bug fix release

Got some bug fixes. 🙂

  • We boo-booed, and some customers couldn’t create new album templates. Oops! Fixed.
  • Fixed a UI issue with the bulk album template tool
  • Fixed an HTML glitch with displaying communities
  • Fixed some permissions issues with inviting and joining communities
  • Fixed a terrible issue where applying an album template would sometimes cause your featured thumbnail selection to be unset. Oops!
  • Fixed issue with multiple hostnames on one domain name. It should now properly forward in rare corner-cases, too.

    • Hope those help. Sorry about that!

    Which pros make sales?

    I sometimes like to look through the checks we mail out at smugmug to see if I can figure out who is most successful at selling prints online.

    The key things seem to be (1) getting shots of people during a moment they never want to forget and (2) making it really easy for them to find their shots online.

    I take shots every year of Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance as a favor to a friend, who runs the show. It’s not something you’d want to shoot because it’s a non-profit and by contract you can’t make money from the prints. But having him direct people to the site makes all the difference, and it’s amazing how many people want big prints of them and their award-winning cars.

    We see a lot of event photographers who shoot horse shows and youth sports do well. Also, photographers who arrange sittings, do bridals, engagement, child portraiture, etc., do great.

    Much as we all love breathtaking landscapes, they seem to be the hardest to sell. There has to be some mechanism like shows to drive traffic to the site.

    What do you think?

    smugmug datacenter expansion

    We thought you might like to know what architecture improvements we’ve made in the last two weeks or so:

  • Aggregate bandwidth available increased nearly 500%. We went from 45Mbps (max) to 245Mbps (max) and will soon reach 300Mbps.
  • Web server capacity increased 50%.
  • Upload server capacity increased 50%.
  • Database server capacity increased 200%.

    • Got canvas print examples today!

    I submitted some examples to EZ Prints for canvas prints. So far, so good. Lots of detail in them. I have to do lots more testing to see how color, contrast, etc., compare to paper prints.

    EZ Prints offers two options: rolled and stretched on a wooden frame. I can’t believe how much more they are when mounted on a frame… Almost three times the price. My inclination is to offer both.

    It looks like our prices would be competitive with the likes of Shutterfly, whcc, etc. There are some discount photos-on-canvas places, but I dunno about quality…

    June 17th, new features!

    Been busy over here at the smugmug HQ! As always, there’s a dgrin thread about these changes.

    Here’s what’s new and changed:

  • Speed boost. You should see a noticeably snappier reaction when clicking around smugmug.
  • Can now delete album templates.
  • Can now batch apply album templates.
  • Can now preview the affects of album templates on your gallery settings page.
  • Community update includes “most popular” communities, searching for communities, browsing by name.
  • You can now delete communities you own.
  • ‘Featuring’ a community gallery now works on all gallery styles (only worked on Elegant before)
  • Cobranding should properly work on the community and user level now.
  • Pro pricing had a bug fix when increasing prices on items that didn’t have pricing already.
  • Images in a gallery with HideOwner enabled were refreshing slowly on Internet Explorer because IE sucks. Fixed.
  • Custom domains should now “auto-forward” multiple hostnames on the same domain to your custom hostname. If you use, for example, myphotos.mydomain.com, you can now point myphotos2.mydomain.com and mydomain.com to smugmug and they will redirect to myphotos.mydomain.com.
  • The organize galleries interface on your homepage has gotten a minor (but important!) facelift. Should be more obvious now.
  • Power & Pro accounts can now, using customization, get rid of “search fo all users” and related links on their search result pages.
  • Single-word wildcard searching works again. ‘band*’ will find ‘bandana’ for example.
  • The math for your referrals page was broken. Fixed, we hope. 🙂
  • Bugs related to the display of your renewal date fixed.
  • Accounts were prematurely getting locked for renewals if your card was expired. Should now be fixed.

    • Whew, lots more small bug fixes, I’m sure. I’ll post more if I think of them.

    Enjoy!