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View Full Version : Gallery Sections - new gallery display feature


jfriend
May-18-2009, 11:56 AM
Here's something I'd like to see that could add a whole new dimension to gallery display.

The majority of my photography is either family vacations/trips or event photography (sports/school/etc...). In both of these types of shooting, I find that when I go to display my photos, I'd like to be able to organize and present the shots with a little more flair and style than a flat list of photos all in a gallery. For example, on a trip to Bryce, Zion, Lake Powell and the Grand Canyon, I'd like to put together a single gallery that kind of summarizes the trip for the family. But, I'd like to have a section in the gallery for each main place that we went and I'd like to have a text description for each section. Each section would have 5-30 photos in it. I don't want to use separate galleries for each section because I want the family to be able to browse the whole trip on one place and some sections may only have a few photos in them.

I've tried Journal mode before, but Journal mode really doesn't show off the photos very well (like the Smugmug view does) and I don't need a length text caption for every photo, just one per section and then maybe just a title on each photo.

I've tried multiple galleries before and it's just way too much of a pain for the viewers to navigate. The photos feel all disjointed and spread out and it's really goofy when one section only have 5 photos in it.

I find the same need in sports and other event photos. For example, when I'm putting up photos from a soccer game, I want to identify, label and present a sequence of 10 photos that show scoring a goal. I don't want them in their own gallery. Same thing for a great defensive sequence.

In a school talent show, if I only have 4-5 photos worth presenting from a particular scene in the show, I don't want to put them in their own gallery, but I want to identify, label and present them separately from the rest of the photos in the gallery.

I've never seen anything like this before and I think it could be a really neat, useful and differentiating feature for Smugmug and make gallery display a lot more useful for many kinds of galleries.

I haven't thought much about how the navigation and presentation would work for gallery sections. They could be pages in the gallery. Or, they could be just laid out differently within a page in a gallery. There are probably lots of ways to do it that would accomplish the goal. The simplest way I can think of is to start a new row of thumbs before a new section, allow some space for a label that identifies the section and then start a new row of thumbs after the section in order to break it apart from the rest of the thumbs.

Andy
May-18-2009, 12:45 PM
Great stuff, John - We've made sure that the team's seen it.

darryl
May-19-2009, 01:51 PM
Hrm. A gallery with sections...

Like this?

http://albums.phanfare.com/1003199/1003800

--Darryl

jfriend
May-19-2009, 01:56 PM
Hrm. A gallery with sections...

Like this?

http://albums.phanfare.com/1003199/1003800

--Darryl

Actually, that's not what I want. That can be achieved today at Smugmug with sub-categories.

I want the section titles and the thumbs for that section title all in the same gallery and on the same screen. I want the viewer to see all the section titles and the thumbs for those sections all inline as they wander through the gallery. I specifically don't want the viewer to have to "drill-down" to open a different page, look at those images, then go back. I want it to work like a book where you go linearly through the images, but encounter chapter headings and descriptive text as you go that adds some meaning to a subset of images.

darryl
May-19-2009, 02:07 PM
Ah, I see what you're saying. Yeah, maybe a view like the Client App for Phanfare has, but obviously without the editing options:

http://www.noxa.org/projects/phanfare/windowsclient/screenshots/WindowsClient-Albums.jpg

Description would have to expand more than one line, etc. And you'd need paging, not scrolling.