Posted by Troy Hickok — 9 Mar 2012
New Stuff - WooHoo!
We've added a photo toolbar under your photos when you view your own photos. The new toolbar shows in the large thumbnail view when you're in your profile and under the photo on the photo detail page. All photo manipulation has been moved into this toolbar to make it easier to find.
You'll now find "edit" in this new toolbar with a sub-menu for setting the photo properties and, for JPG+ members, the basic and advanced editors. Delete has been moved to the toolbar as well so you no longer have to edit a photo to find delete.
JPG+ members can also access the download function from the toolbar as well as the new hide feature.
If you're wondering what the "+" is for... well, it doesn't do anything yet. But we got some more stuff in store. We'll be doing some cool new stuff on this bar (and beyond) that you'll want to keep your eye on in the coming weeks. We can't tell you all about it yet or, well, we'd have to... you know...dispatch you to a frozen tundra somewhere north of Minsk.
New stuff part deux... Double WooHoo!
JPG+ members have a new feature that allows you to hide photos from view, essentially making a photo private until you decide to unhide it making it visible to others again. This feature is available in the new photo toolbar (see the above), look for the hide/unhide icon (like so):
When a photo is hidden, it will show up under your "Hidden" tab when you view your own profile page. Other users do not see this tab. Hidden photos are removed from all other views. This includes your profile, the photos page, all themes, challenges and contests, etc. (so make sure that you don't hide an image that is entered in a theme, challenge or contest that you want to remain in that theme, challenge or contest). Also you will be the only one able to view the photo detail page by clicking through on one of your hidden photos in the hidden tab.
This feature allows you to remove photos from view that you don't want shown but you don't want to delete either. While the image is hidden, all information about votes, views, likes, etc. is kept intact, so... should you decide to unhide the photo again it will be restored to view with the same counts as it had prior to being hidden.
Now... "why", might you ask, would one want to hide their photo? Well, maybe you want to upload some images to JPG for safekeeping (but you don't want them viewed, commented, liked, etc.). Maybe you want those images accessible to you while you're traveling out of the country so you can show your rich uncle Steve, who you're hoping will sponsor your 'round the world photo documentary project on the fruit fly. There's lots of reasons why a person would/could/should use it... some we're sure we've not even thought of yet, so as you think of those reasons...make sure you USE IT!
Enjoy~!
Posted by Troy Hickok — 3 Feb 2012
Hi all,
Well that was an ugly one, but the issue with no hot photos showing up for new challenges has been fixed. Long story short, some undocumented compatibility problems with the new version of our database software.
We have also recalculated the hot photos for any challenges/themes since the issue first occurred. So all challenges since "Red" have been updated now with the list of hot photos.
Posted by Justin Case — 10 Jan 2012
As you may have noted, over the Christmas/New-Year holiday week, we made a big move and upgrade on our servers and systems. Along with this change, we launched a few new features around the site.
As is often the case, with big change, comes a few headaches. Our weekly email newsletter and blog digest have been suspended while we build a new and more scalable and stable system for those email distributions. Additionally, mobile email uploads have been 'broken' while we enhance some elements there that were affected by our upgrade. Several users have also pointed out a few other elements that didn't fare so well in the upgrade.
In addition to a few broken items mentioned above that needed our TLC, we're re-working some of our photo storage and organization so that we can unveil a few things in the new year...
Which brings us to our "New Year's Resolutions"!
As we've evaluated JPG and its direction after we made the difficult decision to discontinue the print magazine, we have spent considerable time and attention focused on the community and what we can do to improve the interactions, tools, utility and overall look/feel and continue to make JPG the best place for our community to share, discover, discuss and more.
So... what does all this mean?
Well, after a few of the remaining bugs are worked out, we're going to be completing some of the elements of our upgrade that will allow us to do more (lots more). We're adding core functionality that will allow you to better organize and manage your images, take advantage more easily of themes, challenges and contests and more easily interact with users and great images around the site. You'll be able to feature your images, have the opportunity to earn revenue and more.
At the same time, we'll be simplifying a lot. Navigation and options will be streamlined and .... (drumroll...) we'll be introducing a new and enhanced interface that will truly celebrate your amazing work.
As you can imagine, we've got lots to do... There will be some noise and some dust. There may be some banging and screaming. Despite all that, we're excited to share our new plans for JPG with you and hope you'll love all the great stuff we're working on!
Happy New Year!
