Looking for Category and Subcategory feature input

Balmer · August 23, 2008

Hey dgrinners! My name is Dave Balmer, and I'm a new sorcerer here at SmugMug. My first big task is to open up our category/subcategory system to make it more flexible, powerful, all that stuff. Along the way, I'd like to make the whole process of creating, arranging and renaming categories smoother.

I've been lurking in a lot of threads on the subject, and already have some great stuff to work with. I'm looking for some more feedback from anyone who's ever been confused by or just wanted more from what we have in today's category/subcategory/gallery structure.

Fire away! :rambo

PBolchover · August 23, 2008

Off the top of my head:
1) The ability to place a gallery in multiple categories/sub-categories (For example, I mainly organize by year/event, but also maintain a "New" category.)
2) The ability to place keyword results pages in categories/sub-categories, as if they were normal galleries. (Though, this might be part of the "virtual gallery" feature, rather than part of the category/sub-category feature)
3) The ability to mix sub-categories and galleries together, rather than having them in separate parts of the page.

I use javascript hacks to implement all of the above on my website. (Gallery redirects, plus using a hacked journal page as a "sub-category" index.) In fact, if smugmug could implement a "gallery redirect" yourselves, then this would resolve a large number of feature requests.

Other requests that I have seen:
4) Ability to have a deeper structure
5) Ability to add descriptions for a (sub-)category (and to choose whether these descriptions appear at the top of the page, or alongside the link to them from their parent)

If you're feeling ambitious, then I could see potential application for the following, though I haven't seen a specific request:
6) Ability to place a sub-category in more than one category. (Ie have a more generic network, rather than a strict tree)

denisegoldberg · August 23, 2008

I've pretty much satisfied my requirements by spinning my own html-only pages to replace the standard smugmug category/subcatgory pages.

While I was happy for quite a while with the

>>> category >>> subcategory >>> gallery

structure, I recently realized that I needed more levels. Why? Because with this very flat structure some of my categories presented many more entries than I wanted. I don't want to hide my galleries, but I do believe that opening a page with a large number of entries is quite overwhelming to visitors to the site.

For example, I was already using subcategories within my travel category in order to group galleries within a trip. That really doesn't give me enough segmentation though. With my html-only entry to the Travel category, my newest trips are at the beginning of my travel category, organized by trip. Galleries belonging to older trips are now grouped by geography, and within geography are shown with newest first. It would be great if this could be done by using the normal smugmug category structure.

Another example - I have a "Wandering near home" category that I use for photos taken as I just wander with a camera, no destination or particular type of photo in mind. The newest galleries stand alone, but the older galleries are grouped by year. You're right - that's just 2 levels so I should be able to use the standard structure for that. But - in this case I still want the newer, single galleries to come before the subcategories.

In other examples, I want my galleries and subcategories intermixed within a category.

As I mentioned, I've implemented all of this in html-only galleries. But I' be happy to go back to the smugmug structure and stop needing to maintain a mass of html-only galleries. Of course I'll only do that if you make these structural changes plus support larger thumbs on the category/subcategory pages. I won't willingly go back to 100x100 or 150x150 thumbs.

--- Denise

caroline · August 23, 2008

Hi Dave
As I've just been struggling a little with getting category descriptions to work, and of necessity thinking around this subject generally I would like to duplicate the following requests from PBolchover:

1) The ability to place a gallery in multiple categories/sub-categories (For example, I mainly organize by year/event, but also maintain a "New" category.)

2) The ability to mix sub-categories and galleries together, rather than having them in separate parts of the page.

3) Ability to add descriptions for a (sub-)category

Caroline

jfriend · August 23, 2008

Balmer wrote:

Fire away!

Stretchy layout option so thumbs can dynamically layout to fit the screen
Much larger thumbs. I commonly have 4-6 thumbs in a category and there's no reason not to use very nice sized thumbs
At least one more level
The ability to show both categories and top level galleries on the home page
Let galleries be in more than one category
Password protected categories so with one password, you can protect a whole slew of galleries and you can prevent people from even looking at the galleries themselves

Balmer · August 24, 2008

PBolchover wrote:

Off the top of my head:
1) The ability to place a gallery in multiple categories/sub-categories (For example, I mainly organize by year/event, but also maintain a "New" category.)
2) The ability to place keyword results pages in categories/sub-categories, as if they were normal galleries. (Though, this might be part of the "virtual gallery" feature, rather than part of the category/sub-category feature)
3) The ability to mix sub-categories and galleries together, rather than having them in separate parts of the page.

