organization - category, subcat, gallery

pigeon · January 30, 2007

Before I upload many photos, I'd like to get my organization squared away. Right now on my site, prints.pigeongallery.com, I have the structure:

Home page
Sports (category) --->
Carolina Hurricanes (gallery)

What I'd like to do is this:

Home page
Sports (category) --->
Ice Hockey (subcategory) --->
Carolina Hurricanes (gallery)

I'm viewing by "category", not gallery, and that works well.

Problem is - in the second scenario - the "Ice Hockey" subcat and "Just for Fun" gallery don't display next to each other; they are separated.

I like this look: http://pigeon.smugmug.com/Sports
but once I add the subcat it screws up the layout.

Seems that photo layout and organization isn't easy to navigate. I wish we had unlimited layers - so that you click through levels until you get to a gallery - that you're not limited in this way.

I'd like to be able to do this:
Home page
Sports (category) --->
Ice Hockey (subcategory) --->
Carolina Hurricanes (subcategory)
January 29, 2007 (gallery)

...and to be able to have galleries next to categories and subcategories - so that it's transparent.

Guess I'm offering a feature suggestion, but also it's a question on how to manage my site now.

thanks,
teresa

Mike Lane · January 30, 2007

pigeon wrote:

Before I upload many photos, I'd like to get my organization squared away. Right now on my site, prints.pigeongallery.com, I have the structure:

Home page
Sports (category) --->
Carolina Hurricanes (gallery)

What I'd like to do is this:

Home page
Sports (category) --->
Ice Hockey (subcategory) --->
Carolina Hurricanes (gallery)

I'm viewing by "category", not gallery, and that works well.

Problem is - in the second scenario - the "Ice Hockey" subcat and "Just for Fun" gallery don't display next to each other; they are separated.

I like this look: http://pigeon.smugmug.com/Sports
but once I add the subcat it screws up the layout.

Do you mean that your subcats are in one box and your cats are in another? If so, when you have all subcats they will all be in the same box. Does this help?

Seems that photo layout and organization isn't easy to navigate. I wish we had unlimited layers - so that you click through levels until you get to a gallery - that you're not limited in this way.

Ahhh heirarchy. IMHO, drilling down to 10000 sub-levels isn't my idea of a fun way to navigate a site. But that's just me.

I'd like to be able to do this:
Home page
Sports (category) --->
Ice Hockey (subcategory) --->
Carolina Hurricanes (subcategory)
January 29, 2007 (gallery)

...and to be able to have galleries next to categories and subcategories - so that it's transparent.

Guess I'm offering a feature suggestion, but also it's a question on how to manage my site now.

thanks,
teresa

Can I suggest an alternate? Perahps you have something like this:

Homepage
>Sports
>>Ice Hocky
>>>Carolina Hurricanes

Then you put all of your carolina hurricanes pics in the gallery regardless of the date they were shot. Think of it as a big bucket of carolina hurricanes pictures that you can pull from. But remember, and this is key, you must use keywords on each of the photos that corresponds to when each of the pics was taken (at a minimum).

So let's say you're starting with an empty gallery and you go shoot a game on the 31st of Jan 07. You photoshop those images and build a simple 2 step batch process that adds a bunch of keywords to each of those photos. Something like this:

Photography, Sports, Ice Hockey, Carolina Hurricanes, Opponet Name, Carolina, 31, Jan, January, 07, 2007, 31 Jan, 31 Jan 2007

Then you upload all those to your Carolina Hurricanes gallery. But say they played again on the 2nd of Feb. So you modify your batch process to make it Look like this:

Photography, Sports, Ice Hockey, Carolina Hurricanes, Opponet Name, Carolina, 2, 02, Feb, February, 07, 2007, 2 Feb, 02 Feb, 2 Feb 2007, 02 Feb 2007

Then you can simply create a link in your album description that takes a person to a keyword gallery for a specific date range. Something like "Click here to see Carolina Hurricanes Pics from 31 Jan 2007." And "Click here to see Carolina Hurricanes Pics from 02 Feb 2007." Then you simply link them to a link something like this:

http://pigeon.smugmug.com/keyword/Carolina+Hurricanes-2+Feb+07

You put a + sign wherever your keywords have a space in them and a - sign between separate keywords. That will take you to a special gallery that has all the images tagged with Carolina Hurricanes and "2 Feb 07".

