- Yay SmugMug let's people do this kind of customization. No other sites offer so much flexibility.
- Boo that simple stuff (not this - this is crazy), like "Recent Galleries" or "Download Image..." or "Share on Facebook" buttons (Like-ing sucks. Period. It has practically no visibility in FB feeds.) require JS and CSS hackery/knowledge.
None of these require JS hacks. It's just that John and some advanced customers like to make them work differently, move them around, do other things, etc. Choice is good! Thanks for posting, Darryl
None of these require JS hacks. It's just that John and some advanced customers like to make them work differently, move them around, do other things, etc. Choice is good! Thanks for posting, Darryl
Showing an extra level of hierarchy like the screenshot above does require JS. Showing a dedicated download image button in a more visible place than the flyout does require JS. I'm not sure what Daryl means by "Recent Galleries". Share on FB does not require any user JS as it's built into the Share button.
Showing an extra level of hierarchy like the screenshot above does require JS. Showing a dedicated download image button in a more visible place than the flyout does require JS. I'm not sure what Daryl means by "Recent Galleries". Share on FB does not require any user JS as it's built into the Share button.
Yeah and download photo is on the photobar flyout. I'm just saying, there's stuff built in right now.
And we plan on more levels, which is the original subj of this thread. It's not trivial, we've been working on this, and will continue to do so.
Yeah and download photo is on the photobar flyout. I'm just saying, there's stuff built in right now.
And we plan on more levels, which is the original subj of this thread. It's not trivial, we've been working on this, and will continue to do so.
I hope you consider enhancing the category view to show stuff like I have done with my customization. I don't think category view has been enhanced in five years and there's so much more you could do to be innovative in how galleries are presented. Blindly adding more levels to the hierarchy and just adding more levels of pages to click through is what some people want, but not generally what I want. I want to be able to show more structure and organization on existing pages without adding more clicks or making it harder for viewers to find things.
I sure hope you're thinking about some actual innovations in how categories and sub-categories are displayed, not just adding more levels.
Yeah and download photo is on the photobar flyout. I'm just saying, there's stuff built in right now.
And we plan on more levels, which is the original subj of this thread. It's not trivial, we've been working on this, and will continue to do so.
He's saying that to add the "download image" button that's visible to Aunt so-and-so requires a customization, which some of us got from jfriend. Yes, it's on the flyout, but I've had a whole lot of family members (some younger than me!) asking "how do I download your photo?" I'm not saying this is a huge deal to me (although I did add the button jfriend provided & have not had the question since!) -- I'm just explaining what Darryl meant. And "AMENnnnn" to the category view such as you've done. It just makes so much visual sense & fabulous in every way.
Showing an extra level of hierarchy like the screenshot above does require JS. Showing a dedicated download image button in a more visible place than the flyout does require JS. I'm not sure what Darryl means by "Recent Galleries". Share on FB does not require any user JS as it's built into the Share button.
By "recent galleries", Darryl means that here on Smug, we got this way of showing "recent photos" not so long ago. But it really should have had the option of us showing "recent galleries" instead.... or both. Sometimes our "recent photos" look really dopey because we might have a whole lot of very similar images, and recent galleries would often make so much more sense. I think someone has found ways of displaying recent galleries, but again it requires a hack.
jfriend, Winsome -- yup, you nailed it on the Download button.
The current Facebook Sharing via the "Be Social" dropdown and all of those other goofy options takes way too many clicks (4 vs 2). Especially in light of the overly agonized-over "Like" button that was added to every single gallery but doesn't actually help photographers one whit. So I created a "Share on Facebook" button similar to jfriend's Download button:
It's a little clunky, and has some bugs: 1) It can only can show a thumbnail from the first 10 photos in the gallery. 2) the link in Facebook takes you to the first photo in the gallery, not the specific photo (it's the # anchor issue).
Re: Recent galleries, yup, Winsome, I wrote the hack:
Indeed, "Recent photos" is of marginal use. Good if you're a daily snapshooter looking for something similar to Flickr's Photostream. Not so good if you want people to see your last several galleries worth of work. Or heck, even a daily snapshooter might want people to see several galleries worth of recent photos, not just the last 6 photos.
The dealbreaker for me was not being able to use SM as extension of my computer, (but I still paid for my account and intent to use it as my secondary photo storage medium) let me explain:
I see that this topic came along way since it started a few years ago, but I have a bit of frustration.
I have about 10,000 pictures, covering span of 12 years. %90 personal shots, family, friends, etc. and %10 scenes & locations.
They are archived in folders by dates or months. Basically I have at least 1 folder for each month, in this format 2005 - 04 (Visit to Turkey), 2008 - 12 (Caribbean) etc..
I will mainly be using my SmugMug as photo repository and virtual back up to avoid data loss due to hard drive failure, and I am looking for suggestions.
First of all, is there anyway to upload my My Pictures folder and have smugmug create galleries based on folder names, and then tag all the pictures with the folder name? I know that smugmug can display all pictures by date, which eliminates need to seperate pictures into folders, but I would prefer to have them all separate so that they are organized, instead of having one folder with thousands of pictures in it, and it will take forever to find stuff. I can probably dump them in a single gallery and create "Collection" gallery that collects pictures based on names, but again that's still not convenient. What I plan to do is instead I would collect the good pictures from those folders in public folders, or in folders that I would allow my friends/family to see as "highlights of ....(folder name)"...
I was hoping I could just keep the same folder structure I have now (like a virtual folder online) and be able to manipulate it with a web interface of smugmug, but it looks it doesn't work that way.
My smugmug still under construction & organization with 17,000 images and counting... meanwhile check my Flickr
The dealbreaker for me was not being able to use SM as extension of my computer, (but I still paid for my account and intent to use it as my secondary photo storage medium) let me explain:
I see that this topic came along way since it started a few years ago, but I have a bit of frustration.
I have about 10,000 pictures, covering span of 12 years. %90 personal shots, family, friends, etc. and %10 scenes & locations.
