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Virtual Gallery & Keywording Customization
Fried
Registered Users Posts: 5 Beginner grinner
Hi Everyone
I'm undertaking a major redesign of my website and I'm giving serious consideration to making SmugMug an integral part of the site. I have some concept of the directions I wish to go but before I go down that path, I was hoping to get some feedback from the SmugMug community as to the feasibility and practicality of some of my ideas and design objectives. At this point I'm not looking for specific answers but more of a general assessment along the lines of a "yeah, you can do that, okay, but its hard, maybe but never been done yet, no way impossible" kind of answer.
WHAT I SHOOT
I photograph competitive sailing events. I primarily shoot national and world championships of one-design racing classes.
CURRENT WORKFLOW
I go to an event for a class. Each day I shoot, process the 800-1200 RAW files in Adobe Browser/Photoshop, select the 60-150 from that day I want to publish, create an album using JALBUM (I think JALBUM albums are SmugMug galleries), upload the album to my website using wyseftp, and add a link to the album on my site's dedicated class page using Dreamweaver. At the end of the event, there may be 1-8 new albums of photos on the class page.
CURRENT SITE
http://www.friedbits.com
My current website contains approx. 20,000 images. Hosted at 1&1, PHP+MySQL on Apache. It consists of a few simple navigation pages that link to various photo album html pages created using JALBUM.
LIMITATIONS OF CURRENT PRACTICE
There are many since the site and workflow have been pretty much the same for six years and were created when I was just starting. Primary problems are the fixed format image display functionality and the inability to search across my images for keywords of interest.
WORKFLOW AND WEBSITE DESIGN GOALS
1. Switch to LIGHTROOM to replace Bridge/Photoshop and use it to apply preliminary keywords (Class, Event, DayinEvent). This is underway.
2. Eliminate JALBUM from the workflow. When I have the JPEGS finished and tagged in LIGHTROOM, I want to simply upload them to an image repository from which they are displayed. LIGHTROOM-->SmugMug looks straight-forward.
3. Manage search and keywords from my website, not in SmugMug. I want to refine and expand my base keywords over time, and apply them retroactively. I also want to allow my users to create their own keywords and apply them as they see fit. Then allow users to selectively search all or selected sets of my photos using my keywords, their own, or selectively those of other users. I can see how the initial keywords get into SmugMug but how I get the new and updated keywords back and forth in and out of SmugMug is a mystery.
4. Eliminate the hard-wired or predefined album (gallery) concept entirely; have the entire image repository available to create "virtual" or dynamic galleries based on keywords. There would be some standard virtual galleries; e.g., {All of a Class}, {All for a Specific Event}, {All for a Specific Day of an Event} and the images can easily be keyworded to support these at the time they're created. However, I'm not sure how this would actually work since everything in SmugMug appears to be built around having collections of images in "galleries". Conceptually, I want ONE gallery, with all 20,000+ photos in it. Having a gallery of 20,000+ images seems unmanageable. How to provide my users the ability to selectively span the repository for their searches, create collections of images into dynamically created virtual galleries based on these searches and keyword combinations, and then serve that up in the SmugMug environment is not obvious to me.
USE CASES
A. A user wants to see Day 6 from the 2010 Star World Championship. They would simply click on a little "2010 Star World Championship Day 6" icon I've already set up for them on the Event's page on my website and they would be launched toward SmugMug and presented with a virtual gallery containing that set of images, which were tagged with all the necessary information at the time they were uploaded into SmugMug.
B. An editor at Sailing World wants to write an article about the current Star World Champion, Iain Percy. I've been shooting Iain for years and probably have 100 photos of him scattered through all my albums. But taking advantage of #3 above, suppose that my users (or Iain's agent LOL) have diligently keyworded a bunch of his photos. The editor would come to my site, search "all images" for "Iain Percy" using "all available keywords" and would get all the photos of Iain I have in one little virtual album, sorted from most recent to least of course!
***********
I like the SmugMug UI and having a vibrant community is critical. In a previous life I wrote code for a living and then ran companies that provided information services. So I am a decent programmer but my skills are rusty and this area is relatively new to me. I appreciate the value of leveraging existing work and the skills and expertise of others. So I really don't want to go off and build a bunch of this from scratch. I'm hoping the answer is here at SmugMug!
