http://concours.smugmug.com) so that the tag cloud only has tags like Rolls Royce (http://concours.smugmug.com/keyword/rolls%20royce/1/7563800) and Duesenberg (http://concours.smugmug.com/keyword/duesenberg/1/640213) and didn't get overwhelmed/polluted by tags like green hair (http://cmac.smugmug.com/gallery/357772/4/14220433).

I know that's one thing for me, who gets free smugmug accounts, and another for people who don't.

mercphoto

Jul-02-2005, 09:21 AM

The system I tried to describe here (http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=13914) (but might not have done a good job describing) would solve your problem. In this system, you'd create a real gallery for each race day and upload all the photos from that race day. Then, you'd define virtual galleries for each racer's number that would automatically display just their pictures from that day. This would let your visitors pick a day/track gallery and then a virtual gallery for their race number. They'd see this as real galleries and wouldn't have to learn anything new. You wouldn't have to explain anything to them.

John, this can ALREADY BE DONE with current Smugmug. mercphoto.smugmug.com/keyword/26-2005may07, for an example, is the exact implementation of your virtual gallery.

As an example, see http://mercphoto.smugmug.com/keyword/9-2005jun25-shifterkart. I have added links to such "virtual galleries" on my own. I don't want to do this on my own, however, but will if I need to.

mercphoto

Jul-02-2005, 09:50 AM

John, this can ALREADY BE DONE with current Smugmug. mercphoto.smugmug.com/keyword/26-2005may07, for an example, is the exact implementation of your virtual gallery.

As an example, see http://mercphoto.smugmug.com/keyword/9-2005jun25-shifterkart. I have added links to such "virtual galleries" on my own. I don't want to do this on my own, however, but will if I need to.

Sorry, I meant to point you to http://mercphoto.smugmug.com/gallery/617230, and see the links to virtual galleries for individual kart numbers, for that group, for that date only, as you described. My point is two things. One, Smugmug already gives you the virtual galleries you are wanting, as my link shows. Two, I'm not wanting to have to edit the gallery description in this manner to put in all these links.

Lastly, one cool feature about keywording is the ability to keep combining keywords. Are racers 26 and 27 friends? They can use keyword combining to see only those photos which have BOTH of them in the photo. Really cool. But this will only work if we can find a way to display all the keywords that can be combined with. And a list box is the only way I can figure out to do this in an uncluttered way.

Another idea. What if Smugmug allows us to give each keyword a classification? For me, I'd have one keyword class called "Race Track", and in that classification would be the keywords "Iron Rock Raceway" and "Cross Creek Cycle Park". Another classification would be for Kart Type, which would have junior, shifter, tag, etc. Another classification would be vehicle number and have tags like 5, 26, 45, 52, etc. A fourth classification for event dates. You get the idea.

On my home page, in my keyword cloud, I could say "display only the track keywords". Then in the combine-with area we could have drop boxes for keyword type.

Admittedly this idea is brand spanking new off the top of my head and might have real issues in implementing or in ease of use.

Mike Lane

Jul-02-2005, 09:56 AM

mercphoto

Jul-02-2005, 10:05 PM

Is it not possible to implement a keyword search (I've done it, it's not so hard) and simply inform your customers how to do a search to get what they want? If you are consistent with the way you use keywords (and it seems like you are) then it shouldn't be difficult at all for users to figure out what keywords to type in to get the results that they're looking for.

You are over-estimating the abilities of most people who use computers. As far as I'm concerned, if I can find a way that only requires them to click the mouse three times or less, and not type any letters or numbers, the much better off I am.

