I'd like to throw in my 3 cents. I think this is just bad user experience for larger galleries.
Being a pro wedding shooter and the director of UX for a major news website, I think its important for very large galleries that you allow subcategories. I have experienced and watched users of both my photography galleries and my websites (where we often show galleries) and users get exhausted and overwhelmed with too many photos at once. Offering thumbnails of them all helps a lot, but its still laborious for long events.
I use one gallery company (despite so many other flaws) because I can divide 600-700 photos into groups like "Ceremony", "Formals", "Dancing", "Cocktails". My "users" consume many more photos this way because I provide them some meaningful way of navigating - a way that makes sense to how they saw the day unfold. Who said that "click, click, click, click, click, click" (x600) is the only way to get through a gallery? With a single gallery and no categories I have users constantly missing certain photos
"Didnt you take a shot of me with my uncle Tom?.
"Yes I did, its photo number 432 on page 25. Here is the link."
"Oh hey I didnt see all these shots!"
Now I know you could all say "Dont take so many damn photos!" I try I try, but in nine hours, 150 guests, five locations and lots of high expectations, its kinda necessary to cover the day as a photojournalist.
I have tried this with creating subcategories first called "Mary and Johns wedding" and then putting 4-5 seperate galleries in there, its close but its clunky at times. Now I have tons of extra galleries to manage, and many of the tools are gallery specific so its not convenient enough.
Please, add this feature. (Oh and the coupons too - its been the reason why I have been a lurker of these boards for the past three years)
I'd like to throw in my 3 cents. I think this is just bad user experience for larger galleries.
Being a pro wedding shooter and the director of UX for a major news website, I think its important for very large galleries that you allow subcategories. I have experienced and watched users of both my photography galleries and my websites (where we often show galleries) and users get exhausted and overwhelmed with too many photos at once. Offering thumbnails of them all helps a lot, but its still laborious for long events.
I use one gallery company (despite so many other flaws) because I can divide 600-700 photos into groups like "Ceremony", "Formals", "Dancing", "Cocktails". My "users" consume many more photos this way because I provide them some meaningful way of navigating - a way that makes sense to how they saw the day unfold. Who said that "click, click, click, click, click, click" (x600) is the only way to get through a gallery? With a single gallery and no categories I have users constantly missing certain photos
"Didnt you take a shot of me with my uncle Tom?.
"Yes I did, its photo number 432 on page 25. Here is the link."
"Oh hey I didnt see all these shots!"
Now I know you could all say "Dont take so many damn photos!" I try I try, but in nine hours, 150 guests, five locations and lots of high expectations, its kinda necessary to cover the day as a photojournalist.
I have tried this with creating subcategories first called "Mary and Johns wedding" and then putting 4-5 seperate galleries in there, its close but its clunky at times. Now I have tons of extra galleries to manage, and many of the tools are gallery specific so its not convenient enough.
Please, add this feature. (Oh and the coupons too - its been the reason why I have been a lurker of these boards for the past three years)
So, Smugmug has categories and sub-categories for exactly what you're talking about. I use them all the time. When I shoot a soccer season, I make a sub-category for the season and then have a gallery for each player, along with some highlights galleries. Are Smugmug's categories and sub-categories not working for you or did you not understand that they had them or how to best use them? Let us know what wasn't working for you and we can probably offer helpful suggestions.
These galleries are password protected, but you can see how I use sub-categories here. I have more than 1000 photos there and the comments I got from the soccer parents were like "wow, I can't believe how organized this is - can you come organize my photos". I have some extra customizations on that page for the formatting, but it's mostly just a sub-category and galleries.
I don't have a link to your Smugmug site so I can't see what you're currently doing. I'm sure folks could offer helpful suggestions if we could see how you currently have your site.
So, Smugmug has categories and sub-categories for exactly what you're talking about.
yeah, like I said I have used them. But its a workaround at best. Perhaps you can show me where I am going wrong or could do things better. I would rather upload just one gallery than six for a single event. Also when I want to make bulk changes to any galleries I will end up having thirty different galleries called "Ceremony". Its not easy to manage at all. Like if I want to customize the presentation for all the galleries in a single wedding, I need to find the six different galleries among the 200+ that I have (I also have 100+ personal, portraits, corporate stuff) and save the settings as a new set before I apply them in bulk.
This method also keeps me from organizing my weddings in any other way - because I have used up the entire info architecture. I would really like to have them grouped by year - meaning I would use Category: Wedding Subcategory: 2009. I cant do that.
Password protecting, which some expect, is a pain because I need to set the password for each gallery and then the subcategory screen doesn't show thumbnails, even after you login. Very unbecoming.
Slideshow and Sharing feature only shows the photos from that one gallery - confusing to some people - as they dont see these as separate galleries.
Finally, how do I set the thumbnail for a subcategory? I would like to choose the thumbnail that displays for the wedding (which is a subcategory not a gallery).
yeah, like I said I have used them. But its a workaround at best. Perhaps you can show me where I am going wrong or could do things better. I would rather upload just one gallery than six for a single event. Also when I want to make bulk changes to any galleries I will end up having thirty different galleries called "Ceremony". Its not easy to manage at all. Like if I want to customize the presentation for all the galleries in a single wedding, I need to find the six different galleries among the 200+ that I have (I also have 100+ personal, portraits, corporate stuff) and save the settings as a new set before I apply them in bulk.
