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.

So I've created a category called "Just for Family," with sub-categories of years (2009, 2008, 2007). I've password protected every gallery within the category with the SAME password so they only have to enter a password one time. And say I want to create galleries like, "New job search" or "My trip to Las Vegas" without my employer or co-workers being able to even read the existence of such galleries (and see the feature thumbnail). It's OK that every visitor knows I have a locked category called "just for family" but I don't want them browsing the history of my life via gallery titles ... Sharegroups are not sufficient to solve my need, for several reasons.

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.

I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to be able to set gallery expiration dates within my settings. I only allow clients to view their gallery for X amount of days and then have to manually go in and change the password to something random that they won't know.

I would like the choice to have their gallery password work for a certain amount of days that I can designate and then when it expires default to a "Your gallery has expired, please contact for more information" kind of deal. Maybe even a "days left" counter when they have to log in to remind them when it will expire.

I don't want to just make the gallery unlisted because then their password would still work. It would just eliminate some calendar set up and reminders for me to personally go in and make the password changes.