"Smart Galleries" AND Lightroom

chipjchipj Registered Users Posts: 149 Major grins
edited January 29, 2013 in SmugMug Support
There's an issue with Smart Galleries. Both SmugMug and Lightroom provide this feature, BUT there's an issue when uploading images from a Smart Gallery created in Lightroom to a SmugMug site. In essence, an image that is contained in multiple Smart Galleries in Lightroom and then uploaded to SmugMug will create multiple copies of that same image on SmugMug, each with a different URL. There are two issues with this:

1) From a consumer perspective (site visitors) this produces multiple thumbnails of the same image after doing a search or clicking on a keyword link. Not a good user experience, and looks sloppy from a presentation perspective.
2) From a Search Engine Optimization perspective, this is a negative because you are creating duplicate results which Google, or Bing won't know how to rank... in essence you are splitting the ranking score for the same image because it now exists at multiple URLs.

Are there any plans to remedy this? If not, is there a guide available that discusses how to work with Smart Galleries in terms of making a Lightroom to SmugMug upload via the Lightroom Plug-in for SmugMug?
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Comments

  • rnrjoshrnrjosh Registered Users Posts: 266 Major grins
    edited January 24, 2012
    Smart galleries within SmugMug and within Lightroom aren't quite the same thing. When you create a Smart gallery within SmugMug, you can set up rules to pull in photos from other SmugMug galleries. When you create a Smart Gallery within Lightroom, you are setting up a gallery that pulls in photos from your Lightroom catalog based on those rules, rather than pulling existing photos from your SmugMug galleries.

    So, when you publish a "Smart" gallery from Lightroom, what that does is to collect photos in your LR catalog based on the criteria you specify, and then uploads those photos to the gallery on SmugMug. Each new image upload gets a unique image ID/key/URL, so that's why you're noticing this.

    At the moment, I don't know of a way to create Smart galleries within Lightroom in such a way as to pull in existing image URLs from your SmugMug account (rather than images themself from the LR catalog). Sorry I don't have a better answer for you! So, if you want Smart galleries that use "virtual" copies of images already uploaded to SmugMug, you'd be best off to create those directly from your SmugMug account in your browser, rather than from within Lightroom.

    I see your point about Smart galleries in LR, and we encourage you to let us know about features you'd like to see added by using our user feedback site: feedback.smugmug.com. Let your voice be heard! :D
    Josh
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  • chipjchipj Registered Users Posts: 149 Major grins
    edited January 24, 2012
    After I sent that post, I thought about a possible workaround which I'd like some feedback on...

    The scenario I was thinking of would be to create one "Master" gallery in Lightroom that would contain all the images that are uploaded to SmugMug. Then, on the SmugMug side of things (and only in SmugMug), create the Smart Galleries as required/desired. This way there would be one url for all images, and then the same image could exist in different Smart Galleries on SmugMug.

    Does this seem like a workable approach that would solve the two issues that I mentioned earlier?

    rnrjosh wrote: »
    [...]At the moment, I don't know of a way to create Smart galleries within Lightroom in such a way as to pull in existing image URLs from your SmugMug account (rather than images themself from the LR catalog)[...]

    I see your point about Smart galleries in LR, and we encourage you to let us know about features you'd like to see added by using our user feedback site: feedback.smugmug.com. Let your voice be heard! :D
    www.chipjonesphotography.com | Search Engine Marketing (SEO, PPC)
  • AllenAllen Registered Users Posts: 10,013 Major grins
    edited January 24, 2012
    chipj wrote: »
    After I sent that post, I thought about a possible workaround which I'd like some feedback on...

    The scenario I was thinking of would be to create one "Master" gallery in Lightroom that would contain all the images that are uploaded to SmugMug. Then, on the SmugMug side of things (and only in SmugMug), create the Smart Galleries as required/desired. This way there would be one url for all images, and then the same image could exist in different Smart Galleries on SmugMug.

    Does this seem like a workable approach that would solve the two issues that I mentioned earlier?
    That could be a huge amount of photos to go thru picking photos for each smart gallery. Perhaps sorting the "Master" Smug gallery by upload date. Then at least the photos would be grouped together for each gallery and easier to find. Also maybe add a keyword to one photo in each gallery before upload. Would make it easier to jump to that gallery section. Look up the one keyword, click "see original" to go to the "Master" gallery position.
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  • chipjchipj Registered Users Posts: 149 Major grins
    edited January 24, 2012
    Allen, I really don't see it being much more work than any other method, at least for me. I always use keywords, so that's nothing new that I would need to do.