Mike Lane

Jul-02-2005, 10:50 PM

You are over-estimating the abilities of most people who use computers. As far as I'm concerned, if I can find a way that only requires them to click the mouse three times or less, and not type any letters or numbers, the much better off I am.
I can't say that clicking 3 times wouldn't be easier. On the other hand, I would agree with you about me over-estimating people if this were 1994. But it isn't, it's 2005 and the net is everywhere. The most popular sites in the world are search sites. You almost can't go to any site on the web and not see a search box. People know how to do searches as much as they know how to change the TV channel, it's just a fact of life these days. Frankly, I'd say don't even make your keywords cryptic. Give each photo an abundant number of plain english keywords or use abbreviations where appropriate. That way you don't have to explain anything other than directing a person to a keyword search.

I'm just saying, it doesn't seem to me that things are going in your favor with your keyword suggestions. I'm not saying they should or shouldn't, I'm just suggesting ways that you can make it work just as it is with minimal heartache to anyone involved.

mercphoto

Jul-03-2005, 08:02 AM

I can't say that clicking 3 times wouldn't be easier. On the other hand, I would agree with you about me over-estimating people if this were 1994. But it isn't, it's 2005 and the net is everywhere. The most popular sites in the world are search sites. You almost can't go to any site on the web and not see a search box. People know how to do searches as much as they know how to change the TV channel...
No, they don't.

I have had parents call me about their kids football photos because they can't figure out how to order photos. I had a racing customer order from me direct because he doesn't like to use the net. I had a scouting parent who didn't even have a computer.

Contrary to popular opinion, the net is not everywhere, and not everyone knows how to use it. Believe it or not, a large part of the population seldom uses the net or is much good at it.

Khaos

Jul-03-2005, 08:35 AM

No, they don't.

I have had parents call me about their kids football photos because they can't figure out how to order photos. I had a racing customer order from me direct because he doesn't like to use the net. I had a scouting parent who didn't even have a computer.

Contrary to popular opinion, the net is not everywhere, and not everyone knows how to use it. Believe it or not, a large part of the population seldom uses the net or is much good at it.
One of the many reasons why broadband was as slow to expand as it was and why Europe and Asia are ahead of us in decent wireless connection. The ignorance and outright laziness in refusing to learn anything new always has amazed me. This type of attitude will ensure that the USA will not be a leading power in the coming decades.

Ooops, there I go ranting again. I got to hurry up and finish my website so I can rant there.:D

mercphoto

Jul-03-2005, 08:45 AM

One of the many reasons why broadband was as slow to expand as it was and why Europe and Asia are ahead of us in decent wireless connection.
Your history is flawed. America had an analog wireless system in the early days. That is expensive infrastructure. Asia didn't have this infrastructure as early as us. But by the time digital wireless was coming along Asia started building their wireless infrastructure. And of course they went with what was new and current at that time.

Sometimes being an early adopter makes it too hard and too expensive to keep up with the Jone's.

kwalsh

Jul-03-2005, 02:43 PM

Sometimes being an early adopter makes it too hard and too expensive to keep up with the Jone's.
The early bird may get the worm, but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese...

Matthew Saville

Jul-03-2005, 03:21 PM

The early bird may get the worm, but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese...
LOL! I love that saying...

Methinks SHAREGROUPS are the solution to all this. Seriously folks. And here's some further ideas:

~ Allow a short description for categories and subcategories. In my opinion this would help and not hinder the confusion of categories -> subcategories -> galleries; because a photographer could write a few tips on how to find certain galleries and how to get back to the main gallery.

~ Or, you could simply create a whole new gallery as an index page to each of your smaller galleries. Using the "journal" or "elegant" style, you could give each photo a title and a CLICK HERE link that takes the person to an "all thumbs" or "slideshow" gallery... What you would have was a category, then a subcategory, and within that subcategory you'd have a half dozen o whatever galleries that were PUBLIC, but each photo in each gallery would act as a link to a separate gallery. Makes sense? I know it sounds round-about, but I kinda like the idea. I already use the wonderful "journal" style for misc. pages such as a Bio page or a copyright page, as do many other smugmuggers.

