question regarding image hierarchy

pix

Hello all, I don't think what I'm wanting to do is possible, but I thought I'd throw this out there on St. Paddy's day and hope to get lucky!:D

Our site is www.pixellight.com. The menu shows titles 'commercial', 'fine art', 'design', and 'web', etc. Commercial and Fine Art represent two separate areas of photography. What we would like to do is replace the two in the nav bar with just 'photography', so we have 'photography', 'design', and 'web' in the nav bar.

Problem is our current hierarchy system. Currently, 'commercial' and 'fine art' are set as categories. Commercial then has galleries only under it, whereas Fine Art has sub-categories and galleries under it. If I was to create a category of 'Photography' so we could only have photography in the nav bar, that would then mean 'commercial' and 'fine art' become sub-cats, and I would then lose the ability to have sub-cats in 'fine art' like we currently have set up.

I hope this makes sense. I guess the question is at the end of it all - "is it possible to have 4 levels of hierarchy? Something like category, sub-category, gallery, sub-gallery?

Really appreciate any suggestions/advice you all might have. Thanks!

jfriend

Smugmug only has the levels you know about category, sub-category, gallery. If you wanted a new level for "Photography", the best way to do that would be to just create a custom HTML page yourself and put thumbs and links to Fine Art and Commercial in it. Since it's your own HTML, you can make it look like anything you want. If you're really only going to have two things in it, you can make it look a lot nicer than a traditional Smugmug category, using larger images and do something fancier - perhaps an image with text in it.

Here's a tutorial for a text only page. Instead of just the text, you can embed some img tags in it also. You then link your "photography" item in the navbar to this.

Allen

Here's another example of a page that you can add any links you want.
http://allen-steve.smugmug.com/gallery/3539056

pix

jfriend wrote: »

Smugmug only has the levels you know about category, sub-category, gallery. If you wanted a new level for "Photography", the best way to do that would be to just create a custom HTML page yourself and put thumbs and links to Fine Art and Commercial in it. Since it's your own HTML, you can make it look like anything you want. If you're really only going to have two things in it, you can make it look a lot nicer than a traditional Smugmug category, using larger images and do something fancier - perhaps an image with text in it.

Here's a tutorial for a text only page. Instead of just the text, you can embed some img tags in it also. You then link your "photography" item in the navbar to this.

Great idea, thanks!

pix

Allen wrote: »

Here's another example of a page that you can add any links you want.
http://allen-steve.smugmug.com/gallery/3539056

Also a great option, thanks Allen!

pix

Am I missing something - I don't see Journal (old style) as an option in my Themes dropdown?

pix

pix wrote: »

Am I missing something - I don't see Journal (old style) as an option in my Themes dropdown?

sorry... never mind, I worked it out!

pix

Allen wrote: »

Here's another example of a page that you can add any links you want.
http://allen-steve.smugmug.com/gallery/3539056

Allen, this is undoubtedly a stupid question, but how do I get the image thumbnail links?

Allen

pix wrote: »

Allen, this is undoubtedly a stupid question, but how do I get the image thumbnail links?

Use the share button to get the photo link.

Also in the browser url the photo number and key will appear after a # sign.
Example
http://www.pixellight.com/Commercial/Products/11059029_k3Ejt#774104163_socDh

<img src="/photos/774104163_socDh-Th.jpg" border="2" height="150" width="150">

Put in the size you want. -S -M etc.
Change the height and width to match.

pix

Thanks Allen. I really appreciate your help here. Couple more questions now - Can you have a look at the page, I'm not sure why it's pushed out right like it is?

http://www.pixellight.com/Photography/Galleries/16230820_pptLW

Also you'll see the gradient grey background that I tried to steal from our 'about us' page. Do I have to do something in the CSS to get it to fill the entire width of the gallery (like it does in the 'about us' page)?

Lastly is the three images - I'd like to have 250x250 thumbnails, so instead of taking the thumbnail links from the 'share' links, I used the 'small' links, but the thumbnails look compressed. Any suggestions? Also with the links, the Stock Collection and Signature Collection links aren't working. These are both Sub-Categories, will they not work because of this (does this only work with Categories and Galleries like your example shows)?

Thank you so much for your help!

jfriend

pix wrote: »

Thanks Allen. I really appreciate your help here. Couple more questions now - Can you have a look at the page, I'm not sure why it's pushed out right like it is?

http://www.pixellight.com/Photography/Galleries/16230820_pptLW

Also you'll see the gradient grey background that I tried to steal from our 'about us' page. Do I have to do something in the CSS to get it to fill the entire width of the gallery (like it does in the 'about us' page)?

Lastly is the three images - I'd like to have 250x250 thumbnails, so instead of taking the thumbnail links from the 'share' links, I used the 'small' links, but the thumbnails look compressed. Any suggestions? Also with the links, the Stock Collection and Signature Collection links aren't working. These are both Sub-Categories, will they not work because of this (does this only work with Categories and Galleries like your example shows)?

Thank you so much for your help!

You have to make the container wide enough to fit your contents. This CSS will do so:

.gallery_16230820 #journal {width: 1050px;}

As for the images themselves, you've taken images that are 400x278 and told the browser to display them as 250x250. The only way to do that is to compress them and to do so unevenly. You get the best image quality if you do not ask the browser to compress them either by specifying the exactly accurate height and width (matches the image precisely) or by leaving off the height and width attributes so that the browser just displays whatever native size the image is.

