Need Help

David Hartcorn

Hi-
I'm new to smugmug. I need help in setting up my site, and have limited skills in these sort of things.... I have all my photos really to upload, but am getting bogged down in the set-up-

Bottom line, I will pay someone out there for their time ( $40 /hour ) for helping me jump start this.

Send me a reply and we'll get started-
Thanks

John Mueller

Hi David,
Im sure you will get responses with help that will cost you nothing.
Post what you want to do.
John

Nikolai

As John said..
What is it exactly that you want to accomplish?
Smugmug/dgrin is a community, so you can receive a lot of help for free - provided you can express your specific needs (AND willing to follow the advises.)

HTH

Cheers!

David Hartcorn

MHJS wrote:

Hi David,
Im sure you will get responses with help that will cost you nothing.
Post what you want to do.
John

Hi John-

I have a bunch of questions that realte to Catagories, and Subcatagories, and how they relate to the galleries...

For example, I have a gallery named Urban. Within that gallery, I'd like to have sections called a variety of things, as I have 5-6 differnt urban themes.

Also, how do I see what a person viewing the site would see?

How do i get that little arrow to allow the viewer to scroll through the pictures?



Stuff like that- problem is, I'm much more a verbal learner that from typing, and I cant find answers to these on the help section that make sense.

can you offer any input????

Allen

David Hartcorn wrote:

Hi John-

I have a bunch of questions that realte to Catagories, and Subcatagories, and how they relate to the galleries...

For example, I have a gallery named Urban. Within that gallery, I'd like to have sections called a variety of things, as I have 5-6 differnt urban themes.

Create Sub-categories for these.

Also, how do I see what a person viewing the site would see?

Just log off.

How do i get that little arrow to allow the viewer to scroll through the pictures?

Log off and you'll see what everyone does. Arrows don't show when logged on.

Stuff like that- problem is, I'm much more a verbal learner that from typing, and I cant find answers to these on the help section that make sense.

can you offer any input????

Just a quick answer to get you started.
Good luck and keep those questions coming. We've all been thru this already.
Al

Nikolai

Smugmug 101
Technically speaking, this is a typical case of RTFM, but since I asked for direct questions and you did asked them - here you are:-)

First thing you need to understand is that smugmug (SM) data structure is a simple tree (same as in your explorer/finder), which is limited by the level of nesting.
In a regular file system you can have folder Downtown within folder LA within folder CA within folder US within folder Urban. This structure would make you full path look like this:
Urban>US>CA>LA>Downtown

SM offers you a highly simplified and abbreviated version of this tree-like structure, where all you can have is either 2 or 3 levels of nesting:

• First level is mandatory and is called Category. there is a whole bunch of predifined categories. Originally only Pro users could create custom ones, but if I'm not mistaken, recent changes made this feature availalbe for everybody
• Last level is mandatory and is called a Gallery (or an album). You can only put your pictures/videos to a gallery, you cannot add them directly to category.
• To accomodate more sophisticated users, SM also offers a non-mandatory 2d level of nesting, called SubCategory. If it exists, it's always below some Category. Galleries can be located directly in Categories, or in some SubCategories, but cannot exist by themselves.

Bottom line: you can only have two possible combinations:

1. category>gallery, or
2. category>subcategory>gallery

It is that simple.

Now - where do you put your pictures?
You need to create a gallery first. Once created, click on the link add photos, and follow the instructions. Later you will be able to move gallery to another category/subcategory, or move pictures between the galleries.

In your particular case it looks like Urban is not a gallery, but rather a Category. Only category or sucategory can contain multiple extra structural elements (like subcategories or galleries), gallery can only contain files (images and videos).

Hope it makes sense..

Cheers

David Hartcorn

I assume RTFM means read the manual....

I did read it, but I greww up with in an analog world, and am light years behind more sophisticated users. But, I am trying...

thanks for you help-

Nikolai

You got it:-)

David Hartcorn wrote:

I assume RTFM means read the manual....

Basically, yes:-)

David Hartcorn wrote:

I did read it, but I grew up within an analog world, and am light years behind more sophisticated users.

Once you grasp the idea of having the following structure in place:

category (standard or custom) 
  optional subcategory (always custom) 
	 gallery (aka album, always custom)
		your images/videos

everything else should really be not that hard..

David Hartcorn wrote:

But, I am trying...

.. and as long as you do, you'll be receiveing a lot of help here:-)

David Hartcorn wrote:

thanks for you help-

You're very welcome!

Cheers!