How do I add text or photos to a gallery without making it "customized"

ChancyRat · October 19, 2013

I seem not to be doing this right.
I want to add text and photos to a standard gallery but I'm getting the message, "By making this Gallery custom, you are separating it from your All Galleries customizations, and it will no longer inherit customizations made at that level."

I want all the site customizations to trickle down to all my galleries, but I also need to add text or other blocks to many of them. It doesn't make sense that doing so would completely isolate them from the site customizations.

Is there a different way to add content other than "make this gallery custom"?

Tx,

denisegoldberg · October 19, 2013

Is there some reason you don't want to put the text in the gallery description?

And when you say add photos, do you mean somehow other than loading photos into the gallery? I believe you could still insert photos in the gallery description using HTML if you needed to.

To edit the gallery description, open the gallery, Customize... Gallery settings, edit description. You can also get to the settings from the organizer.

If you want to add other content blocks then I believe you will need to "make this gallery custom".

--- Denise

ChancyRat · October 19, 2013

Yes, I meant the text block and photo block, not gallery description.
So... if I want to embed photos, or have custom HTML, the only way to achieve that without isolating a gallery from the other site customizations I might make, is to edit the same way I used to in legacy, which is to add HTML to the gallery description.

Al the marvelous new toys - the wide variety of blocks - are isolated from customization I want to add to just one gallery.

This is not good. I think I understand the variety of threads that may have reported bugs on this.

Are you sure I can add html to the gallery description? I see the legacy html is still in galleries, but it is also broken on legacy.... not sure what this means....

Actually, this does bring up another question, which is, what does "will no longer inherit" mean? For example I have a certain navbar that is site wide. It will show in a gallery if I customize it now. Then if I change the navbar format, what will that mean for this customized gallery? Or if I changed the background for the site, what would show on the special gallery, the old background?

Maybe if I understood what would be locked in place, I would have a better sense of what will happen if I continue to customize galleries. At the moment though I think I should wait until this is fixed before doing any more modifications. Is this something that SM has reported it will work on?

ChancyRat · October 19, 2013

Trying to further understand the parameters, I have not yet created a page. Denise, somewhere you suggested I use pages instead of galleries. I don't see how to do that except for the block in navigation. What does that mean? And would I be able to add text or photo blocks to a page without falling into the lock-down on inheriting from above?

ChancyRat · October 19, 2013

I've added a request to fix this, here: http://feedback.smugmug.com/forums/17723-smugmug/suggestions/4714435-enable-option-to-allow-customized-galleries-or-fol

denisegoldberg · October 19, 2013

ChancyRat wrote: »

Trying to further understand the parameters, I have not yet created a page. Denise, somewhere you suggested I use pages instead of galleries. I don't see how to do that except for the block in navigation. What does that mean? And would I be able to add text or photo blocks to a page without falling into the lock-down on inheriting from above?

Create a page by going into the Organizer. Click on the folder in which you want the page to be created (or at the top of the hierarchy if you don't want the page in a folder). Click the Create button and select Page.

See help page at http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/1210637.

I thought you said you didn't want to use pages, that you wanted to keep your gallery URL. Actually I think it would be a good idea to create a page and experiment. You might find that it meets your needs better for some of what are currently galleries. You're right, if the galleries contain photos a gallery makes more sense. But if it is mainly used as an HTML-only gallery to contain text then a page might be a better match.

--- Denise

ChancyRat · October 19, 2013

Denise, thanks again. Yes I would rather use galleries. However now I'm trying to understand if there's a workaround to insure that my pages/galleries/URLs inherit higher level customization.

I have a test page in place. When I went to edit it, I did not get the automatic message saying that I would lose inheriting. Added a photo block and still no warning. Can I take this to mean that pages DO inherit, no matter how one customizes them?

denisegoldberg · October 19, 2013

ChancyRat wrote: »

Denise, thanks again. Yes I would rather use galleries. However now I'm trying to understand if there's a workaround to insure that my pages/galleries/URLs inherit higher level customization.

I have a test page in place. When I went to edit it, I did not get the automatic message saying that I would lose inheriting. Added a photo block and still no warning. Can I take this to mean that pages DO inherit, no matter how one customizes them?

What are you looking for it to inherit?

Pages get your entire site customizations, not sure what else you are looking for.
If you place a CSS block on your entire site then that CSS should be usable from the page.
I believe that CSS from the theme should also be available.
I don't think there is anything else for a page to inherit.

--- Denise

ChancyRat · October 19, 2013

The limit that gets imposed for a folder or a gallery, if you edit them uniquely, says, "By making this Gallery [or Folder, if you're customizing one subfolder] custom, you are separating it from your All Galleries [or folders] customizations, and it will no longer inherit customizations made at that level."

