Announcing PhotoRank

[Baldy]

Finally!

We've been working on several features for a long time, including a Big One that we hope will be very popular among some of our members.

It's called PhotoRank and the idea is to answer two questions we've been hearing for a very long time:

1. How do I find the most popular photos of Rome?

2. I want my great photos to float to the top somehow and get noticed. How do I do that?

Amazingly, we get a million people a day visiting our browse page and it's terrible. Once these new features are live, hopefully you'll say it rocks.

Stay tuned, we're working on it now and if you're around when it goes live you'll get to be the first to try it. The success of it will depend on how many people use it.

Thanks and sorry for the downtime it will take to bring this up. We wanted to do it in our normal maintenance window but couldn't pull that off this time.

More when we're live!

Here are the release notes explaining more:

http://blogs.smugmug.com/release-notes/

Chris MacAskill

[Wireless]

Site has been brought down for push, stay tuned!

[quagmire321]

Hope you guys finish this quick. Just sent out emails to 50 potential customers and my site is down.

Please get this done fast... please.

[Wireless]

We're back online, thanks for your patience!

[bigwebguy]

wow, the browse page is WAAAY better than the old version. I had never even been to the old one until I heard it was gettting redone...but now, i see myself going there quite frequently.

I think there should be more popular photos right on the homepage though...

great stuff!

[Baldy]

Okay, seems to be working smoothly far as I can tell. Onethumb will write up a blog post when he gets a chance but for those who wanna know, here's how PhotoRank works:

http://www.smugmug.com/help/search-online-photo-album

The early users seem to be getting a huge kick out of it, even for family sites because the friends and family get high entertainment out of finding their fav photos, ranking them and getting them to show up on home pages -- even the main browse page.

One important thing: we made a decision to have most popular photos displayed by default on home pages that were not customized. We believe most people who own those pages will like the feature and won't notice it for a long time if it's off. The more people who notice the better the statistics we get and the better browse and search become.

But we made it so they can keep them from displaying with a single click.

Anyone who has customized their page should have it off by default. Many of them will want it on but probably not event photographers. But they come back often and think they'll find out more quickly about the feature. They just need to go to the control panel and move it to their home page.

It's taking time for all the photos to process the many comments they have. Hopefully by morning the statistics will be getting better and better.

More later. It's been an amazingly long week! And right now it's almost 4 a.m.

Baldy

[Andy]

http://blogs.smugmug.com/release-notes/

[Andy]

*What is this?*

Looks like you found our latest addition to the site. PhotoRank is a feature that allows visitors to your site to rate the photos in your galleries. We hope you like this new feature that will help your visitors find your most popular photos easily. We also hope that you will take a few minutes and rate photos on other SmugMug sites. For more detailed information about PhotoRank, please read over this page from our help section:

www.smugmug.com/help/search-online-photo-album

*Get rid of this!*

No problem, you can easily remove this feature from your SmugMug site by going to your homepage and clicking on the 'Remove PhotoRank' button. Changing this setting will remove your popular photos from being displayed on your home page. If you have not done so already, please read over this page from our help section for more detailed information on this new feature:

www.smugmug.com/help/search-online-photo-album


*Turn it OFF! (Power & Pro)*

Since you customized your site, we kept it off your homepage for you to start with. You can quickly and easily disable PhotoRank on your site by going to Control Panel > Customization > Javascript and add the following code to the box:

displaySmugPopular = false;

At the bottom of your screen, click "update customization" and you will be all set!

For more detailed information on this new feature, please read over this page from our help section:

www.smugmug.com/help/search-online-photo-album


*I want it on my homepage!*

Since you customized your site, we kept it off your homepage for you to start with. You can enable it on your homepage if you wish, by going to your Control Panel and selecting "Display on Homepage" for the popular photos box.

For more detailed information on this new feature, please read over this page from our help section:

www.smugmug.com/help/search-online-photo-album


*I Don't Want My Photos Ranked!*

No worries! You can disable the PhotoRank feature on a per-gallery basis by going to Gallery Tools > Customize Gallery > PhotoRank > No. Setting the option to "No" will disable visitors to your site from ranking your photos in that gallery.

Power and Pro customers can disable this feature on a gallery by gallery basis, as just explained, or for your whole SmugMug site, by adding the following code to their Javascript customization:

displaySmugPopular = false;

For more detailed information on this new feature, please read over this page from our help section:

www.smugmug.com/help/search-online-photo-album


*I want to be popular too! How does this really work?*

A photo's popularity is based on the number of positive ratings as well as the photo's timeliness. Photos from events past will usually be less popular than recent ones. You can increase a photo's rank by moving your mouse over it and clicking the thumbs-up symbol that appears. You can cast one thumbs-up vote per photo. For more information about this new feature, please read over our help section:

www.smugmug.com/help/search-online-photo-album

[ankit]

Very interesting stuff. I've been hoping for something like this for a long time now. Couple of questions:

- Can we undo a thumbs up/down if we realize we clicked on the wrong button?

- Is there a way of viewing the tu/td statistics of a picture? Can I reset them for a picture or a gallery?

- Do pictures from private and password protected galleries appear on the front page if marked with a thumbs up? (a quick test revealed it isnt so, but just wanted to be sure).

- One more request to enable page type selection (critique, journal etc) for standard account users (so that the galleries appear in smugmug.com.browse)

- It would be really nice to pick the pictures on the sugmug front page randomly from the pool of today's popular pictures.

thanks,
ankit

[docwalker]

I think it would be cool if the popular photos were automatically included in your banner. I like the idea of fresh photos popping in.

Anyone got ideas on how to do that? :-)