A couple of weeks ago I shared a post showing the early stages of our star rating & filter implementation.

This is a follow up post, showing the current and final implementation – at least for the upcoming picu Pro release.

I think we made some great improvements:

• As you can see, we removed the need to click to reveal the stars. They are constantly visible, if set.
• Internal testing showed, that users can much easier discern the number of stars, if shown the actual stars instead of a number next to a single star.
• A big change was moving the filter and grid size UI from the bottom status bar to the top. While I really loved the old filter implementation, this change will allow us to add more filters in the future and – at the same time – make some room at the bottom for other, upcoming UI challenges.
• Star and selected/unselected filters can also be combined, which will allow for a much more fine grained selection process.

Stars can also be changed in the lightbox view:

Besides clicking on the star rating you can also use your keyboard by typing a number between 1 and 5 to change the star rating.

Star rating & filter will be a Pro feature and we are very excited for this update!

Not an email you want to get on a Saturday:

Turns out, when we refactored our settings, we changed the “Show picu love” setting to “on” by default. The WordPress.org guidelines however state, that “Plugins may not embed external links or credits on the public site without explicitly asking the user’s permission“.

Fortunately – thanks to how picu settings work – it was a very quick and easy fix:

Until now filtering images in a collection was only possible between “selected” or “unselected”.

I wanted to make this more flexible and landed on star rating/filtering.

Star ratings are pretty common and universally understood, although the usual use case is rating products or movies. Still, the concept remains the same: More stars mean “better”. Also, photo management software like Adobe Lightroom have supported star ratings basically forever.

This will make the selection process much more flexible, especially when dealing with lots of images. For example, it will allow making multiple selection rounds, assigning one star in the first round, two in the next, etc., ending up with a final selection which can then actually be selected – and sent to the photographer.

Below you can see a video of the current implementation of star ratings for individual images and the filter:

Please note, that this is still in early stages, so the implementation will probably change for the final release.

With picu 2.3.0 and picu Pro 1.4.0 collections do no longer close automatically. Before collections would close once the last client approved their selection. With the introduction of client (self) registration, this no longer made sense.

We still wanted to make it easy for the photographer to close the collection once everyone is done.

So we added a new “Close Collection” button to the notification email, that the photographer gets, when a client approved a collection.

This button will only be added once the last client has approved their selection.

And this is what it looks like:

The button will be part of the picu Pro 1.4.8 release.

picu collections are never meant to be public, that is why we remove them from XML sitemaps, have robots meta directives set to noindex, etc..

(Short excursion: For various reasons we cannot set our collection post type to ‘public' => false, because they are public, as in they need to be displayed in the front end – just not for everyone.)

We try to support the most common SEO plugins. And by support I mean, make sure that users do not accidentally add their collections to search engines.

We implemented this for the Yoast SEO plugin a long time ago, but until now our custom post type still showed up in the Yoast settings. The settings for picu collections didn’t do anything, but they were still visible, which made it confusing for our users. (I even created an issue on GitHub years ago.)

We recently found this new filter wpseo_indexable_excluded_post_types, which not only allows us to excludes picu collection from being indexed by Yoast, it finally also did the trick of removing collection from the Yoast settings. 🥳

This is the code we used:

/**
 * Exclude collections from Yoast SEO indexable creation.
 *
 * @since 2.3.6
 *
 * @see https://developer.yoast.com/features/indexables/indexables-filters/#post_types
 *
 * @param array $excluded Array of excluded post types by name.
 * @return array The filtered post types.
 */
function picu_do_not_create_indexables_for_collections( $excluded ) {
	$excluded[] = 'picu_collection';
	return $excluded;
}

add_filter( 'wpseo_indexable_excluded_post_types', 'picu_do_not_create_indexables_for_collections' );

With picu Pro you can add markers and comments to individual images.

We now also display the date, of when the comment was made.

This is what it looks like in the frontend:

Backend:

This is only the very first step to enable a more interactive workflow. The goal is to allow a back and forth of messages, discussing individual images between client and photographer – and finally between several different clients as well.

I worked on improving a particular function on the collection edit screen: Adding a client to an open collection.

This is what the previous modal looked like:

This is the new version:

I updated this dialog with the following features:

• Adding a name field. (Which is already possible for clients themselves in the front end, so this establishes feature parity)
• Making the sending of the email optional. (As some clients prefer to send collection links through other channels, it makes sense to make this optional here as well.)

I also made the checkbox somewhat dynamic, by only allowing it to be checked, if the email field is not empty:

(Could be improved by checking if the input is actually a valid email address.)

Yesterday we sent out a newsletter asking for feedback from our users about e-commerce integration into picu.

Selling images directly through picu, as part of the proofing workflow, has been one of the most requested features and we feel like it is finally time to get to work on it.

But we want to make educated decisions on which features make the most sense for the majority of our users – hence, the survey.

So if you are a picu user and have a specific workflow in mind, please fill out the survey, and let us know! Cheers!

PS: Quick note, because it came up in some of the survey replies already: The existing, easy-to-use proofing workflow will always be the core of picu. E-commerce will extend the workflow for photographers who need/want it. If proofing is everything you need, skip right along.

With our last release we added a registration form, so that clients could identify themselves before making a selection. This enables the photographer to share the same link with multiple clients – or even allow the client to share the link with colleagues, etc.

We also added a setting whether entering an email address was required during registration. Unfortunately the setting and the registration form were somewhat confusing.

Many users thought that this option would turn the registration feature on or off. What made this additionally confusing was the fact, that the registration form did not reflect the setting.

The previous setting:

The previous registration form:

I updated the setting to

• make it clear, that it only controls, whether an email address is required during registration
• I added a note, explaining that a confirmation email is always sent if an email address is entered – whether the field is required or not.

The updated setting:

This might not be final, but I think it is already much clearer than the previous version.

The updated registration form (email not required):

I made it clear, that the email field was optional and updated the intro paragraph to not explicitly mention the email anymore.

Welcome to the picu Dev Log.