Wanted: opinions on organising smugmug galleries

jasonstone

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to work out how to organise all my photos :scratch

Basically I am uploading a lot of photos for backup but also to use the slideshow link on my homepage (which is not hosted on smugmug).

I travel a lot so have travel category but then ended up filling it up with a lot of stuff that really was like day trips and not necessarily travel.

But - what else to put it under? It's not really travel or any of the other categories... it's not specifically family or friends or cars etc.... more General

So I created General category (which I've not started to fill yet as I'm still not sure this is the way to go).

Problem is that say I might take 2 different galleries per week (or more) and then I'm going to have over 100 galleries in the general category :huh which is no longer really manageable.

So then I thought - ok General \ 200X (by year) \ but then I'm still going to have 100+ per year.

Any thoughts on how I could best sort out the galleries? I'm sure there must be a better way I'm just not thinking very well at the moment (a little fuzzy in the head with tiredness!)

Thanks for all suggestions...

Cheers, Jase

Allen

jasonstone wrote:

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to work out how to organise all my photos

Basically I am uploading a lot of photos for backup but also to use the slideshow link on my homepage (which is not hosted on smugmug).

I travel a lot so have travel category but then ended up filling it up with a lot of stuff that really was like day trips and not necessarily travel.

But - what else to put it under? It's not really travel or any of the other categories... it's not specifically family or friends or cars etc.... more General

So I created General category (which I've not started to fill yet as I'm still not sure this is the way to go).

Problem is that say I might take 2 different galleries per week (or more) and then I'm going to have over 100 galleries in the general category which is no longer really manageable.

So then I thought - ok General \ 200X (by year) \ but then I'm still going to have 100+ per year.

Any thoughts on how I could best sort out the galleries? I'm sure there must be a better way I'm just not thinking very well at the moment (a little fuzzy in the head with tiredness!)

Thanks for all suggestions...

Cheers, Jase

If you have a power or pro account you could try something
like this.

To get the number of levels I would create an html gallery
like this here. Each thumb would link to a daily jaunts categroy
as shown below. It will get you eight years and the number of thumbs
can be adjusted to suit.

I don't see a navbar so you could feature this gallery so it would
show on your homepage.

2006 Daily Jaunts (category)
   Jan 2006 Daily Jaunts (subcat}
      gal 1
      gal 2
   Feb 2006 Daily Jaunts (subcat}
      gal 1
      gal 2
   ...
   ...
   Dec 2006 Daily Jaunts (subcat}
      gal 1
      gal 2

2007 Daily Jaunts (category)
   Jan 2007 Daily Jaunts (subcat}
      gal 1
      gal 2
   Feb 2007 Daily Jaunts (subcat}
      gal 1
      gal 2
   ...
   ...
   Dec 2006 Daily Jaunts (subcat}
      gal 1
      gal 2

2008 Daily Jaunts (category)
   Jan 2008 Daily Jaunts (subcat}
      gal 1
      gal 2
   Feb 2008 Daily Jaunts (subcat}
      gal 1
      gal 2
   ...
   ...
   Dec 2006 Daily Jaunts (subcat}
      gal 1
      gal 2

If you only have a standard account you could just create the categories
in the diagram above. Then each of hte cats would show in your category box.

jasonstone

Good point it's only a standard account - which should be sufficient for my requirements I think....

papajay

jasonstone wrote:

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to work out how to organise all my photos

Basically I am uploading a lot of photos for backup but also to use the slideshow link on my homepage (which is not hosted on smugmug).

I travel a lot so have travel category but then ended up filling it up with a lot of stuff that really was like day trips and not necessarily travel.

But - what else to put it under? It's not really travel or any of the other categories... it's not specifically family or friends or cars etc.... more General

So I created General category (which I've not started to fill yet as I'm still not sure this is the way to go).

Problem is that say I might take 2 different galleries per week (or more) and then I'm going to have over 100 galleries in the general category which is no longer really manageable.

So then I thought - ok General \ 200X (by year) \ but then I'm still going to have 100+ per year.

Any thoughts on how I could best sort out the galleries? I'm sure there must be a better way I'm just not thinking very well at the moment (a little fuzzy in the head with tiredness!)

Thanks for all suggestions...

Cheers, Jase

Jase, I created a custom category named "Outings, Daytrips, Weekend Jaunts" precisely for the situation you described (for the "not really travel" sorta stuff). I include the year (e.g "2008") in the gallery title, and arrange the gallery from most-recent to oldest for some visual clarity when viewing the category thumbs.

I considered creating sub-categories called "Outings", "Daytrips", "Weekend Jaunts" under the main category heading, but decided (for now, at least) that it was overkill in my case....but the nice part is, I can always change my mind later and quickly assign the sub-cat to the galleries in the main category collection if/when it makes sense to do so.

