N-level nested galleries

letrout

New to Smugmug, sorry if this is a dumb question. I'd like to create a hierarchical structure for my site, something like:

Travel                                                               Racing
    |-----------------------------------|                    |----------------------------|
Italy2008                             Alaska2010       Indy2009                           ...
    |-----------------|                   |                   |-------------------|
Venice                 Rome               ...            Qualifying            Race
    |---------|          |----------|                         |-------|        |
StMarks    Canals   Coliseum   Vatican                     Pits     Turn2           ...

And so on. It seems the bottom layer would be "galleries" in Smugspeak, but that's about as far as I get. I tried playing around with Sharegroups, but they don't quite do what I want to do (they only can contain galleries, not other sharegroups). Categories and subcategories don't seem to do it either. But like I said I'm a newbie and could very well be missing the obvious.

Malte

It looks like your looking for one more level than what exits. The only thing that may contain files is a gallery, and a gallery may be assigned to a subcategory and must be assigned to a category.

I think Smug is working on more levels, don't know if they'll stick to categories or if they'll change it to folders.

Malte

letrout

Well, that's unfortunate. I don't think I can smoosh all of my pictures into a structure that flat and keep it manageable. Guess I'll keep looking

Allen

letrout wrote: »

Well, that's unfortunate. I don't think I can smoosh all of my pictures into a structure that flat and keep it manageable. Guess I'll keep looking

If you want another virtual level direct to a page for your main subjects. Here's one example.
http://allen-steve.smugmug.com/gallery/3539056

You would have one of these for each subject, travel and racing. Then the thumbs on each can be
categories which takes you to the three Smugmug levels.

Page for travel: categories Italy2008 & Alaska2010
Then for Italy2008 sub-cats: Venice & Rome
The page and number of thumb links can be configured any way you'd like.

jfriend

letrout wrote: »

New to Smugmug, sorry if this is a dumb question. I'd like to create a hierarchical structure for my site, something like:

Travel                                                               Racing
    |-----------------------------------|                    |----------------------------|
Italy2008                             Alaska2010       Indy2009                           ...
    |-----------------|                   |                   |-------------------|
Venice                 Rome               ...            Qualifying            Race
    |---------|          |----------|                         |-------|        |
StMarks    Canals   Coliseum   Vatican                     Pits     Turn2           ...

And so on. It seems the bottom layer would be "galleries" in Smugspeak, but that's about as far as I get. I tried playing around with Sharegroups, but they don't quite do what I want to do (they only can contain galleries, not other sharegroups). Categories and subcategories don't seem to do it either. But like I said I'm a newbie and could very well be missing the obvious.

I would suggest you think again about your gallery organization. The normal first thought when organizing galleries is to classify them maximally into nice ordered and fully descriptive buckets like you'd want a library card catalog to file things for maximum classification. That is, though, not actually what you want to achieve with web site navigation. What you want with web-site navigation is for people to be able to find things with the fewest clicks and to be able to "look" or "browse" for things as easily as possible when they aren't immediately sure where they might be. Both of these navigation desires are more easily fulfilled with as shallow a hierarchy as makes common sense. Common sense is typically driven in this case by not putting too many things in the same category/sub-category (don't want to overwhelm someone with 200 things to look through on one page) and not putting things on the same page that have nothing to do with one another. But, equally well, common sense says it's kind of a waste to put only a very small number of things deep down in your hierarchy. That just makes things harder to find and very inefficient to browse.

So, I'd suggest you think about a more navigation-friendly hierarchy like this:

Travel
    |-----------------------------------|
Italy2008
    |-----------------|---------------|----------------|
    Venice StMarks    Venice Canals   Rome Coliseum   Rome Vatican

This gives you a sub-category per trip/year so it's really easy to find which trip and it puts all the galleries from a given trip on one page so it's easy to browse among them or find which one you are most interested in. Your method is not as easy to browse among the different galleries from and isn't as easy to find a specific gallery or see if a specific gallery exists. As long as you don't have zillions of galleries from one trip, this is a lot more efficient for web navigation and it happens to fit in Smugmug's current hierarchy levels (which were initially limited this way to encourage people to make more navigation friendly hierarchies).

Smumug is going to expand the levels available at some time, but no date has been announced for that feature. Even then, I would suggest people think more about web navigation and discoverability and browsability than maximum classification. Reserve maximal classification for computers (keywords, etc...) and design UI for people consumption.

letrout

Thanks for the suggestion, and I will try it out to see how it looks. I'm still not convinced it's better though, at least for me. I didn't list all the galleries from that trip, it's going to be about 25 galleries. Personally that seems like a lot to lump into one page (subcategory). If I could just subdivide it out into the five cities of the trip, with fewer galleries in each, I think it would be more navigable. Of course that's just my opinion, you prefer a different structure that works for you. Be nice if we had a choice.

I suppose that's what bothers me most about this - I'm forced into a layout I don't prefer because of an architectural limitation in Smugmug. Even if I find a satisfactory workaround this particular problem, what else is lurking out there to prevent me from designing a site the way I'd like it? I was expecting to find more flexibility in Smugmug, now I feel rushed to explore all these constraints before my trial expires.

letrout

@Allen:
That is interesting, maybe I can strongarm this with some html magic. It's a fair bit more work than if Smugmug did it naturally, but at least I have an option. Thanks

jfriend

letrout wrote: »

Thanks for the suggestion, and I will try it out to see how it looks. I'm still not convinced it's better though, at least for me. I didn't list all the galleries from that trip, it's going to be about 25 galleries. Personally that seems like a lot to lump into one page (subcategory). If I could just subdivide it out into the five cities of the trip, with fewer galleries in each, I think it would be more navigable. Of course that's just my opinion, you prefer a different structure that works for you. Be nice if we had a choice.

I suppose that's what bothers me most about this - I'm forced into a layout I don't prefer because of an architectural limitation in Smugmug. Even if I find a satisfactory workaround this particular problem, what else is lurking out there to prevent me from designing a site the way I'd like it? I was expecting to find more flexibility in Smugmug, now I feel rushed to explore all these constraints before my trial expires.

I explained that Smugmug is going to add more levels so you will have a choice then. I'm just talking about how you cope with the way it is until that gets here. If they're organized in a reasonable order, I have no issue at all with 25 gallery thumbs on a page. Make the sub-category page stretchy (so they fill the width of the screen) and they'll all be on screen with no scrolling and viewers can find what they want in one glance with no clicking/exploring required on any screen except for a phone.