Feature request: "Copying or linking"

[Nikolai]

Caetgories and subcategories are nice and simple. Too simple, for my test. That makes it inflexible. I have a portrait of the clown, takien during a street event.
WHere shall I put it? Portraits? Events? 2004\April?
Seriously, some images/albums simple cannot be classified as easy as category/subcategory.
Idea: allow creating a link between images (just the way UNIX was doing it since day one). It would bear same title, same set of large/medioum/tiny/thumb images, but it would at least possible to make it APPEAR in different places.

What, image links are not feasible in any near future? Ok, I'm a developer, I can understand "no-can-do", I had to say it myself so many times in my professional life. How about COPYING, at least. I was trying to save the drive space, but, hey, it's "unlimited", let's at least use this. What's NOT unlimited is my time I would have to spend uploading the same darm image into 2-3-4 different categories simply because it fits them all.

What do you say?

[yvonne]

Caetgories and subcategories are nice and simple. Too simple, for my test. That makes it inflexible. I have a portrait of the clown, takien during a street event.
WHere shall I put it? Portraits? Events? 2004\April?
Seriously, some images/albums simple cannot be classified as easy as category/subcategory.
Idea: allow creating a link between images (just the way UNIX was doing it since day one). It would bear same title, same set of large/medioum/tiny/thumb images, but it would at least possible to make it APPEAR in different places.

What, image links are not feasible in any near future? Ok, I'm a developer, I can understand "no-can-do", I had to say it myself so many times in my professional life. How about COPYING, at least. I was trying to save the drive space, but, hey, it's "unlimited", let's at least use this. What's NOT unlimited is my time I would have to spend uploading the same darm image into 2-3-4 different categories simply because it fits them all.

What do you say?

Actually, I asked for the same thing a few weeks ago and got no response.

[PerezDesignGroup]

Good request. It would save Smugmug valuable storage space and bandwidth since we normally upload twice to accomplish this.

And by the way, clowns are always categorized under Other> Humans> Silly :D

[rms]

This may or may not work based on how the smugmug backend works -- but I'll third (or fourth, or...) this suggestion. My model for how it should work is the gmail "labels" concept. The way that works is that, instead of a particular email being in a folder (that is, a copy of it is in a directory or mail spool with a given name) the message is stored once and then references to it are stored in the mail spool itself. To the user, this looks like you just add labels to a message, so one message could have 5 labels.

[Nikolai]

This may or may not work based on how the smugmug backend works -- but I'll third (or fourth, or...) this suggestion. My model for how it should work is the gmail "labels" concept. The way that works is that, instead of a particular email being in a folder (that is, a copy of it is in a directory or mail spool with a given name) the message is stored once and then references to it are stored in the mail spool itself. To the user, this looks like you just add labels to a message, so one message could have 5 labels."Labels" is such a sweet concept.:lust
And, actually, it possible to upgrade existing category-based structure to a label based one. Pull the switch - and all the categories/subcategories become labels, so initially every album may have only one or two of them (depending on its current dwelling, e.g. if I have an album named 'Zyon" in "Travel"|"Canyons" it would have two labels: Travel and Canyons). But users will be able to assign other label to this album, and pro-users will be able to create their own, exactly the way we now can create categories.

I understand ther is a "certain" work onvolved, but, man, how great would this be!!!:thumb

[emo]

I'm a trial user. I've been looking for this Copying/Linking feature but in vain. I came here and and found someone has mentioned it more than two years ago. Then I mailed to help@smugmug.com..

Here's the answer..

====
Hello,

Thanks for emailing Smugmug.

I'm sorry, but there really isn't a way to do that. The only way to
show the same photo in multiple galleries is by making copies. Sorry.

All the best,

Dustin
===

Too bad seems they never tried to improve this over the last two years..

[PBolchover]

Smugmug's keywords are exactly equivalent to Gmail's labels.

If you're a power user or pro, then it's possible to have keyword galleries appear inside categories alongside normal categories. It's even possible to have galleries appear in more than one category. (Search dgrin for "gallery redirect")

[Andy]

Too bad seems they never tried to improve this over the last two years..Really? There is a guy who's doing some cool keyword galleries, here:

http://pictures.little.org/
http://www.moonriverphotography.com/ and click "featured"

and here:
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=47995&highlight=keyword+galleries

[Mike Lane]

Keywords are the hotness. Smugmug's got great keywording abilities. I wish it were easy/possible to change the gallery settings for a keyword generated gallery. So for example let's say this keyword gallery:

http://mikelane2.smugmug.com/keyword/new%20zealand-beth

It'd be great if I could set an album description, custom pricing, watermarks, etc. Basically it'd be neat if I could operate on that as if it were a "real" gallery.

Maybe it'd be possible to make something totally different. What if there was a type of album that was a container for user-defined keywords. Sort of a bucket which you could give any property you wanted which would pull images from various real albums. That way you could have whatever heirarchy you wanted without copying images into different folders.

Seems like it would be more than just a wee bit of work to get to there though. I guess what I'm envisioning could be a complete change about how things are done. :scratch

[olegos]

This conversation seems to repeat here every so often:

- How can I create a virtual gallery? (or whatever the term is this week)
- You can do that with keywords.
- No, keywords are inadequate:
* it's a complicated process to achieve something simple
* the result is deficient (can't rearrange photos, protect the gallery or edit other properties)
* keywords don't work with private galleries
* impossible to do a keyword gallery with basic membership
- <silence>

It's amazing how at SmugMug some complicated things are very well thought out, while some simple things are cumbersome or impossible to do.

[colourbox]

For me, no control over description, style, arrangement, and other standard gallery properties are complete deal-breakers for keyword galleries, and disqualify them as a solution to this request.

Keywords are the hotness...they're just not fully cooked when you look inside.

I'm in no danger of moving to pbase, but their instructions for copying an image to another gallery say that it will be one image displayed in two galleries, not double the disk space. It's unclear whether updating one image updates all instances, which is what would be nice.

[Andy]

This conversation seems to repeat here every so often:

- How can I create a virtual gallery? (or whatever the term is this week)
- You can do that with keywords.
- No, keywords are inadequate:
* it's a complicated process to achieve something simple
* the result is deficient (can't rearrange photos, protect the gallery or edit other properties)
* keywords don't work with private galleries
* impossible to do a keyword gallery with basic membership
- <silence>

It's amazing how at SmugMug some complicated things are very well thought out, while some simple things are cumbersome or impossible to do.Hi Olegos, thanks for posting.

It's not as simple as you make it out to be. And we discuss this constantly here at SmugMug. And our developers are working on it.

Thanks.

[olegos]

Hi Olegos, thanks for posting.

It's not as simple as you make it out to be. And we discuss this constantly here at SmugMug. And our developers are working on it.

Sure, I understand that, and thanks for listening. I just get a little upset when keyword galleries are proposed, time and time again, as a viable alternative.

[Andy]

Sure, I understand that, and thanks for listening. I just get a little upset when keyword galleries are proposed, time and time again, as a viable alternative.
For many, they're working out quite well.
But that's not going to stop us from innovating, I promise :D

[technocraft]

I'll throw a "me too" up in here.

I regularly make "best of" galleries and would love an easier way to do that. Keyword galleries may help - but since I usually use different watermark and display settings for them, I'm stuck with "Make 2nd Copy (single) -> Move (bulk) -> Make 2nd Copy (single) -> Move (bulk)" which sucks.

[Trasmc]

Could there be a new combination command, such as COPY & MOVE? This would at least streamline the process, and prevent double (or triple) uploading.