This method also keeps me from organizing my weddings in any other way - because I have used up the entire info architecture. I would really like to have them grouped by year - meaning I would use Category: Wedding Subcategory: 2009. I cant do that.
Password protecting, which some expect, is a pain because I need to set the password for each gallery and then the subcategory screen doesn't show thumbnails, even after you login. Very unbecoming.
Slideshow and Sharing feature only shows the photos from that one gallery - confusing to some people - as they dont see these as separate galleries.
Finally, how do I set the thumbnail for a subcategory? I would like to choose the thumbnail that displays for the wedding (which is a subcategory not a gallery).
Thanks in advance.
There are ways to deal with most of the issues you mention. I'm not going to defend Smugmug's management of galleries and gallery properties because it is not very good when you have a lot of galleries, but you can figure out how to manage if you want to.
First, you can download SmugBrowser (an add-on for Firefox) and can very easily change settings on all the galleries in a category of sub-category in one fell swoop.
Second, you can use an uploader that lets you upload to multiple galleries in one session. I use StarExplorer and there may be others with this capability too. I separate the images on my PC before uploading and then just drag/drop each set of galleries images to the right gallery in StarExplorer. I also use StarExplorer to bulk create the galleries all with the same settings. Because the management is so messy, when I find I need to move a bunch of images from one gallery to another, I often find it easier to delete and re-upload rather than move them on the server because finding the right target gallery in a list of lots of duplicate names is unworkable.
Third, when you password protect a gallery, if you still want a thumbnail to show for that gallery, you can pick one of the images in the gallery and the "feature" that photo. That will cause it to be used for the thumbnail, even when the gallery is password protected. This is your way of telling Smugmug that it's OK to show a thumbnail image even though the gallery is password protected. Also, if you bulk create a set of galleries in all with the same password (like I do in StarExplorer), then the viewer will only have to enter the password once. Subsequent galleries will open based on the previously entered password.
Fourth, Smugmug has said that more levels of subcategories are coming at some point (though probably not for a little while judging by the chatter about features). Until then, you are limited to the three levels they have now (category, subcategory and gallery). FYI, I created a new pseudo level of hierarchy in the example sub-category I linked above with a bunch of custom javascript. I actually find this more useful than another level of hierarchy because it's faster to navigate while seeing everything on one page rather than making new clicks and new pages for each new level of division. I've been trying to encourage Smugmug to support something like this, but haven't heard any feedback from them on whether they even like the idea. My viewers love it.
Fifth, it's easy to share the URL of a category or sub-category manually (you just copy paste the URL into an email), but unfortunately Smugmug doesn't show the Share button in those cases. I don't know of anyway to get slideshow view of an entire category without custom scripting and keywords.
Again, I'm not defending Smugmug's capabilities here. They are simply not very good when you have lots of galleries to manage. I have a "Highlights" gallery for every soccer season I shoot and seeing them all in a flat list of galleries is simply unworkable sometimes - you can't tell which gallery is which. I've been complaining about it for years and nothing has been done about it. I put up with it with work-arounds (temporarily change the target gallery name to put an x in front of it so you can find it uniquely in the list, carry out your operation, then change the name back), though if something better showed up, I'd be tempted to go with it. In the meantime, you can find work-arounds to many of the issues (something you shouldn't have to do), but if you have an option that is a lot better in this regard and that's one of the more important capabilities to you, then maybe Smugmug isn't the best choice for you because this is not where it excels.
There are ways to deal with most of the issues you mention. I'm not going to defend Smugmug's management of galleries and gallery properties because it is not very good when you have a lot of galleries, but you can figure out how to manage if you want to.
<snipped out the good ideas, several of which I've used myself>
I would also like to see sub-gallery galore. When someone says people don't like to click, click, click to drill down to where they want to go, that's people like my brother and my mother (who are 60 and 80, respectively, and not on line but maybe once a month, if that). Most folks who use the internet are used to drilling down and quite happy to do so, though a visual tree or other nice visual cues is always helpful.
If you are a pro and using this as your delivery mechanism, you really do want to be able to have a well engineered and quite deep drill down structure so that Joe can find the BBQ portrait he's looking for. On the other hand, if this is a store front for artistic work, more than a couple levels is not going to work very well for the occasional visitor. My own current hodge podge is really only of interest to the people in it, for the most part. And generally speaking they get direct links from me.
What I would like to see is something more along the lines of the collections (smart as well as regular) that Lightroom uses. There you can nest collection sets as deep as you want, but you can only have smart or regular collections at the bottom level.
I recently built my first smart gallery and some things became apparent right away:
1. sorting. I was fortunate that the photos I wanted to use could be presented in date taken order. But I have some future project in mind where I would need to be able to arrange them in a subject order that has nothing to do with any of the sorting features in gallery setting.
