New User moving years of photos to SmugMug, any suggestions?

Thronsen

Hi-

Im a new user of SmugMug, and I was looking to upload a year or 2 of my photos. I was curious if any experienced users had some suggestions or thoughts on how best to do it, both upload and organizational tips.

My pictures are currently organized on my comptuer in folders by date, and my first thought was just to start a gallery per date/folder. But that could be a few hundred galleries, which might be cumbersome. I dont mind taking the time if thats what it takes, but if there are better ways Im open to them as well.

Also, if you do have 100+ galleries, is there an easy way to change something across all of them (for example, the password).

Finally, I have been looking for a way to have the same photo in multiple galleries without multiple uploads and storage. Is that possible? To upload the photo once, then assign it to both Gallery A and Gallery B?

Sorry, Im completely new to this. The site looks great, and would love any thoughts or suggestions on how I can get the most out of it.

Thanks for any help.

jfriend

How to organize depends a lot on who the target viewer is. If you're just uploading as an archive/backup, then by date probably makes sense.

If you're uploading for family members to browse, then you probably want to create a gallery per event and figure out if there's some sort of categorization of the galleries that makes it so each category has 5-30 galleries in it with some growing room for the ones that will continue to get more galleries. Some do vacations, sports, family and then just put galleries in each of those categories. Some make the top level be year (I think that only really works when you have 4-5 years worth of stuff).

I would try to avoid using sub-categories unless you absolutely have to have them. Many first time users feel like they are making their site "more organized" if they use categories, sub-categories and galleries (long before they really need them), but they would actually have an easier to navigate site if they made it wide and shallow rather than narrow and deep. For the sake of your viewers, try to think about making it so there are the fewest clicks possible to look for and find what the viewer wants.

Gallery categorization can be changed at any time (you just assign a different category/sub-category to a gallery) so you also aren't making a permanent decision with whatever you start out with. It can be changed later as your needs change or as the viewer changes or as the volume of galleries change. Most people should use something really simple when they start and only add more structure to it as the number of galleries goes up.

I use StarExplorer (a third party uploader) because it's easy to do unattended uploads across a whole bunch of galleries and it's very reliable. If there's ever any issue with an image getting uploaded, that image just stays in your upload queue waiting for you to try it again. It's also the easiest way I've ever seen to create a whole bunch of galleries all with the same settings. You literally just pick the settings you want, then type all the names into one edit box and hit go. In a minute or so, it creates as many galleries as names you typed. When I'm uploading for a big sports season, I sometimes have 600-800 images that need to go into 30 different galleries. I drag/drop the images into the right gallery in StarExplorer and then just say go and it does the entire upload overnight.

Smugmug does not currently have real virtual galleries that let you have the same image in multiple galleries. It is apparently being worked on so it will probably happen at some pont. For now you basically have to upload multiple copies. There are some people who successfully simulate virtual galleries using keywords, but there are lots of limitations to that (no sorting, doesn't work with passworded galleries, doesn't work automatically with all types of keywords, the gallery UI looks kind of techy, etc...).

The best tool I know of for changing the properties of lots of galleries is SmugBrowser (it's a Firefox add-in). It operates on a single gallery, a whole sub-category of galleries or a whole category of galleries (including any sub-categories). It can't set every option (like it can't bulk change categories on galleries), but it can set a lot of the options.

Thronsen

Hi Jfriend-

Thanks alot for your very detailed, helpful reply. I really appreciated it.

I decided to go ahead and upload by month, rather then day. Its definitely a bit messier when you get into the gallery, but it does keep the number of galleries down.

As you suggested, I downloaded Star Explorer. Its working very well, uploading a wide range of galleries at a time. Very useful to unattended uploads.

Thanks again for helping me out.

HaraldE

Morning,

Not sure if this can help Thronsen but I feel I was in a similar situation some years ago.

Smugmug is now main storage for my Archive. I am gradually moving all photos (and some text and film) up to SM. The structure I am using is YEAR > PLACE > EVENT. I wish I could have one or two more levels but this is a good start.

Also agree that STAREXPLORER is very useful ... couldn't live without it. My basic workflow is as follows:
> Organise all photos on the PC using Idimager
> Create new SM struture as required using SE
> Uploading to SM using SE
> And on SM I do some final adjustments of each gallery
>> Customise using Quick Setting
>> Nominate a photo as the "Feature Photo"
>> Add a short gallery description

Then I tell friends and relatives about the new galleries. As of today I have uploaded more than 650 Galleries this way. My way of working will change if/when we get Virtual Galleries.

The above is an overview ... get back to me if you want any details. And you can see my setup on HaraldE.Smugmug.com


Regards, Harald

catspaw

hello and welcome!

I had much the same issue as you do and I uploaded (and still have older files to go through, ugh) by month. these are all private galleries and as I have time, I go through and pull out the better ones and move them into public galleries as appropriate. It'll definitely be something that'll take me a year or so (unless I suddenly have no full time work ) to complete in my "free" time.

nickjo

Other....gallery.
I used the gallery 2 smugmug conversion and ran into the same issue. We have 1800 albums in the "other" Category. Has there any any new relevations on this? Or should we just use smugbrowser and do each album one by one? I'm hoping there is a bulk tool to move .

Thanks.

-Nick