Automatic Featured Image on Folders

visierl

I have searched around a bit in the forum and not come up with an answer, so I guess I will start a thread. Forgive me if this has been covered already -- I am late to the New SmugMug party (and close to having the customization that I want) so I might have missed it.

I think I know why this behavior has changed from the old smugmug to the new smugmug, but I would really like to have a way to reinstate it in some way. In the old smugmug, the featured photo on a category (the closest thing we have to categories now is folders as far as I am aware) was (could be set to be?) the featured photo on the first (sorted) gallery in that category based on the sort criteria (in my case, the most recently added gallery). Now that smugmug has moved to the more general and flexible "folder" concept, this behavior no longer exists, the folder image has to be manually set to a specific image or it will, seemingly randomly, pick some image in the hierarchy beneath it.

Since the site I am managing regularly adds lots of new content, and the owner wants the very latest gallery feature photos to be featured on its top level folders, this presents a challenge. It is necessary to manually set the feature photo on both the new gallery and its containing folder every time a new gallery is added. The owner of the site is, understandably, not terribly pleased with having to do this, since it is a fair amount of extra work to have to do for something she got automatically in the past. It has become the most important of the two remaining hurdles (the other has to do with fonts in CSS, and I think it is my mistake, not a problem with the new customizations) I need to get over before I will convince her to let me switch from legacy smugmug to new smugmug.

Is there any hope of finding a way to do this?

bobbyhero

Unfortunately, there's no workaround for this (as far as I know). You'd need to set the featured image in the Folder settings. There isn't a CSS/HTML solution for this.

visierl

Any chance / way we could request this as a new feature? I understand that it would probably require a linkage between two objects (the folder and a contained set of galleries if it is present) so it might be challenging to make it work, but it seems like something worth having.

bobbyhero

You could request the feature here:
http://feedback.smugmug.com

denisegoldberg

visierl wrote: »

I think I know why this behavior has changed from the old smugmug to the new smugmug, but I would really like to have a way to reinstate it in some way. In the old smugmug, the featured photo on a category (the closest thing we have to categories now is folders as far as I am aware) was (could be set to be?) the featured photo on the first (sorted) gallery in that category based on the sort criteria (in my case, the most recently added gallery). Now that smugmug has moved to the more general and flexible "folder" concept, this behavior no longer exists, the folder image has to be manually set to a specific image or it will, seemingly randomly, pick some image in the hierarchy beneath it.

There has been a request for this in the SmugMug Feature Requests forum since August of 2013.

See the thread Random Thumbnails and add your comments there.

bobbyhero wrote: »

You could request the feature here:
http://feedback.smugmug.com

There is already a request filed there for random photos for galleries - see http://feedback.smugmug.com/forums/17723-smugmug/suggestions/4579800-allow-users-to-choose-a-random-featured-photo-for. It seems like random photos for folders could be a reasonable extension of that request.

--- Denise

denisegoldberg

Have you considered using a photos block set to "recent photos" or a galleries block set to "recent galleries" to highlight recent additions to the site?

--- Denise

leftquark

I have some additional information on using additional fonts here, if it helps: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations/Fonts-Links/Google-Fonts