SMUGMUG QUESTION

gary

gary

Member
Ok, so phanfare has officially been killed by carbonite, all my photos moved over to smug mug like promised. now i used phanfare for 11 years and knew it pretty well, so i have to learn smugmug, but i cannot for the life of me figure out how to have all the galleries lineup in chronological order like they automatically did in phanfare from a selectable dropdown menu
i know some of us use smugmug so i am hoping someone can point me in the right direction
 
Ok. I think I figured out how I did mine. First, two questions about how you want to do yours -

1) Do you want the site to have a home page like mine where the galleries aren't visible, or do you want it set up as close as possible to your Phanfare site with all the galleries visible?
2) For the menu, do you want just a link to each year like on your Phanphare site, or do you want each year to have a drop down listing all of the sub-folders for that year?
 
Found your new site. One thing I'll caution is that it takes several seconds to load since all the galleries are on the home page.
 
i could have groupings by year, that's what i sort of had with phanfare, what i cannot figure out is why they were all jumbled together, no order at all that i could see. i also need to change the name on the homepage to k-gphotos. many of my bluegrass followers will be looking for me, and that is the name they've know me by for photos
 
If you're going to create a splash screen like mine that doesn't have any galleries on it, and if you're ok with having the menu drop down only show the years you need to arrange the galleries into folders accordingly. Unfortunately they don't populate automatically in chronological order, but they're easy to move around.

Anyway, assuming the organization I describe above is what you're looking for, go to "Organize" (top of the page when logged in) and create a folder called "Galleries" and folders for each year (create - folder). Once you have the folders for each year, then on the left side of the screen where everything's listed vertically, drag and drop the galleries into the appropriate year folders. Once all of them are in the years, then drag the years into the "galleries" folder. Then go into each of the year folders and drag them into the order you want. This part is easier to do on the right side of the organize screen.
 
I see that you added a menu. After you re-organize the folders, you'll want to edit the menu, remove browse and add a custom link pointing at your Galleries folder. When creating that menu item, set it to link to "page I choose" and set the page to "galleries". Also make sure the "Include sub links" is set to "on". Then when clicking on galleries, the sub folders will appear like it does on mine.

Two other suggestions. You currently have the setting turned on that allows people to purchase prints of your photos. Unless you have a Pro account, you can't set the pricing, so I would turn that off. Second, I suggest creating a contact page without listing your email address in text form on the site. That allows people to get in contact with you but protects your email from spam bots. Here's the instructions for that:

http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/1248294[url]http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/1248294[/URL]
[URL='http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/1248294'][/URL]
If you run into any trouble, feel free to call me.
 
mSummers said:
I see that you added a menu. After you re-organize the folders, you'll want to edit the menu, remove browse and add a custom link pointing at your Galleries folder. When creating that menu item, set it to link to "page I choose" and set the page to "galleries". Also make sure the "Include sub links" is set to "on". Then when clicking on galleries, the sub folders will appear like it does on mine.

Two other suggestions. You currently have the setting turned on that allows people to purchase prints of your photos. Unless you have a Pro account, you can't set the pricing, so I would turn that off. Second, I suggest creating a contact page without listing your email address in text form on the site. That allows people to get in contact with you but protects your email from spam bots. Here's the instructions for that:

http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/1248294http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/1248294
If you run into any trouble, feel free to call me.
Click to expand...

Excellent work Michael, now get back to your real job! ;)
 
BIG THANKS TO MICHAEL, HE SAVES THE DAY, i have just finished organizing and doing many of the tasks, still have to arrange the galleries and do some private public settings, but at least it's now starting to look like something instead of that dog's breakfast i first saw. time for a well earned cup of coffee ice cream, properly called cup of joe flavor,
 
Glad I could help. Not to make more work for you, but I have a couple more suggestions. First, I think the menu would be better formatted horizontally so it doesn't take up as much space vertically on the page.

Second, don't forget to update your phanfare site with a link to the new site. Make sure its big and bold so nobody can miss it. It's going to take a while for Google work its magic. Don't forget to update your forum signature too.

Third, you might want to consider arranging your galleries by subject instead of year, at least on the first level of sub-folders. You mentioned above that you have people who are interested in your concert photos. But you also probably have people interested in your Disney photos, your railroad photos and your baseball photos. It would make it easier for viewers to find stuff if you grouped galleries together by subject instead of strictly by year. I would even suggest broadening the categories to "Places" with sub folders for Disney, and all other scenic or city photos, "Sports" for all the baseball galleries, "Concert" for all the concert photography and "Transportation" for all railroad and other transportation related stuff. Within each of those folders, you could keep your dated event filing system if you wanted, but that would allow folks interested in one particular subject to easily find what they're looking for.

Fourth, while you're going through the pain and suffering of setting up the new site, don't forget to utilize all the metadata stuff for the site and for each individual folder. That's the stuff Google uses to make stuff easier to find when searching. (reminds self to finish said task on his own site)
 
all good suggestions, and over the next couple of days i will be working on this, except the link over from phanfare, from what i understand on 5/28/17 phanfare is just gone, as if it did not exist, the notice to current customers said any photos not moved to smug mug or downloaded back by then would be lost forever, but i'll put one on there for the remaining time
 
pain and suffering of setting up a whole new site, that my friend is the total truth, especially since i really liked the look and was quite comfortable on phanfare.
 
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