~ I'm pretty happy with the way I've designed my front page. I think it's very easy to separate your professional portfolio of nature type photos, your misc. galleries of local hang outs and equipment reviews, and lastly your event galleries. With my setup and the use of sharegroups, I get the job done.

~ All things considered, I think that Winn should realize that smugmug is very correct when they point out that tons of people are incredibly confused and lost when it comes to navigating categorized web pages and stuff. However, I think that in Winn's case, he obviously needs some means of further categorizing his large ammount of photos. I say, why not just rig Winn's website so that he CAN create another level of sub-subcategories, just to see what happens. If everyone gets lost and Winn stops selling photos, then we'll have him begging to change it back, heheh. But if Winn finds that all his customers think it's so much easier to navigate and weed through the large event to find their own pictures, well then I guess it'd be safe to say that in the hands of a pro, an additional level of categorization could be very effective, right?

I'm just suggesting suggestions here... Quite frankly, many many smugmuggers already abuse the organization that is available to them; many galleries are over-organized or organized in a confusing manner with un-necessary subcategories etc. etc. So, I can understand where smugmug is coming from. But I also think that like I said people like Winn really do need an additional level of organization, since they shoot such big events.

Take care all!
-Matt-

asd

Jul-10-2005, 07:26 PM

~ Or, you could simply create a whole new gallery as an index page to each of your smaller galleries. Using the "journal" or "elegant" style, you could give each photo a title and a CLICK HERE link that takes the person to an "all thumbs" or "slideshow" gallery... What you would have was a category, then a subcategory, and within that subcategory you'd have a half dozen o whatever galleries that were PUBLIC, but each photo in each gallery would act as a link to a separate gallery. Makes sense? I know it sounds round-about, but I kinda like the idea. I already use the wonderful "journal" style for misc. pages such as a Bio page or a copyright page, as do many other smugmuggers.
Wow, dynamite idea. I'd seen cool stuff like using Journal style as bio/copyright pages, and have toyed with it for a photo blog (kinda fun), but hadn't thought of using a gallery to function as a gateway to more galleries. I love it.. Thanks.

winnjewett

Jul-13-2005, 10:57 PM

JamesJWeg

Jul-14-2005, 06:59 AM

Gah! I HATE the keword cloud! That's why I don't have the keywords on my main page in the first place. If you can do it another way it may be of interest, but not if it is that awful cloud.
I also do not like the keyword cloud, I am VERY glad there is a way to remove it. I find it useless on it's own, however, thanks don for the little example found here.

I'm not entirely clear why you wouldn't use the keyword feature of smugmug to get exactly what you want?

For example, tag something as "kart99" and as "raceJun17". Then point them to the combined page of kart99-raceJun17.

Here's a keyword "gallery" that has all my photos tagged with "Hawaii" and "atvs": ATVing in Hawaii! (http://onethumb.smugmug.com/keyword/hawaii-atvs)

Keyword tag sorting is faster than searching, more static, and has an easier URL to pass along. I'm probably missing something, though... ?

Don
I didn't know about that one. That said, I two would like ether another depth of of catagories OR how about multiple root levels. For example, could you arrange this? Have a setting on each catagory such as "Racing" so that when it is set that catagory is now a root level, with the option to have it's own unique domian. As in http://racing.jamesjweg.com instead of http://pics.jamesjweg.com/racing, now you have in fact REMOVED a level of confusion for the end user because I can point my racing customers to this url and they don't have to sort past my other base catagories. With this you could add in another level of catagories and still stay at the same browsing depth for the end user. This would efectivly give pro users the ability to have multiple "Front ends" or "Front doors", a great way to seperate personal photo's from biz ones. Basicly what you can do is set it up so that any catagory which is set as a root can then have an additional catagory in it, and any catagory set as root does not appear on the default root page unless you are logged in as the owner or guest. With this setup you would never excede the current browsing depth for the end user. Yes, I can currently do almost this by pointing people here http://pics.jamesjweg.com/racing the problem is that then if they click "JamesJWeg's home (http://pics.jamesjweg.com/)" they are then lost. The main problem with doing this kind of thing with keywords is two fold, one, I need to be able to hand out a card with my url on it at a race or tell them and they write it down, for this it needs to be simple and easy to remember, and two, it is a real pain to put all the info that would be needed to use keyword in this manor into that many pics. Did that make any sense?