2. Watermarking: I tried to override watermarking, but it was taking it from the original gallery. I wanted to change the watermark on just the smart gallery...
3. Captions: I'm making a journal gallery. It doesn't really bother me that the captions are now changed in the original gallery, but I would very much prefer an option, especially in the journal theme, to have it more like a blog, with associated text entries rather than the captions.
4. rules: The very first thing I wanted to do was select a few photos from an existing gallery. But my expectation of being able to highlight and pick the ones I wanted was not met. Instead, I had to go in and add some artificial keywords so that I could select them that way.
I can live with just category and sub-category, and for the most part in my lightroom work I normally only use two levels at most of collection sets. But there have been times when I felt another level or two would have been helpful.
Now that smart galleries are here, though, if they can become even smarter, I'd like it even more.
Brandon Smith
redwoodtwig.smugmug.com
Brandon Smith http://redwoodtwig.com
Sony A7r4 with a selection of Rokinon Cine primes that I'm really enjoying learning how to use.
I'm brand new and thats a huge bummer if folders are not supported. I have around 15 gigs of photos stored in Gallery2 based off of meticulous folder organization.
I'm brand new and thats a huge bummer if folders are not supported. I have around 15 gigs of photos stored in Gallery2 based off of meticulous folder organization.
When I import these into Gallery2 it creates albums based off of those beautiful folder names. Now I can traverse directly to the image I want to see.
How will I handle this in SmugMug without having to retag thousands of photos individually or in groups?
I can think of two ways to get more levels but the easiest is create an
html gallery with an index link composition. See this page I made for my
site. This allows you to link to any level you want with upper tree labels.
Travel (no link)
Vacations (no link)
Puerto Vallarta {link to category}
2010 {link to sub-cat with 2010 galleries}
2011 {link to sub-cat with 2010 galleries}
Business
People
Street
Family
Nature
Flora
Trees {link to category}
Eastern {link to sub-cat with galleries}
Western {link to sub-cat with galleries}
Flowers
Animals
Wild Animals {link to sub-cat with galleries}
Zoo Animals {link to category}
Chicago Zoo {link to sub-cat with galleries}
Boston Zoo {link to sub-cat with galleries}
I can think of two ways to get more levels but the easiest is create an
html gallery with an index link composition. See this page I made for my
site. This allows you to link to any level you want with upper tree labels.
Travel (no link)
Vacations (no link)
Puerto Vallarta {link to category}
2010 {link to sub-cat with 2010 galleries}
2011 {link to sub-cat with 2010 galleries}
Business
People
Street
Family
Nature
Flora
Trees {link to category}
Eastern {link to sub-cat with galleries}
Western {link to sub-cat with galleries}
Flowers
Animals
Wild Animals {link to sub-cat with galleries}
Zoo Animals {link to category}
Chicago Zoo {link to sub-cat with galleries}
Boston Zoo {link to sub-cat with galleries}
I was just wondering, pcm2a, do you want to intermingle photos and galleries? That is, within "Travel/Vacations/Puerto Vallarta 02-2010" would you expect to be able to have photos there?
Or would "Puerto Vallarta 02-2010" be a folder of strictly galleries?
It sounds like the best work around is to create lots of top level Galleries:
Puerto Vallarta - 02-2010
1993 Ford Mustang
etc
Then I can create sub galleries (if this is allowed?)
Puerto Vallarta - 02-2010/People
If that is not allowed then all images will have to be lumped inside of that folder and separated by some type of tagging?
The structure here is this:
>>> categories contain galleries and optionally subcategories
>>> subcategories contain gallleries
>>> galleries contain photos
So in your example Puerto Vallarta can be a category, 02-2010 can be a subcategory, and People can be a gallery. Alternatively, 02-2010 People can be a gallery.
I'd like to throw in my 3 cents. I think this is just bad user experience for larger galleries.
Being a pro wedding shooter and the director of UX for a major news website, I think its important for very large galleries that you allow subcategories. I have experienced and watched users of both my photography galleries and my websites (where we often show galleries) and users get exhausted and overwhelmed with too many photos at once. Offering thumbnails of them all helps a lot, but its still laborious for long events.
I use one gallery company (despite so many other flaws) because I can divide 600-700 photos into groups like "Ceremony", "Formals", "Dancing", "Cocktails". My "users" consume many more photos this way because I provide them some meaningful way of navigating - a way that makes sense to how they saw the day unfold. Who said that "click, click, click, click, click, click" (x600) is the only way to get through a gallery? With a single gallery and no categories I have users constantly missing certain photos
"Didnt you take a shot of me with my uncle Tom?.
"Yes I did, its photo number 432 on page 25. Here is the link."
"Oh hey I didnt see all these shots!"
Now I know you could all say "Dont take so many damn photos!" I try I try, but in nine hours, 150 guests, five locations and lots of high expectations, its kinda necessary to cover the day as a photojournalist.
I have tried this with creating subcategories first called "Mary and Johns wedding" and then putting 4-5 seperate galleries in there, its close but its clunky at times. Now I have tons of extra galleries to manage, and many of the tools are gallery specific so its not convenient enough.
