Whenever I have been selling prints, customers have pulled away from the option of using the SmugMug system, due to the inconvenience (perceived) and extra cost (significant) of the order being fulfilled on the other side of the Atlantic. I always end up having to use another service to provide prints, which adds unnecessary work I'd rather not be having to do, having paid for the Pro subscription in the first place.

One way around this could be for SmugMug to partner with a European lab, so prints were charged and shipped from within Europe, reducing the shipping costs, shipping time, and unease/inconvenience regarding international transactions. It's the perception of customers regarding the US fulfilment of orders that is key, and all of mine have responded in a negative way (cost, time, etc), to the extent that I had to remove the purchasing options from my galleries to avoid confusion - they now just contact me for for prints. Very inconvenient for all involved.

So, to sum up, are there any plans for SmugMug to link with a UK or European lab, so that I/we can take full advantages of the facilities in our Pro subscriptions?

Thanks,

Dave.

Give users the ability to create groups with arbitrary 'labels' e.g. : family, friends, work colleagues, parents, etc.

Allow a different password to be set for each of these groups, and perhaps even some generic settings (what size photos they get to see, for example)

In gallery settings allow a tick box to tick which 'groups' may see this gallery. (include an "all" tick box too)

When someone goes to the site, they type in the password they were given, which is the one of the group they're in. Then they get to see only what galleries have been checked for their given group with the settings assigned to their group (e.g. can only seem small photos).

SM's fulfillment is very swish. Problem is it's only valid for US people - printing costs and lead times make orders for EU customers prohibitively expensive.

I know several other would like this feature, and like many others, I've been playing around with paypal payments (there's a good thread on dgrin about it). Problem is, well, it's paypal and doesn't give the photographer / seller the option to view an order before receiving payment.

Google has a far better order processing system, but doesn't support logistics; a third party shopping cart is required and that costs money!

So, why not open up SM's excellent print ordering system so that SM members can receive an order via email and manage the fulfillment themselves? :)

Being based in the UK, I'm not losing out on people not being able to buy my photos easily and because of that, I fear I may cancel my SM renewal because it's a real showstopper for me...

We've all used the various uploaders that are available. And all of us have had an instance where an uploader doesn't work, or suddenly stops working, thereby disrupting our entire workflow.

Transferring files over the Internet isn't rocket science. In fact there's a special protocol for it--the File Transfer Protocol, or FTP for short. FTP is much more robust than http for sending files. It is cross-platform and supports almost every computing device out there, new and old. This way, the only time uploading stops working is when something is broken at SM, not when some code on a third party uploader needs updating. Exposure Manager has FTP uploading capability.

I would really like to see the option to have full customization of my SmugMug site by using a fully-fledged template system. I realize that many users would not necessarily want to take advantage of such advanced customization, but I also really believe that there are others like me who are more experienced/proficient in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and who feel severely limited by the existing option only to inject our own markup into ‘custom header’ and ‘custom footer’ sections (as well as into the <strong>head</strong> section).

I have spent a fair bit of time reading about how to customize SmugMug sites using the existing system. As soon as someone wants to change the way something is worded—for example—then he has to resort to JavaScript hacks. I admit to being a purist, but this is definitely not good website-design methodology!

I remember reading a forum thread several months ago where someone asked if he could display the date a photo was taken below the photo itself. The answer came back, no he couldn’t do that, and he likely never would be able to since not enough customers would want such a thing. If, however, advanced customization was based around a complete template system, we could easily imagine a "date-taken" template tag which could be inserted into this user’s templates. (Incidentally, I am also someone who am interested in displaying the photos’ dates below the photos.)

I have also read forum threads where people have commented on the fact that users’ SmugMug sites do not—by default—conform to Web standards. Again the official response was to acknowledge this fact and to say, reasonably enough, that this is not a priority in any way, and that instead the SmugMug designers have aimed for the site to be as compatible as possible with a wide range of browsers—including, ahem, the less standards-conscious browser which predominates. Now, I freely admit that this is a laudable aim, but I am someone for whom Web standards are an important consideration: if you were to introduce a full template system, then I would be able to aim for my own SmugMug site to be standards-compliant while not affecting the ability of others’ sites to be seen identically by both IE and other browsers.

What I am talking about in this feature request is something massive, and something which will require a correspondingly massive amount of development. However, I really think that this is a way to offer SmugMug users the opportunity to design their sites to look how they want them to look, rather than making them fashion their sites around the slightly limiting framework which is currently offered.