6) Ability to place a sub-category in more than one category. (Ie have a more generic network, rather than a strict tree)

That was fast, thanks for the reply!

I think #2 is more on the virtual gallery side of things, but there could definitely be some overlap.

So, if I understand #6 correctly, you want to be able to copy all the structure of a subcategory tree (possibly n-levels deep) to other parent categories, to save time recreating the same structure over and over?

These all sound great on their own, but putting them together could get extremely messy. It would definitely be a challenge balancing power and ease of use, let me ponder some.

Balmer · August 24, 2008

caroline wrote:

Hi Dave
As I've just been struggling a little with getting category descriptions to work, and of necessity thinking around this subject generally I would like to duplicate the following requests from PBolchover:

1) The ability to place a gallery in multiple categories/sub-categories (For example, I mainly organize by year/event, but also maintain a "New" category.)

2) The ability to mix sub-categories and galleries together, rather than having them in separate parts of the page.

3) Ability to add descriptions for a (sub-)category

Caroline

Hi Caroline, thanks for replying!

I think #1 sounds like copying a tree structure around without copying the galleries in it? So, for a given type of event you have the same or similar category/subcategory organization, and you want to be able to copy that "tree" as you add new events?

Adding descriptions do subcategories seems pretty doable.

Mixing subcategories and galleries together... I think this is definitely going to happen if we go for broke on changing how categories and subcategories work, which could be exciting.

Balmer · August 24, 2008

denisegoldberg wrote:

As I mentioned, I've implemented all of this in html-only galleries. But I' be happy to go back to the smugmug structure and stop needing to maintain a mass of html-only galleries. Of course I'll only do that if you make these structural changes plus support larger thumbs on the category/subcategory pages. I won't willingly go back to 100x100 or 150x150 thumbs.

--- Denise

Cool stuff Denise, and I'm seeing a common thread of mixing galleries and subcategories popping up in this thread.

Adding more levels of "deepness" is totally at the top of my list, and I think your case is pretty typical of users who want more levels. From "3 was fine" to "um, one or two more levels might be nice" is probably spot-on for that feature.

Af for thumb size, I hadn't considered this as part of the category/subcategory overhaul, but I hear ya, and definitely will look into that. I'm still a new face on the code monkey team here, so that's an "I'll get back to you soon" type thing for now. :cheeburga

caroline · August 24, 2008

Hi Dave
Thanks for the reply. With ref to your comment/question re no1 - I'm not an event photog as many users here are on SmugMug so perhaps I should clarify by example.

I currently have a category 'Mandip Hills Area' which has 4 sub-categories, theres are galleries within those sub-categories that I would like to appear in other categories/sub-categories - does this make sense ? :-)

Caroline

Balmer · August 24, 2008

jfriend wrote:

Stretchy layout option so thumbs can dynamically layout to fit the screen

Much larger thumbs. I commonly have 4-6 thumbs in a category and there's no reason not to use very nice sized thumbs

At least one more level

The ability to show both categories and top level galleries on the home page

Let galleries be in more than one category

Password protected categories so with one password, you can protect a whole slew of galleries and you can prevent people from even looking at the galleries themselves

Hey JFriend!

At least one more level? check.

Ability to show both categories and top level galleries on the home page -- don't we have that now? The "categories" and "galleries" links do that, or do you have something more sinister/cool in mind?

Password protection at subcategory level is something I'm interested in as well. What happens with this if we allow the same gallery in more than one subcategory (which may end up being on the list of feature goodies)? I think this may prove to be tricky on several levels.

Stretchy layout -- Doesn't it do this now on the gallery page? Do you mean stretchy on the home/category pages as well?

Thumbnail sizes bigger... seems doable. I wish all the browsers handled down-sampled images with consistent quality (cough IE6, cough Safari), because this would make thumb scaling fast and easy.

Let me ask you this. Let's say we sent down a larger thumbnail size by default, and smaller thumbs were shown using browser-based down-sampling. Using this scheme, the large thumbs would look awesome (of course), but the smaller ones would be fast to load but may not look as sweet with some browsers. Could you live with a trade-off like that? The alternative would be for us to pre-render thumbs at lots of sizes, which might put us into gnarly land. :eek1

Allen · August 24, 2008

How about a virtual category and assigning any existing sub-cat or gallery to
it like sharegroups? Probably also need a special breadcrumb to navigate also.

