Organizing categories and subs ideas

apexonephoto

Hello All,

I have a question about how I can make my galleries easier to navigate. I shoot racing almost exclusively. I go to racetracks 1 or 2 times a week, and would like some ideas on organizing. I currently have a category called RACING, within that I have my galleries named by their racing series name, racetrack, location and date. There can be 5 divisions of cars racing in one night, (Super Late Models, Late Models, Street Stocks, Mini Stocks, and Modifieds). Each division can also have a qualifying session, practice session, preliminary races and the main event or feature race. I can shoot almost 600 or so photos in a night. I have read in a few racing forums, that with over 58 pages and 9 photos, per page, that it would take forever to just browse my galleries. I would like to know if any event shooters have a quick way of organizing. I would like to have titles under the gallery thumbs, if possible. I know my site isn't too trick, I work and travel alot and the ease of Smugmug is what got me here. Sorry to ramble.

Thanks in Advance
James
www.apexonephoto.smugmug.com

Sheaf

It sounds as though you should be using sub-categories too.

It looks like all of your photos are actually racing photos, so the racing category probably shouldn't even exist.

Personally, I would do it something like this:

Choose categories by one or more of the limitations: date, racing series, location, etc. Then create 5 sub-categories for the types of cars and put the individual galleries in there.

Example gallery : Anderson Speedway July 15 2006 > CRA Street Stocks > Practice Session

It takes a bit of extra effort to do deep categorization, but it makes the viewing experience significantly better in many cases.
http://www.smugmug.com/help/upload-photo

Dna

I shoot lifesaving and my site is organised by Club --> Carnival --> Event
The feedback that I've had is that it is really easy to navigate and find the event that they want.

Dna

lsv.smugmug.com

pat.kane

Races easily lend themselves to using keywords, e.g., using the car numbers, which can make it easy for the drivers to find their pictures.

Check out this thread for a nifty implementation of the above:
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=38113

cjyphoto

Gee and I thought I was the only one who wanted searchable sub-GALLERIES! It seems more and more people are asking for this in a round about sort of way. Is it difficult to implement? Just wondering.

apexonephoto

Thanks for all the replies, I have changed some things, and think I am heading in a better direction. I need to be more effiecient, and this is a definite plus.

BenHorner

With regard to the sub-galleries what I would like to be able to do is password protect a category, not just a gallery. Then I can have one password entered by the user for an event and they can access all the galleries inside that category.

Is this do-able? It would also mean then that each gallery would have a proper thumbnail to show the user, rather than the padlock symbol.

bwg

BenHorner wrote:

With regard to the sub-galleries what I would like to be able to do is password protect a category, not just a gallery. Then I can have one password entered by the user for an event and they can access all the galleries inside that category.

Is this do-able? It would also mean then that each gallery would have a proper thumbnail to show the user, rather than the padlock symbol.

well, no and kinda yes.

you can't password protect a category, it's either site wide or at the gallery level.

however, if you feature a photo for a gallery it will show up instead of the padlock graphic.

hope that helps.

BenHorner

bigwebguy wrote:

well, no and kinda yes.

you can't password protect a category, it's either site wide or at the gallery level.

however, if you feature a photo for a gallery it will show up instead of the padlock graphic.

hope that helps.

Thanks for the info. I'll drop a note in the feature requests thread about password protected categories.