They are archived in folders by dates or months. Basically I have at least 1 folder for each month, in this format 2005 - 04 (Visit to Turkey), 2008 - 12 (Caribbean) etc..
I will mainly be using my SmugMug as photo repository and virtual back up to avoid data loss due to hard drive failure, and I am looking for suggestions.
First of all, is there anyway to upload my My Pictures folder and have smugmug create galleries based on folder names, and then tag all the pictures with the folder name? I know that smugmug can display all pictures by date, which eliminates need to seperate pictures into folders, but I would prefer to have them all separate so that they are organized, instead of having one folder with thousands of pictures in it, and it will take forever to find stuff. I can probably dump them in a single gallery and create "Collection" gallery that collects pictures based on names, but again that's still not convenient. What I plan to do is instead I would collect the good pictures from those folders in public folders, or in folders that I would allow my friends/family to see as "highlights of ....(folder name)"...
I was hoping I could just keep the same folder structure I have now (like a virtual folder online) and be able to manipulate it with a web interface of smugmug, but it looks it doesn't work that way.
I don't know the answers to a some of your questions, but I can say this much: "Folders" aren't really part of the structure here. The bottom level (what contains your actual photos & therefore becomes your main actual public or unlisted display) is galleries. We don't really have folders, per se. But: a gallery (which can be named just like your folder) can contain a huge lot of photos (I don't even know the upper limit). However, I find that a gallery becomes rather unwieldy after 15 pages. That's about 300 photos, give or take. It becomes hard to arrange them & use some other tools, and also people are unlikely to page through that many. Some of my galleries do contain more than that, but I've been breaking some down into smaller ones. My unlisted archives are more likely to have more pages as I'm not concerned about appearance, etc.
It sounds to me like each of your folders could possibly become a gallery, but it depends how many shots you have per folder. And I'm not sure how you migrate them. I know there are programs & apps out there that people are using to do some related tasks... Smugloader, LightRoom, etc. etc. Others can hopefully explain the capabilities & virtues of these.
Some of us have been asking for more capabilities here as far as date-related structuring, and even for a virtual date-related structure that would be simply available at the same time one has other organizational systems in place. Maybe we'll have that someday. And some of that is possible to do with a customized site, but the folks who have that kind of stuff in place are very knowledgeable about customizing here.... so it may depend what kind of experience you have. Dropdown navbars can help a lot with making some of that possible, but there are other methods too.
So if you use your folders as the basis for each gallery, then you might have sub-categories such as "January 2004", or "Visits to Turkey". And above those sub-categories you might have "Family", "Travel", "Friends" etc. That can help your visitors know if they'll be interested in certain galleries. If you place "Jan. 2004" under "Family", and then within "Jan. 2004" you might have galleries such as "New Yr. Party", family are more likely to find that gallery. (it also helps you yourself keep stuff organized & find it easily) If you or others want to see & find your travel stuff, or if you want to be able to print or display your travel stuff... they'd look under "Travel" & find your sub-categories such as "Visits to Turkey" or "Travel in Jan. 2004" and within that they'd see your galleries. (note: you do not need to have sub-categories. I guess you wouldn't even need to have categories. But for most people, they help a lot.
You should probably look around a lot at different sites here to get ideas. With my site, I'm doing a lot of what you're talking about.... I just haven't used any outside app or program to organize them for me. I do tag (keyword) galleries as well as individual photos, which for me is a great help. And since we have bulk keywording & also bulk captioning when needed, you can add the word "Turkey" to a every photo in an entire gallery in seconds. You can add a keyword page to your Navbar (see mine) and a search box as well, and these work great. You can even make a virtual gallery that would show every photo you have from Jan. 2004-- as long as you have tagged them. So you may have a trip to Turkey and a trip to the beach in Jan. 2004. If you tag all the beach ones and all the Turkey ones with Jan 2004 (or you may need to do Jan2004... I can't recall) then you could tell your virtual gallery (Smart Gallery) to display them all. Meanwhile, the original display photos still reside in your Turkey gallery & Beach gallery. Possibilities for these Smart Galleries are virtually endless! Well, I hope this helps until someone else chimes in with uploading folders ideas for you. Look around & see what's out there on Smug. For me, Smug really is in some ways an extension of my computer & gives great peace-of-mind with the additional backup, no matter what else you might have. ([Note: in my own galleries, if you see one with a "[v]" by the title, that's a virtual or Smart gallery. So those photos reside in some other gallery as well. A "[c]" by my gallery title means I collected virtual copies from a number of my other galleries.) I did that because I don't like it that Smug doesn't tell me which of my galleries contain virtual copies, and I need to know.
However, I find that a gallery becomes rather unwieldy after 15 pages. That's about 300 photos, give or take. It becomes hard to arrange them & use some other tools, and also people are unlikely to page through that many. Some of my galleries do contain more than that, but I've been breaking some down into smaller ones. My unlisted archives are more likely to have more pages as I'm not concerned about appearance, etc.
Hi, thanks for the reply, I did mention that I was using SM primarily as online backup of my photo archive, therefore having 500 or even 1000 pictures in a gallery doesn't really matter to me. Plus, I will be collecting pictures from my galleries (folders) into another "Highlights" gallery/album or stuff that is worth sharing/showing to friends and family in another folder.
It sounds to me like each of your folders could possibly become a gallery, but it depends how many shots you have per folder. And I'm not sure how you migrate them. I know there are programs & apps out there that people are using to do some related tasks... Smugloader, LightRoom, etc. etc. Others can hopefully explain the capabilities & virtues of these.
Actually, I already have "Send to Smugmug", and it a nice (great) tool, and in fact, I now just noticed that this is the #1 requested feature right here and it is exactly what I asked for. Seems like I am not the only one with similar request/problem.
Dropdown navbars can help a lot with making some of that possible, but there are other methods too.