Please, add this feature. (Oh and the coupons too - its been the reason why I have been a lurker of these boards for the past three years)
This is exactly what I am trying to do. I know this post is old, so am wondering if this type of organizing is now available. I am using the trial version now and I really like it, but assumed I would be able to organize this way. If not.... ?
This is exactly what I am trying to do. I know this post is old, so am wondering if this type of organizing is now available. I am using the trial version now and I really like it, but assumed I would be able to organize this way. If not.... ?
I don't understand what is being asked beyond what Smugmug already has. For example, when I upload photos from a whole sports season (like a soccer season), I create a sub-category with the team name, year and season as the name of the sub-category, I put that sub-category in the Sports category and then I create a bunch of galleries that describe the season. I typically have a gallery for every person on the team (with photos of that player in them), some highlights galleries, a team picture gallery and maybe a few others. When I send out a link to the photos to the team, I send out a link to the sub-category. When they open that sub-category, they get thumbnails of all the galleries available. My idea is specifically that I want people to be able to have to look through no more than about 50 photos (3-4 pages of thumbnails in the Smugmug view) to find the ones they want so I try to organize things so that there aren't more than about 50 photos in any given gallery and I try to organize and name the galleries so it's easy for the viewers to zero in on the gallery that has the right photos in it. This takes a bit of organization work on my part (which I do with keywords in Lightroom), but it makes it a lot easier for viewers and it can all be done with Smugmug's existing features.
I also apply some special CSS/JS formatting to the sub-category to improve it's visuals, but that isn't required to have this type of organizational scheme on Smugmug. To give you an idea, here's a screenshot of one such sub-category:
I guess I was thinking about it backwards. I thought the wedding (X & Y Get Married) would be the "gallery" and that the subcatagories would come under that umbrella. Looks like I need to make individual galleries to achieve my goal.
Thanks for the input.
I guess I was thinking about it backwards. I thought the wedding (X & Y Get Married) would be the "gallery" and that the subcatagories would come under that umbrella. Looks like I need to make individual galleries to achieve my goal.
Thanks for the input.
Categories contain either sub-categories or galleries or both.
Sub-categories contain galleries.
Galleries contain photos.
So, you create galleries to display your photos and you create categories and (optionally) sub-categories to display those galleries in the desired hierarchy. When I have more than one gallery for a given event, I create a sub-category with the event name and put all the related galleries into that sub-category. The sub-category is then the top link for the event and it has multiple galleries within it.
You aren't the first one to be confused by this. However Smugmug presents it in their UI and explains it in the UI, lots of people get confused. But, the good news is that once you understand it, it works and then it's not hard to use.
I really got lost in this one. This is the problem why I ended up here, hope someone can help or direct me to the right answer:
I am a travel and wildlife photographer. I just came back from Papua New Guinea and brought many pictures, decided to go for Smugmug to finally take online my photo stock. I am starting with my Papua NG photos.
So, I created a category called Papua New Guinea.
Inside that category, I created a gallery called Mount Hagen and Goroka sing sing (show) and uploaded some photos.
I kept on working on the design of the site while uploading the images.
I created a navigation bar and one of the links is "Photo Archives". In this page I want to show all the images of all the locations I have shot at through the years.
So I looked for the way to create a page that will show all my photos and found the tutorial to create a second home page that shows all galleries. Great, I did it, it works.
The problem is that it shows the galleries and not the categories. Plop! This is not good. I need (and most photographers need, I am very sure) that the visitors to my photo archive can choose a country, then a destination in that country and there look for the images of those places...
For example, the "photo stock" page should open a list, with thumbnails, that presents all my categories (Papua New Guinea, Peru, Chile, Antarctica, etc)
Lets say they choose Peru. When they click on Peru, they should find a page with all the galleres inside the category Peru, like: Machu Picchu, Nasca Lines, Inca Trail, etc.
SOO, what I really need is a link in my navigation bar that takes to a page that shows all my CATEGORIES, and not my galleries.
Can anyone tell me if this is possible in SmugMug? Really, this is a must to keep order of things, I hope I am reading wrong and this IS something that smugmug can do.
I really got lost in this one. This is the problem why I ended up here, hope someone can help or direct me to the right answer:
I am a travel and wildlife photographer. I just came back from Papua New Guinea and brought many pictures, decided to go for Smugmug to finally take online my photo stock. I am starting with my Papua NG photos.
So, I created a category called Papua New Guinea.
Inside that category, I created a gallery called Mount Hagen and Goroka sing sing (show) and uploaded some photos.
I kept on working on the design of the site while uploading the images.
I created a navigation bar and one of the links is "Photo Archives". In this page I want to show all the images of all the locations I have shot at through the years.
So I looked for the way to create a page that will show all my photos and found the tutorial to create a second home page that shows all galleries. Great, I did it, it works.
The problem is that it shows the galleries and not the categories. Plop! This is not good. I need (and most photographers need, I am very sure) that the visitors to my photo archive can choose a country, then a destination in that country and there look for the images of those places...
