Can we lose a few photo tools?

Baldy · May 5, 2008

We've been working on a tools cleanup kindof along the lines of what John mentioned in the UI polish thread. It isn't the extreme makeover that Darryl is looking for yet, but interim steps to make options clearer and eliminate some annoyances.

The menu options would go from what you see on the left, to the right:

(Except I'm gonna change the wording on color effects.)

Button names, placement, and some functionality is changing, as in the pricing tool:

Question is, we have several arrange tools now. We'd like to nuke two of them and consolidate to "Drag to Arrange" (it's now called Drag & Drop photos).

One of the nuked arrange tools allows you to enter numbers for where you'd like the photos sequenced. It's called Arrange Photos (Expert). Anyone use it?

The other is called arrange photos and it has one advantage over the current Drag & Drop Photos tool: you can select a group to arrange. But we're adding that functionality to the Drag to Arrange tool, along with keyboard shortcuts for selecting all, etc., like on your Macs or PCs.

My worry is if you have a gallery of 1,000 photos, dragging to arrange may not be that fun. But I wouldn't think typing in numbers would be either.

BeachBill · May 5, 2008

Go for it Baldy. The UI could really use some cleanup and organization.

jfriend · May 5, 2008

Baldy wrote:

We've been working on a tools cleanup kindof along the lines of what John mentioned in the UI polish thread. It isn't the extreme makeover that Darryl is looking for yet, but interim steps to make options clearer and eliminate some annoyances.

The menu options would go from what you see on the left, to the right:

(Except I'm gonna change the wording on color effects.)

Question is, we have several arrange tools now. We'd like to nuke two of them and consolidate to "Drag to Arrange" (it's now called Drag & Drop photos).

One of the nuked arrange tools allows you to enter numbers for where you'd like the photos sequenced. It's called Arrange Photos (Expert). Anyone use it?

The other is called arrange photos and it has one advantage over the current Drag & Drop Photos tool: you can select a group to arrange. But we're adding that functionality to the Drag to Arrange tool, along with keyboard shortcuts for selecting all, etc., like on your Macs or PCs.

My worry is if you have a gallery of 1,000 photos, dragging to arrange may not be that fun. But I wouldn't think typing in numbers would be either.

It will take some more thinking about which tools could actually be removed. I never use the arrange by position tool. There are definitely times when I don't use the drag/drop rearrange tool because it does so poorly when the thumbs don't all fit on screen and scrolling is required. For those cases, I need keyboard select and move.

As for visually doing the menu, I hate having to pull-down a menu and scroll it (which I do now on my PC). It really takes away the efficiency of picking a tool.

How about replacing the single drop-down with five icons each with a short drop-down menu. Then, you'd do a click on the icon and a click on the command you want and never be more than two clicks away. The icons are only visible to the owner and there's plenty of screen real-estate in the area. It's also more expandable in the future without again feeling crowded. The only challenge I see is to make sure the icons are clear and people can understand which is which and where things might be located. Your give categories (which could each be an icon with menu) are Pros, Organize, Alter, Highlight, Create. You probably could even use buttons with those words and a drop-down toolbar-like arrow on them if you didn't want to just use graphics. If this idea isn't clear, let me know and I'll see if I can describe or draw what I'm talking about. Basically, I want to replace two drop-down menus (one of which requires scrolling) and two checkboxes (which you have today) with more of a nice looking toolbar-like thing that has more drop-downs, none of which scroll.

Visually, I think you want to get rid of the standard system drop-downs and checkboxes (on Windows at least). The Add Photos drop-down you do yourself is gorgeous.

AnneMcBean · May 5, 2008

jfriend wrote:

How about replacing the single drop-down with five icons each with a short drop-down menu. Then, you'd do a click on the icon and a click on the command you want and never be more than two clicks away.

Thanks for the feedback!

I worry about people being forced to hunt for the right tool, though. If you aren't sure where it lives (and no matter how we categorize, some people will think differently)... then it's many clicks until you find the right spot. And you will probably forget next time and have to hunt again.

jfriend wrote:

Visually, I think you want to get rid of the standard system drop-downs and checkboxes (on Windows at least). The Add Photos drop-down you do yourself is gorgeous.

Agreed.

-Anne

jfriend · May 5, 2008

AnneMcBean wrote:

I worry about people being forced to hunt for the right tool, though. If you aren't sure where it lives (and no matter how we categorize, some people will think differently)... then it's many clicks until you find the right spot. And you will probably forget next time and have to hunt again.

Yeah, but no Windows or Mac app with more than five functions puts all their menu items in one giant menu either so there's got to be some sort of tradeoff between discoverability and the efficiency of one giant scrolling menu. Pick the sub-menu titles appropriately and I will bet that people can find what they want quickly, have it work more efficiently and have the whole thing look a lot more beautiful too.

What I really want to get rid of is one giant scrolling menu with all the tools in it like it is today. There's just no UI precedent anywhere that I know of that this is a good way to present all your tools and commands. Break it up into logical units that are easy to categorize and easier to browse and quicker to select, more logical to remember and never scroll. It's also a lot more expandable as things grow over time.

