Best organizational techniques in SM

vlherring

I am working on improving the way my various galleries are laid out in SmugMug and am thinking I should cut back on the number of galleries or somehow organize them differently. I'd appreciate any feedback on optimal organization on homepage of galleries etc. Thanks.

Oakley

I'm interested to see what people post here. I too am having the desire to change how I've organized my "stuff".

For me, I split things between PRIVATE galleries and ONE PUBLIC gallery. The Private are simply organized by year and then gallery. The One Public gallery is organized by keywords, and most popular.

I like the way the Private section is set up - but I would like to improve my public area.

Check it out for yourself - www.thepupil.ca

Ryan

vlherring

Organizational help
I probably should have given my link too, but I'm working on it right now....but for those who might check it out and provide some guidance, its

http://victoriajz.smugmug.com

firedancing4life

vlherring wrote:

I am working on improving the way my various galleries are laid out in SmugMug and am thinking I should cut back on the number of galleries or somehow organize them differently. I'd appreciate any feedback on optimal organization on homepage of galleries etc. Thanks.

Victoria...you totally read my mind.

I'm trying to decide if I want to make my website more like a "portfolio" ....Where it show cases my favorite shots. I was thinking about moving some of my personal "snap shots" to my flickr account and just post the good stuff on smugmug.

I think my galleries are organized relatively well....at one point they almost resembled the dgrin forums names. I guess it still has that sort of feel.

I dunno. I'm going to sleep on it and then maybe get crazy on it this weekend.

vlherring

firedancing4life wrote:

Victoria...you totally read my mind.

I'm trying to decide if I want to make my website more like a "portfolio" ....Where it show cases my favorite shots. I was thinking about moving some of my personal "snap shots" to my flickr account and just post the good stuff on smugmug.

That's a good way to cut down but leave things available for people who feel they need to look thru more == maybe that's what I'll do = I have started it [I figure there aren't as many people looking for work or people in countries or glassblowing and they are separate but maybe I'll be like you and spend my weekend thinking about a way to have main images up but others available = now to be a better self censor.

denisegoldberg

vlherring wrote:

I am working on improving the way my various galleries are laid out in SmugMug and am thinking I should cut back on the number of galleries or somehow organize them differently. I'd appreciate any feedback on optimal organization on homepage of galleries etc. Thanks.

Victoria -
Have you considered showing your galleries by category instead of by (individual) gallery? I find being faced with the number of galleries shown on your home page to be a bit overwhelming. Switching the the category view is a single click, and you can always flip it back to "by gallery" if you don't like the change.

The other thing that I think we all face is how to help people find our most recent photos. Using featured galleries is one way to do that, and that's how I started. I found that I wanted more than links to (up to) four featured galleries though, so I created an html-only page to serve as a place where I can highlight my recent galleries. That page shows random photos from the galleries I want to highlight along with a quick description. If you want to take a look, use the Kaleidoscope link from my navbar (or here's the link to go there directly - http://www.denisegoldberg.com/gallery/2659217).

I also use that page to direct folks to my travel journals. I usually keep a journal from the road, although I don't upload my photos until I return home. So if I'm out traveling, I add a link to my travel journal along with a note about where I'm hiding at the top of the Kaleidoscope page. I also have a category called Travel Stories (http://www.denisegoldberg.com/Travel%20stories) that I use to point to both my photo galleries and my journals of my trips. It seems like something like that might work for you too. I try to keep my site a living, changing thing. I think that if a web site is static that people stop visiting, where if it's changing they might be curious enough to come back again.

Another thing I do is to link from my blog back to my galleries. I post photos in my blog, and clicking on the photo from my blog will jump into the gallery where the photo lives. You and I are using different blogging tools, but it appears that both share the shortcoming of just opening a photo in a new browser window if it's clicked on. I don't use the built-in "click a button to include a photo" in my blog. Instead, I use a combination of <a href= and a <img src= html statements. That allows me to control where the viewer goes when they click on my photos.

I think I'd like to see a closer tie between your web site and your smugmug site too. You do have a link from the web site to your smugmug galleries, but I really had to look for it. In the ideas section of your site you list some general places - that would be a natural spot for some links to your photos.

I hope that this has given you some ideas. Obviously we're all different, and we all like different things, but just in case...

--- Denise

vlherring

great ideas, I'll try them out and see how they look = I did try categories but switched to do some gallery editting and will switch back...Thanks!

JDub

I do it by client, at the bottom I have my personal, private galleries.