When Will SmugMug Offer Sub-Sub Categories

ADubin

I have a client who needs to have sub-sub within categories.
They are looking for this type of hierarchy.

Travel
....Country (USA)
......State/Province (Florida)
........City (Ft. Lauderdale)
...........Location (Downtown)
..............Date
Sports
....Soccer
.....Team Name
.......Date
Etc.
.........

My client is currently using Adobe Lightroom 2 and would like to have similar capabilities on SmugMug for category and subcategory hierarchy. Will this likely to happen in the future? Is so, when??

I guess all I can think about doing now is set-up a gallery page like a "Contact Us"page and just put links to sub-category pages.

Example-Travel Page
China
....Beijing
......Great Wall
......Various Dining Area
Hong Kong
......Market Area
USA
Florida
......Ft Lauderdale
......Downtown Area

Note - The underline indicate links.

If anybody has a better way of accomplishing what my client needs, I would appreciate your inputs.

Thanks,
Arnold

jfriend

From the forums here, it sounds like Smugmug is working on the sub-sub-categories issue. I haven't seen anything about when it will appear and Smugmug usually doesn't tell us when until they're ready to launch it.

In the meantime, here are some work-around ideas.

For your sports example (which I run into all the time), instead of this:

Sports
....Soccer
.....Team Name
.......Date

I do this:

Sports
...Team Name (like "Barracudas Soccer 2008")
.....Date

If the sub-categories in the Sports category are arranged with most recent first, then 95% of what people are looking for is near the top of the category so it's no problem to find, even if you end up with alot of team names over time.

If you really want the "Soccer" sub-category, then you could do this:

Sports
....Soccer
.....Team Name - date1
.....Team Name - date2
.....Team Name - date3

For your other example:

Travel
....Country (USA)
......State/Province (Florida)
........City (Ft. Lauderdale)
...........Location (Downtown)
..............Date

I guess we'd have to know more about how many countries you have, how many states you have, how many cities you have, how many locations you have and how many dates for each you have to know what to recommend.

In general, it is pretty annoying to a user to have to navigate through 6 pages of categories just to get to their desired gallery. I would advise your client that they really shouldn't have a category level unless there are more than 15-20 items in it. Categories are generally about making it easier to find things for the viewer and burying things in uncessarily deep hierarchies is usually not the way to make things easy to find, even if the client might feel like it's "nice and organized" that way.

Start by eliminating any category/sub-category (except the top level) that has less than 10-20 items in it. Use words in the name to distinguish it from others, but combine it with the other levels around it to collapse the hierarchy. Fewer clicks, easier for clients to find things, easier to maintain.

Andy

Stay tuned

jhelms

I kind of like the limitation of only having one layer of sub. I think it keeps my clients from getting too lost by drilling down so far.

They know they can quickly go to "Soccer" from "Sports" and then I have galleries named "2008 08 24 Wildcats vs Snowmen" under there.