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Private Keywords, useless Friends and Family, and other ranting
darryl
Registered Users Posts: 997 Major grins
So, I've been thinking about Keywords lately.
2-3 months ago, when Phanfare users were complaining about Phanfare's lack of tagging or keywords, I wrote that I could are less about keywords, and considered them just a stupid Web 2.0 "must have" that really didn't have much advantage over proper captioning or folder labelling.
But since then, I've set up a SmugMug Pro site for my son's co-op preschool. Parents are welcome to "drop-in" anytime their kid is there, so there are a lot of great candid shots taken.
SCENARIO:
There is a site-wide password for the site. There is a separate guest password.
- Parents who don't take photos can just use the master password to view, download, and order photos. Password gets cached as a cookie for weeks, so they don't have to login every time. Wonderful.
- Parents who take photos use the guest password to upload their shots. They can't delete or rearrange (and as it turns out, rotate). Great -- more photos!
- Me and another "admin" can reorganize/delete galleries/photos as needed, have control over some settings, etc.
PROBLEM:
Tons of photos. Well, not a problem, but we've got some prolific photographers (guilty), and as a parent, going through a bunch of photos of other kids just to find your own? Well, kind of a time sink.
SOLUTION:
Tagging, keywords! Great -- all the parents, even the ones just "viewing", should be able to just click on "add/edit keywords" when they say, "Oh, there's my Joey, and he's playing with... Sara" and type: joey sara
EXCEPT:
SmugMug doesn't support keywords for private albums. Except this isn't a private album. It's public on a password-protected site. Ah well, you're still out of luck. SUCK.
But wait, you say, in the Gallery settings there's something about allowing Editing of Captions/Keywords for [url="http://www.smugmug.com/help/friends-and-family]Friends or Family[/url]. Yah, that is that LAMEST rip-off of Flickr ever.
I just checked and that's *EXACTLY* how Flickr manages permissions for the same thing. EXCEPT, Flickr doesn't require you to [url="http://www.smugmug.com/help/friends-and-family]pay for a membership[/url] to become a Friend or Family. Uh, SmugMug, I know you're a paid service, but here is a place where the free model actually makes some sense.
I am not going to be able to convince some/any of the parents to join SmugMug solely because I want them to be able to tag photos for me. :P
CONCLUSION/QUESTIONS:
So is it just me? Does anybody else think that if you're explicitly giving somebody a private password that you may also want to grant them the right to edit captions and/or keyboards?
Does anybody here actually make use of the Friends/Family permission for adding/editing captions?
2-3 months ago, when Phanfare users were complaining about Phanfare's lack of tagging or keywords, I wrote that I could are less about keywords, and considered them just a stupid Web 2.0 "must have" that really didn't have much advantage over proper captioning or folder labelling.
But since then, I've set up a SmugMug Pro site for my son's co-op preschool. Parents are welcome to "drop-in" anytime their kid is there, so there are a lot of great candid shots taken.
SCENARIO:
There is a site-wide password for the site. There is a separate guest password.
- Parents who don't take photos can just use the master password to view, download, and order photos. Password gets cached as a cookie for weeks, so they don't have to login every time. Wonderful.
- Parents who take photos use the guest password to upload their shots. They can't delete or rearrange (and as it turns out, rotate). Great -- more photos!
- Me and another "admin" can reorganize/delete galleries/photos as needed, have control over some settings, etc.
PROBLEM:
Tons of photos. Well, not a problem, but we've got some prolific photographers (guilty), and as a parent, going through a bunch of photos of other kids just to find your own? Well, kind of a time sink.
SOLUTION:
Tagging, keywords! Great -- all the parents, even the ones just "viewing", should be able to just click on "add/edit keywords" when they say, "Oh, there's my Joey, and he's playing with... Sara" and type: joey sara
EXCEPT:
SmugMug doesn't support keywords for private albums. Except this isn't a private album. It's public on a password-protected site. Ah well, you're still out of luck. SUCK.