Example;
category name > Recent Photos
with resent galleries assigned to it which could be in many different categories.

jfriend · August 24, 2008

Balmer wrote:

Hey JFriend!

At least one more level? check.

Ability to show both categories and top level galleries on the home page -- don't we have that now? The "categories" and "galleries" links do that, or do you have something more sinister/cool in mind?

If I set the homepage to show categories, I can't have any regular galleries on the home page. That forces me to put some galleries in a category all by themself which is just a waste and less than ideal. I'd like for the homepage to be able to show my categories, but also show some galleries. The featured galleries feature doesn't work for the problem I'm trying to solve.

Balmer wrote:

Password protection at subcategory level is something I'm interested in as well. What happens with this if we allow the same gallery in more than one subcategory (which may end up being on the list of feature goodies)? I think this may prove to be tricky on several levels.

If I had to choose, I'd rather have password protected categories than galleries in multiple categories. I do lots of event photography of things that have to be protected by a password (kids). In order to make it easier for people to find only the images they want, I always split my events into multiple galleries and put the event in it's own category or sub-category. The ability to put a password on that category/sub-category is exactly what this usage model wants. I work around it today by putting the same password on all the galleries, but then I have to explain this to everyone so they understand that everything is properly protected and so they know how to use it. If the category or sub-category itself was protected, I wouldn't have any explaining to do - they would all just get it.

Also, if/when you do good virtual gallery support, it seems like that feature will be able to solve the issue of having photos show up in multiple places and that will solve it in a much more flexible and powerful way than just allowing a single gallery to show up in multiple categories. With virtual galleries, I could just give each photo in the gallery a keyword and then make a virtual gallery that shows photos with that keyword. That would serve as a solution to one gallery in multiple places while also being much more powerful than that too.

Balmer wrote:

Stretchy layout -- Doesn't it do this now on the gallery page? Do you mean stretchy on the home/category pages as well?

I want stretchy layout for the home page and for category views. The gallery views are now gorgeous and fully take advantage of whatever size window/screen you have. The homepage and category pages have these little tiny thumbs that only use about 1/4 of a big screen. They need moderninizing. I've experimented with a hack here: http://jfriend.smugmug.com/Family where I've used Javascript to change the thumbs to a larger size and used CSS to make the layout stretchy. Because there are some disadvantages to using and maintaining a hack like this, I don't think I'll do this everywhere on my site or in my other accounts, but this is the idea I'm looking for in official support from Smugmug.

Balmer wrote:

Thumbnail sizes bigger... seems doable. I wish all the browsers handled down-sampled images with consistent quality (cough IE6, cough Safari), because this would make thumb scaling fast and easy.

Let me ask you this. Let's say we sent down a larger thumbnail size by default, and smaller thumbs were shown using browser-based down-sampling. Using this scheme, the large thumbs would look awesome (of course), but the smaller ones would be fast to load but may not look as sweet with some browsers. Could you live with a trade-off like that? The alternative would be for us to pre-render thumbs at lots of sizes, which might put us into gnarly land. :eek1

Thumbs are small (don't take much storage). You are committed to continuing to support the -Th and -Ti sizes anyway for backwards compatiblity (I would think). So, you already have the smaller thumbs sizes, we just need some newer larger sizes. I would think that the only "quality" way to do this would be for you to just start auto-generating new thumb sizes -T1 -T2, for example and have them re-rendered rather than using browser engines for resizing.

Balmer · August 24, 2008

Allen wrote:

How about a virtual category and assigning any existing sub-cat or gallery to
it like sharegroups? Probably also need a special breadcrumb to navigate also.

Example;
category name > Recent Photos
with resent galleries assigned to it which could be in many different categories.

Interesting.

I'll add to my list, thanks!

Balmer · August 24, 2008

jfriend wrote:

If I set the homepage to show categories, I can't have any regular galleries on the home page. That forces me to put some galleries in a category all by themself which is just a waste and less than ideal. I'd like for the homepage to be able to show my categories, but also show some galleries. The featured galleries feature doesn't work for the problem I'm trying to solve.

