How to let user select Gallery Style?

Alameth

Old Smug used to allow users to select the gallery style (SmugMug, Thumbnails, etc.); I just had to set the style to "Viewer Controlled" on the Gallery Settings.

How do I allow this in New Smug?

(I'd like to let my users switch between SmugMug style and Collage Landscape style, at minimum.)

denisegoldberg

Alameth wrote: »

Old Smug used to allow users to select the gallery style (SmugMug, Thumbnails, etc.); I just had to set the style to "Viewer Controlled" on the Gallery Settings.

How do I allow this in New Smug?

As you've already seen, you must select a style for the gallery in new smugmug. The old "viewer controlled" is not available.

You could use two galleries, one set to each style that you like. Maybe you could create a second gallery that is a collection of the photos from the first gallery where you set the style differently in the two galleries. You could place a link to the other styled gallery in each gallery.

--- Denise

Richard

denisegoldberg wrote: »

As you've already seen, you must select a style for the gallery in new smugmug. The old "viewer controlled" is not available.

You could use two galleries, one set to each style that you like. Maybe you could create a second gallery that is a collection of the photos from the first gallery where you set the style differently in the two galleries. You could place a link to the other styled gallery in each gallery.

--- Denise

Yes, this would work. Check out my New Pics gallery for something similar. I used different collected pics, for obvious reasons, but you could easily have different styles for the same collected pics. There's a little more maintenance required than the user selected style in legacy, but the new Organizer makes it pretty efficient.

Alameth

Thanks Denise and Richard. I was wondering if I was just missing something.

I've been looking at other engines that not only allow users to select styles, but also sort order and element used for sorting. Very helpful for the kind of work I do.

Richard wrote: »

There's a little more maintenance required than the user selected style in legacy, but the new Organizer makes it pretty efficient.

Alas, it's the dozens of "little more maintenance" quirks in New Smug that's killing me. Duplicating hundreds of galleries to solve this problem just isn't feasible.

Richard

Alameth wrote: »

Alas, it's the dozens of "little more maintenance" quirks in New Smug that's killing me. Duplicating hundreds of galleries to solve this problem just isn't feasible.

I hear you. If you have hundreds of galleries that are changing all the time, it can add up quickly. OTOH, if most of your galleries are set up once and don't change much afterwards, it would be a one-time effort mainly. You could create the base galleries in whatever style you are used to, then create the alternate style ones as smart galleries that are automatically populated from the base ones. Now I'm pretty sure that once created, changing the sort order manually in the base gallery will not automatically change it in the "smart" offspring (they're not that smart ) and I have no idea what happens in the offspring if you delete a pic from the parent--maybe someone else can jump in who knows. I'm not using smart galleries myself, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was some way of handling deletions through additional rules, dunno. Anyway, just something to keep in mind if you don't find a perfect solution to your needs.

Edit: Out of curiosity, I just played with a test smart gallery set up to collect pics from a real one. As I suspected, it inherited the sort order from the original on creation, but later changes in the source do not propagate to the smart offspring. The deletion part was a little weird. It wouldn't let me delete individual pics from the smart offspring. I could only delete the entire gallery. Since I was using a live gallery for the testing, I didn't try deleting individual pics in the parent to see whether that propagated. I suppose that's what one would want to do in practice, but I'll leave that one as an exercise to the reader.

Alameth

Richard wrote: »

... You could create the base galleries in whatever style you are used to, then create the alternate style ones as smart galleries that are automatically populated from the base ones.

, I already use Smart Galleries for other things; I should have thought of that. Thank you!