But wait, you say, in the Gallery settings there's something about allowing Editing of Captions/Keywords for [url="http://www.smugmug.com/help/friends-and-family]Friends or Family[/url]. Yah, that is that LAMEST rip-off of Flickr ever.
I just checked and that's *EXACTLY* how Flickr manages permissions for the same thing. EXCEPT, Flickr doesn't require you to [url="http://www.smugmug.com/help/friends-and-family]pay for a membership[/url] to become a Friend or Family. Uh, SmugMug, I know you're a paid service, but here is a place where the free model actually makes some sense.
I am not going to be able to convince some/any of the parents to join SmugMug solely because I want them to be able to tag photos for me. :P
CONCLUSION/QUESTIONS:
So is it just me? Does anybody else think that if you're explicitly giving somebody a private password that you may also want to grant them the right to edit captions and/or keyboards?
Does anybody here actually make use of the Friends/Family permission for adding/editing captions?
0
Comments
Nope. Comments aren't searchable. Well, doesn't that suck?
In my case I want to upload old family photographs to private galleries and have other members of the family tag them for me. Ultimately I want to sync those tags back to a local 'Lightroom catalog'. Like you said it is not reasonable to expect anyone else to join smugmug just to tag photos.
Gareth
www.eyeforphotos.co.uk
Thanks for the feedback (you too, Darryl).
Just to be clear, how would you want to indicate who gets permission to edit captions and keywords?
Would it be anyone who has access to a gallery? It sounds like you're saying if it is a private gallery, or a gallery in a site that has a site-wide password in force, then the fact that the visitor is able to view the gallery should qualify them as a friend or family?
I did want to add here, that we had no intention of conniving people into paying for a SmugMug account solely so they could edit someone else's captions or keywords!
The friend/family feature was just a common-sense addition because it let YOU as the account owner designate certain "visitors" as friend or family without forcing visitors to register. We don't make visitors register and we don't collect their email addresses. So, that makes it a bit tricky to decide which visitors should get the power to edit your keywords and which shouldn't. Make sense?
-Anne
Hi Anne -- thanks for reading. I know that you weren't trying to drive membership with Friends/Family. But unfortunately the function isn't very useful unless Friends/Family have joined.
As I said before, you should be able to designate people whom you have given a password to your private gallery (or site-wide password) caption/keyword editing rights.
I envision it thusly (and ideally to avoid confusion those options would be grayed out or hidden if there wasn't a password set for the gallery or site-wide):
I guess it might be a bit more work to limit visibility to the keywords to *only* the galler(y|ies) that a given password might grant you access to. But c'mon, wouldn't it just be one more bit to sort on?
Actually I'm less concerned about private galleries (see my use case) and more concerned about the site-wide password. For this to work, I need to be able to display keywords to people who just logged in with the site password.
Hrm. I wonder if there's any way to hack around this with the API. Provide my own external keyword interface, and float it in a window somewhere? Perhaps I'll open up the discussion over on the customization forum.
I'm a dope. I just had my SmugIslands settings setup incorrectly. Now people logged in with the site-wide password can see keywords. Yahoo!!!
I wonder if comments are accessible from the API. [thread=73426]Nope. :-{[/thread] If so I could probably write a script to copy/append comments -> keywords.
I was thinking along the lines of using the existing keyword 'edit' link along with a new password option on the gallery settings page.
So for each galley you would have something like this in the gallery options:
Keyword edit: ? No: X Password |_______| Allow users with this password to edit keywords
The existing 'edit' keyword option (which currently only shows for logged in users) would be changed so that it displays for all users and its function modified as defined below:
a) If I select the 'edit' link and am not logged in plus the 'keyword edit' option is set to no - display the following message 'You are not authorised to edit keywords'
b) If I select the 'edit' link and am not logged in but a password has been set - the user is prompted for the password - get it wrong and you are presented with the message 'You are not authorised to edit keywords', get it right and obviously you can edit keywords.
c) I am logged in and I select the 'edit' link - operates as normal allowing me to edit keywords.
I don't think it would be wise to allow a blank password since anyone could then edit keywords and that is bound to cause problems.