James.

muddyknees

Jul-14-2005, 09:43 AM

I also do not like the keyword cloud, I am VERY glad there is a way to remove it. I find it useless on it's own, however, thanks don for the little example found here.

I didn't know about that one. That said, I two would like ether another depth of of catagories OR how about multiple root levels. For example, could you arrange this? Have a setting on each catagory such as "Racing" so that when it is set that catagory is now a root level, with the option to have it's own unique domian. As in http://racing.jamesjweg.com (http://racing.jamesjweg.com/) instead of http://pics.jamesjweg.com/racing, now you have in fact REMOVED a level of confusion for the end user because I can point my racing customers to this url and they don't have to sort past my other base catagories. With this you could add in another level of catagories and still stay at the same browsing depth for the end user. This would efectivly give pro users the ability to have multiple "Front ends" or "Front doors", a great way to seperate personal photo's from biz ones. Basicly what you can do is set it up so that any catagory which is set as a root can then have an additional catagory in it, and any catagory set as root does not appear on the default root page unless you are logged in as the owner or guest. With this setup you would never excede the current browsing depth for the end user. Yes, I can currently do almost this by pointing people here http://pics.jamesjweg.com/racing the problem is that then if they click "JamesJWeg's home (http://pics.jamesjweg.com/)" they are then lost. The main problem with doing this kind of thing with keywords is two fold, one, I need to be able to hand out a card with my url on it at a race or tell them and they write it down, for this it needs to be simple and easy to remember, and two, it is a real pain to put all the info that would be needed to use keyword in this manor into that many pics. Did that make any sense?

James.
Maybe using cookies, a power or pro user could "fix" some of the keywords to effectively keep a guest/client within such a a keyword-defined category?

gary

JamesJWeg

Jul-14-2005, 10:42 AM

Maybe using cookies, a power or pro user could "fix" some of the keywords to effectively keep a guest/client within such a a keyword-defined category?

gary
I would love to see an example of that, but it still leaves you with a Gawd-awful long url.

James.

doublemeat

Mar-22-2007, 03:26 AM

Remember, the average computer user isn't like you and I. They don't understand what folders are and how they nest (which is why MS had to make 'My Documents' because people "lost" their work all the time). They don't visualize and understand tree structures....If we could come up with something both more flexible AND as easy/easier to use, we'd do it in a heartbeat. I've asked for help from dgrinners many times, and so far, everyone has come up empty.

Hi Don, I know this is an old post but I stumbled on it trying to find more info on when/if the broken keyword system will be fixed. I seem to recall reading more recent writings that lead to the same conclusions.

I have to say, there are other ways to look at this problem. In fairness I must disclose that I disagree with your assessment of the average user not understanding tree structures. In fact the evidence suggests that the human mind is genetically programmed to understand hierarchies and hierarchical organization, and software usability studies over decades have shown that hierarchical systems are picked up more quickly and intuitively by users. In fact the problem with Microsoft products you mentioned by way of illustration, was (and to some extent still is) actually a problem of the paradigm being too FLAT. Users perceived "My Desktop", "My Documents", "My Computer", and drive letters to be roughly equal, even though presented in a loose, somewhat redundant tree in Explorer. The reason is because they were all accessible on their own from multiple places, and the Explorer tree didn't tell the whole story. Furthermore, that Windows and third party software created innumerable "My *" folders under "My Documents" only served to compound user confusion over where to store things.

