Organizational Tips from Ex-Flickr Users?

mpdehaan

I emailed support with a few suggestions about things I'm missing from Flickr and was very happy to see some great turnaround on response, even on a Saturday.

That being said, this is more of a user question than a support question.

For those of you that have migrated over from Flickr, what is your workflow around Galleries?

I typically add things to more than one set -- for instance, something might be in "Favorites", "Infrared", and "Beach" -- if a picture is in fact one of my favorite infrared pictures I took at the beach. Do you have a particular strategy for doing this? Or do you just use tags and organize based on the place instead? I'm thinking I probably need to go back through my "stream" and remove all the duplicates from the Flickr import.

The other thing I would ask, is how do you make use of "communities", or do you just do tag (keyword) searches? Communities seem to be primarily lists of galleries as opposed to photo pools, so I was wondering if people find those useful when wanting to look at other people's work, and whether that does in fact actually work or not.

Thanks!

ivar

Hello, and welcome to Digital Grin

SmugMug and Flickr, as you have noticed, have a different organizational system.

At this time, if you want to have one photo to be part of multiple galleries (sets) you can either have two copies of the same photo, or create a keyword gallery (sort of a virtual gallery) by using the same keyword for a certain group of photos.

Communities are a good thing to use when looking at (a specific type of) photos; (keyword)searches are great, but still a lot of people don't keyword their photos unfortunately. So you may miss out on a lot.

I'm not a Flickr user myself, really. I do have an account, but rarely use it. I started out on SmugMug.

We may have other refugees here that have some good things to say

mrcoons

To post a photo (or group of photos) in more than one gallery I just upload them to each gallery I want them in using either Smugbrowser or ACDSee Photo Manager. I do not do this all that often, typically only when I have a gallery set up for a specific lens or camera.

I then use the bulk update in each gallery to cut/paste the keywords in.

You can duplicate a photo(s) within a gallery and then batch move it to another gallery. This works fine for one or two images but when I have groups I just upload them again. Works faster for me.

The Flickr method does work very well for what it is intended to do but I see Flickr as a community tool not a photo management/storage/sales tool. I use Flickr to try to make my work known in my community but send my customers to my Smugmug site.

Hope this helps and I'm sure other will chime in eventually.

mpdehaan

Yes, I agree that it shouldn't try to copy Flickr in all community aspects, focus is good...

I still think it could benefit from having a greater focus on the "stream view" though (even though the Timeline provides this, you have to click a button or two to get there).

The idea being that you could visit yourname.smugmug.com and always see new content based on the latest thing the photographer did... that would be fairly nice to be able to enable without having to first submit the form to get to the timeline view.

On the other subject, Tags/keywords do effectively solve the photo in multiple galleries category, though if you could construct "smart albums" based on tags (and rearrange photos in those albums), though would be extremely impressive.

life

mpdehaan wrote:

though if you could construct "smart albums" based on tags (and rearrange photos in those albums), though would be extremely impressive.

I smuggled all my photos to SmugMug last night and I'm already missing this feature.

On flickr, I have my photos grouped in sets by events (birthdays, etc). I then create virtual sets based on tags to crosscut over these events. Mostly to create a set per friend, so that I have a set called "Photos of Fred" that contains all photos that are tagged "fred".

This does not seem to seem to be possible with SmugMug?

coolheadpat

Missing that, too
Hey community,

I was flirting with SmugMug and migrated some of my photos from Flickr. I like SmugMug a lot and would really like to order an account. However, there is one show stopper for me: Not beeing able to have one picture in a number of albums/categories. It would suffice, having a category that shows all images with a given tag. Is this really not possible right now? If not, is this something you guys plan to build into SmugMug very soon?

Cheers
Pat

PS: Actually, another thing. I've set the image size to large for my public galery, because I do not want to make my originals available to anyone. That works fine, except that I don't know how I, myself can view/download the originals. How do I do this?

If this is because people should use the order backup function, then I'd say, I'd still order a backup. I don't want to click on each file and select 'save image as...' if i lost my data. However, I do want to have access to a few of the original images with a web browser anytime. that's why i put my picutures online in the first place...

denisegoldberg

coolheadpat wrote:

...It would suffice, having a category that shows all images with a given tag.

You can use keywords to display all images with a given tag. Take a look at the find page on my site for an example.

coolheadpat wrote:

...I don't know how I, myself can view/download the originals. How do I do this?

I use AlbumFetcher when I want to pull one of my galleries back to my computer. You can get a copy from this thread - http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=47160.

--- Denise

PBolchover

life wrote:

On flickr, I have my photos grouped in sets by events (birthdays, etc). I then create virtual sets based on tags to crosscut over these events. Mostly to create a set per friend, so that I have a set called "Photos of Fred" that contains all photos that are tagged "fred".

This does not seem to seem to be possible with SmugMug?

On Smugmug, you can group your photos in galleries by events, and create keywords to crosscut over these events.

If you are a Power User or Pro, there are several techniques to make a keyword result appear as if it were a standard gallery (I use gallery redirects for this). It is even possible (with a bit of hackery) to add a description to a keyword search, and to change the "breadcrumb" (ie where the gallery is in the tree) to match whatever organisational structure you want.

mrcoons

AlbumFetcher is what I use to retireve my photos. It saved me not long ago when I accidently deleted a folder I was supposed to be backing up! So I used AlbumFetcher to download the photos and recreated the file.