For example, the "photo stock" page should open a list, with thumbnails, that presents all my categories (Papua New Guinea, Peru, Chile, Antarctica, etc)
Lets say they choose Peru. When they click on Peru, they should find a page with all the galleres inside the category Peru, like: Machu Picchu, Nasca Lines, Inca Trail, etc.
SOO, what I really need is a link in my navigation bar that takes to a page that shows all my CATEGORIES, and not my galleries.
Can anyone tell me if this is possible in SmugMug? Really, this is a must to keep order of things, I hope I am reading wrong and this IS something that smugmug can do.
Thanks for your help.
First off, when you don't include a link to your site, all we can do is guess because we can't see what you actually have on your site. My guess is that you need to click on "categories" in the upper right corner of your galleries page to change it to display by category instead of by gallery. But, without seeing your site, that's just a guess.
First off, when you don't include a link to your site, all we can do is guess because we can't see what you actually have on your site. My guess is that you need to click on "categories" in the upper right corner of your galleries page to change it to display by category instead of by gallery. But, without seeing your site, that's just a guess.
Sorry... Here it goes: jorgesalasphoto/smugmug.com
Thanks a lot, that was very easy. Sorry for bothering.
I don't understand what is being asked beyond what Smugmug already has. For example, when I upload photos from a whole sports season (like a soccer season), I create a sub-category with the team name, year and season as the name of the sub-category, I put that sub-category in the Sports category and then I create a bunch of galleries that describe the season. I typically have a gallery for every person on the team (with photos of that player in them), some highlights galleries, a team picture gallery and maybe a few others. When I send out a link to the photos to the team, I send out a link to the sub-category. When they open that sub-category, they get thumbnails of all the galleries available. My idea is specifically that I want people to be able to have to look through no more than about 50 photos (3-4 pages of thumbnails in the Smugmug view) to find the ones they want so I try to organize things so that there aren't more than about 50 photos in any given gallery and I try to organize and name the galleries so it's easy for the viewers to zero in on the gallery that has the right photos in it. This takes a bit of organization work on my part (which I do with keywords in Lightroom), but it makes it a lot easier for viewers and it can all be done with Smugmug's existing features.
I also apply some special CSS/JS formatting to the sub-category to improve it's visuals, but that isn't required to have this type of organizational scheme on Smugmug. To give you an idea, here's a screenshot of one such sub-category:
This is tricky, because it appears that you have sub-sub-categories of Team, Players, and Games. How do you do that John?
This is tricky, because it appears that you have sub-sub-categories of Team, Players, and Games. How do you do that John?
I used JS to dynamically add the extra classifications of Team, Players and Games on this page. The JS that is targeted at this sub-category specifies a regular expressionthat matches gallery names and that determines which galleries go in which classification. I have it set up so the galleries that are not matched by any previous regular expression go in the players classification so I don't have to list all players. The table for that particular sub-category looks like this:
There is obviously then a bunch of JS that uses this table to add the sections to any sub-category that has a table specified for it. I use this technique for most of my sports galleries and folks think it looks awesome. I wish Smugmug would invest a lot more than they have in their category/sub-category thumbnail display. They really haven't done anything to what they have in 5 years. So much more innovation could happen here than the completely bland hierarchy they show today. FWIW, I don't want more nested levels that viewers have to click through. I love showing more organization on the same level. It's fewer clicks, looks great and makes things easier to find.
I have not made this code public (where I share all my other JS customizations) because I don't want to support it. It's not as simple to implement as copy/paste like most of the other customizations I share. You have to create JS tables, point a master table to sub-tables, use regular expressions, get all the JS syntax right when making tables, etc... It's not rocket science for anyone who's familiar with JS, but it's a long ways from copy/paste. The code is in my bottom javascript if you want it. You can have it as long as your expectations for support are low. I don't mind if you ask a few questions, but I don't want to get myself in the position of having to write the custom tables for people who want to use it.
I used JS to dynamically add the extra classifications of Team, Players and Games on this page. The JS that is targeted at this sub-category specifies a regular expressionthat matches gallery names and that determines which galleries go in which classification. I have it set up so the galleries that are not matched by any previous regular expression go in the players classification so I don't have to list all players. The table for that particular sub-category looks like this:
There is obviously then a bunch of JS that uses this table to add the sections to any sub-category that has a table specified for it. I use this technique for most of my sports galleries and folks think it looks awesome. I wish Smugmug would invest a lot more than they have in their category/sub-category thumbnail display. They really haven't done anything to what they have in 5 years. So much more innovation could happen here than the completely bland hierarchy they show today. FWIW, I don't want more nested levels that viewers have to click through. I love showing more organization on the same level. It's fewer clicks, looks great and makes things easier to find.
I have not made this code public (where I share all my other JS customizations) because I don't want to support it. It's not as simple to implement as copy/paste like most of the other customizations I share. You have to create JS tables, point a master table to sub-tables, use regular expressions, get all the JS syntax right when making tables, etc... It's not rocket science for anyone who's familiar with JS, but it's a long ways from copy/paste. The code is in my bottom javascript if you want it. You can have it as long as your expectations for support are low. I don't mind if you ask a few questions, but I don't want to get myself in the position of having to write the custom tables for people who want to use it.
