Folders upload as galleries not folders

tkreyche

I'm a new user, uploading a large number of photos from a local drive. The photos are in folders, some folder names are year-month-day names and others are by subject. Some of them have sub-folders and some do not.

When I upload the folders, the folders that do not have sub-folders appear as galleries, not folders. The folders that have subfolders appear as folders and subfolders, as expected. The problem is that the Photo Organizer lists the folders first, followed by the Galleries. So I don't see a continuous list sorted by name. For example a folder called 2019_6_20 is followed by a whole series of folders, but the Gallery named 2019_6_21 is way down on the list, out of sight. So I don't see everything in the order I need.

Is there a workaround for this, besides some manual tedious process to manipulate the contents of all the local folder?

thanks, Tom

rnrjosh

On SmugMug, only Galleries can contain images. Folders cannot contain images directly — folders can only contain galleries, other subfolders, or pages. So, if a folder you are uploading doesn't contain any subfolders (only photos), that will be created as a gallery on SmugMug. There's not a way to change this behavior, but you are always welcome to create more folders/subfolders later at any time. This can be done in the Organizer tool by clicking on the folder you want (or your name at the top to make a top-level folder) and clicking Create > Folder. You could then move existing galleries into the folder if you like.

Another thing you can do is to change how the folders/galleries are displayed/sorted on your site itself. If you go to your /browse page, you can click Customize > Content and Design, and edit the Folders, Galleries and Pages content block. The default sort for this content block is "by Organizer Position". You can change the sorting option to sort by Name instead. This would display the folders/galleries at the given level sorted by name, which would mix the folders/galleries together, sorted alphabetically, rather than putting the folders before the galleries. Do note, in the Organizer tool, you'll still see the folders appear before the galleries in the hierarchy.

tkreyche

Well that's not very user friendly - when I want to re-create a folder structure from my local drive I expect to be able to do it, rather than have SmugMug decide based on its own rules that my folder is actually a Gallery rather than the folder that I intended.

The underlying purpose is to have a consistent structure at a specific level. Namely I want everything to be in folders for organizational purposes. During the upload process it by default it should keep the existing folder structure and if you want folders converted to Galleries then it should be an option.

When uploading a very large number of folders it's simply not realistic to manually manipulate them individually to force SmugMug to see them as folders. Yes I can and probably will write a script to do this but really it should not be necessary.