    The initial setup would require a bit of work (in terms of creating new Smart Galleries), but once these are setup, there's no additional work required. Each photo will automatically be displayed in the proper gallery (as long as the proper keyword or filter was applied).

    Lastly, there's no need to "place" photos in any other folder (gallery), except for the master. The Smart Gallery functionality seems to take care of separating everything out automatically, as far as I've seen.
    Allen wrote: »
    That could be a huge amount of photos to go thru picking photos for each smart gallery. Perhaps sorting the "Master" Smug gallery by upload date. Then at least the photos would be grouped together for each gallery and easier to find. Also maybe add a keyword to one photo in each gallery before upload. Would make it easier to jump to that gallery section. Look up the one keyword, click "see original" to go to the "Master" gallery position.
    www.chipjonesphotography.com | Search Engine Marketing (SEO, PPC)
  • SamirDSamirD Registered Users Posts: 3,474 Major grins
    edited January 24, 2012
    chipj wrote: »
    After I sent that post, I thought about a possible workaround which I'd like some feedback on...

    The scenario I was thinking of would be to create one "Master" gallery in Lightroom that would contain all the images that are uploaded to SmugMug. Then, on the SmugMug side of things (and only in SmugMug), create the Smart Galleries as required/desired. This way there would be one url for all images, and then the same image could exist in different Smart Galleries on SmugMug.

    Does this seem like a workable approach that would solve the two issues that I mentioned earlier?
    The only caveat I could see is if you need the smart gallery image to have permissions different than the source gallery. In this case you would have to upload two images to have two different settings.
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  • jtbarrettjtbarrett Registered Users Posts: 14 Big grins
    edited January 24, 2013
    I've been trying to decide how to handle this as well. So far, I'm taking a hybrid approach as follows:

    1) Create Lightroom-based Smart Galleries for my "primary" organization scheme. In my case, this is a set of chronological galleries grouped by year and event. These galleries serve as the mechanism to upload everything to SmugMug. (I keyword images in Lightroom, so SmugMug will get the keywords also.)

    2) For "secondary" galleries that organize some of the same photos in alternate ways (e.g., all "kayaking" photos regardless of date), I use SmugMug-based Smart Galleries based on keyword.

    I'm not sure if this is better or worse than using one "master gallery", but for me it seems to solve the issue of multiple copies while still providing some organization in SmugMug for the "master" images.
    Jeff
  • BradfordBennBradfordBenn Registered Users Posts: 2,506 Major grins
    edited January 26, 2013
    Also be aware that a gallery cannot contain more than 5000 images, so that might limit your "master" gallery.
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  • cmasoncmason Registered Users Posts: 2,506 Major grins
    edited January 29, 2013
    Can a gallery be both 'smart' and 'regular'? In other (better) words, can I manually upload photos to a gallery I have determined is 'smart'?

    I want to use a keyword to collect all specific images into a smart gallery, plus add a few images that do not use the keyword, all in the same gallery. I think this would be especially useful for images that are otherwise in a protected gallery: I could put a copy in the 'smart' gallery as well.
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  • mbonocorembonocore Registered Users Posts: 2,299 Major grins
    edited January 29, 2013
    cmason wrote: »
    Can a gallery be both 'smart' and 'regular'? In other (better) words, can I manually upload photos to a gallery I have determined is 'smart'?

    Yes, a gallery can be smart and pull in photos from other galleries based on the rules you have set, as well as accept photos via normal upload.

    You can learn more about smart galleries at http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93308

    Michael
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  • cmasoncmason Registered Users Posts: 2,506 Major grins
    edited January 29, 2013
    mbonocore wrote: »
    Yes, a gallery can be smart and pull in photos from other galleries based on the rules you have set, as well as accept photos via normal upload.

    You can learn more about smart galleries at http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93308

    Michael

    Thanks. I read that bit on help.smugmug.com, but it made no mention that smart galleries don't have be exclusively rules based.
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  • mbonocorembonocore Registered Users Posts: 2,299 Major grins
    edited January 29, 2013
    Yes, I noticed that as well, just figured I would shared that help page as it is very informative on how Smart Galleries work.

    Please let me know if you have any more questions!

    Michael
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