OK, not a great or detailed specification but I'm not a big fan of HTML editors.
Gareth
www.eyeforphotos.co.uk
Also, I don't like the idea of displaying keywords if the option requires another login. This would presumably be after they entered a Gallery or Site-Wide password. Prompting users with another password seems burdensome.
--Darryl
I was thinking of public galleries with individuals authorised for keyword changes. However having thought about it (after your prompt) I see it would be possible to live with 'public' keyword editing only on password protected galleries so long as I there was a toggle to enable/disable the feature on a per gallery basis.
Gareth www.eyeforphotos.co.uk
Don't make me try and implement a custom AJAX pop-up tagging interface hacked in Javascript. You'll be sorry -- really. So will I. :-}
We heard you, I promise.
For what it's worth, you dismissed Gareth's request as too complex, and I actually see it as simpler than yours. A password that allows someone to edit keywords on any gallery (not just a pworded and unlisted gallery) would give a much more consistent experience for visitors. If we implemented your request, people who had public galleries without passwords would be frustrated that their non-SmugMug friends can't edit keywords unless they locked up the galleries with a password.
Oh, and just to back to the Friend & Family bit: The friends and family feature may be useless to you, but don't make the mistake of assuming that it's therefore useless to all of our customers. Many have lots of friends or family who use SmugMug and they enjoy being able to keyword each other's photos without hassling with extra passwords.
-Anne
Can it be set up so that anyone can add keyword tags to my images? I've taken a ton of sport photos over the years and now have implemented search on my sites.
Problem....too many photos, of kids I don't know, to tag.
Solution....allow anyone (beyond the useless 'Family' and 'Friends') to add tags.
Can it be done?
www.queenerfamily.com
www.sorsn-photography.com
www.sorsn.com
www.queenerfamily.com
"A day without sunshine is like night"
Yes, I fully understand this is pretty much an edge-case and that the Customize Gallery page is already *waaaay* too full of options. I hope you guys are working on a way to solve this problem of too many options. Perhaps putting the most basic ones in a primary tab, and then categorizing the rest and putting them in tabs behind. Even so, it's a whole lot of options, which on the one hand I love, but even as a long-time SM user, sometimes I miss something.
Sure, Bulk Settings makes it easier, but not every gallery I have uses the same theme or view. So I have to carefully select which ones to write over. If Bulk Settings could *selectively* overwrite settings, that would be even better. [That is -- don't touch themes or default views, as those might differ from gallery to gallery. But *do* let me change all of my galleries to not allow right-clicking. Or turn off originals. Or add watermarks.]
Perhaps I didn't take the time to fully read and digest it. But my problem with this is: when and where would the user be prompted for this keyword password? Right now SmugMug only asks for passwords if the site is protected, or the gallery. If enabled, would all images show the add/edit keyword link, and upon clicking, they would *then* see a password prompt? That seems really outside of the SmugMug authentication paradigm.
As to your example -- I think it would frustrate users to see that add/edit link (on every single image) but have it be non-functional w/o a password. It's kind of a tease.
Well, it appears to be useless to squeener too. Again, the trick is that friends and family have to be SmugMug *customers*. I'm sure you'd love for that to be the case, but the reality is that most of the people viewing my son's preschool site are not SmugMug customers. The friends & family tagging really only works if anyone can become a friend & family, and that isn't going to happen with SmugMug not offering any free accounts. (I believe this is how Flickr manages to get around this problem.)
Yeah, hadn't thought through implementation yet. That's a good point.
Yeah so, the way I see it for the time-being is... no one gets to edit captions or keywords, or some people get to edit captions or keywords. And, like I said, lots of people use this and love it. Not everybody can and does. I definitely understand where you're coming from wanting all visitors who access your gallery to be able to edit.
Thanks again for the feedback!
-Anne
To me, shared editing is a key social aspect that would make Smugmug just that more useful to customers.
I just realized there was already a *great* example of how to organize the gallery settings. SmugBrowser! I've just attached the first screen, but you see the tabs, right? Perfect!