how I should organize/categorize my photos?

legolas · September 16, 2007

Hi
thank you for reading my post
I was on a vacation and now I am back with about 1000 photos from different cities, different subjects (mountain, flowers, historical places, people,...) I want to upload some of them to smugmug account, what i can not figure out is:

Should i categorieze them by subject ? (create album for each type of subject and put all photo there)
should i categorize them by city? (create one album per city and upload all images there)
should i do something else?

Thanks

denisegoldberg · September 16, 2007

There isn't a right or wrong here. I think it comes down to how you - and your friends & family - will be more comfortable viewing the pictures. If you're building a travelogue so people can see the places as you saw them, then organizing by place might make more sense. But organizing by topic is sometimes good too.

OK, that probably wasn't very helpful.

Maybe some examples will help. I use sub-categories within my Travel category to allow me to group galleries from a single trip together. So that's almost always my first step. Within a sub-category, I usually have galleries that focus on my travel path - but sometimes I add photos for a specific topic too. My travel galleries are at http://denise.smugmug.com/Travel. If you look at the photos from a trip to Nova Scotia last yes, you'll see that I have galleries that are focused on the ground that I covered (as in parts of the province). But I also have a galllery that focused on flowers, and another with photos of living creatures. Here's a link to the Travel sub-cat for my Nova Scotia trip: http://denise.smugmug.com/Travel/234195.

If you keyword your photos, the keywords can also be used to find photos of similar things.

And if you want the best of both worlds, you could try using gallery & keyword redirects. I haven't used them yet, but they are pretty powerful. See # 69 in the advanced customization FAQ: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=52811.

--- Denise

legolas · September 17, 2007

Thank you for reply.
Would you please give me steps that i should follow to create
Travels
|

2007
|

City A

and then some sub categories for People, Nature, Historical places,..

Thanks

denisegoldberg · September 17, 2007

You can only have 3 levels:

category > subcategory > gallery

So you might want to think through the structure from the top down. Having a travel top category works for me. But if you want to, for example, have a travel category for 2007 with subcategories & galleries under it...

You could create:
___ category Travel
______ subcategory 2007
__________ gallery topic1, topic2, etc.

Or
___ category Travel 2007
______ subcategory city1
__________ gallery plants, building, etc.

In any case, go to your control panel, and click the customize tab.

To create a new category, select categories.
To create a new subcategory (after the category exists), select subcategories.

--- Denise

how I should organize/categorize my photos?

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