Hierarchy limit?

djambalawa

I don't get the smugmug galleries and categories - they seem so limitiing - but maybe I just dont understand how they work properly.

I find it frustrating that there are these two different concepts of galleries and categories - I'd rather one thing that is both a container for pictures and a container for other containers - to many levels!

Unless I'm mistaken our max hierachy depth is 3? This would be a category/subcategory/gallery - is this correct?

jfriend

Your understanding is correct. Smugmug has said they are working on expanding the number of levels you can use beyond the three they have now.

In the meantime, many people mistakenly think they want lots of levels because that seems like a good way to classify their photos. That may be true, but it isn't often the best way to present their photos to viewers because it makes a navigation structure that is deep and takes a lot of clicks for users to discover/find what they actually want, when people could actually find things quicker if the structure was shallower and they could just scan more things on a single page rather than look through a bunch of sub-pages. Anyway, that's something work considering for now.

djambalawa

Thanks John - its good that they're looking at this.

Its an interesting topic and I know that organisations like google are making us reconsider how we do (or don't!) organise things with their "search don't search" ethos.

But I just know my clients will want to see things in a heirarchical manner (and me!). Shooting a lot of wildlife I'll need something like /wildlife/birds/waterbirds/pelicans which seems pretty reasonable to me. I don't want my clients to have 100's of images of water birds to wade through (pardon the pun) - and I don't expect them to know to use keywords or some other such tagging method.

jfriend

djambalawa wrote: »

Thanks John - its good that they're looking at this.

Its an interesting topic and I know that organisations like google are making us reconsider how we do (or don't!) organise things with their "search don't search" ethos.

But I just know my clients will want to see things in a heirarchical manner (and me!). Shooting a lot of wildlife I'll need something like /wildlife/birds/waterbirds/pelicans which seems pretty reasonable to me. I don't want my clients to have 100's of images of water birds to wade through (pardon the pun) - and I don't expect them to know to use keywords or some other such tagging method.

I certainly don't know your portfolio like you do, but here's one question for you until Smugmug has more levels.

How many types of birds do you have? Do you need /wildlife/birds/waterbirds/pelicans or could you go with /wildlife/waterbirds/pelicans and make it easier for your clients to find the pelican's shots they're interested in?

djambalawa

jfriend wrote: »

I certainly don't know your portfolio like you do, but here's one question for you until Smugmug has more levels.

How many types of birds do you have? Do you need /wildlife/birds/waterbirds/pelicans or could you go with /wildlife/waterbirds/pelicans and make it easier for your clients to find the pelican's shots they're interested in?

Hmm good point John thanks - thats something I could consider!

PBolchover

Or, if you have a lot of birds, then make birds the top-level category, and get rid of the "wildlife".