Get creative with it. Go through and tag each photo with the names of the players that are in the photo and their numbers. Tag it with what is going on in the photo and anything else you can think of. That way if someone only wants pics of Sutherby from the 2 Feb game they can simply go to:

http://pigeon.smugmug.com/keyword/Carolina+Hurricanes-2+Feb+07-Sutherby

Or if they only want goalie shots from either team they can go to

http://pigeon.smugmug.com/keyword/Carolina+Hurricanes-2+Feb+07-Goalie

Make sense?

pigeon · January 30, 2007

Mike Lane wrote:

Do you mean that your subcats are in one box and your cats are in another? If so, when you have all subcats they will all be in the same box. Does this help?

Yep - that's what I mean. I know if they are all subcats, or if they are all categories, then they will be in the same box. But not everything will fall together that neatly.

Mike Lane wrote:

Ahhh heirarchy. IMHO, drilling down to 10000 sub-levels isn't my idea of a fun way to navigate a site. But that's just me.

Me too. I don't plan to make levels just for the sake of it. But then again I don't want to bunch all my photos together.

Mike Lane wrote:

Can I suggest an alternate? Perahps you have something like this:

Homepage
>Sports
>>Ice Hocky
>>>Carolina Hurricanes

That's the way I had it, but since Ice Hockey ended up next to a category, then the page looked screwy with them in different boxes. Looked like a mistake.

Mike Lane wrote:

Then you put all of your carolina hurricanes pics in the gallery regardless of the date they were shot. Think of it as a big bucket of carolina hurricanes pictures that you can pull from. But remember, and this is key, you must use keywords on each of the photos that corresponds to when each of the pics was taken (at a minimum).

So let's say you're starting with an empty gallery and you go shoot a game on the 31st of Jan 07. You photoshop those images and build a simple 2 step batch process that adds a bunch of keywords to each of those photos. Something like this:

Photography, Sports, Ice Hockey, Carolina Hurricanes, Opponet Name, Carolina, 31, Jan, January, 07, 2007, 31 Jan, 31 Jan 2007

Then you upload all those to your Carolina Hurricanes gallery. But say they played again on the 2nd of Feb. So you modify your batch process to make it Look like this:

Photography, Sports, Ice Hockey, Carolina Hurricanes, Opponet Name, Carolina, 2, 02, Feb, February, 07, 2007, 2 Feb, 02 Feb, 2 Feb 2007, 02 Feb 2007

Then you can simply create a link in your album description that takes a person to a keyword gallery for a specific date range. Something like "Click here to see Carolina Hurricanes Pics from 31 Jan 2007." And "Click here to see Carolina Hurricanes Pics from 02 Feb 2007." Then you simply link them to a link something like this:

http://pigeon.smugmug.com/keyword/Carolina+Hurricanes-2+Feb+07

You put a + sign wherever your keywords have a space in them and a - sign between separate keywords. That will take you to a special gallery that has all the images tagged with Carolina Hurricanes and "2 Feb 07".

Get creative with it. Go through and tag each photo with the names of the players that are in the photo and their numbers. Tag it with what is going on in the photo and anything else you can think of. That way if someone only wants pics of Sutherby from the 2 Feb game they can simply go to:

http://pigeon.smugmug.com/keyword/Carolina+Hurricanes-2+Feb+07-Sutherby

Or if they only want goalie shots from either team they can go to

http://pigeon.smugmug.com/keyword/Carolina+Hurricanes-2+Feb+07-Goalie

Make sense?

The keywords make sense in theory, but I'll have to try it out. Bottom line is I want an easy way for folks to navigate to where they want to go. I don't know what the answer is. But I truly appreciate your suggestions and will see how I can incorporate keywords to make lots of images easier to navigate.

Does anyone have a sample - real page in action - where keywords are pre-set to help folks around? I like the idea of keywords, and also of folks being able to find my photos via keyword, but I don't want visitors to necessarily have to depend on them to "get there from here".

thanks,
teresa

PBolchover · February 2, 2007

pigeon wrote:

Does anyone have a sample - real page in action - where keywords are pre-set to help folks around? I like the idea of keywords, and also of folks being able to find my photos via keyword, but I don't want visitors to necessarily have to depend on them to "get there from here".

I have a Rogues Gallery on my site at
http://pbolchover.smugmug.com/rogues

When you click on the mug shot of the person, it takes you to all of their photos. (In fact, if I have enough photos of someone, I've got it set up to only display the "good" photos of that person.)

