Feature Request: Organization please!!!

[unsavory]

First I would like to say that I am very impressed with SmugMug. What a great job you guys did on providing this service.

That being said, I have a couple of requests dealing with order management, both on the category level and the gallery level.

Right now we only have 2 options for ordering our galleries. We can order them by most recent at the top, or by manually ordering them all.

Is there a reason we cannot have new galleries appear at the bottom? And even more helpful would be the ability to order galleries either in ascending or descending alphabetical order since my galleries use the date in the title such as "2004-12-13 World Tour".

Sometimes I may have 50 or more galleries in one category. It is a real pain to have to manually drag them all around to get them in the correct order. A couple simple list boxes with options like, sort by: date, title, number of photos, most viewed. Order: descending, ascending would really help, and in my opinion is the only big hole in your service at the moment.

Also, why can we not order our categories or sub-categories? This is a MAJOR problem. I want to be able to create 10 to 20 different categories, and place them in the order of my choosing.

I realize that many users may not care about having the flexibility to be able to organize in this way, but I do believe that the more advanced users and photo hobbyists would use these features.

These things are not super advanced or complicated. Just very simple organizational enhancements that would make a lot of people's lives much easier.

Thoughts?

[unsavory]

Case in point. Take a look at my online gallery. Although simple, it would be very difficult to recreate this organizational structure on SmugMug. And I would love to be able to because I am looking to host my images using your service.

http://www.unsavory.org/gallery/albums.php

[PerezDesignGroup]

Good request. I would love to see the alpha-sort personally.

[unsavory]

One other thing I am noticing is that if you are sorting the galleries by most recent, it doesn't use the creation timestamp of the actual gallery. So every time I modify anything in that gallery, such as add a new image, the gallery gets pushed to the top even if it is an older gallery.

I suppose this won't be so much of a problem if we can just have alphabetical sorting. But with the way it is now, we really have no control over the order of the galleries using most recent if we plan to modify them at all.

[Nikolai]

I have a long time outstanding request of a TIMELINE mode.
This would be an optional view (dictated, allowed or not by the gallery owner), which would display galleries in a "natural" Year[, Month[, Day]] hierarchy.
Owner would decide

whether to allow this feature
if yes - to what level (most people, I think, would do a month)
level of album's participating in this TIMELINE view: none, year, month, day
if album is participating in a TIMELINE, what date to consider to be the album's date: creation, last modification, earliest image, latest image, custom=user defined
I understand that this adds a whole lot of complexity to the display, but, boy, would I appreciate this feature. I don't even mind it to be a "subscription" feature, for which users would pay separately..

[onethumb]

I have a long time outstanding request of a TIMELINE mode.
This would be an optional view (dictated, allowed or not by the gallery owner), which would display galleries in a "natural" Year[, Month[, Day]] hierarchy.
Owner would decide

whether to allow this feature
if yes - to what level (most people, I think, would do a month)
level of album's participating in this TIMELINE view: none, year, month, day
if album is participating in a TIMELINE, what date to consider to be the album's date: creation, last modification, earliest image, latest image, custom=user defined
I understand that this adds a whole lot of complexity to the display, but, boy, would I appreciate this feature. I don't even mind it to be a "subscription" feature, for which users would pay separately..

I've actually had this feature built and fiddled with on more than one occasion. The problem? Almost none of the photos on smugmug have useable time/date information. No-one sets their camera.

I'd really like this to work, because it's fun to see and fun to use, but really, most people's cameras make photos with a year of 1980 or 1969. :(

Don

[onethumb]

First I would like to say that I am very impressed with SmugMug. What a great job you guys did on providing this service.

That being said, I have a couple of requests dealing with order management, both on the category level and the gallery level.

Right now we only have 2 options for ordering our galleries. We can order them by most recent at the top, or by manually ordering them all.

Is there a reason we cannot have new galleries appear at the bottom? And even more helpful would be the ability to order galleries either in ascending or descending alphabetical order since my galleries use the date in the title such as "2004-12-13 World Tour".

Sometimes I may have 50 or more galleries in one category. It is a real pain to have to manually drag them all around to get them in the correct order. A couple simple list boxes with options like, sort by: date, title, number of photos, most viewed. Order: descending, ascending would really help, and in my opinion is the only big hole in your service at the moment.

Also, why can we not order our categories or sub-categories? This is a MAJOR problem. I want to be able to create 10 to 20 different categories, and place them in the order of my choosing.

I realize that many users may not care about having the flexibility to be able to organize in this way, but I do believe that the more advanced users and photo hobbyists would use these features.

These things are not super advanced or complicated. Just very simple organizational enhancements that would make a lot of people's lives much easier.

Thoughts?

Actually, everything you've asked for is very complicated. :)

However, I think they're all good suggestions and they've been on our minds for awhile. Let me noodle on it a bit and we'll see what happens. (Mind the holidays, they tend to get in the way of real work. :) )

Don

[Nikolai]

I've actually had this feature built and fiddled with on more than one occasion. The problem? Almost none of the photos on smugmug have useable time/date information. No-one sets their camera.

I'd really like this to work, because it's fun to see and fun to use, but really, most people's cameras make photos with a year of 1980 or 1969. :(

DonI remember Ben was saying something along this lines, but that was a while ago..
Well, I, for one, have my camera's date set up. I think most of the pros do, too. If not that, an extension to Upload method (timestamp parameter) would solve the problem - I can let the user choose to populate it with the file tmiestamp. And if not even that, upload's current date/time can do..

And, after all, it will be smugmug user's decision whether he/she would like to "activate" it. I would. Default can (and should) be "none"...

Again, I understand, that you have to cover most urgent/mass requests. This may be an issue only for a few "ultra-organized nerds" like me. But I would very much like to have that option...

Cheers!:1drink

[rainforest1155]

Well, I, for one, have my camera's date set up. I think most of the pros do, too.
And, after all, it will be smugmug user's decision whether he/she would like to "activate" it. I would. Default can (and should) be "none"...
I second that! Can't even stand when my camera clock setting was wrong, because of daylight-saving.
Having many options is always great. :D

Bye,
Sebastian

[unsavory]

I would still rather see alpha-sort than anything else. :dunno

[unsavory]

(Mind the holidays, they tend to get in the way of real work. :) )
Don
Aye :D :D