How to organize groups of Galleries, comparable to Phanfare's album sections?

mwac_nd

At Phanfare, one of my use cases was sharing a season's worth of pictures with other parents on my sons' sports teams. I'd have one album for the season, then I'd sort the pictures into sections, one for each game of the season. It helped break up hundreds of pictures into more easily consumable chunks. (Or similarly, a year's worth of pictures of school events with other parents in my son's class, divided into sections for the different events that happened that year.)

Then I'd send the parents an "external link" to the main album, and they could look at all the pictures in that album but with no other access to the rest of the albums on my site.

I'm struggling to figure out what the comparable setup would be in SmugMug parlance. I thought perhaps it was a Folder with each individual game as a Gallery. I figured out how to prevent visitors to a specific Gallery from getting to my other albums - I set Gallery permissions to "Unlisted" and turned on "Hide Owner" to hide the menu links to my other albums. But there doesn't seem to be a way to set that at the folder level so that I can share all the related Galleries at once, without exposing the rest of my site?

At this point it seems like my best bet is to just throw all the pictures together in one Gallery... unless there's a feature or nuance I'm missing? Is it possible to isolate a set of Galleries from the rest of your site without having to share each Gallery link separately?

mwac_nd

Still searching, but I think maybe Sharegroups is what I'm looking for...
http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93261?b_id=1644

leftquark

You're correct in that Hide Owner is only available at the Gallery Level, however, I believe you should be able to accomplish this with Folders and Galleries. Folders can be set to unlisted while the galleries inside are public. Likewise, you could just set all the Galleries to Unlisted and send out links to just those galleries that you want them to browse.

It sounds like your real issue, though, is that you just don't want the visitors to that Folder being able to see your Menu with links to your other galleries. It's not the most elegant solution, but with a line or two of some CSS code we can hide your menu / breadcrumb when someone visits that Folder. You could still see the menu and breadcrumbs but the non-owner visitors wouldn't be able to see the menu. Then you could set the Folders/Galleries however you'd like. Would that work? If so, let me know and I'll reach out to you with additional assistance.

mwac_nd

Yes, exactly. In general I like to share specific Galleries (or, as described in this instance, multiple related Galleries) with specific groups of people, and not give anyone a global view of ALL my Galleries. For my immediate need, I think the Sharegroups feature gets me most of the way there, with the exception of having a link back to my homepage (which has no public Galleries, so I guess not that big of a deal, for now).

I appreciate the tip about possibly hiding menus using the CSS code - I will keep that in mind and may come back to that down the road. In the meantime, I think I need to play around with my site organization some more to figure out what I want to do there. Thanks!!

KarinaExPhanfare

This is describing exactly what I am needing too. I previously had many subsites that I had set to either publicly visible or password accessed for various uses for other people that I did not want to have access to the rest of my albums that were solely for family and close friends.

I have utterly no idea what CSS is. I liked being able to just tick a box that told me exactly how and where my album/site visibility was.

bob1854

I've created a site which essentially has separate sub-sites for each sports team that my daughter is on. Each team has its own separate link and password to access the photos. All members of a team share the same password. It took me a long time to figure out how to do this, but its very simple to do. I didn't find any information in the help screens to tell me how to do this. It took a lot of trial and error to get it right. I've create a separate sub-site for each team year. The password for each sub-site controls all the photos/videos underneath it. Essentially think of each sub-site as a stand alone silo. I've tried sharing photos between sub-sites but the security from the original sub-site goes with it to the other sub-sites. I've concluded that its simpler for me to upload the photos separately for each sub-site. However, its not common that I want to show the same photo in more than one sub-site. Is this anything close to what you are trying to do?

MikeLaurel

@bob1854 said:
I've created a site which essentially has separate sub-sites for each sports team that my daughter is on.

I ended up doing a similar approach for different groups. I looked at sharegroups, but that didn't do what I needed. I forget why, but I probably posted my thoughts on another thread.

I've tried sharing photos between sub-sites but the security from the original sub-site goes with it to the other sub-sites.

Yes. I find that painful. On Phanfare, the security was set at the site level, not at the source level. While SmugMug has more fine-grained control, I usually don't want that. I wish there was a security setting for a gallery that was "Private for the original photo AND controlled by the gallery or folder to which it is collected."

I've concluded that its simpler for me to upload the photos separately for each sub-site. However, its not common that I want to show the same photo in more than one sub-site.

Yes, if you don't need to share photos with others, I agree this seems to be the best approach on SmugMug. Unfortunately, my most common scenario is galleries shared with different groups, which is a lot of tedious work. On Phanfare all I had to do was check a box and it was done and they got email notification if I had it set up. Really nice and easy.