Yes that would be very cool only if dropdown menu/navbar was actually dynamic. Think about the coding I would have to do with 100 folders (galleries) that I will be creating, and the links I have to add into that dropdown menu. Unless there was a way to actually make it automatically populate the names.
So if you use your folders as the basis for each gallery, then you might have sub-categories such as "January 2004", or "Visits to Turkey"....
I like the idea, but actually it would look more unorganized to me that way, maybe if I organized my pictures that way from the beginning.. But I will still prefer my own folder structure. Maybe I can have sub galleries within those months. I mean, if you think about it, I should have the following structure which would make more sense:
Year/Month/Subject:
2007/August/Off-Road trip
2007/October/Halloween Party
2007/October/Trip to Uncle Marzipan
2010/July/Independence Day Party at Hamptons
2010/September/Birth of my Son
I think this is a better way to organize than my single folder per month method, but will I be able to use sub/sub/folders?
[Note: in my own galleries, if you see one with a "[v]" by the title, that's a virtual or Smart gallery. So those photos reside in some other gallery as well. A "[c]" by my gallery title means I collected virtual copies from a number of my other galleries.) I did that because I don't like it that Smug doesn't tell me which of my galleries contain virtual copies, and I need to know.
That's really nice. Actually is there anyway to identify which pictures are collected with a little add-on or customization?
My smugmug still under construction & organization with 17,000 images and counting... meanwhile check my Flickr
Hi, thanks for the reply, I did mention that I was using SM primarily as online backup of my photo archive, therefore having 500 or even 1000 pictures in a gallery doesn't really matter to me. Plus, I will be collecting pictures from my galleries (folders) into another "Highlights" gallery/album or stuff that is worth sharing/showing to friends and family in another folder. Yeah, I saw you were primarily archiving, but even with archiving, you may be wanting to use some of the tools. To use most bulk tools, you need to wait for the entire gallery of thumbs to load, or maybe do some dragging or selecting over pages & pages of thumbs or through lengthy scrolling. So, it's just if you need to use rotate or move or arrange tools, etc. it can get klunky. It also seems slower paging through galleries when there are so many pages. That could be my imagination. About collecting photos virtually the way I described: I should warn you that some of a virtual gallery's settings are currently bound to an original galleries' or photos' settings, and they can't be manually arranged like an original gallery can. (They can have some auto-sorting by date or file-name though, I think.) You'll want to check on which settings are able to be different from the original, when you get to the point of thinking through the issue of how to keep many galleries private while some are public. Most of it is quite do-able though.
Actually, I already have "Send to Smugmug", and it a nice (great) tool, and in fact, I now just noticed that this is the #1 requested feature right here and it is exactly what I asked for. Seems like I am not the only one with similar request/problem. Yes, that's why I think more of these capabilities are coming... by hook or by crook!
Yes that would be very cool only if dropdown menu/navbar was actually dynamic. Think about the coding I would have to do with 100 folders (galleries) that I will be creating, and the links I have to add into that dropdown menu. Unless there was a way to actually make it automatically populate the names. I don't think this would be nearly as bad as you think. (Although I don't completely understand your use of the word "dynamic"--I guess you mean it would sorta match itself to your uploads) I have hundreds of galleries, and yeah, I only have a plain navbar so far, but I don't think it would take more than a few hours for me to set up a drop-down, once I understood the basics. Remember you'd mainly just be linking the categories or sub-categories to your navbar... you typically wouldn't be linking each gallery. So it's really not that bad from what I can tell. Even with 1-200 galleries, you might only need 10 to 20 things on your navbar & that's pretty easy. Look at Allen's site... he's got tons of cats, sub-cats & calendar dates & galleries going on, with all his birds & beasts etc! http://www.photosbyat.com That's a pretty complex structure & it works. But it sounds like you wouldn't need anything even half that complicated & could set it up with the tutorials here. (Allen's, actually)
I like the idea, but actually it would look more unorganized to me that way, maybe if I organized my pictures that way from the beginning.. But I will still prefer my own folder structure. Maybe I can have sub galleries within those months. I mean, if you think about it, I should have the following structure which would make more sense:
Year/Month/Subject:
2007/August/Off-Road trip
2007/October/Halloween Party
2007/October/Trip to Uncle Marzipan
2010/July/Independence Day Party at Hamptons
2010/September/Birth of my Son
I think this is a better way to organize than my single folder per month method, but will I be able to use sub/sub/folders? Above galleries, we only have sub-categories and then categories here. This doesn't bother me much, as I think it's a pain to have to drill down so many levels to actually get to see the photos. If I have 2 levels plus galleries, that's already 3 clicks before you see a photo. Some people are begging for more levels, though I would much rather have much bigger thumbs for display pages of cats & sub-cats, instead of more levels. So, in your last example: 2010 could be your category. September would be your sub-cat. Then, "Birth of My Son" could be a gallery. If you need more galleries for that event, you can even name the second one "Birth of My Son, Two". I do that sometimes. Or split your months into the sub-cats "July 1" and "July 2" if you happen to have gazillions of photos/galleries for that month. But yes, I see your thinking about how your own structure might look. I thought I'd already suggested this type of structure as one possibility, but maybe not. I know I thought of it though, and there's no reason at all why it wouldn't work.
Using years as cats is fine for you. But sometimes it's not the handiest for your viewers, for the photos they'd want to see. They often have no clue which year to look in. In my case, I have a whole cat called "Archives", with each month as a sub-cat. So my sub-cats look like this: Jan2007, Feb2007, etc. with galleries in each. You can't see any of that, since all galleries in it are unlisted & also not tied to my navbar...it's just for my own use. So for the photos I want to show off or let my family download for themselves, I have a whole other name-based cat structure tied to my navbar... Portfolio, Travel, Friends, Family, Animals, Music, Church, Map/Newly Added, Keywords, etc. Most of those photos were separately uploaded. Some are copied (not virtually, but actually!) using "make a copy" from my archives. That way, I can control which galleries & photos I want people to see, which are watermarked and right-click protected, and which are downloadable by my family & friends. There are other people here with all kinds of other creative ways to do all this. Some have two separate homepages that take you in different directions. Some have two Smug sites. Some have a whole site-within-a-site that is password-protected for their family photos or client photos.
