How to change pages hierarchy?

fabthi

Hi all
I'd like to change the pages hierarchy in my website.
For instance I now have:
mysite.com/weddings
mysite.com/weddings-info
mysite.com/weddings-in-otherlocations
where I'd rather like to have
mysite.com/weddings/images
mysite.com/weddings/images2
mysite.com/weddings/images3
mysite.com/weddings/info
mysite.com/weddings/otherlocations
and so on for other pages/galleries/folders that might be related to the same "weddings" topic
How can I make such changes, if possible???
And how should I pick settings to place a page under a given hierarchy?
thanks

Ferguson

Do you want to do so and still have the existing links work also? If so, there is no good way to do it. There is an awkward way.

First answer: You can move galleries and folders around in Organizer. It's easy and fast and no need to upload photos again. But...

Let's say you create the folder /weddings/images, and drag all the existing items into that. As you do so, the existing links do not work. If you had links to a gallery you gave to a customer, that link will not function. If you posted actual images in forums, those images retroactively disappear when you move the folders or galleries around.

If that's not a problem great. The only other catch is if you use a publishing tool, like the Lightroom plugin, you have to sync it after you rearrange so it knows the new structure (there's a check box).

Now if it is a problem that the URL's change, there is an approach but it is really ugly and awful. You have to leave everything where it is, and then ALSO create the new structure. Then for galleries that would be in two places, create the a gallery of the same name in the new place and make it a smart gallery which includes photos from the original location. This means you only have one copy of the images (so no need to upload again), but the images can be found in the old location (because you did not move it) and in the new location because they are automatically included as virtual copies by the smart gallery. Tedious and confusing but it works.

fabthi

Hi Ferguson
thanks a lot for your contribution and your clear explanations!
I don't have problems in changing the URLs so I will go fot the easier way, as you suggest.
Only, I'm not sure tuo understand the difference between folders and pages.

Ferguson

A folder holds other things, such as other (sub) folders, galleries, and pages.

A Gallery is a "normal" collection of photos, which have many ways of being presented automatically. A gallery cannot contain other galleries nor folders nor pages (though links in text on a gallery, e.g. in the description, can point to them).

A Page is something of a blank canvas on which you can place text, individual photos, widgets that do things like slideshows, etc. It is not as automatic as a gallery (and in particular you cannot "upload to a page" and the photos have to be elsewhere in a gallery). It is Smugmug's mechanism of a general purpose web page. A Page does not contain galleries, folders, or other pages (but again, can link to them and display them, but they are not "in" a page as photos are "in" a gallery).

Generally speaking you build your hierarchy by creating folders, subfolders, sub-sub-folders as deeply nested as you like, and at the bottom of each such limb are galleries. You do not NEED to have any folders at all, all your galleries could be at the top, but generally people build a tree of folders with galleries separated by some aspect - genre, subject, date, etc.

fabthi

Thanks a lot, very well explained!

fabthi

@Ferguson said:
A folder holds other things, such as other (sub) folders, galleries, and pages.

A Gallery is a "normal" collection of photos, which have many ways of being presented automatically. A gallery cannot contain other galleries nor folders nor pages (though links in text on a gallery, e.g. in the description, can point to them).

A Page is something of a blank canvas on which you can place text, individual photos, widgets that do things like slideshows, etc. It is not as automatic as a gallery (and in particular you cannot "upload to a page" and the photos have to be elsewhere in a gallery). It is Smugmug's mechanism of a general purpose web page. A Page does not contain galleries, folders, or other pages (but again, can link to them and display them, but they are not "in" a page as photos are "in" a gallery).

Generally speaking you build your hierarchy by creating folders, subfolders, sub-sub-folders as deeply nested as you like, and at the bottom of each such limb are galleries. You do not NEED to have any folders at all, all your galleries could be at the top, but generally people build a tree of folders with galleries separated by some aspect - genre, subject, date, etc.

Hi Linwood
still rather puzzled of what a folders is actually for.
I published a folder, http://www.fabiothian.com/Weddings, that contains a gallery and pages but honestly I can't make sense of why I should have it and what I should do with it.
The Gallery icon is an ugly photo that I haven't selected and I can't find how to pick another one to be displayed instead
Not least, its' not clear how I could make it visually more appealing

denisegoldberg

@fabthi said:

I published a folder, http://www.fabiothian.com/Weddings, that contains a gallery and pages but honestly I can't make sense of why I should have it and what I should do with it.
The Gallery icon is an ugly photo that I haven't selected and I can't find how to pick another one to be displayed instead
Not least, its' not clear how I could make it visually more appealing

The icon representing a page can be changed by assigning a feature image to the page.