So I don't think the assessment that users get lost in hierarchies is valid. It's true that too many levels may be annoying, but a large part of that is simply due to a failure of technology to work the way people think. Think of how smugmug (and most websites) navigate hierarchies--it's downright primitive and ugly: you have gallery icons to click through one painstaking layer at a time (re-evaluating your options at each landing), you have the back button, and the bread crumb which helps you jump arbitrarily backward quickly--but not forward, laterally, or some combination.

In other words, don't confuse painfully primitive and limited technology with a failed user paradigm!

So when a web-based photo site has 7 lavels of nested galleries, and you have to click through each layer to finally get to a measly 9 or 10 photos, it's enough to hunt down whodunnit and strangle them. But the same poor structure, represented in a far more elegant and non-sequential way, that wasn't constricted by the severe tunnel-vision of typical web-presented hierarchies, and that intelligently highlighted exactly where the end goal was and assisted you in getting there--that would be a mere trifle.

Furthermore, tagging can completely obviate the problems presented by poorly represented hierarchies--and in fact they can compliment each other. With a strong tagging system, users can then rely on even more complex hierarchies to "physically" MANAGE their data, while relying on tagging to provide effortless USER NAVIGATION.

Tagging is in many respects the ultimate expression of an easy-to-use hierarchical system. It's multi-inheritance (unlike the inverted tree paradigm), can be "nested" arbitrarily deep, navigation is not just up/down/sideways but totally random-access, and the loose structure is very fast and intuitive for users to traverse and morph.

In other words, keywords are a better way to represent "organic" hierarchies. (E.g. most people have more than one parent.)

That's why it's IMPERATIVE that you guys get your keyword system fixed! (Particularly the feature of appending useless filename substrings onto the keywords that users may have spent days/weeks crafting off-line in the IPTC fields.)

But instead of making the decision on hierarchy levels FOR your customers (or their customers), why not let your customers decide themselves? Allow n-level hierarchies. And instead of thinking of them as "categories", "subcategories", etc., just allow a gallery to be nested within a gallery [even with pictures as siblings], and let your users think of that how they will. Some of your customers will abuse it, some of their users will undoubtedly become frustrated with the sheer clickiness of endlessly nested galleries and too few pictures at the bottoms of them. (There are smugmug galleries like this as it is even with limited nesting ability.)

But have some faith in your customers to make that choice for themselves. Sure you may lose some money because print purchasers don't stick around long enough to order prints, due to very bad design decisions. But I'm guessing (actually have no idea) that you get more of your revenue from subscriptions, rather than prints (?). And either way, there are alot of people with unique needs, and you'd stand to earn back some of that lost revenue of people that may be leaving and you don't even know why. (A good example is having one or more sideline photography businesses and personal photos on the same site--and running out of structure to do it.)

Another argument for n-level hierarchy is just sheer frustration. It's clear that your users just don't have enough "wiggle room" to figure out a structure that works best when it can only be so deep. They find themselves refactoring several times in order to get their model of the world to fit within the low cieling of smugmug design. With more space to move, they could reduce the number of refactorings many times. It's like protein folding: they ultimately fold very compact (few levels ultimately), but during the process go through several phases of unwinding (lots of levels), and if prohibited from doing so, can't reach their final, maximal state.

But rather than gambling you hard-earned revenue on what you seem to believe is a philisophical debate (?), why not rely on science? Search out similar usability studies, or hire a firm (or people) to do your own. Better yet, build the feature, but test-flight it to, say, 2% of your (new) users, and after a few months compare the overall revenue, instrumented proxies for satisfaction, and possibly real satisfaction surveys. Then you could make the change--or have good ammo to argue against it--with confidence.

Thanks and I hope these thoughts help. I'm really starting to like smugmug, and would be headover heels in love with it, if only the keyword system weren't broken, and if the maximum size for preview of images (that is not the full original size), weren't an appalling 800 pixels! I have my fingers crossed.

Jim Collier (http://photo.jimcollier.com/)