Please help with organization....

SpiderF1

For various reasons, I recently dumped Flickr and am moving our large photo collection to SmugMug. Currently experimenting, but have some questions before I upload everything.

I've read a lot of posts about how people organize and I decided to follow the tried and true method of (as an example):
Family->Son->2009 - Something,2010 - Something Else
Family->Dog->2011 - New trick
Hobbies->Skydiving->2010 - The schute didn't open :cry
Hobbies->Flying->2011 - Whew, that was a close call
etc.

My problem is that sometimes I'd want a gallery to exist in multiple categories. For example, let's say my dog get's married (work with me here :wink), I'd like the gallery to be visible from Family->Dog and Weddings.

Additionally, I'd like to be able to see everything we did in a given year. So if I look up '99, I'd like to remember what countries we visited and the events we attended without clicking around every possible category->sub-category.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Please keep in mind that I have thousands of photo's that I'm dealing with so I'd like to handle things at category/sub-category/gallery level.

Thank you! :lust

rainforest1155

Hi,

While a gallery can only exist in one (sub)category at a time, you could just create a new gallery in Weddings for your Dog and turn it into a smart gallery. You could set up a smart gallery rule to have all photos from the Dog gallery (in the family category) show up in your new Weddings > Dog gallery.
Read more on smart galleries here:
http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93308-smart-galleries

2. You can use the timeline features to browse your photos by date:
http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93319-photo-timeline

For some general advice on using (sub)categories, check out this post:
http://news.smugmug.com/2011/04/06/smug-tip-of-the-week-get-organized-with-categories/