Featured Photos chosen in Legacy not showing in New SmugMug

WinsomeWorks

All over my (unpublished, unless it goes live today against my wishes) New SmugMug site, I'm seeing that my previously chosen Featured Photos for categories (folders) or galleries are not showing up on the display pages for main categories, subcategories, etc. I mean, these are some of the most important spots on my whole site.. they're my face to the world, so to speak, but they're just ignoring what I chose. What's up with that?? Oddly, they're not even showing one of the first couple photos from a 1st or 2nd gallery in the category (main folder) or sub-category. They seem to be totally random. What's more, different Featured Photos show up on my smartphone than show up on the desktop, whether logged in or not!! This is really bugging me. I have way too many galleries to go through & tell SmugMug for a 2nd time which photo to feature. This is only one of the many many things making my site still a mess.

Is there some way to tell SmugMug you want your site to be in the group of delayed transitions? I have a long ways to go, & have found the whole customize interface excruciatingly difficult to figure out. I don't even have workable navigation in half the menu items (because I can't figure out what to link stuff like "Guestbook" or "Bio", etc. etc. in order to get something similar to what I had in place before). And there's nothing on my homepage at all. Cannot comprehend the "Independent Homepage" mess in a way that lets me move forward without fear of screwing up everything further than I have already. I also still need to do screenshots of my entire Legacy site for reference points-- and don't even know how to do screenshots yet. Feeling very discouraged & in a huge lot of back pain because of sitting for 15 plus hrs a day when I'm supposed to limit it to an hour or less.

WinsomeWorks

Featured Photos Not Transferring to New Site!
Bump.

WinsomeWorks

As to my un-answered question below, I've done some further inspection and see that I need to clarify:

My featured photos for each particular gallery are OK; they're showing up (featured) in the Folder that contains that gallery.

The problem is that I seem to have no control over what gets featured as the main photo for each folder displayed on my "Browse" page, or what we used to call the "All Categories" page. The main photos are at least feature photos for some gallery contained in each folder or sub-folder. However, the way New SmugMug is choosing them appears to be totally random. I'm praying there's some way to choose them myself, or at the very least, force it to choose my feature photo from the first gallery or sub-folder as the main folder image featured. Again, this is frequently our main showcase page to the world.

Does this capability depend on the gallery styles chosen somewhere along the line, such as Grid, Collage, SmugMug Style, etc.?? I feel like I've seen some comments about this awhile back, but idk...

Allen

You can define the featured photo for every folder at any level.
Open folder
Customize > Folder Settings > Feature Image

The featured image will show on parent folder.

leftquark

Yes, and most likely the difference when viewing on mobile is because you're viewing your Old SmugMug site on mobile unless you've published. Old SmugMug actually randomized feature photos while New SmugMug does not.

WinsomeWorks

Thanks for this info. I'm glad to know this is an option now. I suspect the crops, and/or lack of control of them due to the image being a certain aspect ratio in various folder levels or system pages such as /browse is going to be the greater issue now, if defining the feature photo is possible. Can they still be chosen, then placed in other galleries as we did in Legacy, or must they be in the same gallery that we're choosing from? In other words, I had made copies of a photo in a gallery, cropped its thumbnail the way I wanted, then placed that newly cropped copy in an unlisted gallery in Legacy after featuring it, to get around unmatched featured photos (some square, some original crop).

Allen wrote: »

You can define the featured photo for every folder at any level.
Open folder
Customize > Folder Settings > Feature Image

The featured image will show on parent folder.

owilliams

Hiya,

You can certainly store your feature images elsewhere if you want - No need to have it in the actual folder or gallery where you are using it. So, as you described, you can have a separate gallery of folder and gallery feature images that are cropped to your liking. To apply them, go into the feature image picker (folder/gallery settings > basics > feature image) and then click the "Home" icon from the picker. From there, you can navigate into your "Feature Images" gallery to select the one that you want to use.

I hope this helps! Let us know if you need anything else along the way.

Best,
Oliver
SM Support

Allen

For some of my galleries and folders I use specially prepared thumbs. I created an unlisted gallery at the
top level to store these and point to them there.

owilliams

Allen wrote: »

For some of my galleries and folders I use specially prepared thumbs. I created an unlisted gallery at the
top level to store these and point to them there.

That will work perfectly, Allen

Allen

owilliams wrote: »

That will work perfectly, Allen

One suggestion is put in the caption of these special thumbs the location where each is used.

I use square grid on all folders.
I shoot birds and most times a normal crop for feature photo does not show the object very good or too
small. If I had a good "portrait", full frame photo I could use that but both sides would probably be cut
off. Plus most photos with good composition would have the object off center. I usually only special crop
for "rare" birds, here, and the object is very important.

Special thumb and full frame. Folder http://www.photosbyat.com/Birds/2012-Birding/Birding-2012-November

...

WinsomeWorks

different featured photo behaviors
Thanks, Allen, Oliver & Aaron for all the tips & explanations. I'll be using these when I get into actual tweaking mode, as I will truly need step-by-step instructions for this type of thing. I'm currently more in "reconstruction" mode!) I sure wish feature photos could've just been made easy to adjust for the folder page & kept in the same gallery. Bummers. And I'm also not sure still why the old defaults didn't show up for the All Galleries page, until I choose new ones. I just wanted to say that no, it's not quite right that Old SmugMug randomized feature photos (not on Folder-level pages, anyway). Yes, only if you hadn't chosen a feature photo for a gallery, it would display a different one every time, on that category or sub-category page. But I've always set a feature photo. And also, even though you couldn't choose a feature photo for the All Galleries page to represent each category, that page would always show the very first featured photo of the gallery you chose to be first in the category's line-up. So you had some control at least, by setting a representative photo for a certain gallery & making it first in your set order. I know it's all sort of a moot point now, but it won't be when some of these things get revisited eventually as they always do.

Incidentally (& sorry if this was already answered...) is there still a way to have a "Featured Galleries" block on that "All Galleries" or /Browse page? I used to use that. And / or... there's not yet a "Recent Galleries" block, right? (only "Recent Photos"?? My continued frustration with "Recent Photos" is that it shows photos that have been cropped or moved or color-corrected, so if you do anything to a photo, it ends up in there several times in a row. Another thing that has never gotten fixed even though this fix has been requested time & time again...

leftquark wrote: »

Yes, and most likely the difference when viewing on mobile is because you're viewing your Old SmugMug site on mobile unless you've published. Old SmugMug actually randomized feature photos while New SmugMug does not.

leftquark

WinsomeWorks wrote: »

is there still a way to have a "Featured Galleries" block on that "All Galleries" or /Browse page? I used to use that.

You can add a "Galleries" content block, source it from "Galleries I Choose" and then pick the ones you want. All you have to do is give it a title "Featured Galleries" and you're set!