That's really nice. Actually is there anyway to identify which pictures are collected with a little add-on or customization?
I don't know of any way... yet!! But a lot of smart people around here are always adding new stuff/apps/hacks. We've only had virtual stuff for a yr. or less, so I'm sure all kinds of cool stuff will happen w/ that. For me it's just as easy to code my gallery title for now, because when I'm moving photos or whatever, I've gotta know by the title which type of gallery it is; real, virtual, or collected. My thought is that Smug is going to have to do something to identify these at some point. For instance, Animoto is having trouble using our virtual copies right now for our Animoto videos. So it would sure be nice to know at a glance that you can't use that particular virtual gallery for Animoto. (The 2 companies have an agreement. So you can do some pretty cool stuff using a gallery of your photos, which are quickly available to Animoto for the video you may want to make, as soon as you give them access.)
Ok, hope all this helps you make more sense of the Smuggie monsterThe possibilities here can seem almost endless, once you get started, and I wish you many late nights having fun getting it all in place! :giggle
I don't think this would be nearly as bad as you think. (Although I don't completely understand your use of the word "dynamic"--I guess you mean it would sorta match itself to your uploads) I have hundreds of galleries, and yeah, I only have a plain navbar so far, but I don't think it would take more than a few hours for me to set up a drop-down, once I understood the basics. Remember you'd mainly just be linking the categories or sub-categories to your navbar... you typically wouldn't be linking each gallery. So it's really not that bad from what I can tell. Even with 1-200 galleries, you might only need 10 to 20 things on your navbar & that's pretty easy. Look at Allen's site... he's got tons of cats, sub-cats & calendar dates & galleries going on, with all his birds & beasts etc! http://www.photosbyat.com That's a pretty complex structure & it works. But it sounds like you wouldn't need anything even half that complicated & could set it up with the tutorials here. (Allen's, actually)
Actually, I would like to be able to link to all galleries, both for me to find my galleries (not much to find, but to directly go to that category without having to go through navigation) and also for my visitors to be able to see them all in one place, especially being able to jump directly to one gallery while they are looking at another one, without having to go to main page. It is one great feature phanfare had, they had that nice mouse-over drop down menu while in any gallery.
Using years as cats is fine for you. But sometimes it's not the handiest for your viewers, for the photos they'd want to see. They often have no clue which year to look in. In my case, I have a whole cat called "Archives", with each month as a sub-cat. So my sub-cats look like this: Jan2007, Feb2007, etc. with galleries in each. You can't see any of that, since all galleries in it are unlisted & also not tied to my navbar...it's just for my own use. So for the photos I want to show off or let my family download for themselves, I have a whole other name-based cat structure tied to my navbar... Portfolio, Travel, Friends, Family, Animals, Music, Church, Map/Newly Added, Keywords, etc. Most of those photos were separately uploaded. Some are copied (not virtually, but actually!) using "make a copy" from my archives. That way, I can control which galleries & photos I want people to see, which are watermarked and right-click protected, and which are downloadable by my family & friends.
Exactly, this is what I was thinking about doing, so it really doesn't matter if I have 100 galleries or 500 pictures in some of the galleries, because those will be my "Archive", and then I will have whole another set with pictures that I actually want my friends/family to see, those with password protected. I can do whole sort of things to those galleries without touching the originals or my original structure.
I hope they find a way to have a little indicator showing if the picture belongs to another category (collected).
I forgot, there is one more possible deal-breaker, not retaining original videos, the videos get re-coded and originals are poof, gone. (Nuked as SM calls it)
My smugmug still under construction & organization with 17,000 images and counting... meanwhile check my Flickr
Actually, I would like to be able to link to all galleries, both for me to find my galleries (not much to find, but to directly go to that category without having to go through navigation) and also for my visitors to be able to see them all in one place, especially being able to jump directly to one gallery while they are looking at another one, without having to go to main page. It is one great feature phanfare had, they had that nice mouse-over drop down menu while in any gallery. Even though I don't have my archives on my navbar, it's still only two clicks. I arrive at my site, go to "All Galleries" (that's a page most people here have in some form) and there I can see my archive category, click & I'm there. Linking it to my navbar would provide everyone with the link, so I don't do that... would not be any less clicks anyway. Even basic SmugMug customization allows you to easily have a homepage plus a sort of duplicate page on which you can show (or not show) all kinds of different things. On my "All Galleries" page, I've decided to display categories instead because I have so many galleries. But many people decide instead to display all their galleries there. Also, with a navbar or a dropdown navbar, you can quickly get to another gallery even while in one. Some people even have multiple copies of their homepage where they place other kinds of stuff.
Exactly, this is what I was thinking about doing, so it really doesn't matter if I have 100 galleries or 500 pictures in some of the galleries, because those will be my "Archive", and then I will have whole another set with pictures that I actually want my friends/family to see, those with password protected. I can do whole sort of things to those galleries without touching the originals or my original structure. Yes, if you're not ever moving, copying or rotating photos in archives, it's no big deal to have a ton of photos per gallery.... unless you want to look through them a lot; it could make that slower.
I hope they find a way to have a little indicator showing if the picture belongs to another category (collected). You can see underneath each photo's large preview that it's collected, because it will say "See photo in original gallery" under it. But an indication on its thumb in gallery would help, and also it would help to have an indication somehow on each gallery that has virtual photos. Here's an example of a gallery full of window shots that I collected (virtually) from other galleries, so that you can see the note under each one (except the first) that gives a link to its native gallery. The first photo is a real copy, so it has no native gallery. http://www.winsomeworks.com/Arts-and-Crafts/Architecture/Windows/14105026_YEmA5#747939479_gy2uo
I forgot, there is one more possible deal-breaker, not retaining original videos, the videos get re-coded and originals are poof, gone. (Nuked as SM calls it) Well, I sure wouldn't let that be a deal-breaker if most of everything else works for you, because there are so many other ways you can backup your videos. The DAM book by Peter Krogh will give you ideas galore.
