Tim H Posted August 4, 2013 Share Posted August 4, 2013 For those of you using Smugmug (And I know I'm not the only one), the site has undergone a ground-up redesign. "Legacy sites" will remain unchanged until you press the "Unveil New Smugmug" button, after which there's no going back. I've pressed the button on mine, would like to know whar people think: http://kalyr.smugmug.com/ Note that my site isn't exclusively railway photos. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glorious NSE Posted August 5, 2013 Share Posted August 5, 2013 Interestingly the template you're using works better on the old IE8 at work than the one i've used Tim, the mouse-over images on mine I really like, but just don't work in IE8 (I just get black squares, no images!)... Personal preference - but square menu images don't lend themselves well to railway photo's (looks great on the concert ones though!) - on railway images the subject hangs partly off the side of the thumbnail all too often and distracts from the cleanliness of the look.The blog integration (colour/style) is something to work on maybe, I haven't played with the settings for colour on the galleries, but it looks exceedingly customisable.. Mine's here, and I'd also appreciate any feedback http://ukrailwaypics.smugmug.com/ Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold roundhouse Posted August 5, 2013 RMweb Gold Share Posted August 5, 2013 Martyn Had a quick look at your site using Google Chrome and it looks very good. Ian Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold The Stationmaster Posted August 5, 2013 RMweb Gold Share Posted August 5, 2013 Looks very nice on the Mac and far more user friendly than the new Flickr I reckon. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
eastwestdivide Posted August 5, 2013 Share Posted August 5, 2013 Looks fine visually, but from a usability point of view, neither of those two sites linked above have caption info on the photo thumbnails. That might be your choice, but for a subject like ours, a short caption is often very useful when looking at a whole series of similar thumbnails. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glorious NSE Posted August 5, 2013 Share Posted August 5, 2013 Looks fine visually, but from a usability point of view, neither of those two sites linked above have caption info on the photo thumbnails. That might be your choice, but for a subject like ours, a short caption is often very useful when looking at a whole series of similar thumbnails. I agree that's lacking - and is probably my biggest issue with the new software so far (although i'm sure not big in the greater scheme of things) - the previous version I had set to use the photo filename as a default caption if I hadn't entered anything* - at least that way some basic info (e.g. number, location, date) was visible, but this version doesn't seem to have an option to show the filename-vice-caption at a gallery level, although it will do it (and i've set it to) show up when you click on an image itself. Smugmug's team seem to have their work cut out dealing with support for the change so far (there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the change in some quarters, despite it being 'opt in' at the moment) but I will raise that as a request once things calm down a little. Where there is a caption on an image i've currently got it set one of two ways, i've used some of each, and i'm not sure which is better? Either it shows the caption underneath, or it appears on mouseover - the latter is cleaner looking, but maybe less helpful if you're trying to find something specific? What do folk think? (*And no, i'm not manually captioning every image on the site with a nice, descriptive, meaningful caption, it's 30k plus images... ) Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim H Posted August 5, 2013 Author Share Posted August 5, 2013 The reason I went for the square thumbnails is that many of my concert photos are in portrait rather than landscape format, and the site looks cleaner if all the thumbnails are the same shape and size. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glorious NSE Posted August 5, 2013 Share Posted August 5, 2013 Thought it might be that Tim. There is a way round it, as you can define what image goes on each specific folder (menu level) you should be able to 'cherry pick' an image that works cropped square for each folder? Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
eastwestdivide Posted August 5, 2013 Share Posted August 5, 2013 ... Where there is a caption on an image i've currently got it set one of two ways, i've used some of each, and i'm not sure which is better? Either it shows the caption underneath, or it appears on mouseover - the latter is cleaner looking, but maybe less helpful if you're trying to find something specific? What do folk think? ... Well if you're scanning for a word or number in a bunch of captions, the mouseover route is less helpful - I've seen someone liken it to having road signs that only light up once you're too close to the junction to change lanes. It's a problem for photo sites generally - you have to answer the question of what's more important, the "artistic" or the "factual/reference" content. Flickr clearly took the "artistic" route with their makeover, to the point where the captions disappear off the bottom of the screen even in single-photo mode. I've recently done google photo searches where I found something that looked about right, clicked through to the site, only to be presented with a massive page of thumbnails scrolling off the bottom of the screen, with no searchable words on the page that would let me get to the photo that google found. You end up manually scrolling down and searching by eye for the photo that google found, which may look similar to many others on that page. Rant over. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glorious NSE Posted August 27, 2013 Share Posted August 27, 2013 My default method of captioning is now working again... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steadfast Posted August 27, 2013 Share Posted August 27, 2013 I like the new layout on your site Martyn. The whole smugmug upgrade seems a lot better than the Flickr one, both in terms of ease of use and presentation of the pictures. I'm still playing with mine, working out how to do a few things, but its getting there. The not thing that seems worse than the old one so far is collecting photos for another collection, doing so manually is more time consuming than before. jo Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glorious NSE Posted August 28, 2013 Share Posted August 28, 2013 Thanks Jo, i'm really enjoying the change so far! Got to admit i've never used that 'collect' function, i've always done that kind of thing using keywords and smart galleries. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
markharris Posted December 8, 2013 Share Posted December 8, 2013 Its very nice. thanks. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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