If people are interested, they can go from a photo in the keyword search, to the gallery containing the event where that photo was taken.

pigeon · February 3, 2007

thanks Paul for the idea.
Does anyone know if future versions of SmugMug will change how photos are organized - with more options?

thanks,
teresa

PBolchover wrote:

I have a Rogues Gallery on my site at
http://pbolchover.smugmug.com/rogues

When you click on the mug shot of the person, it takes you to all of their photos. (In fact, if I have enough photos of someone, I've got it set up to only display the "good" photos of that person.)

If people are interested, they can go from a photo in the keyword search, to the gallery containing the event where that photo was taken.

S&SPhoto · February 3, 2007

PBolchover wrote:

I have a Rogues Gallery on my site at
http://pbolchover.smugmug.com/rogues

When you click on the mug shot of the person, it takes you to all of their photos. (In fact, if I have enough photos of someone, I've got it set up to only display the "good" photos of that person.)

If people are interested, they can go from a photo in the keyword search, to the gallery containing the event where that photo was taken.

Paul,

That's pretty clever. Can you please share any information as to how you created this gallery (or is this actually a category or subcategory)? I see that most of the links on the thumbnails trigger some type of keyword search for the person in the picture.

Thanks.

Samir

PBolchover · February 3, 2007

S&SPhoto wrote:

Paul,

That's pretty clever. Can you please share any information as to how you created this gallery (or is this actually a category or subcategory)? I see that most of the links on the thumbnails trigger some type of keyword search for the person in the picture.

The page is actually an "html-only" page, with all of the mug shots written as html in the description box of photo-free gallery. (If you don't have a power account, then can get a similar effect by hosting the Rogues Gallery on a separate website.)

The way I generated the page is as follows:

1) Keyword every photo on the site with the name of each person in the photo.
2) Create a private gallery containing the images I wish to use as thumbnails for each person. ( This is at http://pbolchover.smugmug.com/gallery/1692150 ) NB: Use "Create a second copy" to move the photos into the thumnail gallery, to avoid losing the original.
3) Zoom the thumbnails of the photos in that gallery to give a square (1x1) thumbail that clearly shows the person's face. (For some people, I had to crop the photo first, to allow the thumbnail to zoom in far enough.)
4) Go to the keywords page
http://pbolchover.smugmug.com/keyword/
5) Save a copy of the keywords page on my local machine, removing all of the keywords that don't refer to people.
6) Edit the source of the keywords page in such as way as to change text like
[FONT=courier new,monospace] <a onmouseover="createHelpie(event[/FONT][FONT=courier new,monospace],'20 photos','','100');" onmouseout="removeHelpie();" class="keyeight keyword" href="/keyword/abbie" >abbie</a> <span class="title">·</span> [/FONT]

to text like
[FONT=courier new,monospace]<a onmouseout="removeHelpie();" class="keythree keyword" href=" http://pbolchover.smugmug[/FONT][FONT=courier new,monospace].com/keyword/abbie" onmouseover="createHelpie (event,'Abbie','','100');"><img src=" http://pbolchover.smugmug.[/FONT][FONT=courier new,monospace]com/photos/78216565-Th.jpg" class[/FONT][FONT=courier new,monospace]="imgBorder"/></a>
[/FONT]
(It is possible to do almost all of this in bulk for all of the keywords simultaneously, by judicious choice of suitable "Find and Replace" strings, as follows)
6a) Firstly, change all the "keyone" "keytwo" etc to "keythree" (this defines the text height)
6b) Remove the original onmouseover string (note that the string will vary according to the number of photos each person has - you'll have to run find-and-replace a few times)
6c) Replace the text between the two occurrances of "abbie" above
6d) Replace the text after the second occurance of "abbie".
7) You'll have to manually edit the number curresponding to the photo thumbnail. (Using -Ti instead of -Th gives smaller thumbnails
8) Save the page, and you should be done.

Another tip: I have an additional keyword "good". If I have lots of photos of a person, then I set up the Rogues gallery to only show "good" photos of that person; if I only have a few photos, then I set up the Rogues gallery to show all photos of that person.

S&SPhoto · February 4, 2007

PBolchover wrote:

The page is actually an "html-only" page, with all of the mug shots written as html in the description box of photo-free gallery. (If you don't have a power account, then can get a similar effect by hosting the Rogues Gallery on a separate website.)

The way I generated the page is as follows...

Paul,

Wow, that sure does require some effort. I'm in the process of keywording most of my photos, so hopefully I can implement the steps you describe in the near future. Thank you so much for describing your technique!

Thanks.

Samir

organization - category, subcat, gallery

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