Hope you're able to get started soon! It's definitely a lot of fun-- so much better than having photos in closets and hard drives.
Thanks Anna,
I got started a while ago, and created a few galleries with my new baby boy, and my niece and nephew and shared those with the family, it seems to work fine, i just never got around to uploading my whole archive. Honestly, if smugmug was just like a vault with a place to keep all pictures without all these bells and whistles, nobody would complain. The more they give, more people will complain about more stuff.
All these features makes it hard to figure out how to take advantage of all those stuff.
My smugmug still under construction & organization with 17,000 images and counting... meanwhile check my Flickr
Yeah and download photo is on the photobar flyout. I'm just saying, there's stuff built in right now.
And we plan on more levels, which is the original subj of this thread. It's not trivial, we've been working on this, and will continue to do so.
I'm glad to see you are working on more levels Andy. The biggest complaint I get is that my site is confusing and disorganized but it's as organized as I can make it without having more levels. I need to be able to add more subcategories asap. I appreciate your efforts to respond to the needs of your customers. Thank you.
I'm in the trial period of my account and I have to say that there's a lot to like here. i really like the look and feel & customization. I have ~35GB of photos categorized in ~1500 folders & subfolders, many of them 4-5 levels deep and there's the dealbreaker. I've tried to think about how I can fit them into categories, subcat's and galleries but I can't. It makes things very unorganized.
I've tried other similar websites and while fotki allows what I want, I hate the site. I much prefer the SmugMug look & feel. I'm at a loss to imagine why a site as professional and customizable as this doesn't allow for subgalleries. If this is planned for the near future, I may hold off and wait.
Is there a reason for not having this obvious feature that I'm overlooking?
I face the same problem and I have gone to numbering what would be "sub-galleries", then putting a key at the beginning. Not great, but at least I can get folks to the competitor they want. I am going to try to see if this method, plus a search mechanism, makes it any better.
Please!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Pleeeeeaaaase give us more layers! You are literally taking money out of my pocket because of a term someone came up with that makes no sense. I'd love to know who came up with the idea of "click fatigue". It's the dumbest damn thing I've ever heard of and almost sounds like an excuse for whatever reason you really don't want to give us more layers. It makes absolutely no sense, I'm a pro photographer who can run a successful event photography business but I can't be given the freedom to decide if I want to subject my customers to one or more clicks than they have to deal with now? I can assure you I'm losing more customers now because of "search fatigue" than I ever would because of this thing you are doing to supposedly protect MY customers from something you guys call "click fatigue" that I've never even heard of outside of here and am not sure even really exists. You can give me example after example of how to improve on what I'm doing now but there is really only one thing that makes sense and that's to GIVE US MORE LAYERS!!!! I'm a pro, let me decide what to protect my customers from.
I'm frustrated, I took a team in and shot a 70 team indoor soccer tourney two weeks ago. I'd like to upload these to the site but I have no idea how to organize it. I'll tell you how I need to break it down, you tell me how I should arrange my site to accommodate all the galleries. I'll list how I did it with my software on site (with many compliments about how organized and easy it was to find photos with no one complaining about "click fatigue") and you can tell me how to make it work on my site. People would drill in from each of these levels to find teams and games.
Main Category - Soccer Tourney (generic )
2. - Male, Female
3. Friday, Saturday, Sunday
4. List of multiple galleries (team a vs team b)
5. Photos
I'd go with:
Soccer Tourney (category)
Male Friday, Male Saturday, Male Sunday, Female Friday, Female Saturday, Female Sunday (sub-categories)
Then have the galleries of each game within their respective sub-category
I'd go with:
Soccer Tourney (category)
Male Friday, Male Saturday, Male Sunday, Female Friday, Female Saturday, Female Sunday (sub-categories)
Then have the galleries of each game within their respective sub-category
This would sound good but it adds to the clutter of an already cluttered gallery page with waaaaay to many individual events listed as categories. Shouldn't a category be used to categorize a group of things instead of an individual event? I currently have 38 categories. One other thing I should have mentioned. I sell digital files on site that I upload where they can order 10 files, 20 files or all their files. I also take orders for prints that I sometimes print on site and sometimes put together after the fact and upload to the site and give them the option to order more. Even if I had individual events as categories and list it as you suggested I have no room for these other things. Hey Putty, what else can you tell me about zenfolio as compared to smugmug as far as pros and cons? I generally like smugmug but as the title of this thread suggests their inflexibility with this subject may be a deal breaker. I think I'll try the free trial and see how it goes.
This would sound good but it adds to the clutter of an already cluttered gallery page with waaaaay to many individual events listed as categories. Shouldn't a category be used to categorize a group of things instead of an individual event? I currently have 38 categories. One other thing I should have mentioned. I sell digital files on site that I upload where they can order 10 files, 20 files or all their files. I also take orders for prints that I sometimes print on site and sometimes put together after the fact and upload to the site and give them the option to order more. Even if I had individual events as categories and list it as you suggested I have no room for these other things. Hey Putty, what else can you tell me about zenfolio as compared to smugmug as far as pros and cons? I generally like smugmug but as the title of this thread suggests their inflexibility with this subject may be a deal breaker. I think I'll try the free trial and see how it goes.
FYI, Smugmug has announced they are actually coding additional levels of hierarchy, though we have no information on when it might actually be available to us.
Hey Putty, what else can you tell me about zenfolio as compared to smugmug as far as pros and cons? I generally like smugmug but as the title of this thread suggests their inflexibility with this subject may be a deal breaker. I think I'll try the free trial and see how it goes.
It's been way too long since I used smugmug to give a good comparison to zenfolio, but the only negative related to zenfolio that I can think of is that it doesn't have a community as vibrant as dgrin. Get the free trial and spend some time playing around. When I switched, I remember also finding the gallery options much more easily understandable and available there.
