How do you organise your galleries??

Rhuarc

This question is aimed more at the regular joe's, and not so much at the professionals, although maybe they'll have some input on this as well. I'm having trouble figuring out how I want to organise my site. I basically like to organise things in two ways. One is I like to be able to group my shots by the trip that I took them on. So say all the pictures from Christmas vacation would go into one gallery. Then I also set up a Weekly gallery, where all of my general day to day shots I take live. Doing it this way makes it easy for people to keep track of what pictures are new on the site, and what they have already seen.

But at the same time I want to be able to group all of my macro flower shots into one gallery, or all my shots in downtown Seattle. I'll try to outline it below.

-Category 1 (Holidays)
--Gallery 1 (Christmas 2007)
---Picture 1
---Picture 2
--Gallery 2 (Memorial Day 2007)
---Picture 3
---Picture 4

-Category 2 (Cities)
--Virtual Gallery 3 (Seattle)
---Picture 1 (would just be the same picture as in Gallery 1, just used in a second gallery)
---Picture 3 (would just be the same picture as in Gallery 2, just used in a second gallery)
--Virtual Gallery 4 (Tampa)
---Picture 2 (would just be the same picture as in Gallery 1, just used in a second gallery)
---Picture 4 (would just be the same picture as in Gallery 2, just used in a second gallery)

So in the above example the base pictures would reside in the Holidays Galleries. But then in any Category I wanted I could create virtual galleries that I could contain pictures from any of the non-virtual galleries on my site. Does this make any sense? This way it would be really easy for people who visit the site regularly to see when I post up the pictures from the latest holiday or vacation or outing. But if someone wanted to come on and see all my pictures of Seattle they would be accessible from a virtual gallery.

Is something like this in the works, or even on the radar as a feature? And if it isn't, how can I get the closest to this feature right now?

Thanks so much!!

PBolchover

What you want is doable via keyword galleries. Simply mark all of the photos you wish in one of your "virtual galleries" with the same keyword.

If you are a Power User, then you could create a gallery redirect, to enable the keyword search to appear in a category. If not, then I am afraid that you would have to link to these searches in gallery descriptions / captions, or possibly host a look-alike page on another server.

Rhuarc

PBolchover wrote:

What you want is doable via keyword galleries. Simply mark all of the photos you wish in one of your "virtual galleries" with the same keyword.

If you are a Power User, then you could create a gallery redirect, to enable the keyword search to appear in a category. If not, then I am afraid that you would have to link to these searches in gallery descriptions / captions, or possibly host a look-alike page on another server.

Sounds promising.

Questions,

1) How do I create a gallery redirect basedoff of a keyword
2) Could I put the gallery redirect on the main home page so that it looked like it was just another category? Meaning that it would have a thumbnail and could have the same font as the regular category, but when I clicked on it it would take me to that keyword gallery

PBolchover

If you want a Category to redirect, then find the thread describing "Vanity URLs" (look in the advanced FAQ).

This allows you to redirect URLs of the form
http://yoursite.smugmug.com/sometext
to any URL you wish.
To redirect to a keyword gallery, simply navigate to view that gallery, and cut-and-paste the URL to the relevant point in the Vanity URL script.

To make the category appear on your front page, you need to create a "sometext" category as well as the "sometext" Vanity URL. Add a single (public) gallery to this category, with a single photo that you wish to use as the category thumbnail.

This would lead to the following situation
http://yoursite.smugmug.com/sometext will redirect to your specified URL
http://yoursite.smugmug.com/sometext/ will go to the category

Fortunately, if you click on the category in your homepage, smugmug does _NOT_ add the trailing "/", which means that when you click on the category in your homepage, you will be sent to the redirected URL (ie the keyword page), and _not_ to the category. [Should you wish to enter the category yourself, then you can manually add the trailing slash.]

I hope that this makes sense,

Paul

Rhuarc

Is this possible to do using sub categories? I'd like to use the category Places, and then have subcategories send me to different keywords.

PBolchover

Rhuarc wrote:

Is this possible to do using sub categories? I'd like to use the category Places, and then have subcategories send me to different keywords.

Yes, it's possible to do it via sub-categories (via a modification of the gallery redirect script). But, if you're going to that level, I'd suggest just using galleries as redirects, rather than subcategories, since it will allow better integration of any redirects with any genuine galleries within the Places category.

Rhuarc

Hmm, ok, so I put the following code into the customizations section

var vanityTable = 
   {
   	gallery/2990749: "http://wendell.smugmug.com/keyword/seattle"
   	
   };
   
   function CheckRedirects()
   {
   	// get the path from the current URL, 
   	// convert it to lowercase and remove the leading slash
   	var path = window.location.pathname.toLowerCase().substr(1);
   	
 	var newURL = vanityTable[path];		// look it up in our table
  	if (newURL != undefined) 		// if we find it in the table
   	{
 		window.location = newURL;		// go to the new URL
   	}
   }
   
   CheckRedirects();

The gallery/2990749 is the dummy gallery I created. This resides in the Places category. It doesn't seem to be working though. Any ideas?

Thanks!

Edit: Ahh, the gallery/##### has to go in quote marks "gallery/######"

Thanks for all the help!!

PBolchover

You should probably modify the script so that you are only redirected when you are not logged in. Look up the gallery redirect script in the Advanced FAQ, and you'll see an example.