I appreciate any and all suggestions and comments.
Fried
I'm undertaking a major redesign of my website and I'm giving serious consideration to making SmugMug an integral part of the site. I have some concept of the directions I wish to go but before I go down that path, I was hoping to get some feedback from the SmugMug community as to the feasibility and practicality of some of my ideas and design objectives. At this point I'm not looking for specific answers but more of a general assessment along the lines of a "yeah, you can do that, okay, but its hard, maybe but never been done yet, no way impossible" kind of answer.
WHAT I SHOOT
I photograph competitive sailing events. I primarily shoot national and world championships of one-design racing classes.
CURRENT WORKFLOW
I go to an event for a class. Each day I shoot, process the 800-1200 RAW files in Adobe Browser/Photoshop, select the 60-150 from that day I want to publish, create an album using JALBUM (I think JALBUM albums are SmugMug galleries), upload the album to my website using wyseftp, and add a link to the album on my site's dedicated class page using Dreamweaver. At the end of the event, there may be 1-8 new albums of photos on the class page.
CURRENT SITE
http://www.friedbits.com
My current website contains approx. 20,000 images. Hosted at 1&1, PHP+MySQL on Apache. It consists of a few simple navigation pages that link to various photo album html pages created using JALBUM.
LIMITATIONS OF CURRENT PRACTICE
There are many since the site and workflow have been pretty much the same for six years and were created when I was just starting. Primary problems are the fixed format image display functionality and the inability to search across my images for keywords of interest.
WORKFLOW AND WEBSITE DESIGN GOALS
1. Switch to LIGHTROOM to replace Bridge/Photoshop and use it to apply preliminary keywords (Class, Event, DayinEvent). This is underway.
2. Eliminate JALBUM from the workflow. When I have the JPEGS finished and tagged in LIGHTROOM, I want to simply upload them to an image repository from which they are displayed. LIGHTROOM-->SmugMug looks straight-forward.
3. Manage search and keywords from my website, not in SmugMug. I want to refine and expand my base keywords over time, and apply them retroactively. I also want to allow my users to create their own keywords and apply them as they see fit. Then allow users to selectively search all or selected sets of my photos using my keywords, their own, or selectively those of other users. I can see how the initial keywords get into SmugMug but how I get the new and updated keywords back and forth in and out of SmugMug is a mystery.
4. Eliminate the hard-wired or predefined album (gallery) concept entirely; have the entire image repository available to create "virtual" or dynamic galleries based on keywords. There would be some standard virtual galleries; e.g., {All of a Class}, {All for a Specific Event}, {All for a Specific Day of an Event} and the images can easily be keyworded to support these at the time they're created. However, I'm not sure how this would actually work since everything in SmugMug appears to be built around having collections of images in "galleries". Conceptually, I want ONE gallery, with all 20,000+ photos in it. Having a gallery of 20,000+ images seems unmanageable. How to provide my users the ability to selectively span the repository for their searches, create collections of images into dynamically created virtual galleries based on these searches and keyword combinations, and then serve that up in the SmugMug environment is not obvious to me.
USE CASES
A. A user wants to see Day 6 from the 2010 Star World Championship. They would simply click on a little "2010 Star World Championship Day 6" icon I've already set up for them on the Event's page on my website and they would be launched toward SmugMug and presented with a virtual gallery containing that set of images, which were tagged with all the necessary information at the time they were uploaded into SmugMug.
B. An editor at Sailing World wants to write an article about the current Star World Champion, Iain Percy. I've been shooting Iain for years and probably have 100 photos of him scattered through all my albums. But taking advantage of #3 above, suppose that my users (or Iain's agent LOL) have diligently keyworded a bunch of his photos. The editor would come to my site, search "all images" for "Iain Percy" using "all available keywords" and would get all the photos of Iain I have in one little virtual album, sorted from most recent to least of course!
***********
I like the SmugMug UI and having a vibrant community is critical. In a previous life I wrote code for a living and then ran companies that provided information services. So I am a decent programmer but my skills are rusty and this area is relatively new to me. I appreciate the value of leveraging existing work and the skills and expertise of others. So I really don't want to go off and build a bunch of this from scratch. I'm hoping the answer is here at SmugMug!
I appreciate any and all suggestions and comments.
Fried
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