Pages are at the same level as galleries, so if I changed "all galleries" in some way, I'm trying to understand if unique pages will inherit those changes. I've emailed SM help about this.

denisegoldberg · October 19, 2013

ChancyRat wrote: »

The limit that gets imposed for a folder or a gallery, if you edit them uniquely, says, "By making this Gallery [or Folder, if you're customizing one subfolder] custom, you are separating it from your All Galleries [or folders] customizations, and it will no longer inherit customizations made at that level."

Pages are at the same level as galleries, so if I changed "all galleries" in some way, I'm trying to understand if unique pages will inherit those changes. I've emailed SM help about this.

Pages are not related to galleries. They are not beneath galleries, they are a separate element. They do not inherit anything from galleries.

Pages can be at the top level of your site or they can be contained within folders.
Galleries can be contained within folders.

--- Denise

ChancyRat · October 19, 2013

Ohhh... thank you. Okay, then, to pursue using pages instead of galleries, can I do this:

- store photos in an unlisted gallery
- embed them in a page using the page block, such that the public can see them in that page

I ask this because I thought I saw on various threads that this option is broken in New Smug. It worked in legacy.

denisegoldberg · October 19, 2013

ChancyRat wrote: »

Ohhh... thank you. Okay, then, to pursue using pages instead of galleries, can I do this:

- store photos in an unlisted gallery
- embed them in a page using the page block, such that the public can see them in that page

I ask this because I thought I saw on various threads that this option is broken in New Smug. It worked in legacy.

You would embed photos in a page using a photo block, yes. And those photos can be in unlisted galleries.

Unlisted galleries are not broken in the new smug. The problem is that if you have an unlisted gallery (or an unlisted page or anything else) when you specify a link you must use the link with the funky characters on the end.

For example, I built a Find page for my site containing a search box and a keyword element. It is currently unlisted because the keyword box only contains 255 keywords and I don't want to provide a link to it on my site because it is missing more keywords than it contains. Here's the link so you can see the difference between a link to an unlisted page or gallery and a public one:

unlisted: http://www.denisegoldberg.com/Find/n-FbVg7
public: http://www.denisegoldberg.com/About

Both of these are pages. I have a number of unlisted galleries as well, and I regularly link photos from those galleries. For example, I am in the process of building some galleries from a trip I took last weekend - but I wanted to share some photos. I loaded them into an unlisted gallery and referenced the photo in a blog post, http://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com/2013/10/reflecting-color.html. The photos shown in this post is in an unlisted gallery.

--- Denise

ChancyRat · October 19, 2013

More thanks more thanks.
Okay, a Google analytics concern... I don't think it picks up views of embedded photos. Do I have that right? It would only pick up page visits?

denisegoldberg · October 19, 2013

ChancyRat wrote: »

More thanks more thanks.
Okay, a Google analytics concern... I don't think it picks up views of embedded photos. Do I have that right? It would only pick up page visits?

Does it pick up individual photos in galleries? I see visits to pages or galleries but not individual photo stats. (The google analytics interface has changed, it's possible I just haven't found the references. But I've usually used smug stats for the photos.

SmugMug stats do show photo counts but the stats there only reference galleries.

--- Denise

ChancyRat · October 19, 2013

Denise fyi I have found that if the photo I want to add (via a photo block), is hidden in a gallery, the system gives me "invalid" and I can't embed it in a page.

EDIT: If I go back and unhide the photo, I'm then able to embed it. Then I go back and hide the photo in the original gallery. I can't actually tell if the public can view the photo in the page, because if I click view as legacy, the page isn't visible (it was created in new Smugmug). So i guess I can't know for sure what will happen if I embed a photo that is hidden in another gallery.

denisegoldberg · October 19, 2013

ChancyRat wrote: »

Denise fyi I have found that if the photo I want to add (via a photo block), is hidden in a gallery, the system gives me "invalid" and I can't embed it in a page.

EDIT: If I go back and unhide the photo, I'm then able to embed it. Then I go back and hide the photo in the original gallery. I can't actually tell if the public can view the photo in the page, because if I click view as legacy, the page isn't visible (it was created in new Smugmug). So i guess I can't know for sure what will happen if I embed a photo that is hidden in another gallery.

You can't use a hidden photo - by hiding it you have said that you don't want it seen on your public site. You can use photos from either a public or unlisted gallery but the photo can't be set to hide.

From the help page titled Can I Hide Individual Photos in a Gallery?

Now no one can see it but you! That photo is instantly invisible to the rest of the world.

--- Denise

ChancyRat · October 19, 2013

Thanks for that, that didn't used to be the rule in legacy.

I have just created a page. Trying another one. I think I have to have a mixture of pages and galleries depending on the content. Thanks so much for getting me on a track to explore what I need to do.

denisegoldberg · October 19, 2013

ChancyRat wrote: »

...that didn't used to be the rule in legacy.