DJ-S1 · May 6, 2008

Agree this really needs to be done. Here are some quick thoughts -

- "This is me!" - Why is this here? It is so seldom used but it takes up menu space for every action. I would put it in the customize area of the CP; a "pick bio photo" button that lets you browse to the photo you want.

- Move any items that affect the entire gallery to the "gallery tools" drop down. Featured photo stuff and probably "set prices" come to mind unless you want a pick to the set price for this one photo (and I'm not sure how useful that would be).

- "blah (expert)" - No problem nuking these AFAIC. I used them very early on but there are much better tools now.

- I have always thought there should be 3 menus - one for gallery settings, one for "alter this one photo" and one for "alter multiple photos". Having items like "colors" and "colors (bulk)" in the same pull down doesn't make sense to me, but I definitely don't want to lose the speed and convenience of the "single photo" tools.

- No scrolling in the pull-downs would be huge.

- Currently the last item picked from the pull down stays visible - I think it should revert back to "Photo Tools" automatically.

dmc · May 6, 2008

Yes, Please move "gallery" tools to "Gallery tools" dropdown

DJ-S1 wrote:

...
- Move any items that affect the entire gallery to the "gallery tools" drop down. Featured photo stuff and probably "set prices" come to mind unless you want a pick to the set price for this one photo (and I'm not sure how useful that would be).
...

please... from 2006...
http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=343774&postcount=379

Andy · May 6, 2008

dmc wrote:

please... from 2006...
http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=343774&postcount=379

We didn't forget about you dmc but that's not something that we can consider right now, as far as I know - however - it's surely something that I'd love to see as we get beyond the improvement that Baldy's making right now, and towards a new tools gui of some kind - something that could be ajaxy, on the page, and not hamstring you just becuase you use journal style

PBolchover · May 6, 2008

One quick point: When scrolling through the tool list, I frequently type the first letter of the tool I'm interested in, in order to select the tool. It would be extremely useful if I could do the same here.

(E.g. for bulk updating lots of thumbnails via the tools menu: I want _most_ of the them to be 1:1, but there are a couple of exceptions, so I can't use the bulk thumbnail hack)

DrDavid · May 6, 2008

Arrange photo (expert) - highly useful for taking one or two photos and making them #1 and #2, etc..

Move (expert) - Very nice - I can move multiple images to multiple locations (I do use it sometimes)

Smugmungous view - why not just convert everything to smugmungous internally and be done with it for good? Make all images have an XL, XL2, XL3, but just respect the users selection. OR, do as jfriend suggested. Create thumbnails that are bigger automatically when the user changes (via *any* method, including smugbrowser) the max viewing size beyond what's currently generated.

edit captions/keywords (bulk) - you're not really getting rid of this, are you?

Edit geography - I'd love a way to bulk edit this.

Could we also get COPY to a new gallery and COPY (bulk) to a new gallery? That would be very nice!

And, please, for the love of God... Coupon codes, packages and custom items! Please!!!!!

Think of all the extra money SM would make vs. the current method of using Google Checkout/paypal (and SM getting $0). Plus, upselling ability. Buy an 8x10, offer to frame it. Buy a 4x6, offer a photo album. Plus, in my dream world: email your cart! Create a cart of photos, then email it (like what Dell does) to your mother/father/brother/etc.. so that they can review the photos and buy them.

For the shopping cart, check out Zen's cart.. It's nice (but the flow isn't good IMHO). BUT, the important thing is that it allows custom items, etc.. I find it a bit kludgy to work with, so SM can definitely improve it, but, it has the features that many pros have been begging for for a long time. Too bad the rest of it sucks

I like the idea of having a flyout visible to the owner with the options showing up as icons/text--grouped into obvious groups. So, no drop down list at all.

David

Andy · May 6, 2008

DrDavid wrote:

edit captions/keywords (bulk) - you're not really getting rid of this, are you?

No, the tools menu will go to the bulk tool - single caption is on the page itself, so we lose the edit single tool

(lots of other cool stuff about pkgs, coupons, card etc... mentioned!)

Another thread for that, thanks David

Ann McRae · May 6, 2008

I use
arrange photos (expert)
and
edit captions/keywords (bulk)

exclusively.

I can adapt if it is better, but do not like the dragging/arranging tool as it doesn't always do what I want quickly and easily. Numbering works.

ann

timnosenzo · May 6, 2008

BeachBill wrote:

Go for it Baldy. The UI could really use some cleanup and organization.

I agree! The long option list doesn't bother me, I just wish it was organized better (like the example).

claudermilk · May 7, 2008

As is seemingly normal, I'm with John on this. I like the idea of several separate menus, each dedicated to a specific type of function. Several shorter, well-defined, well-organized menus would be much better than the two huge scattered ones we have now.

The improvements made to the SM UI over the past few months have been great. Things are getting easier to locate & use.

Cameron · May 7, 2008

I agree with a lot of what people are saying. I think the huge drop-down list is horrible - especially when using my tiny laptop and touchpad - navigating a huge scrolling drop-down gets tricky. I'd much rather see smaller organized menus, or even a well organized tabbed interface.

Can we lose a few photo tools?

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