Organization question

allanrubé

I just joined and 98% of my photos to upload will be birds.
Examples - I have eagles which I will divide into flying and perching
I have shorebirds which I will divide into sanderlings, dunlin, piper plovers, black belly plvers , etc

Which would be the better way to organize?

Should categories be eagles and shorebirds with perching, flying, dunlin etc be subcategories

or

should category be birds, with eagles, shorebirds being subcategories?

If I do it this last way can I have bird - shorebird - and then several sub-galleries?

Looking for opinions before I start creating my galleries.

For an example he is where I have photos now:

http://www.nhbungalow.com/birdsphoto.html

Allen

joseph473 wrote:

I just joined and 98% of my photos to upload will be birds.
Examples - I have eagles which I will divide into flying and perching
I have shorebirds which I will divide into sanderlings, dunlin, piper plovers, black belly plvers , etc

Which would be the better way to organize?

Should categories be eagles and shorebirds with perching, flying, dunlin etc be subcategories

or

should category be birds, with eagles, shorebirds being subcategories?

If I do it this last way can I have bird - shorebird - and then several sub-galleries?

Looking for opinions before I start creating my galleries.

For an example he is where I have photos now:

http://www.nhbungalow.com/birdsphoto.html

Birds are tough, so many different ways to organize. I finally created
an html gallery here and use keywords. Each has it's own slideshow link with
a menu there to switch shows. Also see bird nav dropdown.

jfriend

joseph473 wrote:

I just joined and 98% of my photos to upload will be birds.
Examples - I have eagles which I will divide into flying and perching
I have shorebirds which I will divide into sanderlings, dunlin, piper plovers, black belly plvers , etc

Which would be the better way to organize?

Should categories be eagles and shorebirds with perching, flying, dunlin etc be subcategories

or

should category be birds, with eagles, shorebirds being subcategories?

If I do it this last way can I have bird - shorebird - and then several sub-galleries?

Looking for opinions before I start creating my galleries.

For an example he is where I have photos now:

http://www.nhbungalow.com/birdsphoto.html

I like to choose categories that are "usefully descriptive" and tend to divide up the photos in my site. So, in other words, I don't want to use a category that will contain 90% of my photos because that's not really helping my viewers get to what they want. I'd rather end up with 5-15 categories that will separate out the photos in my site.

In your case, if most of your photos are going to be birds, I wouldn't use a "birds" category. That's just an extra level for your viewers to always have to click on and somewhat a waste of one level of categories. So, instead, you should find some sub-classification of birds and use that at the top level. You then have the sub-category level available for further division, if necessary.

Only you can say what would work best for your images, but type of bird seems like a reasonable idea to me for the top level.

Also, do not feel like you have to use sub-categories if you do not need them. I see way too many sites, where I click on a category, then see two sub-categories, click on a sub-category, then see five galleries. This is a complete waste and an inconvenience to the viewer. They had to go through four screens to get to the galleries when a max of one or two screens was all that was needed. There's no point in that many levels of hierarchy for a total of 10 galleries. 10 galleries can easily fit in one category with no sub-categories at all and is a lot more efficient for the viewer to find things and get to things. Also keeping in mind that you can start with the minimal category/sub-category layout initially when you only have a small number of galleries and you can trivially add categories/sub-categories and reassign existing galleries to them at any time. So, don't over design it initially. Add more complexity only when the number of galleries at any given level starts to feel unwieldy to the viewer.