Hidden photos are only viewable by the owner of the site in both legacy and new smug. Are you sure that you were logged out when you were viewing one?

--- Denise

leftquark · October 21, 2013

You do realize that if you make a page custom ("Just this Page") you can still apply the theme settings to it and have it take all of the same settings as that theme. I use a theme called "Aaron Galleries" for all my CSS and customizations on my galleries page. As long as my "Just this page" also uses the theme "Aaron Galleries" all my CSS is inherited on this new page. The only thing not inherited are any content blocks that were dragged into "All Folders" or "All Galleries". Anything on "Entire Site" will also be inherited to "Just this page".

You should be able to use "Just this page" just fine and use the theme you've been using. If you need to, copy the CSS from a CSS block into a new CSS block on "Just this page" and add whatever you need.

ChancyRat · October 22, 2013

denisegoldberg wrote: »

Hidden photos are only viewable by the owner of the site in both legacy and new smug. Are you sure that you were logged out when you were viewing one?

--- Denise

I thought I had tested this many times over the years. Ah, wait, what I remember doing was embedding the image in HTML in a gallery, where the original photo was hidden (either in that gallery or another one). So the gallery would be public but the picture hidden, and yet it would be visible as embedded HTML.

ChancyRat · October 22, 2013

denisegoldberg wrote: »

Hidden photos are only viewable by the owner of the site in both legacy and new smug. Are you sure that you were logged out when you were viewing one?

--- Denise

leftquark wrote: »

You do realize that if you make a page custom ("Just this Page") you can still apply the theme settings to it and have it take all of the same settings as that theme. I use a theme called "Aaron Galleries" for all my CSS and customizations on my galleries page. As long as my "Just this page" also uses the theme "Aaron Galleries" all my CSS is inherited on this new page. The only thing not inherited are any content blocks that were dragged into "All Folders" or "All Galleries". Anything on "Entire Site" will also be inherited to "Just this page".

You should be able to use "Just this page" just fine and use the theme you've been using. If you need to, copy the CSS from a CSS block into a new CSS block on "Just this page" and add whatever you need.

No I did not realize any of this! Does it follow that the same rules that you describe above, also trickle down and apply to customized galleries or folders as well? (That's what I really want.)

leftquark · October 22, 2013

ChancyRat wrote: »

No I did not realize any of this! Does it follow that the same rules that you describe above, also trickle down and apply to customized galleries or folders as well? (That's what I really want.)

As long as the customized galleries and folders are using your theme it will take the theme's settings. Remember, the THEME has the setting -- not the page/gallery/all galleries/all folders/etc. You're giving the THEME some CSS (via the Advanced CSS) section, you're giving the THEME some background colors, etc. When you use that THEME on any page, it will take the settings for that theme. If you re-use the theme on a "Just This Page" for folders or galleries, it will have the settings for that theme.

Anything on "Entire Site" will show up in every page, even on "just this page".

ChancyRat · October 22, 2013

leftquark wrote: »

As long as the customized galleries and folders are using your theme it will take the theme's settings. Remember, the THEME has the setting -- not the page/gallery/all galleries/all folders/etc. You're giving the THEME some CSS (via the Advanced CSS) section, you're giving the THEME some background colors, etc. When you use that THEME on any page, it will take the settings for that theme. If you re-use the theme on a "Just This Page" for folders or galleries, it will have the settings for that theme.

Anything on "Entire Site" will show up in every page, even on "just this page".

This is very relieving and shows yet again the limits of my understanding of the rules of the new format.
So that others can understand the parameters here, what will NOT flow down when one makes a customized folder or gallery?

Allen · October 22, 2013

"entire site", "all folders" and "all galleries" flow down. You have to override any specific CSS using a "Just this ... " CSS block.
"homepage" is specific to only the homepage.

leftquark · October 22, 2013

ChancyRat wrote: »

This is very relieving and shows yet again the limits of my understanding of the rules of the new format.
So that others can understand the parameters here, what will NOT flow down when one makes a customized folder or gallery?

If you are on a FOLDER or a GALLERY and click "Just this page" and select the same theme as your "ALL FOLDERS" or "ALL GALLERIES" then the ONLY things that will not flow down are:
- Any content blocks you specifically dragged onto the "All Folders" or "All Galleries".
This includes: CSS Blocks, Text Blocks, Breadcrumbs, HTML blocks, Single Photo, etc

By selecting a theme you are using the backgrounds, color choices, and any CSS entered into the "Advanced CSS" section of the theme's options.

Anything under "Entire Site" will be copied into your "Just this page"

ChancyRat · October 27, 2013

This has been a very helpful thread - I wish it were a sticky for everyone, to help with understanding the rules.

How do I add text or photos to a gallery without making it "customized"

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