faking sub-galleries

joelg

Hi dgrinners,

First, I have spent a long time searching through these forums and reading
threads, and I'm very impressed with the level of support and effort put out by everyone!

My issue: I need a sub-gallery, or at least functionality that approximates it. I know SM does not (directly) support sub-galleries, and I've read through some of the tricks people have done to approximate them. Categories and sub-categories won't do what I want, as far as I can figure.

The site I'm trying to create is fairly simple. I want my homepage to show galleries, because most of my photo sets are just a single folder of photos. However, every once in a while I'll have a photo set that I want to sub-divide further (like a recent trip to Turkey where I have 10 separate directories of photos corresponding to each of the 10 days).

So most links on my homepage would link straight to a gallery (i.e., one click from the homepage and the visitor is looking at the gallery view). For the sub-divided directories, the link on the homepage would go to a "sub-gallery" page, one with links to the various galleries.

I threw together a quick sample site to show you what I'm trying to do: http://www.largest.org/sm/

To solve this, I was playing around with ideas on this page http://allen-steve.smugmug.com/gallery/3539056
but for some reason, when I edit the gallery description and insert my HTML, the images don't show up. Not sure if this is the recommended direction to solve the problem.

Thanks for any help you can provide!

Joel

PBolchover

Assuming that you are a Power User, then one way to do this is to use a custom html galleries as an entry point, pointing the user to other galleries in a hidden sub-category. (You can also use an old-style journal or traditional gallery as your index page.)

You then need to use various javscript and css hacks to clean up the breadcrumb etc.

See http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=57994 for one way that I did it. (Note that this is an unsupported hack - it is up to you to figure out the details. Also, the way I described in that page isn't 100% the way that I implement it now.)
http://pbolchover.smugmug.com/2007/San-Diego-San-Francisco/2413328_MRXrW
gives my initial attempt at such a page
while
http://pbolchover.smugmug.com/2008/Yellowstone-National-Park/6792095_m3QQR
and
http://pbolchover.smugmug.com/2009/France-July-2009/9206526_bGXtA
include added functionality. (If I were to redo these pages now, I would use Virtual Galleries instead of the keyword results pages for some of the sub-galleries...)

denisegoldberg

The examples you gave can be done with subcategories.

There are examples on my site in the Travel category.
Travel = category.
Recent trip to Hawaii - Pele's Wonders = subcategory.
There are 4 galleries within that subcategory.

--- Denise

PBolchover

The trouble is that sub-categories are sorted separately from galleries. If the two could form a combined list (mixing them up in an arbitrary order), then that would be a good solution for me...

denisegoldberg

PBolchover wrote:

The trouble is that sub-categories are sorted separately from galleries. If the two could form a combined list (mixing them up in an arbitrary order), then that would be a good solution for me...

True.

I've built my own replacement category and subcategory pages so I don't have that problem...

--- Denise

joelg

PBolchover wrote:

The trouble is that sub-categories are sorted separately from galleries. If the two could form a combined list (mixing them up in an arbitrary order), then that would be a good solution for me...

Yes! This is the direction I went at first, and it seemed like a perfect solution for me, until I saw that sub-categories are sorted separately from galleries. Being able to combine them in any order would solve my problem.

Maybe we'll see this functionality in the future? (crossing fingers)

Thanks for the tips. I'll go play around with the other ideas you mention. Denise, did you build your own category and sub-category pages using similar tricks to the ones mentioned?

-J

jfriend

PBolchover wrote:

The trouble is that sub-categories are sorted separately from galleries. If the two could form a combined list (mixing them up in an arbitrary order), then that would be a good solution for me...

Within a category, gallery thumbs and sub-category thumbs can be combined with the script in customization #6. The script doesn't currently offer the ability to specify an arbitrary order though.

denisegoldberg

joelg wrote:

Denise, did you build your own category and sub-category pages using similar tricks to the ones mentioned?

Unfortunately, no. My replacement category/subcategory pages are html-only pages. That means whenever I add a gallery I also need to add entries on my html-only pages. I knew the overhead when I did it, and it was worth it to me. I was trying to solve two problems - the size of the thumbs, since I believe both 100x100 and 150x150 are both too small, and the grouping/order of galleries and subcategories.

--- Denise

mbrady

PBolchover wrote:

The trouble is that sub-categories are sorted separately from galleries. If the two could form a combined list (mixing them up in an arbitrary order), then that would be a good solution for me...

I would like this feature as well.