Wow, awesome hack. Regexps - clever.
But ugh, hacks. I've said it a million times:
- 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.
Comments
We still expect to do deeper galleries.
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
Do you have any sort of ETA on this, Andy?
This topic was started over a year ago, and some of who really need this functionality would prefer it over other "features".
Being a pro wedding shooter and the director of UX for a major news website, I think its important for very large galleries that you allow subcategories. I have experienced and watched users of both my photography galleries and my websites (where we often show galleries) and users get exhausted and overwhelmed with too many photos at once. Offering thumbnails of them all helps a lot, but its still laborious for long events.
I use one gallery company (despite so many other flaws) because I can divide 600-700 photos into groups like "Ceremony", "Formals", "Dancing", "Cocktails". My "users" consume many more photos this way because I provide them some meaningful way of navigating - a way that makes sense to how they saw the day unfold. Who said that "click, click, click, click, click, click" (x600) is the only way to get through a gallery? With a single gallery and no categories I have users constantly missing certain photos
"Didnt you take a shot of me with my uncle Tom?.
"Yes I did, its photo number 432 on page 25. Here is the link."
"Oh hey I didnt see all these shots!"
Now I know you could all say "Dont take so many damn photos!" I try I try, but in nine hours, 150 guests, five locations and lots of high expectations, its kinda necessary to cover the day as a photojournalist.
I have tried this with creating subcategories first called "Mary and Johns wedding" and then putting 4-5 seperate galleries in there, its close but its clunky at times. Now I have tons of extra galleries to manage, and many of the tools are gallery specific so its not convenient enough.
Please, add this feature. (Oh and the coupons too - its been the reason why I have been a lurker of these boards for the past three years)
So, Smugmug has categories and sub-categories for exactly what you're talking about. I use them all the time. When I shoot a soccer season, I make a sub-category for the season and then have a gallery for each player, along with some highlights galleries. Are Smugmug's categories and sub-categories not working for you or did you not understand that they had them or how to best use them? Let us know what wasn't working for you and we can probably offer helpful suggestions.
These galleries are password protected, but you can see how I use sub-categories here. I have more than 1000 photos there and the comments I got from the soccer parents were like "wow, I can't believe how organized this is - can you come organize my photos". I have some extra customizations on that page for the formatting, but it's mostly just a sub-category and galleries.
I don't have a link to your Smugmug site so I can't see what you're currently doing. I'm sure folks could offer helpful suggestions if we could see how you currently have your site.
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yeah, like I said I have used them. But its a workaround at best. Perhaps you can show me where I am going wrong or could do things better. I would rather upload just one gallery than six for a single event. Also when I want to make bulk changes to any galleries I will end up having thirty different galleries called "Ceremony". Its not easy to manage at all. Like if I want to customize the presentation for all the galleries in a single wedding, I need to find the six different galleries among the 200+ that I have (I also have 100+ personal, portraits, corporate stuff) and save the settings as a new set before I apply them in bulk.
This method also keeps me from organizing my weddings in any other way - because I have used up the entire info architecture. I would really like to have them grouped by year - meaning I would use Category: Wedding Subcategory: 2009. I cant do that.
Password protecting, which some expect, is a pain because I need to set the password for each gallery and then the subcategory screen doesn't show thumbnails, even after you login. Very unbecoming.
Slideshow and Sharing feature only shows the photos from that one gallery - confusing to some people - as they dont see these as separate galleries.
Finally, how do I set the thumbnail for a subcategory? I would like to choose the thumbnail that displays for the wedding (which is a subcategory not a gallery).
Thanks in advance.
http://danaphoto.smugmug.com/Weddings/861647
password is 090801
First, you can download SmugBrowser (an add-on for Firefox) and can very easily change settings on all the galleries in a category of sub-category in one fell swoop.
Second, you can use an uploader that lets you upload to multiple galleries in one session. I use StarExplorer and there may be others with this capability too. I separate the images on my PC before uploading and then just drag/drop each set of galleries images to the right gallery in StarExplorer. I also use StarExplorer to bulk create the galleries all with the same settings. Because the management is so messy, when I find I need to move a bunch of images from one gallery to another, I often find it easier to delete and re-upload rather than move them on the server because finding the right target gallery in a list of lots of duplicate names is unworkable.
Third, when you password protect a gallery, if you still want a thumbnail to show for that gallery, you can pick one of the images in the gallery and the "feature" that photo. That will cause it to be used for the thumbnail, even when the gallery is password protected. This is your way of telling Smugmug that it's OK to show a thumbnail image even though the gallery is password protected. Also, if you bulk create a set of galleries in all with the same password (like I do in StarExplorer), then the viewer will only have to enter the password once. Subsequent galleries will open based on the previously entered password.
