BarB’s BloG

In November, an LA Times reporter interviewed SmugMug folks for an article in the newspaper … fast forward to December 24th, Christmas Eve day, front page, column one

Click here for full article.

You have got to see this to believe it!  SmugMug just got a whole lot more beautiful on everything from an iPhone up to dual 30″ monitors.  

Several years ago, I made quite a few abstract computer desktop wallpapers. I thought, hey, why not resize them for the iPhone! So, I have, and here they are, free to download if you would like. The aspect ratio will be off a tad on some of them due to resizing; but, hey, they are abstracts, so does it really matter?!

This is so slick! I absolutely am in love with my iPhone, and now I can view my SmugMug photos on it, too, thanks to our SmugSorcerers.

http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/07/13/smugmug-on-our-iphones/

Portrait:

And Landscape - w00t!

The new year could not have been brought in with a bigger bang! Boise State University played Oklahoma State in the 2007 Tostitos Fiesta Bowl in Glendale, Arizona, on January 1, 2007. If you missed this game, shame on you! What you missed was one of the greatest college football games in the history of the sport. We have finally earned some respect. I’m still reeling from the excitement as is the entire community of Boise and the state of Idaho. What a game, what a game! As a BSU football season ticket holder, all I can say is, I can hardly wait for next football season!!

Congratulations Broncos!!!

Broncos on the Blue!

New features - August 31, 2006

Ok, ok, so we’ve had two releases since I last posted. I’m a slacker - I admit it. Please forgive me.

Of course, that makes it look like we have a huge release today, when really, it’s like 3 releases rolled into one. Here we go:

• 14-day free trials instead of 7!
• No credit card required to try SmugMug - friction free signup!
• Can freely upgrade and downgrade between account levels during trial so you can experience them all.
• Streamline signup process - takes you right to creating your first gallery instead of making you read a welcome page full of stuff no-one wanted to read.
• Streamline creating gallery process - take you right to adding photos after creating a gallery, rather than dumping you on a new empty gallery.
• Theme preview on gallery creation!
• Upgraded the Universal Drag & Drop uploader to show both a per-photo and a per-batch status bar.
• New Pro Pricing tool. Much faster, AJAX’d, new gradient design. Quickly price groups of products, including highlighting the ones you’ll be changing.
• Bulk Pro Pricing - price all your galleries at once.
• Tweaked the PhotoRank algorithm to be more fair.
• Added ‘quick pricing’ when creating a gallery for Pros.
• Added ‘create category’ when creating a gallery.
• Added ‘create subcategory’ when creating a gallery.
• Added YUI includes on all pages, rather than just some, for all of our hackers to really play with.
• Show filenames in cart and pro order summaries.
• Added the ability for customers to reset their Print Order password.
• Made the upload log show only last 24 hours by default, with options to expand to recent week or month.
• Fixed watermark fade previewer.
• Updated the cart and catalogs to be more clear about which print sizes belong to with categories. Got rid of ‘xD’ on print size names - no-one knew what they were anyway.
• Cancelling out of customize gallery and bulk settings now puts you back in the right place every time.
• Setting your preferences to ‘Original’ no longer destroys Filmstrip style.
• Made PhotoRank votes on tiny images get discarded so Popular Photos doesn’t fill up with junk.
• Fixed sending Pro Sales emails to non-Pro users. Ooops.
• Pro sales emails didn’t have proper totals. Oops.
• Use the customer’s first & last names, instead of ‘A customer ordered’ in Pro sales emails.
• Allowed setting a $0 download price (to disable it).
• Couldn’t add to the shopping cart when only digital downloads were available (no prints).
• Render tiny PNG transparent watermarks on-the-fly so they look better when doing custom watermarks.
• Copying Pro pricing from one gallery to another didn’t work for digital download prices.
• Fixed a browsing bug in SmugMug style on popular, dates, and keywords.
• Replaced missing “map this” button on some pages.
• Fixed bogus error message when attempting to upgrade from Pro.
• Deleting a single photo somehow got broken. Fixed.
• Fixed small bugs in Old Family Album, Longest Yard, Christmas, Sand, and Bon Voyage themes.
• Fixed returning from customizing your geography.
• Fixed a bug where orders with prints from multiple Pros and Proof-Delay could result in one Pro shipping the order before the other Pro was done.

New features - July 28, 2006

Pros - if you’ve got a defibrillator, you might want to get it. At the very least, sit down and relax before continuing with our list of new features:

Custom Watermarks. You can now create as many custom watermarks as you’d like and apply them to whatever photos you’d like. The feature includes some advanced options:

Position. Choose where you’d like your watermark to appear: Center, Top Left, Top, Top Right, Right, Bottom Right, Bottom, Bottom Left, Left, or Tiled.

Fade. Choose how much transparency and blending we use on your watermark.

Thumbs. Choose whether the thumbnails are also watermarked, or just the larger images.

Any image. Any SmugMug image, whether it’s a JPEG from your camera, or a PNG from Photoshop, can be used as your watermark. We recommend PNGs with alpha transparency for the most professional look, and have a tutorial on how to make them, but you can use anything you’d like.

Digital downloads. You can now price digital downloads and let your customers buy them. You currently have 3 sizes and 2 licenses to choose from, for a total of 6 options. The sizes include ‘Low-Res (1Mpix)’, ‘Hi-Res (4Mpix)’, and ‘Original’. The licenses include ‘Personal use’ and ‘Commercial use’. You can have all 6 options available at different prices, if you’d like, so your customers can choose the size & use that fits their need best. Note that Digital Downloads are ‘instant gratification’ and do not work with ‘Proof delayed shipping’, another new feature.

Backprinting. We’ll send your photos to be printed with up to 40 characters of text on the back. What’s more, the backprinting is dynamic so you can include the date the photo was taken, the photo’s caption, your name, your domain name, or any one of a dozen other variables. You can set your Backprinting options on a per-gallery basis or for your entire site. (Gallery settings override site settings, just like everything else at SmugMug).

Proof delayed shipping. You can now, with a gallery setting, choose whether printing and processing should be delayed for a few business days. Using this feature, you can upload low-resolution non-adjusted proofs and replace them with full-resolution adjusted final photos after a customer places an order. The order will automatically ship after that # of days, regardless of whether you’ve made any changes, but if you’re done with your changes you have the option of sending it off for printing immediately with a single click.

Pro order notification emails. Every time a customer of yours places an order, you’ll immediately receive notification of what they ordered and how to contact them in case of an error.

Clearer shopping cart wording. We make it clear that the customer is buying YOUR photos and that you’ve partnered with SmugMug to ensure they get the best service and quality possible.

Pro contact email. You can now set a separate email address in your Control Panel to allow your customers to contact you. This email will be included in their order email & receipt so they can ask you any questions they may have about your order.

Enhanced our resize-on-demand feature to respect the file extension. For example, if you upload a PNG, you can now get any custom pixel resolution you want, and also choose whether you want a JPEG or a PNG based on the extension in the URL. (We used to always provide a JPG).

Polished our thanks page for gift accounts.

Fixed bug on bulk watermarking tool where your photo wasn’t automatically selected.

Fixed bug on bulk watermarking tool where you could submit a batch of watermarks with no contents.

Fixed a bug on the new user welcome page regarding Themes.

Fixed and rewrote lots of helpies.

Added and updated lots of help sections.