Question/conversation starter for SmugMuggers who mainly use SM as their shoebox.
uncool
Registered Users Posts: 96 Big grins
Keep in mind that I use SM as a family album (that is also off-site storage). I provide access to family and friends on an as needed basis. One day I’ll have a public section but for now it’s locked down.
Feel free to pipe in with what works (or doesn’t for you). Or just submit a link.
What does your Organizational structure look like or what are some of the categories that you use?
The backbone of my site is the ole Year - Month layout.
From here I am in exploration mode (thus this thread). I’m using a mix of dumb and smart folders/galleries.
All Content in Year folders containing Month galleries.
Smart Galleries for vacations; Florida 2002, Dells 2008 etc.
Folder for Events with Smart Galleries for the specific event; Air show, Twins game, Grandma and Grandpa visit etc.
This folder is already unwieldy due to the number things we have done - Thinking about breaking these down by year.
Holidays (Or Holiday related stuff)
Not sure if I even want separate galleries - may just rely on keyword searches (actually I need to confirm if keyword searches are possible in private sharing.)
Some holidays are well defined - July 4th is one day. For Halloween, we end going to a few events related to the holiday so limiting a date search for October 31 will miss photos.
Thank you for taking the time to contribute.
Feel free to pipe in with what works (or doesn’t for you). Or just submit a link.
What does your Organizational structure look like or what are some of the categories that you use?
The backbone of my site is the ole Year - Month layout.
From here I am in exploration mode (thus this thread). I’m using a mix of dumb and smart folders/galleries.
All Content in Year folders containing Month galleries.
Smart Galleries for vacations; Florida 2002, Dells 2008 etc.
Folder for Events with Smart Galleries for the specific event; Air show, Twins game, Grandma and Grandpa visit etc.
This folder is already unwieldy due to the number things we have done - Thinking about breaking these down by year.
Holidays (Or Holiday related stuff)
Not sure if I even want separate galleries - may just rely on keyword searches (actually I need to confirm if keyword searches are possible in private sharing.)
Some holidays are well defined - July 4th is one day. For Halloween, we end going to a few events related to the holiday so limiting a date search for October 31 will miss photos.
Thank you for taking the time to contribute.
Well every person you can know,
And every place that you can go,
And any thing that you can show,
You know they're nouns.
And every place that you can go,
And any thing that you can show,
You know they're nouns.
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I too, use SM as an album for family and friends. Here's my organization / workflow:
In Lightroom (using Jeffrey Friedl's SmugMug Publish plugin) I create smart galleries based on photo rating in basically a year/month structure, splitting out special occasions or trips into separate galleries and combining periods with fewer photos. These galleries are then synced with SM as public but password protected galleries and are the master galleries for all non-password protected smart galleries.
In SmugMug I create smart galleries based on keyword, date or location and exclude pictures of family or friends to respect their privacy. Naturally, in order to achieve this I have slavishly keyworded and gps'ed my photos, which is a lot of work! I do all of my editing, kewording, etc. in Lightroom (or PhotoShop as needed) and not in SM. Lightroom (i.e. my computer) is my main storage and work location and not SM. I also don't upload full-size pics. Not that I think lots of people are interested in stealing my photos, but if someone does want to take something they can do a lot less with 1900x1200 than full-size.
I wish that SmugMug would import the LR ratings so that we could use this as a further smart gallery criteria - this would be a great addition for me.
Hope this helps.
Cheers, Sara
I also start in LR and found a workaround for the lack of star ratings in SM. For the photos I star rate in LR I added the keyword(s) "star" or "four stars".
Then using SM's Smart Galleries I add the corresponding keyword.
Becuase I am more of a family documenter than an arts photographer my culling skiils are pretty pathetic - I keep way more photos than I probably should. Although these days I am much better about being selective (and ruthless) when it comes to what I keep. But in the early digital days, I snapped like the camera was providing me with oxygen. So those early years are heavily documented and I don't feel right deleting those photos now.
As such the 1000 photo limit on smart galleries is a barrier I need to work around.
And every place that you can go,
And any thing that you can show,
You know they're nouns.
Sometimes I need to remind myself of those days when film and developing were expensive and we thought about every single picture we took. Like you I am getting better about deleting pictures and limiting what I publish but I know it's still too much!
Perhaps a solution to your 1000 photo smart gallery dilemma is to split the galleries into sections. There is after all, a limit to how many pictures any viewer is willing to scroll through. :-)
I kind of took the opposite approach from you...I organized my galleries into "topical" folders and sub-folders, like vacations, family gatherings, etc. You can browse my hierarchy if you'd like, at http://photos.bellhanley.com/browse
Then...I have a page with a custom HTML block on it that I call my "timeline". It's organized by year/month. I manually add a link in the appropriate place whenever I add a new gallery. Note that some of my galleries cross years (for example, I have a gallery with photos of my pets). For galleries that cross years, I add two keywords to each photo: 1) the year, and 2) the keyword "multiyear" (indicating to me that the gallery contains multiple years). Then on my timeline page, for each year I have a link to a keyworded gallery that pulls everything with the keyword "multiyear" and whatever year I'm linking to. It'll probably be easier to look at an example:
http://photos.bellhanley.com/Timeline
So yeah, every time I add a new gallery there is a manual step to add the link to it on my timeline page. But it's just become part of my workflow to maintain that HTML page; I don't find it too painful, and I like having the timeline...we often find ourselves looking at it with a question like "where did we go on vacation in 2013"?