Fourth, Smugmug has said that more levels of subcategories are coming at some point (though probably not for a little while judging by the chatter about features). Until then, you are limited to the three levels they have now (category, subcategory and gallery). FYI, I created a new pseudo level of hierarchy in the example sub-category I linked above with a bunch of custom javascript. I actually find this more useful than another level of hierarchy because it's faster to navigate while seeing everything on one page rather than making new clicks and new pages for each new level of division. I've been trying to encourage Smugmug to support something like this, but haven't heard any feedback from them on whether they even like the idea. My viewers love it.
Fifth, it's easy to share the URL of a category or sub-category manually (you just copy paste the URL into an email), but unfortunately Smugmug doesn't show the Share button in those cases. I don't know of anyway to get slideshow view of an entire category without custom scripting and keywords.
Again, I'm not defending Smugmug's capabilities here. They are simply not very good when you have lots of galleries to manage. I have a "Highlights" gallery for every soccer season I shoot and seeing them all in a flat list of galleries is simply unworkable sometimes - you can't tell which gallery is which. I've been complaining about it for years and nothing has been done about it. I put up with it with work-arounds (temporarily change the target gallery name to put an x in front of it so you can find it uniquely in the list, carry out your operation, then change the name back), though if something better showed up, I'd be tempted to go with it. In the meantime, you can find work-arounds to many of the issues (something you shouldn't have to do), but if you have an option that is a lot better in this regard and that's one of the more important capabilities to you, then maybe Smugmug isn't the best choice for you because this is not where it excels.
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I would also like to see sub-gallery galore. When someone says people don't like to click, click, click to drill down to where they want to go, that's people like my brother and my mother (who are 60 and 80, respectively, and not on line but maybe once a month, if that). Most folks who use the internet are used to drilling down and quite happy to do so, though a visual tree or other nice visual cues is always helpful.
If you are a pro and using this as your delivery mechanism, you really do want to be able to have a well engineered and quite deep drill down structure so that Joe can find the BBQ portrait he's looking for. On the other hand, if this is a store front for artistic work, more than a couple levels is not going to work very well for the occasional visitor. My own current hodge podge is really only of interest to the people in it, for the most part. And generally speaking they get direct links from me.
What I would like to see is something more along the lines of the collections (smart as well as regular) that Lightroom uses. There you can nest collection sets as deep as you want, but you can only have smart or regular collections at the bottom level.
I recently built my first smart gallery and some things became apparent right away:
1. sorting. I was fortunate that the photos I wanted to use could be presented in date taken order. But I have some future project in mind where I would need to be able to arrange them in a subject order that has nothing to do with any of the sorting features in gallery setting.
2. Watermarking: I tried to override watermarking, but it was taking it from the original gallery. I wanted to change the watermark on just the smart gallery...
3. Captions: I'm making a journal gallery. It doesn't really bother me that the captions are now changed in the original gallery, but I would very much prefer an option, especially in the journal theme, to have it more like a blog, with associated text entries rather than the captions.
4. rules: The very first thing I wanted to do was select a few photos from an existing gallery. But my expectation of being able to highlight and pick the ones I wanted was not met. Instead, I had to go in and add some artificial keywords so that I could select them that way.
I can live with just category and sub-category, and for the most part in my lightroom work I normally only use two levels at most of collection sets. But there have been times when I felt another level or two would have been helpful.
Now that smart galleries are here, though, if they can become even smarter, I'd like it even more.
Brandon Smith
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Sony A7r4 with a selection of Rokinon Cine primes that I'm really enjoying learning how to use.
Travel/
Travel/Vacations
Travel/Vacations/Puerto Vallarta 02-2010
Travel/Vacations/Puerto Vallarta 02-2010/Resort
Travel/Vacations/Puerto Vallarta 02-2010/Animals
Travel/Vacations/Puerto Vallarta 02-2010/Beach
Travel/Business
People/
Etc....
When I import these into Gallery2 it creates albums based off of those beautiful folder names. Now I can traverse directly to the image I want to see.
How will I handle this in SmugMug without having to retag thousands of photos individually or in groups?
html gallery with an index link composition. See this page I made for my
site. This allows you to link to any level you want with upper tree labels.
Travel (no link) Vacations (no link) Puerto Vallarta {link to category} 2010 {link to sub-cat with 2010 galleries} 2011 {link to sub-cat with 2010 galleries} Business People Street Family Nature Flora Trees {link to category} Eastern {link to sub-cat with galleries} Western {link to sub-cat with galleries} Flowers Animals Wild Animals {link to sub-cat with galleries} Zoo Animals {link to category} Chicago Zoo {link to sub-cat with galleries} Boston Zoo {link to sub-cat with galleries}My Website index | My Blog
While I appreciate hacks and workarounds as much as the next guy, I really don't think he wants to create HTML galleries for 15 gigabytes of photos.
:-}
Or would "Puerto Vallarta 02-2010" be a folder of strictly galleries?
It sounds like the best work around is to create lots of top level Galleries:
Puerto Vallarta - 02-2010
1993 Ford Mustang
etc
Then I can create sub galleries (if this is allowed?)
Puerto Vallarta - 02-2010/People
If that is not allowed then all images will have to be lumped inside of that folder and separated by some type of tagging?