Ah, gotcha, thanks for the clarification.

jfriend wrote:

If I had to choose, I'd rather have password protected categories than galleries in multiple categories. I do lots of event photography of things that have to be protected by a password (kids). In order to make it easier for people to find only the images they want, I always split my events into multiple galleries and put the event in it's own category or sub-category. The ability to put a password on that category/sub-category is exactly what this usage model wants. I work around it today by putting the same password on all the galleries, but then I have to explain this to everyone so they understand that everything is properly protected and so they know how to use it. If the category or sub-category itself was protected, I wouldn't have any explaining to do - they would all just get it.

I think I understand. So when you were saying you wanted to have the same subcategories under different categories, you mean the same names -- but with different galleries under each? If so, then I dig it, and that shouldn't be a blocker. I was more concerned about the same galleries showing up in different subcategories, which has also been requested, but would make security a bit funky if the permissions for one parent category were different than another parent which also had the same gallery, if that makes sense.

jfriend wrote:

Also, if/when you do good virtual gallery support, it seems like that feature will be able to solve the issue of having photos show up in multiple places and that will solve it in a much more flexible and powerful way than just allowing a single gallery to show up in multiple categories. With virtual galleries, I could just give each photo in the gallery a keyword and then make a virtual gallery that shows photos with that keyword. That would serve as a solution to one gallery in multiple places while also being much more powerful than that too.

Yeah, virtual galleries have huge overlap with this effort, so we're looking at that as well as part of the "grand scheme" of things.

jfriend wrote:

I want stretchy layout for the home page and for category views. The gallery views are now gorgeous and fully take advantage of whatever size window/screen you have. The homepage and category pages have these little tiny thumbs that only use about 1/4 of a big screen.

I agree, and that difference has bugged me for a while as well. I'm looking at increasing the stretchy, not sure if it'll be in the scope of this first effort, but it's on the radar.

jfriend wrote:

Thumbs are small (don't take much storage). You are committed to continuing to support the -Th and -Ti sizes anyway for backwards compatiblity (I would think). So, you already have the smaller thumbs sizes, we just need some newer larger sizes. I would think that the only "quality" way to do this would be for you to just start auto-generating new thumb sizes -T1 -T2, for example and have them re-rendered rather than using browser engines for resizing.

Excellent point, I'll shop this around as well and see what magic we can do. If we do, it may be part of another project, same as the stretchy. It doesn't hurt to see what can be done sooner than later though.

Thanks very much for your feedback and the followup. Good stuff!

PBolchover · August 25, 2008

Balmer wrote:

So, if I understand #6 correctly, you want to be able to copy all the structure of a subcategory tree (possibly n-levels deep) to other parent categories, to save time recreating the same structure over and over?

My #6 (which is in the "ambitious" list) is essentially to allow a sub-category to have multiple parents. Instead of having a strict tree-like structure, this would allow more of a network. Perhaps have one of them as a "primary parent", and the rest as the equivalent of symlinks in Unix, or shortcuts in Windows.

The only use-case I can think of for this at the moment is a follows:

Suppose smugmug have implemented a structure where a gallery can appear in multiple (sub-)categories. And suppose that I organise my photos by event. Most events would be a single gallery; however, some events have too many photos, and should be split into multiple galleries, grouping these galleries into a sub-(sub-)category, which would hopefully appear alongside my normal galleries. In such a case, for consistency, the sub-(sub-)category should appear in multiple (sub-)categories.

I hope that this makes sense,

Paul

PBolchover · August 25, 2008

I'd like to second password-protection for (sub-)categories.

While it's not something that I'd use myself, new users frequently ask how to do it in the forums...

Haigh · August 25, 2008

My needs are in line with the crowd except for #3

1) Galleries in multiple categories/subgategories (subgategories in multiple parent categories is not needed as it adds complexity and a flat tree structure will do the trick. Just create subcats with the same name and place the same galleries in the two subcats)
2) Deeper levels (1 or 2 extra seems enough)
3) Multiple passwords for each gallery (I´ll explain a bit below but you´ll find a lot in the posts below)

http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=858325&postcount=460
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=97689

As I see it, passwords today are implemented at the Gallery level. If galleries in a category or subcat have the same password then they can be accessed by typing the password only once. If a Gallery belongs to more than one Cat/Subcat and it is meant to be viewed by different groups of users (who have different passwords to access their galleries) then it needs to have multiple passwords. Something as simple as an add password button on the customize page would do the trick (and a bit of shuffling around in the database structure......