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
My database at the top level has various functional pages and folder titled "Browse All" where all the pictures live. "Browse All" contains a bunch of sub folders for different topics. "Browse All" also contains several custom-built pages, one for each year, that contain a folder/gallery/page content block listing the galleries associated with that year. So there's a 2015 page, and a 2014 page, and so on. I have customized the display of "Browse All" to have one folder/gallery/page content block that shows the topical folders ... and a second page content block that shows all the year-specific pages. You can look at my site to see it in action.
The only real problem is that the folder/gallery/page content blocks inside the year pages are created using the "Items I choose" approach. The SmugMug interface is more than a little flaky when dealing with f/g/p blocks populated that way. I've managed to make it work by totally re-selecting the items when I have to add one. I have to do it all on one pass. If I stop and look at what I have, SmugMug alphabetizes the list of items I've entered rather than keeping the temporal order I want. But with caution, and written notes before I start, I've managed to make do.
And Denise - I have been a part of this community for a while and am always impressed with your technical and informational generocity. I can't do a search on any topic that doesn't include one of you responses. And you take the time to shoot and blog on a regular basis. Let me know what kind of coffee you're drinking that makes you that productive.
So is everyone using Smart Folders to sub-divide their sites or are you uploading to those specific categories?
And every place that you can go,
And any thing that you can show,
You know they're nouns.
I don't use Smart Folders; I use "regular" sets of folders, some nested, most just flat.
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
I just use regular folders/subfolders to organize my site, then, as I mentioned, the "timeline" page is just hard-coded HTML.
I am also a shoebox-user, with a low profile. All my galleies are normal. There are a few smart ones but I am quite happy with the non-smart ones. I have no main home page at the top. Instead each group of interested people (like friends, family, ...) have been given their own corner.
Link to this corner is sent out. A visitor to one corner do not see or are aware of the other corners. At the moment I have around 30 corners.
All preparations are done on my PC. Here I make sure Description, GPS coordinates (if any), keywords (very few) and such are maintained.
On PC I use PSU (Photo Supreme) which has all the key features to organise a large number of photos. And it also has a good upload facility to SmugMug
As of a structure I use different ones, depending on the corner (and who the visitors are). Some are Topic driven while others are Date driven, it all depends.
In SM I rarely use Unlisted or Password or Hide User, almost all galleries are plain and looks good. They are all private and I ask the visiting people not to post any links anywhere.
I have started to use maps in some corners and this may well become a more standard feature.
Hope this helps, Harald
My focus is on digitizing memories
We do actually import them (yay), we just don't display them (boo). Perhaps in the future we will
I have 2 SmugMug sites: my Professional portfolio, and then my family/friends site with all of my galleries. On the later, I also start with the Year, but I don't take enough photos each month to require a second month breakdown. I then just keep it simple and do normal galleries for each gallery. I let keywords and search take care of anything else I need and don't dabble into Smart Galleries.
Glad you're getting some good discussion here!
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
Actually, I've never used the SM Publish plugin (maybe I tested it right at the beginning but I don't remember).
When I read the SM documentation about their plugin, the differences I notice is that JFriedl's goes into more detail. I can set a custom caption or title using any Lightroom field (my caption includes the caption, city, state and country fields) and there also seems to be more choice of which fields trigger uploads. For example, a develop change will trigger a re-publish or I can set it to not include any "People" metadata (after LR 6). The interface is definitely more complicated but that doesn't bother me - I would always rather have more choices. You can download a test version to check out - it's probably not for everyone but there are certain features like the custom caption/title builder that I wouldn't want to be without.
Since I often change ratings on photos (what I thought was great two years ago I often find not-so-stunning today...) it would be rather a pain to also click a keyword every time I change a rating. The use of those imported ratings would be a great boon for me! Please, please, pretty please. :-)
Hope this helps,
Sara
Ahh, that's pretty neat!
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
One thing I've been impressed by is that around the new Smugmug time, the LR plugin seemed to get an order of magnitude better. It's both solid and fairly feature rich (though it sounds like maybe not quite as much as JF's). Emphasis on the "reliable", as the few issues that have crept in have gotten almost immediate fixes, far faster than most parts of Smugmug in general. At least one reliability issue was a bug in Adobe, and SM put in a workaround to use different parts of the API.
In particular, one advantage I see of Smugmug's (admittedly self induced by them) is that JF struggled with getting cooperation and access to certain features, leaving his plugin less capable for periods of time than SM's. SM's was naturally up to date. While one could say "shame on SM for not helping him", from a user perspective it meant that just using SM's plugin was a much more trouble free experience.