Finally groups like "Puerto Vallarta" can be grouped by categories.
Means a lot of rework but I don't particularly care for Gallery2, I only used it since it was quick and free.
>>> categories contain galleries and optionally subcategories
>>> subcategories contain gallleries
>>> galleries contain photos
Help pages at http://www.smugmug.com/help/upload-photo and http://www.smugmug.com/help/arrange-albums.
So in your example Puerto Vallarta can be a category, 02-2010 can be a subcategory, and People can be a gallery. Alternatively, 02-2010 People can be a gallery.
You can also create a gallery that is a collection of photos from other galleries. Help page at http://www.smugmug.com/help/collecting-photos.
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
My Website index | My Blog
This is exactly what I am trying to do. I know this post is old, so am wondering if this type of organizing is now available. I am using the trial version now and I really like it, but assumed I would be able to organize this way. If not....
I also apply some special CSS/JS formatting to the sub-category to improve it's visuals, but that isn't required to have this type of organizational scheme on Smugmug. To give you an idea, here's a screenshot of one such sub-category:
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Thanks for the input.
Sub-categories contain galleries.
Galleries contain photos.
So, you create galleries to display your photos and you create categories and (optionally) sub-categories to display those galleries in the desired hierarchy. When I have more than one gallery for a given event, I create a sub-category with the event name and put all the related galleries into that sub-category. The sub-category is then the top link for the event and it has multiple galleries within it.
You aren't the first one to be confused by this. However Smugmug presents it in their UI and explains it in the UI, lots of people get confused. But, the good news is that once you understand it, it works and then it's not hard to use.
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Promise, it'll clear things up for you! (Well, not you jfriend.. I meant it'll clear things up for you, idle!
David
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Hi,
I really got lost in this one. This is the problem why I ended up here, hope someone can help or direct me to the right answer:
I am a travel and wildlife photographer. I just came back from Papua New Guinea and brought many pictures, decided to go for Smugmug to finally take online my photo stock. I am starting with my Papua NG photos.
So, I created a category called Papua New Guinea.
Inside that category, I created a gallery called Mount Hagen and Goroka sing sing (show) and uploaded some photos.
I kept on working on the design of the site while uploading the images.
I created a navigation bar and one of the links is "Photo Archives". In this page I want to show all the images of all the locations I have shot at through the years.
So I looked for the way to create a page that will show all my photos and found the tutorial to create a second home page that shows all galleries. Great, I did it, it works.
The problem is that it shows the galleries and not the categories. Plop! This is not good. I need (and most photographers need, I am very sure) that the visitors to my photo archive can choose a country, then a destination in that country and there look for the images of those places...
For example, the "photo stock" page should open a list, with thumbnails, that presents all my categories (Papua New Guinea, Peru, Chile, Antarctica, etc)
Lets say they choose Peru. When they click on Peru, they should find a page with all the galleres inside the category Peru, like: Machu Picchu, Nasca Lines, Inca Trail, etc.
SOO, what I really need is a link in my navigation bar that takes to a page that shows all my CATEGORIES, and not my galleries.
Can anyone tell me if this is possible in SmugMug? Really, this is a must to keep order of things, I hope I am reading wrong and this IS something that smugmug can do.
Thanks for your help.
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Sorry... Here it goes: jorgesalasphoto/smugmug.com
Thanks a lot, that was very easy. Sorry for bothering.
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Thanks Dr. David!
No, he'd have to create an HTML page for each category. And each sub-category.
And he'd have to keep the pages updated.
This is tricky, because it appears that you have sub-sub-categories of Team, Players, and Games. How do you do that John?
var force2010SpringDefinitions = [ {re: /Highlights|Girls|Faces|Expressions/, sectionName: "Team"}, {re: /Game\svs\.\s/, sectionName: "Games", modRegExp: /Game\svs\.\s/, modRegExpReplace: ""}, {re: /./, sectionName: "Players"} ];There is obviously then a bunch of JS that uses this table to add the sections to any sub-category that has a table specified for it. I use this technique for most of my sports galleries and folks think it looks awesome. I wish Smugmug would invest a lot more than they have in their category/sub-category thumbnail display. They really haven't done anything to what they have in 5 years. So much more innovation could happen here than the completely bland hierarchy they show today. FWIW, I don't want more nested levels that viewers have to click through. I love showing more organization on the same level. It's fewer clicks, looks great and makes things easier to find.I have not made this code public (where I share all my other JS customizations) because I don't want to support it. It's not as simple to implement as copy/paste like most of the other customizations I share. You have to create JS tables, point a master table to sub-tables, use regular expressions, get all the JS syntax right when making tables, etc... It's not rocket science for anyone who's familiar with JS, but it's a long ways from copy/paste. The code is in my bottom javascript if you want it. You can have it as long as your expectations for support are low. I don't mind if you ask a few questions, but I don't want to get myself in the position of having to write the custom tables for people who want to use it.
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Wow, awesome hack. Regexps - clever.
But ugh, hacks. I've said it a million times:
- 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.