Need ideas for how to present new type of gallery

jfriend

I've got a photo display challenge that I haven't figure out how to do well on Smugmug so I thought I'd ask for ideas. I was taking pictures of a rowing regatta and, after sorting through all the images, I end up with 4-5 keeper images from each race with a total of about 50-60 images. I could dump them all in one gallery, but the viewers would rather go quickly to their particular races so they can see their images. With just 4-5 images per race, it seems kind of silly to make a gallery for each race.

What I'd really like is some sort of way to group and label every 4-5 images with the ability to give each group it's own title and description (Men's Novice 8, Men's Novice Quad, Men's Varsity Single, Men's Varsity Double, etc...), but still have them all in one overall gallery. That would make it both easy to browse and easy to find the specific races a viewer wants. But, I have no idea how to do anything like this in Smugmug without doing it all with custom HTML which is much too much of a pain for 50-60 images and something I will repeat many weeks through the season.

I've had a need for something like this in several other circumstances too (often with family vacation photos), but never been able to do anything like it in Smugmug. One way of thinking of it is kind of a cross between a photo blog and a photo gallery, or a gallery with groups of photos and annotations describing each group. Maybe it could be called a "grouped gallery". On a vacation, each group might be a day or a location on the trip. When you only have a handful of photos for each group, you don't want to make a gallery for each one, but you also don't want to just dump them all into one gallery either with no layout or organization to them.

Anyone have any ideas how to do anything like this on Smugmug? Anyone else had any interest in something like this?

denisegoldberg

Just thinking out loud...
I suspect that you've already thought about this, but I'll jump in anyway.

Working with the current smug structure, what if you put all of the photos in a single gallery, applying a specific keyword to each photo based on the race category? Then create a second HTML-only gallery linking to the keyword "galleries". The HTML-only gallery could have a title, description, and link to the specific keyword "gallery".

--- Denise

jasonscottphoto

Not sure if this would work for you or not, but check out how I have linked to the keywords in the description of this wedding album.

http://www.jasonscottphoto.com/Wedding-Photos/2008/Pilar-and-Mike/6865476_6a4hV

jfriend

The point is that I don't want separate galleries for each race. I could use virtual galleries to make that today, but I'm trying for something different because I don't want a whole bunch of galleries each with 4-6 images in them. I know I could do that either with keyword galleries or virtual galleries, but that isn't the goal here.

I want them all in one gallery, but with labels for each group of images. Here's a general idea in text form. This makes it super easy to find the right race, then browse the images for it. There's no drilling into sub-categories and then thumbs. It's all in one place, yet highly organized. I'm still wondering how to do this without a ton of manually created HTML.

Men's Varsity Eight

thumb 1     thumb 2      thumb 3     thumb 4


Men's Varsity Quad

thumb 1     thumb 2      thumb 3     thumb 4     thumb 5     thumb 6


Men's Novice Eight

thumb 1     thumb 2      thumb 3     thumb 4     thumb 5     thumb 6

....

jasonscottphoto

I get what you're saying - but mine ARE all in one gallery... I don't know how you would do what you suggest within SmugMug's framework...

You could use an "Event" but again, that is a lot of galleries (the exact reason I don't want to use Events...)

PBolchover

Is there a way to query the API (or RSS feed) via javscript, to get all the image IDs for a particular keyword (or keyword combination)?

If so, then you automate it as follows:


You put all of the photos from the event into a single gallery, and add suitable keywords to the photos from each of the races.

You then use javascript or css to hide all of the photos from view. (My understanding is that you would still be able to use the "lightbox" links to trigger a large copy of the photos to appear.)


In your customisation, you will need to have a "page source" table for each gallery. This would be a list of "Subtitle" "keyword" combinations for that particular gallery. For example "Men's Novice 8", "firstregattamennoviceeight", etc.

You then need to write javascript to insert the custom html at the end of the gallery description. You first need to insert the subtitle text. Then you need to query the API (or RSS feed) for the keyword, and obtain a list of the photos with that keyword. You can use this to construct the html for the thumbnail with a link to the lighbox URL for that photos. Do this for all of the photos with that keyword, and then loop over all of the subtitles within the gallery's "page source" table.


It's rather involved, but it's the only way I can think of that doesn't involve you manually maintaining a list of which image IDs correspond to which subtitles.

jfriend

PBolchover wrote:

Is there a way to query the API (or RSS feed) via javscript, to get all the image IDs for a particular keyword (or keyword combination)?

If so, then you automate it as follows:


You put all of the photos from the event into a single gallery, and add suitable keywords to the photos from each of the races.

You then use javascript or css to hide all of the photos from view. (My understanding is that you would still be able to use the "lightbox" links to trigger a large copy of the photos to appear.)


In your customisation, you will need to have a "page source" table for each gallery. This would be a list of "Subtitle" "keyword" combinations for that particular gallery. For example "Men's Novice 8", "firstregattamennoviceeight", etc.

You then need to write javascript to insert the custom html at the end of the gallery description. You first need to insert the subtitle text. Then you need to query the API (or RSS feed) for the keyword, and obtain a list of the photos with that keyword. You can use this to construct the html for the thumbnail with a link to the lighbox URL for that photos. Do this for all of the photos with that keyword, and then loop over all of the subtitles within the gallery's "page source" table.


It's rather involved, but it's the only way I can think of that doesn't involve you manually maintaining a list of which image IDs correspond to which subtitles.

Yes, that would be the full programming solution. I'd essentially be building a new dynamically generated view. That's a creative idea to use the keywords to identify the groups. I don't know if I'm up for the amount of work this would entail. I'll have to think about it.

PBolchover

For the first event, it is probably best to hand-code an html-only page, as that gives you the most control while you are experimenting with the setup.

Inevitably, this page will consist of a number of repeating elements, just replacing the imageID each time. You could exploit this, and manage future pages as follows:

• Add the photos to your gallery
• Get the list of imageIDs
• Copy the list to Excel
• Use a (relatively simple) excel formula to build up the repeating elements of the page
• Use excel to combine these together, to give the html code for your entire layout
• Copy-and-paste the excel result into a new html-only page.

photokandy

I'm wondering if you couldn't accomplish the same thing with a little bit of CSS & HTML in the first photo of each group? I don't know if it would work well, but I would envision an H1 tag inside the first image description of each group that could be positioned up above the image (instead of below) -- ideally positioned relatively, and then another element in the last image description of the group to force a break (clear: left) so that the next image starts on a new line.

I'm not entirely sure if that would really work given how SM creates all the elements for the images, but it might be worth a go. Still not automatic, but all the images are in one gallery, and provided you sort them correctly, the rest would tend to take care of itself.

That said, it'd be really, really cool if SM would build a "break-on-keyword" feature in the galleries that would then generate a heading at each break. Not really sure how it would work, since each image's keywords can be any order, and there could be multiple keywords, or where the heading would come from (it could be another keyword, I suppose, but how to determine which one to use?) but it'd be really cool, and wouldn't entail a new type of gallery -- just an addition to the existing types.