Selecting photos from hundreds

afarber

Hi all,

I'm working on distilling my many shoots to just those selects from each that I'd like to include in my portfolio. I'm finding it to be tedious task and I'm wondering if there's an easier way in the new SM organizer.

What I've been doing is creating Portfolio Galleries and then collecting my photo selects from my larger galleries. Currently, I am going through the photos in the organizer, but since the thumbs are so small, I need to look at them all in the lightbox. Once I come across a select, I can either collect it by Sharing in the lightbox or go back to the thumbs and drag it to the portfolio gallery.

These both have major downsides:

Sharing requires me to re-navigate to the destination gallery manually for each photo. That's a non-starter for me. I thought I remember in legacy SM the collection tool remembered the last gallery you selected. Has that changed?

The dragging and dropping works nicely, but when I go back from the lightbox to the thumbs, the photo I was last looking at is not highlighted. Rather, the photo I first clicked on to open lightbox is highlighted. I therefore have to peer at dozens or hundreds of photos to find just the one I want. That is also proving to be a huge time suck. The one resource to help with this is to display the file names under the photos, which is an option, but my file names are too long to actually see the photo number at the end.

Is there anything I'm missing? Is there a completely different strategy that I could be doing?

Thanks!
Adam

mrneutron

Hi Adam,

Instead of uploading all the photos and selecting your pics, select them on your computer where you can see them better, then upload them to your portfolio gallery.

If you use Lightroom, our plugin is great for this. You can select your pics using the white flag, then drag them to a gallery in the publish service and upload from within Lightroom.

This is just my opinion and others may have suggestions.

AceCo55

+1 for that.

Allen

If you are going through all your galleries selecting photos I'd add a keyword to each selected one.
Something like portfolio1, portfolio2.

Then for these Portfolio galleries make each smart using its keyword. This requires nothing but viewing
galleries and adding a keyword to a photo. What makes this more efficient is in the future it's easy to
add or delete photos by just adding or removing a keyword.

dennismullen

The workarounds are great but the OP is pointing out a fundamental flaw in the organizer.
The thumbnails are too small and it is awkward to arrange pictures.
All simple viewer programs have basic features that smugmug should have like being able to have adjustable thumbnail size.
In the old smugmug you could drag and rearrange the order of pictures right on the gallery page.

Cheers,

afarber

mrneutron wrote: »

Hi Adam,

Instead of uploading all the photos and selecting your pics, select them on your computer where you can see them better, then upload them to your portfolio gallery.

If you use Lightroom, our plugin is great for this. You can select your pics using the white flag, then drag them to a gallery in the publish service and upload from within Lightroom.

This is just my opinion and others may have suggestions.

Thanks, Andy. Yes - this would be the best way to do it if I was always home with my files. I do use Lightroom and love it. Unfortunately, this is a very big, long project and I'm hoping to do it piecemeal as time allows from a variety of locations. Home a bit, at work during lunch, at my family's house on visits, etc.

I'm really trying to take advantage of what Smugmug offers for remote access to my photos.

Just to clarify - I don't have my complete shoots up on SM. Out of 750-1000 clicks per shoot, I sift through and upload about 75-150 to SM. What I'm doing is whittling that down to less than 20 for my portfolio.

afarber

Allen wrote: »

If you are going through all your galleries selecting photos I'd add a keyword to each selected one.
Something like portfolio1, portfolio2.

Then for these Portfolio galleries make each smart using its keyword. This requires nothing but viewing
galleries and adding a keyword to a photo. What makes this more efficient is in the future it's easy to
add or delete photos by just adding or removing a keyword.

Nice idea, Allen. I'll have to give that some thought. I'm not big on keywording, but that is exactly the type of other solution I was looking for.

Thanks!

afarber

dennismullen wrote: »

The workarounds are great but the OP is pointing out a fundamental flaw in the organizer.
The thumbnails are too small and it is awkward to arrange pictures.
All simple viewer programs have basic features that smugmug should have like being able to have adjustable thumbnail size.
In the old smugmug you could drag and rearrange the order of pictures right on the gallery page.

Cheers,

Bingo! Small thumbs amongst other flaws. Or, maybe more accurately, ways of working that I don't agree with.
-Current Lightbox photo not being highlighted
-Collecting not remembering last gallery selected

I don't want this thread to become a dumping ground for all the things SM doesn't do perfectly. I'm just looking for the best way to work with what we have (which is pretty damn great!)

Thanks!