ShareGroup issues
BECoggins
Registered Users Posts: 6 Beginner grinner
Although I've been with SmugMug for three years now, this is actually my first DGrin post...
I set up a ShareGroup a few days ago and had a lot of trouble getting the gallery arrangement right. The arranging tool appeared to work fine, but each time I went back to the ShareGroup page, the changes wouldn't have stuck, or some changes would have stuck but not others. A couple of times moving a single gallery wrecked the entire ordering, as if they were rearranged at random.
The relevant ShareGroup is here:
http://becoggins.smugmug.com/share/NwxJQVXKQaqvg
...but note that I eventually got the order right. A support person might try creating a new ShareGroup out of the same galleries and then rearranging them to match the order here.
On a side note, how are the galleries arranged in the ShareGroup gallery picker? It seems quasi-sorted by creation time, but with a dose of randomness thrown in.
As a general comment, I wish we had a better mechanism for doing something like this than ShareGroups or at least the current ShareGroups. The purpose this time was to collect together, in one place, all of the galleries related to a recent trip I took. The fact that the breadcrumb doesn't link back to the ShareGroup when you view a gallery in the ShareGroup context is a big problem. I would love to be able to put the ShareGroup in the featured galleries so that someone could click to it and have a travelogue, but that isn't possible without hacking, and I already do enough programming in my day job. And it seems silly to re-upload all the files. So instead I have to email out the ShareGroup link.
I was searching the forum archives and found all the old threads on the keyword URL capabilities. It would seem like some combination of keywords and timeline would allow something like this to be made, but then how would you add the gallery descriptions and set up the gallery configuration? Not to mention needing a page to serve as the home for all the different keyword galleries from this trip. I'm sure someone has a way to hack it, but I wish there were a way to do it from the UI.
The ideal solution would be a "virtual category" composed of "virtual galleries". I could not tell from the archives whether there was a promise that such a thing would happen some day? There has certainly been much clamoring for it...
Thanks,
Brian
I set up a ShareGroup a few days ago and had a lot of trouble getting the gallery arrangement right. The arranging tool appeared to work fine, but each time I went back to the ShareGroup page, the changes wouldn't have stuck, or some changes would have stuck but not others. A couple of times moving a single gallery wrecked the entire ordering, as if they were rearranged at random.
The relevant ShareGroup is here:
http://becoggins.smugmug.com/share/NwxJQVXKQaqvg
...but note that I eventually got the order right. A support person might try creating a new ShareGroup out of the same galleries and then rearranging them to match the order here.
On a side note, how are the galleries arranged in the ShareGroup gallery picker? It seems quasi-sorted by creation time, but with a dose of randomness thrown in.
As a general comment, I wish we had a better mechanism for doing something like this than ShareGroups or at least the current ShareGroups. The purpose this time was to collect together, in one place, all of the galleries related to a recent trip I took. The fact that the breadcrumb doesn't link back to the ShareGroup when you view a gallery in the ShareGroup context is a big problem. I would love to be able to put the ShareGroup in the featured galleries so that someone could click to it and have a travelogue, but that isn't possible without hacking, and I already do enough programming in my day job. And it seems silly to re-upload all the files. So instead I have to email out the ShareGroup link.
I was searching the forum archives and found all the old threads on the keyword URL capabilities. It would seem like some combination of keywords and timeline would allow something like this to be made, but then how would you add the gallery descriptions and set up the gallery configuration? Not to mention needing a page to serve as the home for all the different keyword galleries from this trip. I'm sure someone has a way to hack it, but I wish there were a way to do it from the UI.
The ideal solution would be a "virtual category" composed of "virtual galleries". I could not tell from the archives whether there was a promise that such a thing would happen some day? There has certainly been much clamoring for it...
Thanks,
Brian
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Comments
Welcome to dgrin!
Thanks for the thorough explanation. I'll try and re-produce on my end.
Seems like a few of the gallery pickers are a bit random. This is on our list of future improvements we'd like to make. I'd like them all to work like the "add photos" menu, myself.
So, the original idea behind sharegroups was actually a way to give access to multiple private galleries at once, I believe. You're absolutely correct that once you click through to the gallery, navigating back to the sharegroup page requires your browser's back button (there are no breadcrumbs back to the sharegroup).
They weren't intended to function as a virtual category, and I'm not actually sure what a "virtual category" would entail. We certainly have had requests for "virtual galleries", wherein photos can be in two galleries at once without a re-upload. It sounds like you'd actually like the ability to make a certain gallery appear in more than one category. Is that correct?
-Anne
Thanks for writing back and looking into these things.
Yes, the "add photos" menu would be a better model.
Yes, that was the original purpose for them as I remember. However, even as a way of distributing multiple private galleries, the navigation issues in the ShareGroup are problematic. The private gallery breadcrumbs on my site are completely useless, since the categories are composed solely of private galleries, and thus the breadcrumb can only take the user to places that look empty. It would be an improvement if the breadcrumbs could be made context-dependent. Since access to the private galleries is itself dependent on having the sharegroup, there must be knowledge of the context somewhere. Not saying it would be easy to implement...
Yes, that is what I am looking for. I may not be using the terminology from the forums correctly. My wish would be to have ways to create "virtual galleries" that were composed of photos selected from other galleries, by keyword or timestamp or manual selection or some sort of union/intersection logic. A "virtual gallery" would not actually own the photos it displayed but rather display photos from other galleries. When I said "virtual category" I was thinking by analogy, of a category that did not have galleries of its own but rather showed galleries from elsewhere.
However, thinking about it some more, the "virtual" terminology is actually needless. Really what one wants is for a gallery to display both its photos and links to photos, and for a category to display both its galleries and links to galleries. Thus in simple form one would have something like UNIX symbolic links. But the more exciting possibility would be to let galleries include their own photos, links to photos as well as what amounts to query search results.
What I'm getting at would be a much more flexible way to build structure on a SmugMug page. For this trip of mine, I could create a category or sub-category. I could then make galleries for each day, build them up using timeline and keyword queries and explicit composition/linking operations, and set descriptions and gallery options for them. I could add some links to complete galleries from other categories as well as adding some actual galleries found only in that category.
If you know databases, what I'm saying is that it would be nice if galleries could be not just "tables" but also "queries".
Probably a very tall order to create, but you asked...
Brian