)

Thanks for asking and listening
Robert

Balmer · August 25, 2008

Haigh wrote:

As I see it, passwords today are implemented at the Gallery level. If galleries in a category or subcat have the same password then they can be accessed by typing the password only once. If a Gallery belongs to more than one Cat/Subcat and it is meant to be viewed by different groups of users (who have different passwords to access their galleries) then it needs to have multiple passwords. Something as simple as an add password button on the customize page would do the trick (and a bit of shuffling around in the database structure...... )

Thanks for asking and listening
Robert

Interesting, Robert. So assigning a password for a subcategory would mean that all the galleries in that subcategory would require that password to view. And if the same gallery were in more than one subcategory, any of the passwords assigned to it would work.

What if a gallery were in a subcategory with a password, and anther without a password? In that case, require the password from the subcategory that's protected, even if they got there from another subcategory? This sounds like it would either be amazingly intuitive or extremely frustrating. Either way, I'm intrigued enough to look a little deeper into this. Thanks!

PBolchover · August 25, 2008

One more request:

Have more flexibility for the featured photo for the (sub-)category, rather than being forced to use the featured photo for the first gallery within the (sub-)category.

Haigh · August 25, 2008

Balmer wrote:

What if a gallery were in a subcategory with a password, and anther without a password?

From my understanding passwords are currently not assigned to Categories or Subcategories but only to Galleries. The implementation I imagine would maintain passwords at the Gallery Level which is what users and owners are used to. This way it would not be possible to be both passworded and unpassworded at the same time. Today (and in the implementation I imagined) it is up to the owner to use the same password for galleries in the same category or subcategory if that is what he wants. I imagine it would be the same but since galleries can belong to more than one cat/subcat then they can have more than one password.

I´ll use my setup as an example:
I have 4 main categories
General public - has unpassworded galleris
For Family only - all galleries have password A
For Family and Friends - all galleries have password B
For Specific Groups - each gallery has a specific password

Today all my groups of friends know password B and see all galleries in that group.

My family knows password A and B to see both gallery groups.

In the new setup I can assign a gallery to both categories (Family only and Friends and Family) and assign boths passwords to it (A and

and thus have my family remember only one password and upload galleires only once and have them show up on both places. I would then rename my categories "For Family only" and "For Friends only". Galleris on the "For Specific Groups" have independent passwords as each gallery is meant to be accessed by a specific group of people (neither friend or family). No Category or Subcategory passwords needed, just clever cat/subcat gallery allocation and multiple passwords per gallery.
With multiple passwords I could get a lot fancier, giving out different passwords to different groups of friends or separate passwords to my family and my wife´s family and having each group remember only one password and manage access to each gallery just by assigning passwords. My family trip would be accessible to my family, her brother´s birthday to her family and our christmas party to both....

Another example using pros and little league:
I could have a category for a specific league and a subcat for each team. Two passwords would be assigned for each gallery, one for the team and one general password for the entire league. Parents on each team would view only their own team shots. League administrators would use the "master" password to access images for all teams. No Category or Subcategory passwords needed, just clever cat/subcat gallery allocation and multiple passwords per gallery.

Hope the ideas are helping
Robert

Balmer · August 26, 2008

Haigh wrote:

Hope the ideas are helping
Robert

Absolutely are, thank you!

HaraldE · August 26, 2008

Morning,

Virtual Gallerias and more level than 3 are my top-ranked wishes.

Then I hope you can make the overall structure easier to use ... like the following:

> When looking at stats in my control-panel I am shown page after page of galleries and since I have some with the same name (like "Spring Walk") it just isn't possible to know which one is referred to

> There are a number of pre-defined Categories (like Animals) which are of no interesting to me and (as far as I know) they can not be removed

> Breadcrumbs are great ... but I would like to be able to specify which parts to show. Somehow I want to be able to say that only the levels below are available. So when you get to a specific CATEGORY you should not be able to bread-crumb yourself up to see other CATEGORIES.

