What's the point of unlisted Collections?

marsbarmarsbar Registered Users Posts: 3 Beginner grinner
edited October 7, 2013 in SmugMug Support
As the title suggests, what is the point of unlisted collections, when, even when you provide a link to an unlisted collection and it works, you cannot see the galleries within it because the only option you have available is 'unlisted' and 'private'? Therefore you cannot see any galleries when you arrive at the unlisted Collection via a direct link?

Comments

  • beardedgitbeardedgit Registered Users Posts: 854 Major grins
    edited September 27, 2013
    Hi,

    I hope that I've understood your question correctly, if so here's an example of how I've found unlisted galleries of collected pics to be useful:

    Say I take 100 pics of an event, such as a family holiday. I'd put all of them in a listed gallery because they all belong together. I'd keep it "listed" so that all and sundry can see it on my SM site.

    But say that I wanted to create an externally-embedded slide-show of a subset of just 20 pics from that gallery. I'd create a new unlisted gallery and populate it by "collecting" the 20 required pics from the "donor" gallery, and then use the "Show Off" slide-show code generator to make the embed code. The slide-show would then be visible on, say, a blog, but the gallery from which it draws the pics wouldn't be visible to visitors to my SM site, thus reducing clutter.

    This "subset" thing is also useful for creating embeddable Badges, but in New SM there's no Badge-code generator so the embed code has to be constructed manually.

    No doubt there are other scenarios where this is useful.

    Hope that helps.
    Yippee ki-yay, footer-muckers!
  • marsbarmarsbar Registered Users Posts: 3 Beginner grinner
    edited September 29, 2013
    beardedgit wrote: »
    Hi,

    Say I take 100 pics of an event, such as a family holiday. I'd put all of them in a listed gallery because they all belong together. I'd keep it "listed" so that all and sundry can see it on my SM site.

    But say that I wanted to create an externally-embedded slide-show of a subset of just 20 pics from that gallery. I'd create a new unlisted gallery and populate it by "collecting" the 20 required pics from the "donor" gallery, and then use the "Show Off" slide-show code generator to make the embed code. The slide-show would then be visible on, say, a blog, but the gallery from which it draws the pics wouldn't be visible to visitors to my SM site, thus reducing clutter.

    Hope that helps.

    Hi beardedgit, thanks for your reply. Your examples do make perfect sense, however they're at the gallery level as I understand?

    What I wanted to achieve is sort of like a 'backend' for clients. So for example, I create a folder containing galleries. Both the folder and the galleries are set to 'unlisted' because I don't want them to appear on the main site.

    Sure enough, I provide a link to the unlisted galleries and it works,though I must say the link that is generated from the settings does not work, I only found out from smugmug help you have to append a certain code at the end of the URL for it to actually work, which I thought was unusual and different to how legacy smugmug used to work...

    However, with the unlisted folder link, it does not show the unlisted galleries on the new Smugmug. Now I can preempt what the response would be to this, because the galleries are unlisted too. However, this used to actually work on legacy Smugmug.

    On legacy Smugmug I would be able to have unlisted folders and galleries then provide the unlisted folder link to the client and it would all work. For some reason it stopped working with the new Smugmug, unless I have to configure it differently to work with the new Smugmug?

    Hope that makes sense...

    At the end of the day, the reason why I ask these things is because what I would *REALLY* like is the ability to create both public facing galleries for the 'front end' of the site and private galleries for clients. I would like the ability to create private/unlisted folders with galleries for client A and client B. I would then appreciate it if, when client A logs in or views their folder, they can perform searches on their folder and it would only retrieve results from their folder without having the results mixed up with public galleries or other client's galleries.

    I have found it strange how Smugmug, Zenfolio and Photoshelter don't offer something like this? I'm with all three services and have not been able to find a way for this to work. This did work with legacy Smugmug a couple of years ago through their 'events' feature but for some reason keyword searches on those events stopped working for unlisted galleries. I opened up a support case for it and were unable to find the reason why it changed (to SM's credit, their support was great).

    Smugmug's and Photoshelter keyword search works really well, however both have deficiencies in how they are able to facilitate private galleries for clients and searching within those galleries, unless someone can show me otherwise?

    With Smugmug, the minute you make something private or unlisted, it seems site-search results cannot be retrieved from those galleries?

    With Photoshelter, you can achieve this (where you can have client A and client B searching within their folders and only retrieve results from their respective folders) however to get this to work you have to turn off the entire site search because the public site search will retrieve results even from unlisted galleries (why?).

    With Zenfolio, they actually have made this work via their 'events' feature, however their keyword search only works on one keyword. ie. you can only search using one keyword, you cannot add more than one keyword when doing searches, which is quite restrictive. They only way around this, they say, is to add 'keyword phrases' but to do that would be extremely cumbersome and goes against what simple keyword search is all about.

    So I'm currently looking at all three to find out how I can get this going but haven't had much luck.

    Sorry for the long post.
  • ChancyRatChancyRat Registered Users Posts: 2,141 Major grins
    edited October 7, 2013
    With Zenfolio, they actually have made this work via their 'events' feature, however their keyword search only works on one keyword. ie. you can only search using one keyword, you cannot add more than one keyword when doing searches, which is quite restrictive. They only way around this, they say, is to add 'keyword phrases' but to do that would be extremely cumbersome and goes against what simple keyword search is all about.

    I also see that Zenfolio does not have a keyword page.
    To my inquiry about keywords, I got an answer after 3 rounds of re-asking (when my question got booted up to a higher level, I think), with this. I don't think they understood my question about a keyword page:
    Can i set up a keyword page, a unique page where all keywords are listed alphabetically? And what
    is the maximum number of keywords I can create?
    Then, can I format pages so that the keywords assigned to each photo or
    video, show up below them?


    Custom pages hold a maximum markup limit of 100000 characters or 100 KB. You can enter in whatever keywords/text you’d like on these pages. You can add photos above or below the keywords, but if you want keywords to actually be appearing on built-in gallery pages, a custom page would not be able to be references in that way. You’d instead want to click on the gallery or photo in your ORganizer, then click to edit the Description section of your Toolbox. Keywords, captions, and titles can be added here.
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