Posted by Justin Case — 25 Dec 2011
Welp we have new and improved (upgraded) speed-enhancing, service-improving technical stuffity (basically, like adding more hamsters under the hood) as a holiday gift. Most things should be working correctly but as always there were a few glitches (grumble, grumble) that cause some serious lack of sleep.
We'll have to iron out these issues over the coming days. Currently there is an issue with the photo editor, its refusing to load the original photo. The other issue is the email upload if you use that for mobile photo uploads. The photos are currently not getting uploaded.
Now for the new feature... you'll notice a new box on the the photo page with all the photos counts along with new like/dislike buttons. This is the first cut at this feature so give us some feedback on it.
A few things to note. You can optionally give a prop when you like a photo which gets entered into the comments. If you want to dislike a photo we are currently requiring you to leave a comment in an effort to prevent drive-by dislikes. The comments left show up as regular comments and you can of course remove them or block the commenter if necessary.
Lastly if you want to reverse your like or dislike back to neutral, just click the button again to remove the like or dislike.
Happy holidays & Enjoy!
Posted by Troy Hickok — 21 Dec 2011
Update:
We are moving this maintenance window one day to Saturday Dec 24 at 11pm PST.
Original Post:
We will be conducting site-wide maintenance Friday December 23 beginning at 11pm PST. We expect the maintenance to last until approximately 5am Saturday December 24. During this time the site will be unavailable. We will update this post when the maintenance is complete or if the schedule changes.
Posted by Troy Hickok — 19 Dec 2011
We are currently experiencing a problem with our storage and CDN provider where files are intermittently not being saved and pushed out to CDN. This is causing broken thumbnail images on many of the photos pages.
We have reported the issue to our provider and they are working to correct the problem. Once it has been corrected we will regenerate the thumbnail images.
Thank you for your patience while we resolve this issue.
Update: Dec 19, 2011 16:00 PST
The problem with our storage provider has been resolved and we believe all thumbnail images have been regenerated. If there are any photos you uploaded today that are still missing thumbnail images please let us know.
Posted by Troy Hickok — 19 Nov 2011
Gotta love it. Upgrading to the latest and greatest version of JQuery totally busted the theme entry checkboxes on the edit photo page so you couldn't select any themes to enter. We've just pushed an update that should have that all fixed up so you can now enter themes again from the edit photo page.
Oh and while we were at it, we added the 3 voteable themes back to the top of the theme list on the photo edit page as well. So all is right with the world of theme entry from the edit page again.
Posted by Troy Hickok — 4 Nov 2011
***Update: We've been informed the maintenance completed earlier than expected. Photo uploads have been reenabled.
We have been notified that our storage provider will be performing maintenance on the systems we use for photo storage tonight. The maintenance is scheduled for Nov 4, 11pm EST through Nov 5, 7am EST. Durning this time uploads of photos to JPG will be disabled and if you are JPG+ member you will not be able to download your originals.
Posted by Troy Hickok — 2 Nov 2011
If you are a JPG+ member and were having problems getting the basic and advanced photo editors to load some of your images for editing, fear not we've found the issue and it should be working consistently again.
Also fixed is a problem were the photo may appear squashed or stretched after saving the image. This was occurring only if you did an operation in the editor that changed the dimensions of the image, such as rotate or crop. The actual dimensions of the image were then out of sync with the dimensions we used when displaying the image on the site.
Note that if your large image on the site still looks stretched after saving, that is caused by the original image still being cached in our CDN (Content Delivery Network) and it will fix itself once the new image has made its way out to all the servers in the network. Just be patient and check it again, it can take up to an hour for the image to get updated on all the servers.
We've also fixed an issue with the NSFW filter where some images that were flagged as NSFW were not being filtered correctly in the contest entry block in the right sidebar on photo pages. All photos flagged as NSFW should now show as filtered there if you have enabled your filter.
Posted by Justin Case — 5 Oct 2011
Are you a user-design rock-star? Do you know someone with unbelievable user-interface chops and the ability to code/develop? Do you know a great developer that lives and breathes user-experience? Do they LOVE photography and photographers? If so, send them our way!
We're working away on lots of cool stuff for the site and our awesome community and we're looking for help to bring some of these great new features to you even faster!
Specifically, we're looking for someone with amazing skills in:
- Javascript + jquery
- CSS 3
- HTML 5
- Php
The perfect person or team will be able to design AND develop AND deploy.
If you are this person (or team) or if you know this person (or team), use this email: support@jpgmag.com!
What are you waiting for?!?!?!
View All Entries »