FWIW.
Glad to hear that! We have a full-time dedicated sorcerer on Lightroom and he works his tail off making sure we keep it running great.
FWIW, I also use it pretty much exclusively to maintain my site(s)!
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
I've been reading along, interested in hearing ideas... and then on an unrelelated quest stumbled onto Nicholas Sherlock's code for an "activity feed". I thought I would post the link (apologies if someone else did it in this thread and I missed it):
http://www.sherlockphotography.org/Customisations/Activity-feed
http://www.photosbyat.com/Recent-Gallery-Changes
My Website index | My Blog
There were some periods of time where I had some upload problems with JFs plugin but when I read the forum, they were no different than the problems that those using the SM plugin were having. JF also updates regularly and is really great at helping if there's a problem. But of course it is donationware and not free, and I do donate more than the bare minimum.
If the SM plugin had the same feature set I'd probably switch but the clincher for me was always the custom title/caption export - wouldn't want to be without it.
Cheers, Sara
And every place that you can go,
And any thing that you can show,
You know they're nouns.
In general, I use my site while logged in as the owner (as does my immediate family). But, I have other family that log in as users with passwords for the directories. Most of my directories are password protected and only a small portion of my site is public: http://sunflowerstudio.smugmug.com/. I sometimes mess up and have open directories.
At smugmug I have folders for key shares (sports, travel, family events, drama, . . .) and a time based directories (for each month, which are used in my blog)
Here's my workflow, on the mac:
1) select pictures using Lemke's Graphic Converter (by assigning labels to "good" photos)
2) upload using the web browser smugmug uplaoder (recently, I've been organizing
3) pictures to be used in the blog are placed in the monthly galleries
4) pictures from special events (say a trip to london) are placed in a gallery inside the travel folder.
5) my galleries can be big 500-1000 pictures
6) I've only recently started using keywords (which I assign in Graphic Converter)
7) I use the keyword "like" for super special pictures (but I'm not good at this); I have found that the 3 level assignment for pictures is all I can manage: 1=don't upload 2=upload 3=like.
8) my keywords are stored in the comments section of the picture and are searchable on my home computer (as are the labels).
I have lightroom, but have not yet been using it to organize pictures.
And every place that you can go,
And any thing that you can show,
You know they're nouns.
My solution are made more difficult by the difficulty of checking how things are working (i.e. there's no preview that lets you check whether your hidden galleries are hidden). My kluge fix to the problem of checking is to use a different browser to look at the site. But, that's an imperfect solution because once you've entered a gallery password (or a page password), changes made don't necessarily update immediately (i.e. the passwords are sticky).
Right now, I have a page that corresponds to one group and is password protected, but haven't figured out completely how to manage individual galleries within it. I'm wondering if an equivalent of the Timeline page described in this thread might be used effectively to give pointers to groups of galleries (including hidden ones).
My Website index | My Blog
SmugMug Support Hero
I wanted the flow to be as logical as possible for visitors, this is what I do:
- import to LR, no ratings or stars or levels, I feel like my images should fall into two categories (keep or delete)
- i use the actual smugmug LR plugin for uploads
- top level sections are very basic.... Friends / Family / Local Events / Travel / etc.
- most of the things i shoot are centered around something that can be logically organized into a <200 image folder
- under 'family' i breakdown by year, then folders for each major event named via "YYYY MM DD child name 3rd bday" and i have sm display order set to show galleries in reverse alpha order... that way the most recent event is always at the top so people don't have to scroll down to see if new events have been added
- for stuff that doesn't fall into a logical event folder i come up with some common thread to cull them together like "YYYY MM august swimming pics and vids" or "YYYY studio behind the scenes"
Nikon | Private Photojournalist
Yes, very similar to my ideas as I redesign/simplify my SM site. Also suggest the use of Smart Galleries so the same photo can be used in different galleries instead of copying or to show selected unlisted photos in public galleries.
Smugmug: Bayou Oaks Studio
Blog: Journey to the Light
"Serendipity...the faculty of making happy, unexpected discoveries by accident." .... Horace Walpole, 1754 (perhaps that 'lucky shot' wasn't really luck at all!)
DayBreak, my Folk Music Group (some free mp3s!) http://daybreakfolk.com
Good SM help article http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93308#rules on Smart Galleries. Explains fairly well. I use for unlisted gallery photos too and find that only the selected photo shows up, not the whole unlisted gallery. If photo shows up in more than one public smart gallery, it is referenced at bottom. So far no problems but doesn't mean I won't find one.
Smugmug: Bayou Oaks Studio
Blog: Journey to the Light
"Serendipity...the faculty of making happy, unexpected discoveries by accident." .... Horace Walpole, 1754 (perhaps that 'lucky shot' wasn't really luck at all!)
Yep, I use smart galleries for some things (portfolio collections, etc.) but also got used to putting the same photo into multiple galleries via LR. That way I can right click the photo and choose "goto collection>" and it will list all the galleries that the photo appears in.
Nikon | Private Photojournalist