A site for personal use

jemostrom

I've been looking around the web for a way to make a site for my own personal use, that is: I'm the only one who is going to see it.

On this site I want to be able to

• Look at the photos chronologically in a timeline
• Find photos by searching title/caption
• Find by tag
• Find photos using a map
• Organize one photo in 0, 1, 2, ... albums (0 == exists in timeline only)
• Look at the photo on a mobile device

I've looked at three sites: Google Photos, Flickr and now Smugmug. All three sites have their plus and minuses. Here are the things I've found (I've been using my existing smugmug account to look at how it can be done):

• Timeline - Doesn't exist on smugmug. I looked at the "Date Page" but it was not quite what I was looking for (an endless scrolling page similar to Flickr/Google) and it also had the wrong information: it says that I have 2400 photos from 2012 but when I click there I only see 2. I used to have a lot more photos in this account but have removed them ... many, many months ago. I also tried making a smart album but there the limit is 1000 photos from what I can see. Is it possible to do some kind of timeline on Smugmug?
• Search title/caption - works
• Find by tag - yep
• Find by map - yep
• Organize in albums - 0 albums, nope (no timeline), 1 album: yep, 2+: with a bit of work
• Mobile - Yep

So the chronological view seem to be the biggest problem using Smugmug (in Google and Flickr this is the easiest part but they have problems in other areas).

Does anyone have any suggestion for how to setup a site like this?

pbandj

jemostrom wrote: »

Is it possible to do some kind of timeline on Smugmug?

I haven't found a way to do this in an automated fashion, but since Smugmug lets me create a page, I've created a page to display a timeline. It has become part of my workflow whenever I upload a new album, I just add the link to this page. It's a manual step, but it works for me. Note that some of the links are to keyword galleries. http://photos.bellhanley.com/Timeline

I know this isn't what you're looking for...but it does illustrate a nice feature of Smugmug - the ability to add pages (though I'm not sure if all plans get that feature or not).

jemostrom

Thanks for the idea, I will think about this and try to figure something that fits my needs

leftquark

All galleries can be sorted by Date Taken, so they should display chronologically. Are you trying to view more than 1 gallery by time or would that work for you?

jemostrom

I was trying to see if there was some way of trying to imitate the timeline organization of Flickr/Google Photos. In other words, having all photos in a timeline and then be able to put photos in one or more albums. I don't know if it sensible to do this with one "timeline album" and then collect photos in other albums (I couldn't find if there are a maximum number of photos in one album).

However, flickr/google photos have this feature where it's fairly easy to scroll to a specific place in the timeline - which I don't think I can easily do using Smugmug.

So I suspect that to do this in Smugmug I have to rethink my organization a bit.

I would love to hear any ideas for how to do this.