Migrating from Coppermine to SM; Advice pls

wslam

With the help of Star Explorer, I managed to upload over 6GB of photos and put them in the right albums in Smugmug over the weekend. Without S*E, I could not have done it!

However, after messing with the album arrangement over the weekend, I am still not entirely happy with Smugmug's way is.

1) Organization:
Namely, the lack of multi-subcat support is messing me up.

For example, I take photos of my super niece every weekend. On avg, I end up with about 120 photos per week, and in the old days when I was running my own Coppermine server, the photos are arranged in the following:

Home\Kids\Niece Name\Year\YYMMDD

Since there are so many albums, I find it most logical to arrange them by date.

I can't do this with SM. I am forced to getting rid of the Year Sub-subcat.

I end up with hundreds of galleries on one page. SM does not break it down to pages. The page ends up to be way too long and requires scrolling.

Any advice for this newbie?

2) Is there a way to change settings in bulk BY category/sub cat?
Problem is, since I use DATE as the GALLERY names, I end up with a bunch of dates when I hit BULK settings. And since many of them are password protected, I basically have no idea what those galleries are! The way SM functions are designed right now assume you use meaningful and unique galleries names. Then why have Cat and sub Cat?!

3) I did not mark my photos to be not 'buyable' in many galleries. Is there a way I can batch this variable?!

Thank you in advance.

ws.smugmug.com

wslam

One more example why I think ONE extra level of subcat will REALLY help.

I have the following:

Cat \Subcat \Camera Model\Gallery
Hobbies\Cameras\Sony R1 \Test 1
\Test 2 etc...
Hobbies\Cameras\Canon 5D \Test 1
\Test 2 etc...

Problem again! Gallery names will be the same, or I can't differentiate the galleries even if I use cat and subcat...

Andy

Hi Wslam

You'll need to set a gallery template, for no prints offered (printing=no) and for the sort direction you prefer. Then, apply it to each gallery. I'm sorry, there's not a way to do this in bulk.

As to organization, yes, we have

Homepage>category>subcategory>gallery.

However, you can use keywords to creat any variations on this you can image. And, you can use your customization ability, to further organize.

All the best,

Mike Lane

wslam wrote:

1) Organization:
Namely, the lack of multi-subcat support is messing me up.

For example, I take photos of my super niece every weekend. On avg, I end up with about 120 photos per week, and in the old days when I was running my own Coppermine server, the photos are arranged in the following:

Home\Kids\Niece Name\Year\YYMMDD

Since there are so many albums, I find it most logical to arrange them by date.

I can't do this with SM. I am forced to getting rid of the Year Sub-subcat.

I end up with hundreds of galleries on one page. SM does not break it down to pages. The page ends up to be way too long and requires scrolling.

Any advice for this newbie?

My advice is to get rid of the YYMMDD rather than the Year. Then you can keyword the pics with the YYMMDD info and put links to keyword pages that are something like this username.smugmug.com/keyword/YYMMDD in that gallery. Think of that as a filter or a means of getting basically infinite heirarchy.

wslam

Mike Lane wrote:

My advice is to get rid of the YYMMDD rather than the Year. Then you can keyword the pics with the YYMMDD info and put links to keyword pages that are something like this username.smugmug.com/keyword/YYMMDD in that gallery. Think of that as a filter or a means of getting basically infinite heirarchy.

Thank you. So it seems like 'Keyword' is the key to Smugmug. I never liked Keywords, it's a 'photo specific' tool, not for a gallery of photos... But if that is what I have to settle with, I will try.

But when my photos are uploaded, it seems that SM uses diff values from the metadata to generate the keywords, I now have very strange keywords. Is there a way for me to remove ALL keywords from ALL photos? I have 50k photos, and don't know how many galleries...

bham

Just an idea. You could do use niece year for the category and then have a sub cat and still gallery. Or niece for category, year for subcat, then etc for gallery.

Just a couple of ideas.

Also in customizing your gallery you can choose to sort by date taken of the images in the gallery.

wslam

bham wrote:

Just an idea. You could do use niece year for the category and then have a sub cat and still gallery. Or niece for category, year for subcat, then etc for gallery.

Just a couple of ideas.

Also in customizing your gallery you can choose to sort by date taken of the images in the gallery.

Thank you for your advice.
I thought of that, but it looks so not elegant. I used to have just four top level categories: Events, People, Places, Portfolio.

It was easy and covered all my needs. But I can't do that anymore. I am frankly a little surprised that not more people are asking for more flexibility on the Cat\SubCat structure. Coppermine does it, so does most open source photo galleries. Keywords are 'cool' but it takes a LOT of work to make it really work.