It's been way too long since I used smugmug to give a good comparison to zenfolio, but the only negative related to zenfolio that I can think of is that it doesn't have a community as vibrant as dgrin. Get the free trial and spend some time playing around. When I switched, I remember also finding the gallery options much more easily understandable and available there.
Thanks for responding, I'm going to check it out but I really, really, really don't want to leave smugmug and I'm kind of hoping it has some other hidden flaws but this level thing is huge and not just to me. I did a search for "click fatigue" and couldn't believe how many people are requesting this and how long it has been requested. It doesn't make much sense to not let a professional business owner decide what is best for his business.
edit: It looks like my rant is a few days to late. They do seem to finally have something in the works. It figures, I've been stewing over this for a while and I finally decide to speak up and they start it just before I do. I'd be surprised if happened soon but I'm glad its going in the right direction.
I did a search for "click fatigue" and couldn't believe how many people are requesting this and how long it has been requested. It doesn't make much sense to not let a professional business owner decide what is best for his business.
I've posted here many times that we've recently finished the behind-the-scenes underpinnings of this feature. Stay tuned for the rest. And you'll be able to click-click-click-click away
I've posted here many times that we've recently finished the behind-the-scenes underpinnings of this feature. Stay tuned for the rest. And you'll be able to click-click-click-click away
Are we talking a week, a month, a year? Inquiry minds want to know. The reason I ask is the same reason my frustration boiled over tonight. I need to decide what to do with 22,000 soccer photos. I'm not trying to be a butt (not anymore at least), I just have to figure out what to do.
Are we talking a week, a month, a year? Inquiry minds want to know. The reason I ask is the same reason my frustration boiled over tonight. I need to decide what to do with 22,000 soccer photos. I'm not trying to be a butt (not anymore at least), I just have to figure out what to do.
Couldn't you for the time being do something using a much more involved NavBar structure? I don't completely understand what a dynamic NavBar is, but I'm pretty sure I've seen some very deep layers around here with the use of NavBar dropdowns. (yeah, I know it's not entirely the same, but if the goal is basically finding & cross-referencing stuff, I think that's one way to do it) Allen's site comes to mind, where he's got layers of various bird & wildlife photos also separated by year & by area or what-have-you. Sorry I'm not being very helpful here w/o links, and this kind of thing may take you a couple days to set up unless you're a wiz with customizing, but if I can find something more helpful, I'll let you know. I checked out Z-fol -- a few times & really don't like the slim options they had on gallery presentation, from what I could tell. Smug is a LOT more handsome, imho.
A possible NavBar answer to multiple layers here...
As per my last post, here's Al's site: http://www.photosbyat.com . If you look at "Birds" or "Archery" on his navbar, & start hovering around, there's a lot of depth there. The navigation is taking you to the various cat or sub-cat pages, but through his use of the dropdowns, there can be several ways to get there. Like I said, I don't know if this helps. And I'm sorry to disagree with you, but I completely understand the "click fatigue" thing, as I hate going through a bunch of different cat-subcat- pages just to finally get to some pics (even though I do use the 3 layers available here now-- someday I hope to do something different w/ layers). The way Al has this structure, it does seem to take you past all that clicking because now you can just hover over the ones you want & get to that gallery or sub-cat page or whatever quickly, right? I think he's got instructions around here about how to do this. As a sidenote-- I knew "click fatigue" did not originate here as I've often heard the term. But I Googled it (in quotes) and got 2,600 hits. DGrin only came up on the 6th page. It's out there. Besides, I do massage therapy on lots of people with click fatigue! And too many of them have gone for carpal tunnel surgery... uhh, before they thought about trying massage. :cry [ETA: I found one thread with an example of Al's NavBar thing, but I think it's one level short of what you're looking for, NorthernBuck. There's a ton more of that around here somewhere though. Calling for Al !! ] Back againlater... Found it: Very first post in this thread has the deep NavBar structure info. from Al: http://www.digitalgrin.com/showthread.php?t=168571&page=77
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None of these require JS hacks. It's just that John and some advanced customers like to make them work differently, move them around, do other things, etc. Choice is good! Thanks for posting, Darryl
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Yeah and download photo is on the photobar flyout. I'm just saying, there's stuff built in right now.
And we plan on more levels, which is the original subj of this thread. It's not trivial, we've been working on this, and will continue to do so.
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I sure hope you're thinking about some actual innovations in how categories and sub-categories are displayed, not just adding more levels.
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DayBreak, my Folk Music Group (some free mp3s!) http://daybreakfolk.com
DayBreak, my Folk Music Group (some free mp3s!) http://daybreakfolk.com
The current Facebook Sharing via the "Be Social" dropdown and all of those other goofy options takes way too many clicks (4 vs 2). Especially in light of the overly agonized-over "Like" button that was added to every single gallery but doesn't actually help photographers one whit. So I created a "Share on Facebook" button similar to jfriend's Download button:
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=125130
It's a little clunky, and has some bugs: 1) It can only can show a thumbnail from the first 10 photos in the gallery. 2) the link in Facebook takes you to the first photo in the gallery, not the specific photo (it's the # anchor issue).
Re: Recent galleries, yup, Winsome, I wrote the hack:
http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=688574&postcount=18
An awesome example of it in use is here:
http://www.nzsnaps.com/
Less awesome (because they're my photos) example:
http://darryl.smugmug.com/
Indeed, "Recent photos" is of marginal use. Good if you're a daily snapshooter looking for something similar to Flickr's Photostream. Not so good if you want people to see your last several galleries worth of work. Or heck, even a daily snapshooter might want people to see several galleries worth of recent photos, not just the last 6 photos.
I see that this topic came along way since it started a few years ago, but I have a bit of frustration.
I have about 10,000 pictures, covering span of 12 years. %90 personal shots, family, friends, etc. and %10 scenes & locations.