For "true" big-time travel vacations, I prefer to use category=Vacation, and create a sub-cat for each one (again with the year in the title). For me, the beauty of the sub-cat approach is the ability to put multiple galleries (day1, day 2, etc. or the names of the places we visited on that trip)underneath that "Trip to Florida (2008)" sub-cat.

I've found I prefer to create the sub-cat even for "one-gallery" vacations so the arragement of my vacation trips is chronologically all in one place (in other words, I don't allow any single-gallery records to exist without attaching them to a sub-cat because I prefer the "unified" look of all the vacation sub-cats in one place rather than seeing a collection of sub-cats at the top, followed by a bunch of single-galleries in a separate section at the bottom of the "Vacation" group.

PBolchover

After trying various schemes, I eventually decided that simple is best, and now put all of photos in categories corresponding to the year: http://pbolchover.smugmug.com/2007 etc. I mix the longer vacations alongside the day trips, but use a couple of hacks to create a number sub-galleries within the vacation gallery (e.g. my Yucatan: November 2007 gallery)

Since I'm a Power User, I can also implement a parallel category structure by subject, using gallery redirects. For example, the galleries in http://pbolchover.smugmug.com/Weddings actually redirect to galleries located in the relevant years.

Are many of these day-trips repeat visits to the same location? If so, then you could like your best photos from a single location solve this problem by using keywords (and potentially having gallery redirects to keyword galleries). For example: http://pbolchover.smugmug.com/keyword/cambridge-good
A power user could also even fake a keyword result to look more like a normal gallery: http://pbolchover.smugmug.com/keyword/dordogne07best

I am also starting to use photo-maps (generated via Google MyMaps) to geographically link to galleries and keyword results by location. For example: http://pbolchover.smugmug.com/gallery/4338724_r4KdU

KDunlap

more subcategories

PBolchover wrote:

After trying various schemes, I eventually decided that simple is best, and now put all of photos in categories corresponding to the year: http://pbolchover.smugmug.com/2007 etc. I mix the longer vacations alongside the day trips, but use a couple of hacks to create a number sub-galleries within the vacation gallery (e.g. my Yucatan: November 2007 gallery)

Since I'm a Power User, I can also implement a parallel category structure by subject, using gallery redirects. For example, the galleries in http://pbolchover.smugmug.com/Weddings actually redirect to galleries located in the relevant years.

Paul,

I'm quite interested in the gallery redirects- I had no idea Smugmug had that. I like your method of storing by date and using the redirects for things like weddings, or whatever. Has using redirects worked well for you?

Did you use html pages to get subcategories like you have in the Yucatan:Nov 07 subgallery? The setup looks like Smugmug's journal style, so I wasn't sure how you managed to do it.

Kristi

jasonstone

PBolchover wrote:

After trying various schemes, I eventually decided that simple is best, and now put all of photos in categories corresponding to the year: http://pbolchover.smugmug.com/2007 etc. I mix the longer vacations alongside the day trips, but use a couple of hacks to create a number sub-galleries within the vacation gallery (e.g. my Yucatan: November 2007 gallery)

Since I'm a Power User, I can also implement a parallel category structure by subject, using gallery redirects. For example, the galleries in http://pbolchover.smugmug.com/Weddings actually redirect to galleries located in the relevant years.

Are many of these day-trips repeat visits to the same location? If so, then you could like your best photos from a single location solve this problem by using keywords (and potentially having gallery redirects to keyword galleries). For example: http://pbolchover.smugmug.com/keyword/cambridge-good
A power user could also even fake a keyword result to look more like a normal gallery: http://pbolchover.smugmug.com/keyword/dordogne07best

I am also starting to use photo-maps (generated via Google MyMaps) to geographically link to galleries and keyword results by location. For example: http://pbolchover.smugmug.com/gallery/4338724_r4KdU

Any links on where to setup / how to setup the maps navigation?? that looks cool.... is it easy?

PBolchover

KDunlap wrote:

I'm quite interested in the gallery redirects- I had no idea Smugmug had that. I like your method of storing by date and using the redirects for things like weddings, or whatever. Has using redirects worked well for you?

Unfortunately, gallery redirects aren't built into smugmug, but require customisation (a bit of javascript), so you'd have to be a Power User. I've found that they work very well...

KDunlap wrote:

Did you use html pages to get subcategories like you have in the Yucatan:Nov 07 subgallery? The setup looks like Smugmug's journal style, so I wasn't sure how you managed to do it.

The page is in journal style. I then used javascript to change where you go when you click on an image. You can use a similar trick on Traditional style galleries (e.g. http://pbolchover.smugmug.com/gallery/4773896_qEy8z, where I also added a couple of extra photos in the gallery descripion.)

jasonstone wrote:

Any links on where to setup / how to setup the maps navigation?

Go to maps.google.com and click on the MyMaps tab on the top of the left-hand pane. Once you have set up your placemarks with photos and links, you click on "Link to this page" to get code that you can then embed in a gallery description of an html gallery.