> And I also very much need to use national characters in CATEGORY and SUB-CATEGORY names. This is already possible in a GALLERY name but not in the others. For me in Sweden it means I have to use the wrong characters for some domestic city names ... and it looks all wrong

Regards, Harald

Balmer · August 27, 2008

HaraldE wrote:

Morning,

Virtual Gallerias and more level than 3 are my top-ranked wishes.

Then I hope you can make the overall structure easier to use ... like the following:

> When looking at stats in my control-panel I am shown page after page of galleries and since I have some with the same name (like "Spring Walk") it just isn't possible to know which one is referred to

> There are a number of pre-defined Categories (like Animals) which are of no interesting to me and (as far as I know) they can not be removed

> Breadcrumbs are great ... but I would like to be able to specify which parts to show. Somehow I want to be able to say that only the levels below are available. So when you get to a specific CATEGORY you should not be able to bread-crumb yourself up to see other CATEGORIES.

> And I also very much need to use national characters in CATEGORY and SUB-CATEGORY names. This is already possible in a GALLERY name but not in the others. For me in Sweden it means I have to use the wrong characters for some domestic city names ... and it looks all wrong

Regards, Harald

Nice, got one of my pet peeves in there, not being able to remove categories you're not using. National characters in cat/subcat names, excellent point. I hadn't played with that, so thanks for pointing it out!

Good stuff, thank you!

jasonstone · August 27, 2008

more levels of categories
Hey there, for me it is getting kinda crucial to have more than 1 level of sub-category

e.g.

--> home
  --> Travel
    --> Americas
      --> 2008
        --> SoCal Trip
          --> Day 1 - LA
          --> Day 2 - SF
          --> Day 3 - XX
        --> Work trip to Irvine
    --> Europe
      --> 2008
        --> Summer hols in ....
        --> Xmas in Ruka
        --> Week in Tuscany, Italy
      --> 2007
        --> Summer hols in ...

you get the idea I hope

would be nice to have an option too maybe that if you're at e.g. SoCal trip in the path above that you could see all photos in all galleries under that "section"

That would just make smugmug worlds apart from other hosting sites

oh and I don't want to html code it as the whole point of smugmug for me is that I don't have to hack/code it

thanks

Jase

HaraldE · August 27, 2008

Morning,

At the moment we can Customise a Gallery. I feel we also need to be able to Customise a Category or a Sub-Category as well. Example of such Customising could be:

> Description ... just like for a Gallery

> Private / Public ... just like for a Gallery

> And some info like number of photos and last updated

Maybe the key thing here is not exactly what is Customised but a design that allows for future enhancement in the area of Category and Sub-Category customisation.

And if we have further levels in the structure then the same thinking should apply also for them.

The interesting bit is when we start thinking about Virtual Galleries and Customising. Why not also have Virtual Categories and Virtual Sub-Categories ... and so on.

Myself, I would very much like to upload all my photos to SmugMug and store them in a strict but un-friendly structure. Then create a virtual structure which makes them easy to view and find and allow the same photo in many places ... that would be just great fun (;=))

Regards, Harald

HaraldE · August 27, 2008

jasonstone wrote:

oh and I don't want to html code it as the whole point of smugmug for me is that I don't have to hack/code it

Couldn't have said it better.

Hey Balmer ... maybe the deep hackers can tell you what are the most popular hacks in the Category area so you could build it into SmugMug. This would allow us basic users to benefit from them as well

Regards, Harald

jfriend · August 27, 2008

HaraldE wrote:

Couldn't have said it better.

Hey Balmer ... maybe the deep hackers can tell you what are the most popular hacks in the Category area so you could build it into SmugMug. This would allow us basic users to benefit from them as well

Regards, Harald

Some common category hacks (from various FAQs and dgrin postings):

Adding a category description
Hiding a category
Password protecting a category
Display all of the gallery name without truncation
Make a gallery appear in multiple categories
Recent photos timeline hack
Hide galleries on home page, show on other pages

HaraldE · August 28, 2008

Structure Report
Morning,

My use of the Category - SubCategory - Gallery structure is to have
Time - Place - Event ... for example 1974 - Chicago - Herring Party (this one).

Now and then I need to know for example ... Which years do I have Chicago? or in which cities is there a Town Walk?

As far as I know the only way to find out is to open the Categories (=Years) one by one and take a look. And when I am looking for a specific type of Gallery this is quite some task.

I am not asking for a search facility but a way to get an easy overview of the current structure. It could be an online report showing the whole structure. Maybe this can already be done inside SmugMug, in which case I don't know how to do this.

