Searching by date not finding images

javierplumey · July 21, 2014

Hello,

I have a snapshot I took on my iPhone which has meta data showing it was taken 2010-12-31. This shows up when I browse the gallery and find the image directly. However, the image doesn't show up when I search using the date range:

http://site.blah.com/date/2010-12-31/2011-01-01/

This photo was uploaded today but taken on 2010-12-31. Does the search work with the actual EXIF date or only the uploaded date?

Wendee · July 21, 2014

We do have behavior we're looking into with regards to the image Date Taken and Date Uploaded. Could you please write to our Heroes at help @ smugmug.com so that we can get the link and photo information from you and tag the ticket with the bug number? Thanks very much!

Wendee
SmugMug Support Hero
http://help.smugmug.com/

Allen · July 21, 2014

I suspect that the /date page shows actually an upload date. Many photos including from scans do not have a date taken.

Allen · July 21, 2014

Videos fall into this category. From my 7D only a modified date shows, no date taken, is why they always fall first in a gallery.

javierplumey · July 21, 2014

Wendee wrote: »

We do have behavior we're looking into with regards to the image Date Taken and Date Uploaded. Could you please write to our Heroes at help @ smugmug.com so that we can get the link and photo information from you and tag the ticket with the bug number? Thanks very much!

Wendee
SmugMug Support Hero
http://help.smugmug.com/

I emailed support. Case number 746367.

Thanks for the replies!

javierplumey · July 21, 2014

So this is a known issue and one that SM feels is working as intended. The search only works on the date of the upload, not the file itself. To me that's pretty useless. A customer is going to think..."hey my photo was taken on July 4th" and then go search that date, not some random date of the upload.

Peter · September 8, 2014

javierplumey wrote: »

So this is a known issue and one that SM feels is working as intended. The search only works on the date of the upload, not the file itself. To me that's pretty useless. A customer is going to think..."hey my photo was taken on July 4th" and then go search that date, not some random date of the upload.

Any word from support on this issue?

javierplumey · September 8, 2014

Peter wrote: »

Any word from support on this issue?

Nope. Frankly, I am getting really frustrated with SM.

Jenuine · September 9, 2014

Hello,

We did respond to the email that you sent last month. If you have additional questions feel free to email us back at help@smugmug.com. The search is not working as intended, and we are working to get the search working as it should.

http://feedback.smugmug.com/forums/17723-smugmug/suggestions/6047948-ability-to-search-by-date-taken

Thank you,

Peter · September 9, 2014

Jenuine wrote: »

Hello,

We did respond to the email that you sent last month. If you have additional questions feel free to email us back at help@smugmug.com. The search is not working as intended, and we are working to get the search working as it should.

http://feedback.smugmug.com/forums/17723-smugmug/suggestions/6047948-ability-to-search-by-date-taken

Thank you,

Jen. I just discovered this problem with my galleries the other day. Yesterday, I spent half the day responding to support emails, trying different solutions on my galleries, etc. Everything from, "It's because your galleries are private", "enable embedding", and so on, was suggested by SM support. Finally, the last support email was that "it looks like it's a bug that SM needs to repair". Wish they had some reference to your past information regarding this matter so that my time wasn't so wasted. Support Heros should share notes on known issues and or bugs.

Jenuine · September 9, 2014

Peter wrote: »

Jen. I just discovered this problem with my galleries the other day. Yesterday, I spent half the day responding to support emails, trying different solutions on my galleries, etc. Everything from, "It's because your galleries are private", "enable embedding", and so on, was suggested by SM support. Finally, the last support email was that "it looks like it's a bug that SM needs to repair". Wish they had some reference to your past information regarding this matter so that my time wasn't so wasted. Support Heros should share notes on known issues and or bugs.

Hello Peter,

So sorry that your time was spent trying to resolve this issue. We Heroes do in fact share notes and information. We are very diligent about that, but given the amount of information to share, the issues or situations with individual tickets and the many turns/facets a bug can take, the messages and notes are not always instantaneous or easily found. Our first go to on "trouble shooting" has to start with the looking for the known issues that could cause a problem. The "known issues or bugs" don't always come to light until we see the issue repeating itself and we can make that note available for us all to see. Sometimes too, in the process of the trouble shooting it is then that we see that it may be a bug and can report it. The time spent with folks like you to help us drill down to the problem is time consuming, but we greatly appreciate
the help and patience in testing so that we can then declare it an issue that needs our engineers attention.

That being said, we don't like to hear that this caused undo time and frustration. We DO appreciate your thoughtful concern because we always want to do better.

Best,

thewanderer · October 21, 2014

Hi SM,

Any update on this issue?

I would like to introduce a date search page on my website but the fact information is fed from upload date and not the EXIF data makes this feature pretty useless. Also doing a search for one day e.g. 19/10/14 to 19/10/14 returns no images.

The Wanderer.

javierplumey · October 22, 2014

Aside from the searching on one day issue, I think SM considers this working as designed, which is a load of .poo if you ask me. I've gone back to uploading to Dropbox for my mobile photos until this is resolved.

leftquark · October 22, 2014

Quite often I use flickr's date search to look up images taken in a certain date period, so this is something I'd love to see work similarly. Unfortunately, I cannot offer a timeframe on if or when we would be able to offer a solution.

rrlyman · November 30, 2014

Here is the way I somewhat got around the date selection problem. It gives me date selection granularity by year.

First create a folder called Photos by Date

Within the folder create about 80 smart galleries, with names like 1930, 1931, 1932 etc.
For each gallery set a smart rule such as select photos based on date taken 01/01/1930 to 12/31/1930.

On my home page, the Photos by Date shows up in a folder, galleries and pages block. Clicking on Photos by Date then shows a page with all 80 smart galleries on it. Clicking on the 1930 smart gallery gives all photos in 1930.

javierplumey · December 1, 2014

rrlyman wrote: »

Here is the way I somewhat got around the date selection problem. It gives me date selection granularity by year.

First create a folder called Photos by Date

Within the folder create about 80 smart galleries, with names like 1930, 1931, 1932 etc.
For each gallery set a smart rule such as select photos based on date taken 01/01/1930 to 12/31/1930.

On my home page, the Photos by Date shows up in a folder, galleries and pages block. Clicking on Photos by Date then shows a page with all 80 smart galleries on it. Clicking on the 1930 smart gallery gives all photos in 1930.

Interesting workaround, and something I've tried doing, but this is something that should be in the product.

mcfang · December 10, 2014

I was quite disappointed to find that date search was working on Date Uploaded instead of Date Taken. Trying to search for photos taken in the past month gives me photos uploaded in the past month but taken earlier.

If I recall correctly the Timeline search in 'old smugmug' could work with either date.

leftquark · December 10, 2014

mcfang wrote: »

I was quite disappointed to find that date search was working on Date Uploaded instead of Date Taken. Trying to search for photos taken in the past month gives me photos uploaded in the past month but taken earlier.

If I recall correctly the Timeline search in 'old smugmug' could work with either date.

I, too, was disappointed to find that it wasn't using date taken. It's on my list of things that I'd love to fix when we can. If you can head on over to the feedback forum and give this a few votes it'll help tell us how badly we need to work on it: http://feedback.smugmug.com/forums/17723-smugmug/suggestions/6047948-ability-to-search-by-date-taken

Searching by date not finding images

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