To get images that are 250px wide, you can use custom size URLs. For example, for the commericial image, you would use a URL like this:

<img border="2" src="/photos/1024765603_zgeyf-250x250.jpg">

Notice, there is no height and width specified (so the browser just uses what the actual image size is) and we've asked for a custom size of 250x250. Smugmug will look at the shape of the original image and give us an image with a max dimension of 250px and the other dimension will be proportional to the aspect ratio of the image.

To make this work perfectly for all three images, all three images need to be exactly the same aspect ratio (which yours are not right now).

The other alternative is to prepare the images to the exactly size you want outside of Smugmug, upload to Smugmug to an unlisted gallery that permits the display of original size images and then link to the original size. That way, you control the entire production of the image and nobody (Smugmug or browser) is doing any scaling for you.

Here's what I get after removing the height and width attributes and using the 250x250 custom size URL (note how the commercial image is a different aspect ratio - something you need to fix):

pix

That's fantastic Jfriend! I'll work on the aspect ratio for the commercial image.

Last question - the Stock Collection and Signature Collection links aren't working. These are both Sub-Categories, will they not work because of this? Any ideas?

jfriend

pix wrote: »

That's fantastic Jfriend! I'll work on the aspect ratio for the commercial image.

Last question - the Stock Collection and Signature Collection links aren't working. These are both Sub-Categories, will they not work because of this? Any ideas?

You don't have the right links. You can link to sub-categories just fine. The easiest way to get the right links is to go to that sub-category by other means (via the Fine Art link in your navbar) and then when you're at the correct destination for the link, copy the URL from your browser bar.

In this case, the links you want are:

/Fine-Art/Signature-Collection
/Fine-Art/Stock-Collection

pix

jfriend wrote: »

You don't have the right links. You can link to sub-categories just fine. The easiest way to get the right links is to go to that sub-category by other means (via the Fine Art link in your navbar) and then when you're at the correct destination for the link, copy the URL from your browser bar.

In this case, the links you want are:

/Fine-Art/Signature-Collection
/Fine-Art/Stock-Collection

I've done this but the links are still going to the homepage?

<td><a href="/Fine-Art/Stock-Collection">Stock Collection</a></td>
<td><a href="/Fine-Art/Signature-Collection">Signature Collection</a></td>

never mind - just realized I'm putting this in wrong place!

pix

For my own understanding, why must the gallery be 'unlisted'? Does that mean that it will always have 'smugmug' in the url?

http://pixellight.smugmug.com/Photography/Galleries/16230820_pptLW.

jfriend

pix wrote: »

For my own understanding, why must the gallery be 'unlisted'? Does that mean that it will always have 'smugmug' in the url?

http://pixellight.smugmug.com/Photography/Galleries/16230820_pptLW.

Unlisted just means it won't show to the public in your gallery listing. That's all. Other than that, it's identical to a normal gallery, including the URL. Hide Owner is the setting that make the URL www.smugmug.com.

pix

jfriend wrote: »

Unlisted just means it won't show to the public in your gallery listing. That's all. Other than that, it's identical to a normal gallery, including the URL. Hide Owner is the setting that make the URL www.smugmug.com.

I believe I have Hide Owner set to 'No' for all of our galleries, but this new gallery I just created is the only one showing smugmug in the url?

http://pixellight.smugmug.com/Photography/Galleries/16230820_pptLW
http://www.pixellight.com/Fine-Art/Stock-Collection/LandscapeStock/11060847_fQiqv#774244818_ryEu5

jfriend

pix wrote: »

I believe I have Hide Owner set to 'No' for all of our galleries, but this new gallery I just created is the only one showing smugmug in the url?

http://pixellight.smugmug.com/Photography/Galleries/16230820_pptLW
http://www.pixellight.com/Fine-Art/Stock-Collection/LandscapeStock/11060847_fQiqv#774244818_ryEu5

Just link to it as this: http://www.pixellight.com/Photography/Galleries/16230820_pptLW instead of the other. Either your custom domain or the pixellight.smugmug.com domains will work. Whichever one you go to will show. So, if you're putting a link to this gallery in your site somewhere, put the http://www.pixellight.com/Photography/Galleries/16230820_pptLW link in.

pix

It's all working now. Jfriend, thank you so much for all your help - you are a 'smugmug saint'!

pix

sorry, but having the same issue again with my custom domain name not working. I created two new galleries, but they only work with smugmug in the domain. When I remove smugmug from the url, I get a 404'd it. http://pixellight.smugmug.com/About/The-Who/16817182_t7m2Qv.

rainforest1155

Make sure you use the www in front of your domain. Your domain without the www isn't set up properly. If you want to correct this so your site works in all cases without the www as well, you'll need to go to your domain registrar and set up an A record as instructed in the 'how to drop the www' section hereL
http://www.smugmug.com/help/professional-accounts

If you're having problems with setting this up, you can email us Heroes:
http://www.smugmug.com/help/emailreal

Sebastian

pix

Thanks for the reply Sebastian!