All galleries on home page..Thanks!! But now needs another sorting option

Shemmers · June 12, 2015

I just got an email (What's new in June) letting me know that it is now possible to have all my galleries on the main page, just like old Smugmug. Very happy to see it :thumb! Many people on old smugmug had all their galleries in a simple chronological order on the home page.

I understand that this is a bandwidth problem (hence the new scroll and load, scroll and load method). The only problem now is that the only two sorting options are gallery 'date added' and 'date modified'. This means uploading or modifying any photo within a gallery changes the order completely. No control over what goes where.

Old smugmug provided a way to manually order the galleries (true for new smugmug but only if all galleries are in one folder which defeats the purpose of folder organization). A very simple solution is to have the ability to manually apply a date (and time?) to galleries and then have a sort option for that. This should be an option anyway. Smugmug could even automatically predict a date by taking the most prominent EXIF date of the gallery. Manually changeable of course. I think this option would be useful to many people beyond this usage case.

denisegoldberg · June 13, 2015

Since the sorting option you want doesn't exist, have you considered showing all folders on your home page instead of all galleries?

I would argue that showing all galleries doesn't give your viewer a way to focus on a part of your site. If I am presented with a seemingly unending list of galleries my instinct would be to close the page - I prefer to see a level of organization to the presentation.

--- Denise

leftquark · June 22, 2015

As Denise mentioned, keeping your photos Organized into folders is one of the best ways to make it easy for you and your viewers to find your photos quickly and easily. The scroll-and-load (or "pagination") enables us to quickly display items on the page without killing peoples browsers or making them wait for hundreds of galleries to load. I realize it does make it harder to do a "Find" on the page for a particular gallery, which is why organizing galleries into Folders can help.

The Old SmugMug had a tool for manually sorting the galleries on the homepage, which wasn't brought over into New SmugMug, which is why we couldn't offer manual sorting. I'll jot this down as a Feature Request and keep it in my mind as we make SmugMug even better in the future.

All galleries on home page..Thanks!! But now needs another sorting option

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