They are archived in folders by dates or months. Basically I have at least 1 folder for each month, in this format 2005 - 04 (Visit to Turkey), 2008 - 12 (Caribbean) etc..
I will mainly be using my SmugMug as photo repository and virtual back up to avoid data loss due to hard drive failure, and I am looking for suggestions.
First of all, is there anyway to upload my My Pictures folder and have smugmug create galleries based on folder names, and then tag all the pictures with the folder name? I know that smugmug can display all pictures by date, which eliminates need to seperate pictures into folders, but I would prefer to have them all separate so that they are organized, instead of having one folder with thousands of pictures in it, and it will take forever to find stuff. I can probably dump them in a single gallery and create "Collection" gallery that collects pictures based on names, but again that's still not convenient. What I plan to do is instead I would collect the good pictures from those folders in public folders, or in folders that I would allow my friends/family to see as "highlights of ....(folder name)"...
I was hoping I could just keep the same folder structure I have now (like a virtual folder online) and be able to manipulate it with a web interface of smugmug, but it looks it doesn't work that way.
It sounds to me like each of your folders could possibly become a gallery, but it depends how many shots you have per folder. And I'm not sure how you migrate them. I know there are programs & apps out there that people are using to do some related tasks... Smugloader, LightRoom, etc. etc. Others can hopefully explain the capabilities & virtues of these.
Some of us have been asking for more capabilities here as far as date-related structuring, and even for a virtual date-related structure that would be simply available at the same time one has other organizational systems in place. Maybe we'll have that someday. And some of that is possible to do with a customized site, but the folks who have that kind of stuff in place are very knowledgeable about customizing here.... so it may depend what kind of experience you have. Dropdown navbars can help a lot with making some of that possible, but there are other methods too.
So if you use your folders as the basis for each gallery, then you might have sub-categories such as "January 2004", or "Visits to Turkey". And above those sub-categories you might have "Family", "Travel", "Friends" etc. That can help your visitors know if they'll be interested in certain galleries. If you place "Jan. 2004" under "Family", and then within "Jan. 2004" you might have galleries such as "New Yr. Party", family are more likely to find that gallery. (it also helps you yourself keep stuff organized & find it easily) If you or others want to see & find your travel stuff, or if you want to be able to print or display your travel stuff... they'd look under "Travel" & find your sub-categories such as "Visits to Turkey" or "Travel in Jan. 2004" and within that they'd see your galleries. (note: you do not need to have sub-categories. I guess you wouldn't even need to have categories. But for most people, they help a lot.
You should probably look around a lot at different sites here to get ideas. With my site, I'm doing a lot of what you're talking about.... I just haven't used any outside app or program to organize them for me. I do tag (keyword) galleries as well as individual photos, which for me is a great help. And since we have bulk keywording & also bulk captioning when needed, you can add the word "Turkey" to a every photo in an entire gallery in seconds. You can add a keyword page to your Navbar (see mine) and a search box as well, and these work great. You can even make a virtual gallery that would show every photo you have from Jan. 2004-- as long as you have tagged them. So you may have a trip to Turkey and a trip to the beach in Jan. 2004. If you tag all the beach ones and all the Turkey ones with Jan 2004 (or you may need to do Jan2004... I can't recall) then you could tell your virtual gallery (Smart Gallery) to display them all. Meanwhile, the original display photos still reside in your Turkey gallery & Beach gallery. Possibilities for these Smart Galleries are virtually
DayBreak, my Folk Music Group (some free mp3s!) http://daybreakfolk.com
Hi, thanks for the reply, I did mention that I was using SM primarily as online backup of my photo archive, therefore having 500 or even 1000 pictures in a gallery doesn't really matter to me. Plus, I will be collecting pictures from my galleries (folders) into another "Highlights" gallery/album or stuff that is worth sharing/showing to friends and family in another folder.
Actually, I already have "Send to Smugmug", and it a nice (great) tool, and in fact, I now just noticed that this is the #1 requested feature right here and it is exactly what I asked for. Seems like I am not the only one with similar request/problem.
Yes that would be very cool only if dropdown menu/navbar was actually dynamic. Think about the coding I would have to do with 100 folders (galleries) that I will be creating, and the links I have to add into that dropdown menu. Unless there was a way to actually make it automatically populate the names. I like the idea, but actually it would look more unorganized to me that way, maybe if I organized my pictures that way from the beginning.. But I will still prefer my own folder structure. Maybe I can have sub galleries within those months. I mean, if you think about it, I should have the following structure which would make more sense:
Year/Month/Subject:
2007/August/Off-Road trip
2007/October/Halloween Party
2007/October/Trip to Uncle Marzipan
2010/July/Independence Day Party at Hamptons
2010/September/Birth of my Son
I think this is a better way to organize than my single folder per month method, but will I be able to use sub/sub/folders?
That's really nice. Actually is there anyway to identify which pictures are collected with a little add-on or customization?
Ok, hope all this helps you make more sense of the Smuggie monster
DayBreak, my Folk Music Group (some free mp3s!) http://daybreakfolk.com
Actually, I would like to be able to link to all galleries, both for me to find my galleries (not much to find, but to directly go to that category without having to go through navigation) and also for my visitors to be able to see them all in one place, especially being able to jump directly to one gallery while they are looking at another one, without having to go to main page. It is one great feature phanfare had, they had that nice mouse-over drop down menu while in any gallery.
Exactly, this is what I was thinking about doing, so it really doesn't matter if I have 100 galleries or 500 pictures in some of the galleries, because those will be my "Archive", and then I will have whole another set with pictures that I actually want my friends/family to see, those with password protected. I can do whole sort of things to those galleries without touching the originals or my original structure.
I hope they find a way to have a little indicator showing if the picture belongs to another category (collected).
I forgot, there is one more possible deal-breaker, not retaining original videos, the videos get re-coded and originals are poof, gone.