While on the page:
Customize...
Page Settings...
Select Feature Image and browse to the desired image

fabthi

Thanks Denise!
However my main concern at now is "if and why" I should use Folders.
A little bit like the "meaning of life"..

Ferguson

You actually do very little with a folder per se, it is just a container that provides structure. If (for example in lightroom) you have a place to put a description, it appears to be ignored (why? Ask Smugmug).

As a container it provides structure in the URL's to which you refer to the galleries, e.g. site/a/g1, site/a/g2, site/b/g1 the "a" and "b" are folders, and provide for different hierarchy. In fact, the "g1" I showed there are different galleries, even if they have the same name. I use them, for example, to specify a sport (e.g. Women's Basketball, Men's Basketball, Volleyball, etc.), and within them I put chronologically ordered galleries of individual games.

Here is an example of a folder:

captivephotons.com/Events/FGCUMBB

By default a folder has more or less what you see here (though mine is slightly customized). You can further customize it, much like a page, by adding HTML content to it, or CSS blocks from the customize menu, but in terms of templated designs (i.e. where you do not intend to customize each folder individually) there is not a lot you can do, since there is no folder level content (such as descriptions) that Smugmug exposes - just contained folders and galleries.

If you are doing CSS customization, folders do provide a context for that. by that I mean (taking my example above of site/a/g1, site/a/g2, site/b/g1) that the folder's inclusion in the path ("a" or "b" here, never both at the same time) is visible as a set of identifiers in the actual pages HTML, and you can use them as selectors for CSS. As a more clear example consider these two galleries:

captivephotons.com/Events/FGCUMBB/GSU121316/
captivephotons.com/Events/FSW/MBB/PalmBeach121516/

Inside of them, there is a selector that looks for the FGCUMBB or FSW folder (by its internal and rather obscure and arcane ID), and picks which logo appears at the top of the page. This is done identically in every folder and gallery, so I do not have to do individual customization, but instead relies on where in the overall folder structure a gallery falls to decide what logo to show. In that way folders provide the mechanics for this automated customization by existence, not by anything they actually do. You can of course do this in a brute force way by customizing each folder and gallery manually, but that is a lot of work if you have a lot of galleries. One might use different color schemes or logos for weddings vs. portraits vs. events or whatever matters to you for your site.

Think of folders as scaffolding on which you hang things; they provide the shape of your site moreso than content (again, they can have content, but are not as friendly to that). Without folders your site is flat -- just a bunch of galleries. With one level you have what might be categories - one level of individuality (Weddings, portraits, etc.). If you use two levels you get more, e.g. in my case schools are the first level, sport type the second.

One thing of note- navigation can follow folders. Smugmug's menus for example can auto-populate from folder contents to build links. But you can force navigation manually as well, and navigate in a different path than the folders. The drop down menu at the top of my site, for example, has an additional level for FGCU that is not reflected in the folder structure (because I did not think of it at the time I created it, notice in the example FGCUMBB is a folder as opposed to FGCU/MBB which would be a nested folder inside a folder). When I added FSW I redid the menu navigation manually (tediously) to circumvent the actual folder structure, but to be consistent.

That's one bad thing about Smugmug folder structures -- They ARE the URL builder, so if you decide to rearrange folders, URL's change automatically - you cannot override that. You can override it in menus, but the actual URL's are tied intimately to the folder/gallery structure.

denisegoldberg

@fabthi said:
However my main concern at now is "if and why" I should use Folders.
A little bit like the "meaning of life"..

I think your site would be cleaner without presenting folders at the top level. For example, for your Weddings menu entry, don't include the "weddings" pick in the drop-down entry (you can just leave the link portion blank instead of specifying the folder name). Include only the three picks that go to a page or a gallery. That is, allow the viewer to pick one of the three elements in the drop-down but not the top level Weddings folder.

I find folders helpful for organizing my site. If you look at the "gallery" page on my site (at http://www.denisegoldberg.com/Gallery/), each of the entries on that page is a folder. Once the folder is clicked the viewer is taken to the selected folder which gives access to the galleries.

fabthi

@Ferguson @denisegoldberg Phew! Gotcha!