Adobe advertises: "Your membership includes unlimited hosting and bandwidth so you can upload as many Pages as you'd like". But my experience is that making large websites with this service is really frustrating.
Galleries can only exist in the menu bar. If we have many galleries, the menu bar is soon very crowded. Instead we should be able to put galleries into each other, like folders.
When I add several LR albums at once, an error often occurs, and only some of them appear on the page. In the beginning I couldn’t find the remaining pages anywhere. But I couldn’t re-import them, because Portfolio said they were already imported. Finally I discovered them under the Manage Content toolbar > Integrations tab, where they are completely unavailable to move or delete. My solution has been to stop syncing the albums from LR and start syncing them again. This will cause that Portfolio doesn’t recognize the albums when I import them. But they get a new web address (ending with "-1"), because a (hidden) page already exists with that name. If I have to repeat this process, the pages are named "page-1-1", and so on. My Integrations tab is now filled up with hundreds of duplicate pages that is impossible to get access to or delete.
It is also impossible to batch delete many pages at once. If I delete a gallery, the containing pages are just moved to the main gallery. Portfolio is the slowest web service I have ever used, so deleting all pages one by one is a never ending job. Instead I have hidden my main gallery and just use it as a trash bin that will never be emptied.
All in all I think Portfolio is a real pain to use. But I feel forced to use it, because I pay for my LR subscription, and I don’t want to pay for another web service (but how I miss SmugMug!). I thought I could expect something better from an industry-leading computer software company like Adobe.
Galleries can only exist in the menu bar. If we have many galleries, the menu bar is soon very crowded. Instead we should be able to put galleries into each other, like folders.
When I add several LR albums at once, an error often occurs, and only some of them appear on the page. In the beginning I couldn’t find the remaining pages anywhere. But I couldn’t re-import them, because Portfolio said they were already imported. Finally I discovered them under the Manage Content toolbar > Integrations tab, where they are completely unavailable to move or delete. My solution has been to stop syncing the albums from LR and start syncing them again. This will cause that Portfolio doesn’t recognize the albums when I import them. But they get a new web address (ending with "-1"), because a (hidden) page already exists with that name. If I have to repeat this process, the pages are named "page-1-1", and so on. My Integrations tab is now filled up with hundreds of duplicate pages that is impossible to get access to or delete.
It is also impossible to batch delete many pages at once. If I delete a gallery, the containing pages are just moved to the main gallery. Portfolio is the slowest web service I have ever used, so deleting all pages one by one is a never ending job. Instead I have hidden my main gallery and just use it as a trash bin that will never be emptied.
All in all I think Portfolio is a real pain to use. But I feel forced to use it, because I pay for my LR subscription, and I don’t want to pay for another web service (but how I miss SmugMug!). I thought I could expect something better from an industry-leading computer software company like Adobe.
Posted 4 months ago
Alex Dixon, Company Admin
@evikne I've passed this feedback on to the Portfolio team, as a great deal of this feedback is for their product.
My team (Lightroom Web) also works on part of the Lightroom/Portfolio integration. It looks like there are some integration issues, and that we should start doing some integration testing with larger & more complex sites. I think we've been a little more focused on the simpler/smaller site workflow in our testing.
Also, thanks for taking the time to write this up. It is really helpful to hear a detailed picture when things aren't working (and in those cases, I find it's more helpful to get the whole story).
Thanks,
Alex
My team (Lightroom Web) also works on part of the Lightroom/Portfolio integration. It looks like there are some integration issues, and that we should start doing some integration testing with larger & more complex sites. I think we've been a little more focused on the simpler/smaller site workflow in our testing.
Also, thanks for taking the time to write this up. It is really helpful to hear a detailed picture when things aren't working (and in those cases, I find it's more helpful to get the whole story).
Thanks,
Alex
Thank you very much for reading this and taking my problems seriously!
I can repeat some of my challenges and ideas for more complex websites:
I can repeat some of my challenges and ideas for more complex websites:
- Nested collections for large archives. And nested galleries should also have the possibility for "More in this gallery", like an ordinary page.
- Bulk edit/delete galleries. What about making it possible to do some of this from the Connections area in LR CC? It would be much faster than doing it in the web editor.
- Title/description on galleries (like pages). Yes, I know I can make a Masthead. But this is unnecessarily cumbersome when I just want a simple heading and description.
- Automatic resizing of thumbnails. I downloaded some random thumbnails from my galleries, and they varied from about 600 KB to almost 1000 KB. This is way too much! A gallery containing only 20 pages can be almost 20 MB, and will load very slowly. And yes, I know I can replace with smaller custom made thumbnails (I’ve made a Photoshop action that resizes my thumbnails down to about 20-30 KB), but this shouldn’t be necessary, and very cumbersome if one have a large number of galleries and pages. I think this is something a web service should do automatically.
evikne
Franck Payen
But if I may, it's only monday morning in Europe, still night in the US, I don't think they monitor precisely on week-ends :)
And I would still suggest the smaller and precise feedback that would be interpreted as precise bug reports :)
Have a nice week.
evikne