Since joining SmugMug I have discovered that PhotoShelter offers the kind of templated customization that I am talking about (http://pa.photoshelter.com/help/tut/custom/manual). I read through their documentation for manual customization and kept thing ‘This is exactly what SmugMug needs.’ In fact it was the difficulties that I perceived in customizing my site that made me initially reluctant about joining SmugMug a year ago, but I decided to take the plunge on the basis that it was the best such service on the market. I am not going to jump ship just yet—apart from anything else PhotoShelter is quite a lot more expensive, and I am not a professional photographer—but am merely mentioning PhotoShelter as an example of a competitor’s product which is doing something along the lines of what I imagine. They have various standardized ‘widgets’ which users can drop in to their templated markup which provide the basic functions like photo-display, photo-switching, etc.

I don’t envisage that SmugMug would want to replace the existing customization options with this alone, but rather that the templating system would be an alternative method for users to customize their sites. The recent introduction of the Easy Customizer demonstrates that SmugMug is prepared to offer these alternative/parallel customization methods. Less-experienced users presumably wouldn’t want to go anywhere near this (unless they were to pay template designers to produce a custom SmugMug site for them). But it is evident from reading the forums that there are lots of more-experienced users who would be able to ‘cope’ with templates (if they wanted to!).

I hope people will feel free to add their own comments to this feature-request thread.

Smugmug already provides password-protected viewing of a gallery. Wouldn't it be nice if you could ALSO have password-protected UPLOADING too!

This could easily be accomplished by adding a simple "Upload Password" right below the "Password" field in GALLERY SETTINGS.

Imagine going to a party or Event where 5 separate friends all have cameras, and all are taking pictures.

Wouldn't it be awesome to be able to provide each of those 5 friends with a simple "Upload Password" and then all the event photos could easily be consolidated into ONE Gallery?

This a Totally Killer App! No more having to look at 5 separate Facebook or MySpace accounts to see ALL The photos for one event or Party.

I would TOTALLY pay extra for this feature.

I like having all of my galleries listed on my photo home page (http://photos.jasondunn.com) - but the thumbnail images are ridiculously small. Looking at them on a 24" inch, 1920 x 1200 monitor, they're barely more than 1 inch by 1 inch! That's not easy to see, especially if an image has a lot of detail in it.

Please give us an easy, non-hacking-CSS way to chose from a few different home page layouts with different gallery image sizes. I'd be perfectly happy myself if the layout stayed basically the same, but the gallery images got 2x to 3x bigger. I like square thumbnails inside a gallery, but on the front page of my site, I'd like to see 3:2 images instead.

A bigger image, and some nice descriptive text (more space for text to display is a part of this request), would go a long way toward making my photo page more vibrant.

The 'Hide Photo' option is a great feature and currently it's a very quick and easy task to go through a whole gallery culling images from public view by using the 'H' key shortcut and the arrow keys. Unfortunately, once you have hidden some photos, there is no way to review a gallery and quickly identify which photos you have hidden from view. You must manually step through the photos one by one again, paying close attention to the little 'Hide Photo' check box that appears below the image, and only in the SmugMug view. In large galleries, or galleries with many similar images, it becomes almost impossible to keep track of what you've hidden and what you haven't. There is no way to select all of the hidden photos in a gallery for grouping, moving, deleting, keywording, etc.

My proposed feature request is to add the following functionality to the current 'Hide Photos' feature:

1) Highlight all hidden photos with some type of obvious indicator on the image itself. It could be a special watermark or some obvious icon that sits in a corner of the image but, it must appear on all sizes of the image no matter where that image is viewed and, most importantly, it must appear on all the thumbnails so that these images stand out on the various utility pages - caption/keyword, delete, move, etc.

2) Create a way to quickly view all hidden photos, and only the hidden photos, in any gallery, category, or even site-wide. Perhaps this could be accomplished by automatically adding a keyword such as 'owner_hidden' to each image as it's flagged to be hidden, or by using the existing 'Hide Photo' flag and adding an option on the tools dropdown for the owner to view all hidden photos.

3) Lastly, it would be really helpful if there was a small check box visible while logged in with the option to 'Include/Hide Hidden Photos?' Unchecking/Checking the box would actually hide the hidden photos from all views and allow a site owner to work on gallery layout, as seen by a client, without logging out and back in, or flipping between multiple browsers. It can become very confusing when trying to arrange photos for a client if there are several hidden images mixed in with the normal images. I know the 'Visitor View' does roughly the same thing, but it's still much easier to work in a WYSIWYG environment.