Rourke on Technology

Smugmug is currently beta testing the latest version of their photo gallery interface. After playing around on the beta server a little, I’m cautiously optimistic. There are some features that are almost a huge improvement, and some that are a nice step up, and one downsides to the new interface. As is, the new interface is a nice incremental improvement. With a few tweaks it has the potential to be a really impressive step forward.

If you scroll to the bottom of this post and click on the bottom screenshot you’ll have a good overview of the new interface. Move that window off to the side and refer back to it as you read this post and you’ll be able to easily see what I’m talking about.

All of the changes are to Smugmug’s picture gallery view, and most of those changes involve more use of AJAX. The biggest improvement, though, is actually not AJAX related — comments are now displayed on the picture pages by default. In the current production version of Smugmug’s galleries you have to click on comments to see them. Now those comments show up on the main page for each picture as you view that page. While a small change, this is a major improvement because it makes comments and user participation more central to the Smugmug experience. To make this feature complete, comments need to show up in the lightbox view — the view you get when you click on a picture, and the only view of a single picture that you’ll be able to email to someone.

I’d love to see Smugmug take this one step further and allow comments to be added to pictures without requiring users to click an “add comment” button. Blogs have comments set up this way. Yes, this would make the pages a little less “clean” looking, so perhaps this should be an option that users can control.

Smugmug’s display of EXIF information (metadata about photographs) has been a little clunky in the past, and this was one area where Flickr currently has the edge. The new Smugmug interface vastly improves handling of EXIF information. With this new interface you hover over a picture and toolbar appears. You then click “info” on that toolbar and a transparent element appears and hovers over your page. This element shows all the EXIF information for the image you’re viewing and can be moved around your browser window. The hovering EXIF element is really slick, but there are still some rough edges. The EXIF window shows far too much. At the very least, there should be a way to toggle between “basic” and “full” so you don’t need to see all of the information all of the time. Worse, though, is the fact that you can’t see this information when you click on a picture (enter lightbox mode) to get the larger version of that picture (see above right). If I’m interested enough in a picture to look at the EXIF information, I also want to see a larger version of that image than what you have on the default gallery view.

Smugmug caters to folks who are a little more serious about their photography than the crowd over at Flickr. Those same photographers are accustomed to magazines that list the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO in every photo’s caption. I wish Smugmug would do the same so I wouldn’t need to click anything to see basic shot information. I especially want to this information when I choose to look at a larger version of a given picture.

On a related note, I’d also like to have an option to view a version of pictures larger than “L”, or “Large,” version. I’d love to have a full screen view of images, even if it just gets my browser to scale the image down from an “XL” option. “L” images take up only a small part of my laptop screen (1400×1050) and “O” — for original — images are way too large.

The rest of the changes deal with modifying the gallery view so it requires fewer pageloads. This means that when you click on an individual image in a gallery it can grab that picture and show it without actually reloading the whole page. Individual photo pages load faster and everything seems snappier. The downside is that you won’t be able to copy a url out of your address bar and send it to someone to show them a specific picture. I’m really impressed with the fact that Smugmug made the lightbox view a permalink, so there’s a fairly easy way to send someone the url for a particular picture.

The one unresolved side effect of the new gallery view is the fact that you won’t be able to use a web site analytics service (like Google Analytics) to track individual pageloads.

Speed is important, and I really like the snappier interface. I’m also really impressed with the fact that you can now navigate using keyboard shortcuts. Arrow keys now move you forward and backward. I do hope, however, that Smugmug takes the required steps to give folks back what that snappier interface will take away. Enhancing the built-in Smugmug stats so there’s a list of “top photographs” will give users back the only valuable part of what they lost in terms of analytics.

Smugmug also improved the theme preview and theme selection for galleries. I still think the default Smugmug themes are the nicest, so I don’t really have an opinion on this feature.

I’m confident that the guys at Smugmug will clean things up some before this new interface goes from beta to full release. Overall, these changes are certainly taking Smugmug in the right direction and I’m very happy with the service. That said, I have a short list of items I’d love to see in a photo sharing and presentation service, including better access control, the ability to store digital negatives, and more ways to organize images.

Smugmug’s access control model is great for professional photographers, but its not as good for folks who want to share photos with family and friends. All of my photographs are currently open for all to see, but I’d really like the ability to lock that down so only my “showcase” photographs are public, and the rest (Christmas picture, vacation pictures, etc) are only viewable by friends and family. More and more, I wonder about the wisdom of leaving all of my pictures open to the general public. Sharegroups are not an acceptable answer to this problem.

Smugmug almost provides a great way to archive my pictures. Because Smugmug only allows me to upload JPEG files, though, I need to keep a mirror of my galleries offline with all of my RAW files, or “digital negatives.” The ability to link a digital negative — stored by Smugmug — to each JPEG would be a great feature. I’d be willing to pay extra for that.

As I upload more and more pictures to Smugmug, it becomes harder and harder to find things. Search is good, but the ability to put photo galleries in multiple categories would open up quite a few organizational possibilities. Smugmug announced a feature some time ago would use the data information in my pictures to help organize those pictures. I have no idea how this works because despite numerous requests to support this feature remains unavailable to me. Oh, well.