Regards, Harald

jfriend · August 28, 2008

jfriend wrote:

Some common category hacks (from various FAQs and dgrin postings):
Adding a category description

Hiding a category

Password protecting a category

Display all of the gallery name without truncation

Make a gallery appear in multiple categories

Recent photos timeline hack

Hide galleries on home page, show on other pages

Here's another one from just today.

Request for control over the specific thumbnail for a category or sub-category.

Lou Gonzalez · September 4, 2008

Balmer wrote:

Hey dgrinners! My name is Dave Balmer, and I'm a new sorcerer here at SmugMug. My first big task is to open up our category/subcategory system to make it more flexible, powerful, all that stuff. Along the way, I'd like to make the whole process of creating, arranging and renaming categories smoother.

I've been lurking in a lot of threads on the subject, and already have some great stuff to work with. I'm looking for some more feedback from anyone who's ever been confused by or just wanted more from what we have in today's category/subcategory/gallery structure.

Fire away! :rambo

I'm a wedding photographer and I wish I could create mutliple galleries in a category or subcategory.

For example, here is my hierarchy:

Category : Weddings _2008
Subcategory : The Asitos (I name the Subcategory the client's last name)
Then in that subcategory I have multiple galleries that represent each partof their day.

- Getting Ready
- Pre-Ceremony
- Ceremony
- Formals and Portraits
- The Reception
- The Slideshow

Right now I have to go and create each gallery individually. A royal pain in the arse. I would love to be able to add a category, sub category and multiple galleries in one step. Or at least mutliple galleries in one step.

I can envision a form like this:

Enter New Galleries:

Gallery Name___________________________
Gallery Name___________________________
Gallery Name___________________________
Gallery Name___________________________
Gallery Name___________________________
Gallery Name___________________________
Gallery Name___________________________
Gallery Name___________________________

"What Category do you want to place them in?" (Drop down box of all current categories) Then a choice in the dropdown box of 'Create New Category')

I can select 'Create New Category' and then a box appears where I type the new category name.

Then below that "What Subcategory do you want to place them in?" (Drop down box of all current categories) Then a choice in the dropdown box of 'Create New Sub-Category')

Then a box appears where I type the new category name.

So all of this could theoretically be done on screen.

Or at the very least it would be great to dig into a category or subcategory, and be able to generate multiple galleries within that Cat or Sub-Cat.

Please?!?!

jfriend · September 4, 2008

Lou Gonzalez wrote:

I'm a wedding photographer and I wish I could create mutliple galleries in a category or subcategory.

For example, here is my hierarchy:

Category : Weddings _2008
Subcategory : The Asitos (I name the Subcategory the client's last name)
Then in that subcategory I have multiple galleries that represent each partof their day.

- Getting Ready
- Pre-Ceremony
- Ceremony
- Formals and Portraits
- The Reception
- The Slideshow

Right now I have to go and create each gallery individually. A royal pain in the arse. I would love to be able to add a category, sub category and multiple galleries in one step. Or at least mutliple galleries in one step.

I can envision a form like this:

Enter New Galleries:

Gallery Name___________________________
Gallery Name___________________________
Gallery Name___________________________
Gallery Name___________________________
Gallery Name___________________________
Gallery Name___________________________
Gallery Name___________________________
Gallery Name___________________________

"What Category do you want to place them in?" (Drop down box of all current categories) Then a choice in the dropdown box of 'Create New Category')

I can select 'Create New Category' and then a box appears where I type the new category name.

Then below that "What Subcategory do you want to place them in?" (Drop down box of all current categories) Then a choice in the dropdown box of 'Create New Sub-Category')

Then a box appears where I type the new category name.

So all of this could theoretically be done on screen.

Or at the very least it would be great to dig into a category or subcategory, and be able to generate multiple galleries within that Cat or Sub-Cat.

Please?!?!

I'm not arguing against having Smugmug support this multiple gallery creation themselves, but I do exactly what you are asking for in StarExplorer. When I post the photos from a soccer season, I typically end up with ~20 galleries all in one sub-category. In StarExplorer, I can create all 20 galleries with identical settings all at once. I just type each name, one per line into a text box, click off the settings I want and hit go and it creates them all for me.

Looking for Category and Subcategory feature input

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