DayBreak, my Folk Music Group (some free mp3s!) http://daybreakfolk.com
I got started a while ago, and created a few galleries with my new baby boy, and my niece and nephew and shared those with the family, it seems to work fine, i just never got around to uploading my whole archive. Honestly, if smugmug was just like a vault with a place to keep all pictures without all these bells and whistles, nobody would complain.
All these features makes it hard to figure out how to take advantage of all those stuff.
I'm glad to see you are working on more levels Andy. The biggest complaint I get is that my site is confusing and disorganized but it's as organized as I can make it without having more levels. I need to be able to add more subcategories asap. I appreciate your efforts to respond to the needs of your customers. Thank you.
I face the same problem and I have gone to numbering what would be "sub-galleries", then putting a key at the beginning. Not great, but at least I can get folks to the competitor they want. I am going to try to see if this method, plus a search mechanism, makes it any better.
http://www.equidigital.com/Three-Day-Event/Rolex-Three-Day-Event
http://www.equidigital.com/Three-Day-Event/Jersey-Fresh-Three-Day-Event/2010-Jersey-Fresh-Three-Day/12151287_rM2c7#864265594_GebVb
Pleeeeeaaaase give us more layers! You are literally taking money out of my pocket because of a term someone came up with that makes no sense. I'd love to know who came up with the idea of "click fatigue". It's the dumbest damn thing I've ever heard of and almost sounds like an excuse for whatever reason you really don't want to give us more layers. It makes absolutely no sense, I'm a pro photographer who can run a successful event photography business but I can't be given the freedom to decide if I want to subject my customers to one or more clicks than they have to deal with now? I can assure you I'm losing more customers now because of "search fatigue" than I ever would because of this thing you are doing to supposedly protect MY customers from something you guys call "click fatigue" that I've never even heard of outside of here and am not sure even really exists. You can give me example after example of how to improve on what I'm doing now but there is really only one thing that makes sense and that's to GIVE US MORE LAYERS!!!! I'm a pro, let me decide what to protect my customers from.
I'm frustrated, I took a team in and shot a 70 team indoor soccer tourney two weeks ago. I'd like to upload these to the site but I have no idea how to organize it. I'll tell you how I need to break it down, you tell me how I should arrange my site to accommodate all the galleries. I'll list how I did it with my software on site (with many compliments about how organized and easy it was to find photos with no one complaining about "click fatigue") and you can tell me how to make it work on my site. People would drill in from each of these levels to find teams and games.
Main Category - Soccer Tourney (generic )
2. - Male, Female
3. Friday, Saturday, Sunday
4. List of multiple galleries (team a vs team b)
5. Photos
Soccer Tourney (category)
Male Friday, Male Saturday, Male Sunday, Female Friday, Female Saturday, Female Sunday (sub-categories)
Then have the galleries of each game within their respective sub-category
This would sound good but it adds to the clutter of an already cluttered gallery page with waaaaay to many individual events listed as categories. Shouldn't a category be used to categorize a group of things instead of an individual event? I currently have 38 categories. One other thing I should have mentioned. I sell digital files on site that I upload where they can order 10 files, 20 files or all their files. I also take orders for prints that I sometimes print on site and sometimes put together after the fact and upload to the site and give them the option to order more. Even if I had individual events as categories and list it as you suggested I have no room for these other things. Hey Putty, what else can you tell me about zenfolio as compared to smugmug as far as pros and cons? I generally like smugmug but as the title of this thread suggests their inflexibility with this subject may be a deal breaker. I think I'll try the free trial and see how it goes.
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It's been way too long since I used smugmug to give a good comparison to zenfolio, but the only negative related to zenfolio that I can think of is that it doesn't have a community as vibrant as dgrin. Get the free trial and spend some time playing around. When I switched, I remember also finding the gallery options much more easily understandable and available there.
Thanks for responding, I'm going to check it out but I really, really, really don't want to leave smugmug and I'm kind of hoping it has some other hidden flaws but this level thing is huge and not just to me. I did a search for "click fatigue" and couldn't believe how many people are requesting this and how long it has been requested. It doesn't make much sense to not let a professional business owner decide what is best for his business.
edit: It looks like my rant is a few days to late. They do seem to finally have something in the works. It figures, I've been stewing over this for a while and I finally decide to speak up and they start it just before I do. I'd be surprised if happened soon but I'm glad its going in the right direction.
I've posted here many times that we've recently finished the behind-the-scenes underpinnings of this feature. Stay tuned for the rest. And you'll be able to click-click-click-click away
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Are we talking a week, a month, a year? Inquiry minds want to know. The reason I ask is the same reason my frustration boiled over tonight. I need to decide what to do with 22,000 soccer photos. I'm not trying to be a butt (not anymore at least), I just have to figure out what to do.
DayBreak, my Folk Music Group (some free mp3s!) http://daybreakfolk.com
As per my last post, here's Al's site: http://www.photosbyat.com . If you look at "Birds" or "Archery" on his navbar, & start hovering around, there's a lot of depth there. The navigation is taking you to the various cat or sub-cat pages, but through his use of the dropdowns, there can be several ways to get there. Like I said, I don't know if this helps. And I'm sorry to disagree with you, but I completely understand the "click fatigue" thing, as I hate going through a bunch of different cat-subcat- pages just to finally get to some pics (even though I do use the 3 layers available here now-- someday I hope to do something different w/ layers). The way Al has this structure, it does seem to take you past all that clicking because now you can just hover over the ones you want & get to that gallery or sub-cat page or whatever quickly, right? I think he's got instructions around here about how to do this. As a sidenote-- I knew "click fatigue" did not originate here as I've often heard the term. But I Googled it (in quotes) and got 2,600 hits. DGrin only came up on the 6th page. It's out there. Besides, I do massage therapy on lots of people with click fatigue!
DayBreak, my Folk Music Group (some free mp3s!) http://daybreakfolk.com
nav in visual form. Much easier to find things with one click.
My Website index | My Blog
That index page is AWESOME! When I get more photos, I will definitly do something like that. where are the instructions for this?