Gallery widget on the gallery page

JWatson

I'm having a tough time with setting up my gallery the way I want without having to customize each and every gallery on my site. I'm hoping someone out there can help me out, or point me in the right direction.

My site is separated into folders, sub folder and finally galleries. For example:

Primary Folder: Galleries

Sub-Folder 1: Events
Gallery 1
Gallery 2
Gallery 3

Sub-Folder 2: Travel
Gallery 4
Gallery 5
Gallery 6

Sub-Folder 3: Nature
Gallery 7
Gallery 8
Gallery 9

What I'm trying to do is add the content block 'Galleries' at the gallery level. The intent is to provide a quick link to other galleries within the same folder. For example, If a person is in gallery #7, they will see a quick link to all other galleries in sub-folder 3, but not sub-folders 1 or 2.

Using the 'Galleries' widget, it allows me to select 'current location' but this apparently only drills down, and not up to other galleries in the current folder. The only way I can seem to accomplish what I want is to select 'Folder' and then specifically add Sub-Folder 3. The issue with this approach is that I have to customize every one of my galleries to achieve the look I want.

Can anyone tell me if what I want to do is possible so that I can set the default gallery view so that each gallery will only display a link to other galleries within the same folder?

If you want to see what I'm trying to do, you can check out my site at www.jasonwatsonphotography.com

Note, I'm still attempting to figure this out on my own, so if you check out a gallery that doesn't look as I have described, just check out a different gallery.

Thanks!
Jason

ChancyRat

I want to understand, but I don't understand ... what you want to do...
I'm tempted to ask many questions about what you mean or how you're using terms (e.g., "gallery"), but maybe this one question will help: How about adding a navbar to each gallery, and choose the links you want to populate for each gallery. My guess is that if I'm way off base about what you want, this suggestion will fall far off the mark, but I thought it worth asking.

denisegoldberg

I can't help with your question - I don't know of a way to automatically generate the block of galleries you are presenting on the right side. Hopefully someone else will jump in with an answer.

But - I did notice two things as I wandered through your site. The first is that it was not obvious to me (although your viewers may be quicker to understand) what the blocks on the right side of the screen represented when I entered a top level folder (for example, http://www.jasonwatsonphotography.com/Gallery/Travel). The names of the galleries show on hover, but will your viewers realize they need to hover over the unnamed blocks to see additional options? Once I jump down a level the blocks on the right have a haze over them and also show a name. That is a trigger to me that they will take me somewhere else on the site. I have a personal preference not to obscure content elements with a haze because that never attracts me to click - but having the names of the galleries is key.

The second is the look on a mobile device. Are you aware that if you look at one of your galleries on a phone that the "other galleries" block is presented before the gallery content? This means the viewer needs to scroll quite a bit to reach the content they requested. Shouldn't the content show first?

--- Denise

JWatson

ChancyRat wrote: »

I want to understand, but I don't understand ... what you want to do...
I'm tempted to ask many questions about what you mean or how you're using terms (e.g., "gallery"), but maybe this one question will help: How about adding a navbar to each gallery, and choose the links you want to populate for each gallery. My guess is that if I'm way off base about what you want, this suggestion will fall far off the mark, but I thought it worth asking.

Thanks for your feedback! When I use the term 'Gallery', I'm simply referring to the gallery where the photos are residing. When I refer to a 'Folder', I'm referring to the folder where the galleries reside.

yes, I'm aware that I can add a navbar to each gallery. However, I'm trying to determine if the look I want to achieve can be done without doing customized galleries for each gallery.

JWatson

denisegoldberg wrote: »

I can't help with your question - I don't know of a way to automatically generate the block of galleries you are presenting on the right side. Hopefully someone else will jump in with an answer.

But - I did notice two things as I wandered through your site. The first is that it was not obvious to me (although your viewers may be quicker to understand) what the blocks on the right side of the screen represented when I entered a top level folder (for example, http://www.jasonwatsonphotography.com/Gallery/Travel). The names of the galleries show on hover, but will your viewers realize they need to hover over the unnamed blocks to see additional options? Once I jump down a level the blocks on the right have a haze over them and also show a name. That is a trigger to me that they will take me somewhere else on the site. I have a personal preference not to obscure content elements with a haze because that never attracts me to click - but having the names of the galleries is key.

The second is the look on a mobile device. Are you aware that if you look at one of your galleries on a phone that the "other galleries" block is presented before the gallery content? This means the viewer needs to scroll quite a bit to reach the content they requested. Shouldn't the content show first?

--- Denise

Hi Denise. Thanks for the feedback. I am aware that the mobile site shows the other gallery links first. I plan on addressing that through css at a later time. For now, I'm just trying to get the quick link within the gallery to take me to other galleries within the folder without having to customize each gallery.

So far I haven't had any issues with people navigating my site. Once they select a gallery folder, the various galleries can be found on the right hand side. I've tried different views with labels cover, not covering, bottom bar, under etc. I prefer a clean look and hope that the Title over the galleries will be enough to draw attention. That being said, I've tweaked this page many times and likely will do so again.

For the moment, I'm just trying to figure out how to get my gallery page set up the way I want without customizing each gallery. Once I get that done, I will look at other options. If I can't do what I want, I may ditch this idea altogether as the maintenace of the site becomes too much work when I want to make a minor change.

Thanks!

leftquark

When a Gallery Content Block is set to "Current Location" it should show the children within that location. Since Pages and Galleries cannot contain children galleries, there's nothing to return. When a Gallery Content Block is added to a Page or a Gallery, we shouldn't be allowing the "Select From" to be set to "Current Location". I'm having the team write-up a bug report so we can remove this.

The other option to fix this was to have Pages and Galleries show the contents of the Folder they're in, but ultimately that leaves for a confusing system. Folders, which are the main use-case for this content block, would show the Galleries within them (the children), while Galleries and Pages would show the Galleries from where they live (the parent). We'd like to keep it consistent.

Unfortunately this means that the only way to do what you'd like would be to make every gallery custom, which I realize is a pain in the butt.

JWatson

leftquark wrote: »

Folders, which are the main use-case for this content block, would show the Galleries within them (the children), while Galleries and Pages would show the Galleries from where they live (the parent). We'd like to keep it consistent.

Unfortunately this means that the only way to do what you'd like would be to make every gallery custom, which I realize is a pain in the butt.

Thanks for the reply. This is pretty much what I had expected. Now on to my next quest to see if I can use css to display the galleries in the parent folder! Unless of course you want to have your development team change the option 'Current Location' to 'Current Folder' only when the content block is placed within a gallery It sure does make for an easy visual way to switch between galleries!

Thanks!